What Would Happen If You Flew a Normal Plane Above Other Planets?

By Jamie Condliffe on at

We're lucky enough to live on a planet where it's comparatively easy to design and build aeroplanes that work: our atmosphere and the Earth's gravitational pull are kind in that respect. But what would happen if you tried to fly a regular plane around another planet or moon?

As Randall Munroe points out in a new What If? post, in most cases, not a lot: there's no atmosphere on plenty of those celestial bodies, so a plane would fall straight out of the sky. On the few that do have an atmosphere — including Mars, Venus, the four gas giants, Saturn's moon Titan, and the Sun — it's more difficult to say.

So Munroe took to X-Plane, a highly tweak-able flight simulator, which accurately models flight physics in-game. It's so tweak-able, that it can simulate flight on other planets. So... that's what Munroe did. His results, which you can read over on What If?, are entertaining:


But there is one piece of good news. On Saturn's moon, Titian, a relatively low surface pressure and insanely low gravitational pull (weaker than our Moon's), means even a pedal-powered plane could take off. You can — and should — read the whole post over on What If? ... and then maybe take a flight to Titan. [What If?]