[inquisitive]

Oh, so you don’t actually know the speed, but rather assume the number shown to you is accurate.

Well then, I’d sure like to play you in poker

Use the GPS on your phone, hold it by a window to show speed and location.

It might even tell you the distance from New York to Paris.

[WellRoundedIndividual]

You can calculate GS, aka ground speed, using the time it takes to pass between two landmarks with a known distance. Since, at least in the US, the grids on which country roads are laid out are in one square mile increments, you could technically use that as a landmark, assuming the surveyor and road workers paved the road properly.

[TomFoolery]

Jim,

I don’t HAVE an argument. You do. I am asking for reliable evidence to support your argument, and I am trying to help you formulate it.

Is there any way you can think of to estimate the distance you are traveling in a plane? Imagine there are no clouds, and you are flying over farm country.

QED, We actually had a thread going a week ago or so where we discussed a number of ideas like reconstructing the scenery from a cell phone video taken out of the airplane window to measure distance.
Another was to test a portable GPS in an airplane on overland flight to see if it correctly reported the distance between passing over known landmarks on land at airplane speeds. The reasoning being that if a given GPS gave accurate speeds and distances in a plane at flying speeds over land that it should be good flying over water too. But then it was postulated that the GPS system may shift into an inaccurate skewed reading of speed and distance while the airplane simultanously slows down or speeds up (often flying at below it's stall speed or over the speed of sound) in order to reach it's flat-world location in the time that the globe model predicts, but in a way that is undetectable by the passengers.

Other ideas included chartering a single engine plane so the RPM of the engine could be recorded via microphone and so the would be no secret airplane speedup.

we kind of decided accurately measuring long distances was out of the reach of hobbyists which is a real problem because flat earthers don't trust any professional to measure if the results or globular.

 

[QED]

I like the first idea the best - because it relies on no fancy gizmos.

So it IS possible to make a rough estimate of the speed an airplane is flying, by measuring the time it takes to cross between certain landmarks. Also, certain farmlands are often parceled into regular plots of known acers. This would likewise help you measure a distance. You’d have to be very careful of course, but this can be done.

It can certainly be done well enough to determine if the speed on the screen is roughly correct or not.

[stack]

I like the first idea the best - because it relies on no fancy gizmos.

The fancy gizmos are what help modern commercial pilots do what they do; transport goods and humans safely and profitably around the planet 24/7.

So it IS possible to make a rough estimate of the speed an airplane is flying, by measuring the time it takes to cross between certain landmarks. Also, certain farmlands are often parceled into regular plots of known acers. This would likewise help you measure a distance. You’d have to be very careful of course, but this can be done.

Well, to estimate the speed you need the distance and to estimate the distance you need the speed. So if you're trying to estimate the speed with time between known landmarks then you need to know the distance. And the distance comes from a map. That map was derived from surveyors using fancy gizmos or even fancier gizmos like satellite GPS. So just b/c the end output is a number on a piece of paper and not on a screen, it still came from a lot of fancy gizmos to you.
And if you want to believe you can visually count what you think are acres and come up with a distance that's more accurate, or even in the ballpark, than the numbers derived by fancy gizmos, I am very impressed.

It can certainly be done well enough to determine if the speed on the screen is roughly correct or not.

Or, like I said, listen in on the pilots' radio transmissions and see if what they and ATC say jives with what's on the screen in front of you. I've done it and it has. It's not like it's voodoo.

[QED]

You really shouldn’t be THAT impressed. It is quite possible to estimate such parceled distances with a little thought.

In physics, we call these fermi problems. 

[stack]

You really shouldn’t be THAT impressed. It is quite possible to estimate such parceled distances with a little thought.

In physics, we call these fermi problems.

Sure you could Fermi out a guestimate from 35k ft as to the size of each parcel of land passing below you and be wildly inaccurate in your measurement. Or, you could listen to the pilot transmissions as I hope they have more accurate readings and are not trying to do what you are doing by counting corn fields out the window. Then there's the whole business of over water flights - maybe one can fermi it out by counting waves.

[QED]

You really shouldn’t be THAT impressed. It is quite possible to estimate such parceled distances with a little thought.

In physics, we call these fermi problems.

Sure you could Fermi out a guestimate from 35k ft as to the size of each parcel of land passing below you and be wildly inaccurate in your measurement. Or, you could listen to the pilot transmissions as I hope they have more accurate readings and are not trying to do what you are doing by counting corn fields out the window. Then there's the whole business of over water flights - maybe one can fermi it out by counting waves.

Lol, point taken. But you’d be surprised what can be estimated fairly accurately using this method. I teach it to students all the time, and they arrive at accurate order of magnitude estimates for all sorts of things: the number of windows in Chicago, the mean-free path before you see a limousine, the speed that grass grows, how many heart beats have taken place on earth so far....

So I would suggest that it would be premature to discount such a method, especially before you learn it

[stack]

You really shouldn’t be THAT impressed. It is quite possible to estimate such parceled distances with a little thought.

In physics, we call these fermi problems.

Sure you could Fermi out a guestimate from 35k ft as to the size of each parcel of land passing below you and be wildly inaccurate in your measurement. Or, you could listen to the pilot transmissions as I hope they have more accurate readings and are not trying to do what you are doing by counting corn fields out the window. Then there's the whole business of over water flights - maybe one can fermi it out by counting waves.

Lol, point taken. But you’d be surprised what can be estimated fairly accurately using this method. I teach it to students all the time, and they arrive at accurate order of magnitude estimates for all sorts of things: the number of windows in Chicago, the mean-free path before you see a limousine, the speed that grass grows, how many heart beats have taken place on earth so far....

So I would suggest that it would be premature to discount such a method, especially before you learn it

I get it. And I'm not calling it a crap method by any means. I'm all for ballparking stuff, but when it comes to flying in a tube 30k feet up I prefer more exacting methods. And those exacting methods seem to work the world over, 24/7, 365. It's kind of like if I need to drive a nail into a 2x4 and I have a hammer in one hand and a rock in the other, I'm probably going to go with the hammer.