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Even if you strapped on giant wings, you could never fly because the human heart can't pump blood quick enough to satisfy the enormous strain of flapping. When flying, a sparrow's heart pumps more than 450 times each minute!
The windows in an airport control tower must be tilted out at exactly fifteen degrees from the vertical to minimise reflections from both inside and outside the control tower.
Airplanes often cruise at around 35,000 feet. That sounds pretty far up, but compare this to the size of the earth itself: If the Earth were shrunk to the size of a typical desktop globe, the airplane would be cruising at only one - tenth of an inch (2.5 mm) off the surface.
The captain and the first officer always eat different meals during a flight, just in case one of them gets sick.
The pilots can only see about half the wing from the flight deck, and they cant see the tail at all. Some airlines are exlporing the use of tiny video cameras mounted outside the aircraft to transmit images to the pilot.
If everyone in an airplane jumped into the air at the same time, would the plane get lighter? In fact, the opposite is true. Because of a basic law of physics, every action has an equal and opposite reaction, so if you jump into the air, you actually force the airplane downward a little bit, thereby increasing its weight momentarily.
The first United States coast to coast airplane flight occurred in 1911 and took 49 days
When airplanes were still a novel invention, seat belts for pilots were installed only after the consequence of their absence was observed to be fatal – several pilots fell to their deaths while flying upside down
An airplane’s “blackbox”‘ is a device which records conditions and events on an air vessel. A “blackbox” is actually orange in color to make it more visible in the wreckage. The term black box might come from its charred appearance after an air crash
A 747-400 has six million parts (half of which are fasteners) made in 33 different countries
Seventy-five thousand engineering drawings were used to produce the first 747
The outer skin of an aeroplane is only 5 mm thick. Only 7.5 in (19 cm) separate the passengers from the outside
During takeoff, when full of high pressure air, the takeoff weight is increased by about a ton