Can a plane freeze in the air? A video that appears to show just that is going viral.
On Friday, Will Manidis shared a video to X (formerly Twitter) showing what appears to be a stationary aircraft hovering in the air above the San Mateo-Hayward Bridge and San Francisco Bay.
On the flight home from New York to the Bay Area, Manidis tells PEOPLE that he “looked out the window and noticed the optical illusion right after [the plane was] landing.”
William Manidis via Storyful
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He adds that he was “taking videos of the beautiful views before he noticed the strange illusion.”
Manidis, who is the CEO of a healthcare natural language processing (AI) company, shared the video on X, captioning it: “Today I watched a plane stop in midair and you still think physics is real. ”
In the following post, Manidis writes: “Lots of ‘physics savants’ in qts who pretend they’ve never dropped a pound of bricks and a pound of feathers at the same time and disproved Newtonian physics at home,” before joking, “I didn’t know that great physics has so much nonsense.”
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One user responded to the post, writing: “They’re just buffering.” Another posted: “There is an error in the matrix.”
In an email to PEOPLE, Manidis noted that the plane’s apparent lack of motion is apparently an “illusion,” the cause of which can be explained with a little science.
During the journey, planes can encounter headwinds and tailwinds. While a tailwind comes from behind the plane, allowing passengers to reach their destination faster, a headwind can slow the plane down.
Some headwinds can be so strong that the aircraft will appear to be frozen in the sky, when in reality the aircraft is moving very slowly through the air.
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William Manidis via Storyful
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Additionally, in some cases, a person’s literal point of view may be what deceives the eye. A person moving in the opposite direction of a decelerating aircraft, not necessarily due to a headwind, may also notice that the aircraft is stuck motionless in the sky.
One X user responded to Manidis’s video post, “Bc of the bridge: best video for this illusion yet 👏” regarding the way the plane doesn’t appear to be moving over the freeway due to the way Manidis’ camera curves around the massive bridge.
Others have caught this phenomenon in the past. Another video went viral on social media in 2022 that appeared to show a plane stuck in mid-air. A third, filmed near Dallas Fort Worth Airport, was posted on YouTube and gained attention in 2018.
Categories: Trends
Source: HIS Education