It's all good, but the internet nerd in me won't let him get away with this section:

"If you've ever had to stop your car short at a stop light, you know how people and objects can go flying forward. That force increases exponentially when you go from a two-ton car to a twenty-ton steel tube."

The mass of the plane does not effect the mass of people and objects inside of it. They have the exact some inertia and force whether they're on board a car, plane, train, or pogo stick.

Hahaha, "fight attendants" is one of the better freudian typos I've ever seen. :)

@Reymont: That isn't internet nerd, that is physics nead.

However, I don't think the brakes are as good in a plane as in a car. The brakes in a car are more than powerful enough to lock up the wheels even when they are in contact with the ground: They can put several tons of pressure on the drums/discs and the tires will skid well before the pads will. With ABS they don't skid, so the deceleration is very good, (a car can easily stop at close to 9.8 m/s/s.) However, in a plane the brakes per ton of aircraft aren't as good, if they tried to put a proportional amount of force against the discs they'd just break them off. And they don't have ABS on most planes, so if they do succeed in getting the wheels to lock up, (which isn't hard: if the runway isn't perfect the plane will bounce slightly since the wheels don't have fancy shock absorbers like most cars, and then brakes will stop the wheel from turning while it is up in the air and a stationary wheel will come down and skid,) then the friction goes way down anyways. That fact is why most large planes are equipped with thrust reversers: making the engines go backwards is the only good way to stop the plane anyways. All that adds up to planes not being able to stop at anything close to 9.8 m/s/s.

Of course, without a shoulder harness you wouldn't want to stop that quickly anyways: Military aircraft that land at short airfields, (or aircraft carriers!) do put people in 3 or 5 point harnesses, (and/or face the passengers backwards.)

@Reymont: after getting distracted by the post below, and finding out no explicit images links there, I must add this: I think the writer was referring to the speed which it can gather a piece of steel of that weight, therefore augmenting the forces involved in it .

That´s how I saw it, but again, am not gonna say what my fav pastime in science class was for a while, cuz a cousin or something might be reading this. .

This is like the Tea Party of Physics.

Completely unrelated question question that I wonder if Dan has any insight on.

There seems to be a disproportionate amount of gay male flight attendants. My cousin, who works at an airport, attests to this (she claims they "all" are, but that's obvious hyperbole). I've always been curious what about this job attracts gay men.

The fact is the Passenger caused this. She was just a mean nasty Bitch. I myself would have done much worse. Heaven forbid she had hit me in the head. She needs to apologize to this man. It seems to me she felt she had the right to do and say these things. She did not. She should be held accountable for her nasty ghetto behavior. America should know her name. She needs to be heavily fined. And held up to public ridicule. She knows she was wrong or she would have come forward already to explain her unacceptable behavior.

@Karom1962 I agree with everything you said, except what part of this is "ghetto"?