Is this plane landing or departing? (2017) | Hacker News Reader

Is this plane landing or departing? (2017)

aviation.stackexchange.com

145 pointstkelemen48 comments

Buried in the comments[1] is a jpg showing the sequence of multiple photos and one of the images has smoke from the tires landing:

https://i.stack.imgur.com/QTrv2.jpg

It's a fun mental exercise to know that the final answer is landing while reading the answers that forcefully argue that the plane is taking off. Some of the "evidence" to support that the plane is taking off is very persuasive.

[1] https://aviation.stackexchange.com/questions/34586/is-this-p...

Well, that's interesting. The person who originally wrote the Aviation SE question was claiming to be the original photographer and saying he couldn't remember if the plane was taking off or landing... But, if the internet had access to the whole sequence of images, surely he did as well? So why was he asking? Was it just a puzzle?

EDIT: From a different comment, it's clear that the photographer later found the whole series of pictures AFTER asking the question, and posted them online. So the photographer was confused, but later found the rest of his photos, which definitively show the plane LANDING. Case closed.

I remember this showing up in the SO sidebar a long time ago (what a time-suck that thing is). At the time, I remember thinking that some of these people must be trolling - and I still do.

For example, the people arguing that the wheels have already touched down. It seems abundantly obvious to me that the wheels have NOT touched down, and that the small strip of black asphalt running parallel to the wheels is a taxi-way in the background which has lots of small aircraft sitting on it. I get the uneasy feeling that anybody that sees it any differently is just trying to gaslight me. But, then, that was also the feeling I got about the blue dress, and that turned out to be all too genuine... People genuinely saw it differently, they weren't trolling.

To me, the lack of heat blur behind the engines seems to be reasonably conclusive evidence that it's landing... But who knows.

Based on the later-discovered extra photos, it appears that the taxi-way in the background (which, as you say, is clearly much further from the camera than the landing plane due to the tiny small aircraft parked along it) is nearly perfectly overlapping with the actual runway, so that at the moment of touchdown the wheels look like they are touching both the runway and the background taxi-way. The larger blacktop with yellow lines in the foreground of the picture is a second taxi-way (closer to the camera than the runway, and clearly offset from it visually). This in particular can be seen by the fourth photo in the time series, the one taken immediately after the OP photo.

The quirky features of OP photo are such a nerd snipe, and the later finding the complete photo series is just so convenient, that I'm tempted to think the whole Stack Exchange post was planned.

The full set of photos was found - it was landing

https://i.stack.imgur.com/QTrv2.jpg

The taxi-way is the foreground - the wheels do indeed seem like they have touched down or are millimetres away

As one person pointed out on the site, the shadow of the airplane can just be made out on the actual runway, while it is clearly missing from the ramp / taxiway in the foreground.

The wheels are, in fact, off the ground, but only just, as revealed by the smoke in the next image of the sequence.

I, too, was convinced by the absense of heat blur.

> I remember this showing up in the SO sidebar a long time ago (what a time-suck that thing is).

I ended up installing this Chrome extension to block the "Hot Network Questions" parts of Stack Exchange because I found that I was getting distracted by them too often.

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/stack-block/oaimjd...

You can now disable "Hot network questions" in the site's settings.

Had to do this as well because they were just too distracting.

The strip in the foreground seems to be taxiway B[1], and not the runway (taxiways have yellow short lines, runways white long lines)

[1] https://skyvector.com/files/tpp/2014/pdf/00384AD.PDF

Did you see the extra photos at https://i.stack.imgur.com/QTrv2.jpg ? That might help with the wheels question.

Do you think it's possible that Air Force One Pilots are instructed to land at unconventional spots on the runway to foil potential threats? Perhaps even to land at different spots on the runway on different landings?

I know it sounds far-fetched, but my mom who was the "Cultural Affairs Officer" at the US Embassy in San Jose Costa Rica was instructed to take a different route from home to the embassy and back every day, and to try to depart at slightly different times each trip. This was in the late 80s when Costa Rica was a relatively safe place (it's even safer today).

My uninformed intuition would be that trying to land the plane differently each time would introduce more risk than it would protect against (and what threats would it even protect against?).

You might be right with that suspicion, but if the person responsible for procedures puts up a rule demanding unpredictable runway usage they have done their job Very Well. A cautious "this might not be such a good idea actually" however will make them seem weak in certain eyes and might even make them some personal enemies, for displaying lack of trust in the pilots' abilities. I suspect that nobody without the career instincts to intuitively know those things will come anywhere close to that plane.

That's... not how military aviation works. The people flying the plane (Lieutenant-Colonels) are junior/subordinate to the people making the rules (usually 1- and 2-star Generals).

Autolanding systems already do that, they incorporate 'dithering' so that they spread landing wear randomly over the runway surface

I've never been able to find it again, but I distinctly remember seeing video of Air Force One taking off from Sarasota on September 11, 2001. In my memory it was far louder than normal and climbed at a very steep angle.

I've always wondered if I was imagining that or if they really did act more aggressively to gain altitude quickly.

I know in combat zones military cargo planes haul ass at much steeper angles than commercial flights because comfort is not an issue. Mostly to get out of rocket/missle range. Even small arms fire can damage engines.

on 9/11 it would have made sense to tell everyone to strap TF in we're going out hot!

I just searched for it and I found a story about Air Force One that morning in Sarasota:

https://www.jacksonville.com/news/20160904/anderson-morning-...

> Air Force One — the 747 that transports the President of the United States — took off in an unconventional direction and climbed nearly straight-up, like a rocket, at 8,000 feet per minute in the direction of the Gulf of Mexico. No one had ever seen such a steep and urgent ascent.

That's quite a trajectory for a 747.

Wow, interesting. I used to work as a civilian for the Navy and if you needed to get to another Navy base you could usually hop on whatever plane was headed that way next. Kind of a fun experience and I thought they tended to take off more aggressively than commercial flights, but nothing like that!

Nice detective work!

Maybe if they were landing in a risky country (the presidents have visited warzones like Iraq), but even then, they would ensure the airfield and a 10km radius around it would be clear and secure. If they cannot ensure that, how would landing in an unconventional spot improve security? Every part of an AF1 flight is tightly orchestrated on the one hand, and on the other, they would keep the exact flight route and timing a need-to-know secret.

> Do you think it's possible that Air Force One Pilots are instructed to land at unconventional spots on the runway to foil potential threats?

No. It's hard enough to nail a landing to pick the "right spot" especially when you don't need it

If there's a threat on ground the best thing you can do is stay on air, not try to land on a different spot of the same runway (but yes, given some types of obstructions you can try to use only part of the runway, I'm not sure if they prefer you landing after it or in front of it, but I think the latter makes more sense - depending on the type and position of obstruction of course)

I politely disagree with you. Landings in an aircraft that you have flown for any length of time are not all that hard. In many cases I have been in aircraft that "land long" so as to not have to taxi 3 miles (literally) to get to the gate or parking area.

I would imagine there is a bit of risk mitigation with AF1 as it relates to taxiing on the ground. As you state (correctly I surmise) the best place for AF1 to be is in the air. The worst, is unprotected on the ground. The secret service is great, but I don't see them clearing a mile of taxiway in multiple directions for the safety of the aircraft.

Best to land long, turn off at taxiway and be at your destination with proper equipment nearby as soon as possible.

Thanks for your answer, you probably know more than me about the subject :)

But yes, I understand that you might want to land closer to the beginning or the end of the runway and that's easier the longer the runway is.

And if your taxi back was 3Mi, yeah, it was a long runway. Now, in something like 5000ft/1500m runway, you'll just want to touch down early and hit the brakes as soon as possible (not that the VC-25 should be landing at anything that short in a non-emergency setting)

The full-blown practice of this (so things like losing a tail) is referred poetically referred to the Russian intelligence services as dry-cleaning (Proverka? I forget the exact russian term)

Previous discussion (2017): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13405121.