WATCH: Plane Appears to ‘Pause in the Air’ in Viral Video — Here’s What Causes the Strange Phenomenon
"There's a glitch in the matrix," one commenter wrote on X (formerly Twitter) of the unusual video
Can a plane freeze in mid-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 seems to be a still plane floating in the air above the San Mateo-Hayward Bridge and San Francisco Bay.
On a flight home from New York City to the Bay Area, Manidis tells PEOPLE he “was looking out of the window and noticed the optical illusion right as [the plane was] landing.”
William Manidis via Storyful
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He adds that he “was recording videos of the beautiful views before noticing the weird illusion.”
Manidis, who is the C.E.O of a healthcare natural language processing company (a branch of A.I.), shared the video on X, captioning it in jest, “Watched a plane pause in the air today and y’all still think physics is real.”
In a follow up post, Manidis writes, “Lots of ‘physics understanders’ in the qts pretending that 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, “didn’t realize big physics had this many shills.”
lots of “physics understanders” in the qts pretending that they’ve never dropped a pound of bricks and a pound of feathers at the same time and disproved Newtonian physics at home. didn’t realize big physics had this many shills
— Will Manidis (@WillManidis) October 13, 2023
One user responded to the post writing, "They’re just buffering." Another posted, “There’s a glitch in the matrix.”
In an email to PEOPLE, Manidis noted that the plane’s seeming lack of motion was obviously an “illusion,” the cause of which can be explained by a little science.
Throughout a journey, planes may encounter headwinds and tailwinds. While the tailwinds come from behind the plane, allowing travelers to get to their destination quicker, headwinds can slow a plane down.
Some headwinds can be so strong that the plane will appear to be frozen in the sky, when in reality the aircraft is moving very slowly through the air.
William Manidis via Storyful
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Additionally, in some instances, a person’s literal point of view may be what’s tricking the eye. A person moving in the opposite direction of a plane that is slowing down, not necessarily due to headwinds, could also perceive that the aircraft is stuck motionless in the sky.
One X user responded to Manidis’s video posting, “Bc of the bridge: best video for this illusion so far 👏” in reference to the way the plane does not appear to move over the highway due to the way Manidis’s camera view curves around the massive bridge.
Others have captured this phenomenon in the past. Another clip went viral on social media in 2022 that appeared to show a plane stuck in mid-air. A third, captured near Dallas Fort Worth's airport, was posted to YouTube and gained attention in 2018.
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