Can passenger airliners hover completely motionless in the air?

Question

I've seen many stories of this occuring on r/glitch_in_the_matrix (a popular Reddit). People have been seeing big airliners just paused in the air, not moving. Some of them stopped their car and saw that the planes still weren't moving. I thought an airplane would stall if it went too slowly? I'm not a plane expert but can newer passenger planes hover in the air?

Edit - often times, the planes are not high up, but coming in to land or take off. Someone said they were watching planes take off or land, and suddenly a big jet just paused in mid air for 30 seconds before starting to move again.

Answer 1

In theory they can stop moving relative to someone standing on the ground. In practice this does not occur.

Aircraft fly through the air and, yes, below a certain airspeed, an aircraft will stall. Let's take a super-simple example to explain the situation:

You are standing on the ground on a very breezy day. It's quite windy on the ground, and blowing even harder at altitude. For the sake of this example, let's say at 15,000 ft. There is a 150Kts wind from the west. A small airliner is slated to go west at 15,000 ft and levels off but slows down to a cruise speed of 150Kts. The airplane is still moving through the air at 150 Kts, but the air is moving in the opposite direction at the same speed. In terms of a fixed point on the ground the airplane does not move.

However, big jets are capable of flying faster than even the biggest practical headwinds. You can, however, observe this in small aircraft on a gusty day (I have flown a PA-28 backwards in this scenario). Here is a video of someone doing it in a slow plane.

What is likely occurring is that a plane that is very high up and very far away appears not to be moving due to its small size in the sky and lack of surrounding points of reference.

Answer 2

Unequivocally: no. Big airliners (or passenger planes of any size for that matter) do not hover in air.

From a moving car, train or such it is possible to have an illusion that an airplane hovers midair, but someone who was claiming that they were standing still and witnessing an airliner hover in the air, was most probably deceived by one's senses. It might also be that the motivation for such a statement is the sheer joy of trolling, or, in extreme cases, pathological need to make things up, or hallusinations induced by drugs and/or mental disorders.

The bigger the plane, the slower it seems to move through the air due to our brains' limited capability to compute the size and speed correctly. This is a contributing factor when observing big planes from moving vehicles and misjudging the planes to be still. Also a layer of cloud at a proper distance with right direction and speed of motion will create an illusion of the plane floating in it's place.

Answer 3

A plane requires air moving over the wings to generate lift. If there is no air movement, there is no lift, and the plane will fall. Note that this requires that the plane is moving relative to the air, but not necessarily relative to the ground. In theory, you could have a plane pointed into a very strong wind that would have an airspeed sufficient to generate lift, while having a groundspeed of 0. In practice, you'd require a constant ~50mph wind to generate enough lift to keep even a small Cessna aloft. The stall speed of commercial airliners is over 100mph, so you'd have to be flying into the upper categories of hurricane-force winds to have airspeed sufficient for flight while maintaining zero groundspeed. So no, passenger airlines do not hover - in any realistic circumstance, a plane in flight is always moving relative to the ground.

Answer 4

If a jet airliner "suddenly just paused in mid air for 30 seconds before starting to move again," a hundred passengers would be furiously tweeting about it. We'd also likely have video of coffee sloshing over everything in the cabin and similar unpleasantries, resulting in an FAA Incident Report.

The lack of such on-board complaints of sudden braking and accelerating casts doubt on any reports of the same made from terra firma.

Answer 5

This is a case where there are caveats on caveats.

No. The standard meaning of "airliner" refers to aircraft that require airspeed to produce lift.

Except yes, airspeed doesn't have to equal ground speed, so an aircraft can produce lift while having zero ground speed.

Except no, the conditions in which an aircraft would have zero ground speed would generally not apply to everyday life.

Except yes, our perception of motion isn't based on actual speed, but angular speed. An aircraft coming directly towards you or away has no angular speed, and thus will appear to hover. In addition, if the observer is moving and comparing the aircraft's position to a landmark such as a building, the aircraft's angular velocity with respect to the landmark can be zero. And even if the aircraft does have nonzero angular velocity, if it's far away its angular speed can be small enough to be imperceptible.

Answer 6

Any fixed or rotary wing requires airflow to generate lift. Helicopters hover because their rotors are continuously rotating to create airflow. Jet airliners are designed for cruising speeds (true air speed at cruise) on the order of 600 MPH at high altitudes (35,000-40,000 feet or more). They won't fly much slower than that at those altitudes because there is no benefit, and for some aircraft under some conditions, they can't (in the thin air at such altitudes, some fully loaded aircraft with most of their fuel load will be near one of the corners of their flight envelope). The fastest recorded jetstream winds don't come close to that, so would at most slow a jet's progress over the ground somewhat, but never halt it. The slowest a jet airliner will ever fly will be just after takeoff or just before touchdown. In those moments, it will still be flying at a true airspeed of about 150 MPH or more. No aircraft of any type would attempt to take off or land in winds anywhere close to that speed (hurricane force).

Given all that, a jet airliner will never just hang motionless in mid-air, and may only appear to do so because of some form of illusion or mis-perception.

Answer 7

A plane flying into a high speed jet-stream head wind could appear stationary from the ground. But that isn't likely because pilots rarely waste time or fuel. MORE LIKELY: A jet flying in a line directly toward/away from a viewer may appear not to be moving at all because the change in distance and size isn't obvious at great distances. The more sinister version is that two airplanes flying flat and level on a collision course appear to the pilots to be stationary - weather they be approaching head on (12 oclock), from behind (6 o'clock) or any intersecting angle in +between.

Answer 8

I've seen that myself, in cities.

It's an optical illusion

To the novice, most jetliners have the same basic shape (planform). Embraer, SuperJet 100, B737, B767, B777, A380, Me262. All the same shape but dramatically different sizes. But, fairly comparable approach speeds, for traffic control reasons.

And they are far enough away that people trust their view of shape more than their stereovision. So they are relying on the visible size of the airplane to judge its range.

And so, the Embraer seems to zip across the sky... While the 747 just hangs there if suspended by magic*. When really, they are both going the same speed, but the 747 is at a much higher altitude.

That will amplify if the person, like many, lives near a regional airport like Newark, Midway, Burbank, Oakland or National where smaller planes land regularly, but farther from a major international where the big iron are approaching from higher up of course.