"xerj" wrote in message
...
I was talking about Coriolis effect with someone and he asked me about
planes against or with the earth's spin of around 1000mph at the equator.
He asked why this didn't benefit east to west plane travel timewise and
hurt west to east. I couldn't give him a straight answer, and felt like an
idiot when I said "it just doesn't".

What IS the straight answer? The dropping something in a moving vehicle
analogy doesn't work, does it? A plane has a method of acceleration,
whereas a passively dropped object doesn't.

Sometimes really simple questions can give you the worst time.


Is the wind outside blowing at 1000 mph right now? The atmosphere, the
medium in which we fly, is spinning with the planet.