Professor taken off plane for doing calculus

I heard about this episode on Boston TV this morning. I think the Professor taught Economics and I notice, he was writing differential equations for a
planned lecture.

Isn't it a bit weird that the Prof was taken off the plan, while the uneducated and complaing woman was allowed to stay on?

The Prof needs to contact a lawyer about suing both the woman and the airlines.

How was the "dark, curly hair" related to the fears of the woman?

Math is scary.

Is "black curly hair" also scary? I love black, curly hair...I'm not a afraid..

Well, everybody knows terrorists don't have straight blond hair and blue eyes.

You can only trust blue eyed, blond, tall nordic type men.....

The complaining passenger initially told cabin crew she wasn't feeling well, and then said she was suspicious of the professor. She left the flight and did not re-board.

The professor was taken off the plane, questioned briefly, and allowed to re-board the plane.

Good grief..

Ah, good, he was let back on the plane. I'd not read enough of the thread. I had been wordering, wouldn't one of the pilots recognize calculus?

Not the Canadian ones who thought kilogrammes were pounds and had to glide a 767 to an emergency landing when they ran out of fuel.

It's famous, Google the 'Gimli Glider'. An Air Canada flight from Montreal to Edmonton was flying with main and backup fuel gauges out of service. The plane was therefore unserviceable but the captain mistakenly believed it was OK to fly if the fuel level in the tanks was confirmed with measuring sticks. When this was done, the captain used the conversion factor for pounds per litre when he should have used kg per litre. He calculated the fuel he needed as 22,300 lb when it should have been 22,300 kg. Captain and co-pilot were demoted for a period.

You've stated that the pilots used a dip-stick to measure the vol of the flight fuel and they found that the vol was satisfactory. My question to you is..".Is there only one type of fuel for this airplane?

Can we conclude that all containers of the fuel will have the same density?

At the time of the incident, Canada was converting to the metric system. As part of this process, the new 767s being acquired by Air Canada were the first to be calibrated for metric units (litres and kilograms) instead of Imperial units (gallons and pounds). All other aircraft were still operating with Imperial units (gallons and pounds). For the trip to Edmonton, the pilot calculated a fuel requirement of 22,300 kilograms. A floatstick check indicated that there were 7,682 litres already in the tanks. To calculate how much more fuel had to be added, the crew needed to convert the quantity in the tanks to a mass (weight), subtract that figure from 22,300 kg and convert the result back into a volume. In previous times, this task would have been completed by a flight engineer, but the 767 was the first of a new generation of airliners that flew with only a pilot and co-pilot.

The mass of a litre of fuel was 0.803 kg, so the correct calculation was:

7,682 L × 0.803 kg/L = 6,169 kg : fuel already onboard
20,088 L × 0.803 kg/L = 16,131 kg : fuel to be transferred to plane
27,770 L × 0.803 kg/L = 22,300 kg : fuel for flight

The ground crew had arrived at an incorrect conversion factor of 1.77, which was the weight of a litre of fuel in pounds and this error was not noticed by the flight crew. The conversion factor provided on the refueller's paperwork was one that had always been used in the past, when Air Canada's fleet had been imperial-calibrated. Their incorrect calculation was:

7,682 L × 1.77 lb/L = 13,597 lb : fuel already onboard
4,916 L × 1.77 lb/L = 8,703 lb : fuel to be transferred to plane
12,598 L × 1.77 lb/L = 22,300 lb : fuel for flight

Instead of 22,300 kg (27,770 L ) of fuel, they had 22,300 pounds (12,598 L ) on board — 10,100 kg, about half the amount required to reach their destination

Ah, yes (imitating the voice of W.C. Fields). Could this be The Blond Beast a la Nietzche? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Genealogy_of_Morality

that was a long time ago

I had friends living in Gimli at the time

we thought it was cool that Gimli finally got recognition - for being the place a plane landed

Heck. The Arabs invented the mathematical "0" (zero). And now only Nordic Caucasoidals should do math? Let's not forget it wasn't just guess work to engineer a pyramid (and the Egyptians were Black Africans at the time).

By the way, as many educated people know, many Jews in modern times have been mathematicians, since one did not have to take one's tool kit with them, to set up shop, after escaping from the rioting pogrom (actually a redundancy). I've even met a few Jews with curly black hair. It actually made their ethnicity more authentic, in my opinion. And, a Jewish woman with black, curly hair was always more attractive to me, since I did not think she was trying to be the proverbial Shiksa Godess.