Most people wrongly believe that the situation is similar to that of a car on the highway. If a car is capable of going ~80 miles per hour, and you put it on a

Most people wrongly believe that the situation is similar to that of a car on the highway. If a car is capable of going ~80 miles per hour, and you put it on a treadmill going 80 miles an hour in the other direction, the car will run in place on the treadmill. The takeoff speed of a jet is something like 160 mph, so the picture most people have is running a treadmill at -160 mph, and they picture the airplane running in place just like the car. As Mythbusters showed, that's not what will happen, the plane will just move at 320 mph relative to the treadmill. Of course you could imagine a situation that's not analogous to the car at all, in which we just dictate that however fast the treadmill needs to move to exert a force on the jet equal to that of the engines, it will move that fast. That means we've defined the situation in just a way that by definition, the airplane will not be able to move forwards. What most people don't realize, though, is that doing this is not like stopping the car on the highway. In fact the force exerted by the ground on the wheels during takeoff is so small that to effectively stop the plane, you'd have to spin the treadmill fast enough to destroy the wheels and carriage. And maybe even that wouldn't do it!