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The weight imbalance from everybody rushing to the right made the plane unstable.
by ad404b8a372f2b9 4y ago
The weight imbalance from everybody rushing to the right made the plane unstable.
- 22c 4y agoInterestingly, I recently spoke to a loadmaster who told me that left/right side weight distributions are far less important than forward/aft, to the point that for the majority of aircraft they're loading, imbalance to the left or right side of the plane aren't accounted for at all.
- eftychis 4y agoYes you want the center of mass to be more forward than the center of lift. Otherwise, a small deviation in the pitch becomes hard to impossible to recover -- the system is unstable and stalls extremely easily. If that is a fighter plane of course you want that, so you make sure the opposite is true, and have a computer counteract that during normal flight.
- cwillu 4y agoI laughed the first time I made an airplane with the centre of mass behind the centre of lift in Kerbal Space Program.
- 2-718-281-828 4y agothis is the only answert to the question above and it's being downvoted? welcome to hacker news ...
- stephen_g 4y agoI didn't downvote it, because it's not a bad attempt at an answer if you don't know the context, but the actual joke is completely different and about calculus and control systems. The right side of the plane is double meaning for the right half of the complex plane in dynamical systems analysis, which is the area where the real part of every point is positive. If your poles are on the right half of the complex plane, then the system is unstable and the output will tend towards exponential growth (going out of control) for any change in input.
- ad404b8a372f2b9 4y agoThe question is about the literal meaning of the joke, he knows what a pole is within the context of calculus. He didn't understand within the context of the joke what lead to the crash.
- stephen_g 4y agoBut the plane didn’t crash because of weight imbalance - if the Poles all went to the left half of the plane, it wouldn’t have crashed, because that would make the system stable!
- lupire 4y agoIt's a joke. There is no cause within the literal context. The humor comes from word play. After the plane crashed, one survivor was stranded in the wilderness. Miles from civilization, he cried and screamed until he got hoarse. Then he mounted the horse and rode back to civilization. Back at home, he found himself locked out of his house, since he lost his house keys with his luggage on the plane. He sat on the porch and sang various lamentations, until he found the right key and unlocked the door.
- ad404b8a372f2b9 4y agoThe joke relies on the fact that keys unlock doors, this is the cause, just like the prior one relies on the assumption that people rushing to one side crashes the plane. If there are 10 comments explaining what a key is in the context of music and I add another that says "I understand what the key refers to but how was the door opened", one can only assume I lack the knowledge that keys open doors. Sometimes people understand the more complex behaviours but somehow miss the simpler explanations, it's happened to me before.
- selimthegrim 4y agoThere are enough actual LOT crashes he can form a model on his own…