Once a plane gets into the air, it can fly at amazing speeds, and they are always affected by the wind and other weather conditions. Here are some facts about airplane speeds, during takeoff, mid-flight and landing. As a general rule, airplanes can fly from to miles per hour, although this is most common with commercial planes.
However, this is only an average because wind and the elements can affect that number. In addition, military aircraft, private jets, and other types of aircraft may have speeds that are higher or lower. Big commercial airplanes generally fly in the MPH range, but their landing and taking-off speeds are naturally going to be different. Each flash of the LED produces a tiny electrical current in the photoreceptors that a computer can graph onto a screen.
Tests reveal the fastest fly records distinct responses to flickering up to times per second, more than six times faster than our own rate. The fastest vision of all is found in a species literally called a "killer fly".
It's a tiny predatory species found in Europe that catches other flies out of the air with super-fast reactions. In her "fly lab" at Cambridge University, Dr Paloma Gonzales-Bellido demonstrates the killer flies' hunting behaviour by releasing fruit fly prey into a special filming box with a female killer fly.
Paloma records the behaviour at 1, frames per second using slow motion video cameras with a recording buffer. The attached computer constantly saves the video, over-writing itself every twelve seconds. When the fly moves, Paloma clicks a button to permanently save the last 12 seconds. Essentially, we can't even click a button before the behaviour has happened, it's that fast. With the killer flies and their prey in the filming box, initially the killer fly just sat around motionless, but as one of the fruit flies flew about 7cm above it, there was a flash of movement and suddenly the killer fly was at the bottom of the box chomping into the quivering fruit fly.
Only looking at the slowed-down footage on the computer did it become clear what happened; the killer fly took off, circled the fruit fly three times as it tried to grab it repeatedly, before succeeding in capturing the elusive fruit fly with its front legs.
The whole behaviour from take-off to landing took just one second. It appears as a flash to our eyes, so conversely, the swatting hand of a human must appear at a snail's pace. To enable this incredible speed of the killer fly, which is faster even than other fly species, the light-detecting cells in the killer fly eyes contain many more mitochondria the "batteries" of biological cells than are present in the same cells of other flies. These are the batteries of the cell, so the speedy vision must take more energy than slow vision, explaining why all eyes aren't just set to the highest flicker fusion rate.
The carnivorous diet of the killer fly provides the large amounts of energy it needs to power these high-energy cells. But even if we had the same number of mitochondria in the cells or our own eyes, we wouldn't have the same vision speed because flies' light-sensitive cells have a totally different design to those of vertebrates. Behind the structural differences in the eyes of flies is their evolutionary origin. This site tries to understand how it feels to move like a fly, a squirrel, a cat, a rhinocerous, or a falcon.
What's it like to be an animal? Animals: land air water insect Your height: cm cm cm cm cm cm cm cm cm cm cm cm cm cm cm cm cm cm cm cm cm cm cm cm cm cm cm cm cm cm cm cm cm feet meters Graph: top speed feels like Imagine what it's like for a tiny insect to jump and fly as quickly as they do.
But how fast is fast? And is there such a thing as fast enough? Or is it a case of the tortoise versus the hare? Even though the aviation world is largely one of knots and not miles per hour, when it comes to speed, some of us still think in terms mph. With the advent of a number of slippery, big-engine singles, most notably the Cirrus SR22, knots might well be the new benchmark of how fast fast is.
The big question remains, though. What does speed mean in real terms? What kind of advantages do those fast movers enjoy, and is it worth what you have to pay for it? The answers are, there are a lot of advantages, some big, some not so big, and the costs can be great. Can they be too great? Good question. Fair enough. And super long days with a trip home late in the evening almost guarantees less than optimal human performance on those last legs.
But in terms of the simple math, again with that mile trip, which is average for most pilots, how much does speed get you? Is the time worth what it costs to save it?
Real-world cross-country flying is all about taking all the parameters into account, and that means looking realistically at weather, optimum altitudes, passenger needs and the amount of daylight you have to work with—winter days are short.
When you begin factoring in considerations such as required alternates on an IFR flight plan or thunderstorm diversions, the process can get complicated, and pilots need to have a solid grasp of all of the variables that go into planning any particular trip.
So is the extra speed worth it?
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