Originally Posted by Lsos
I see everyone finally agreed that the airplane will take off because it's not powered by its wheels...but they still seem to have missed the point. Fact is, even a car powered by its wheels would be able to make progress down the conveyor. The only difference is that its engine would have to work twice as hard becasue it has to compensate for the conveyor, where as the airplane doesn't.
You lose... If the car is accelerating and the belt has a sensor to speed up at the same rate as the car, matching speed for speed no matter what, the car won't go anywhere.
If the belt had a set speed or was a little behind in the matching, then yes slowly the car would move off the belt, until the car hit its top speed, thus giving the belt a chance to match.