Bernie B It occured to me that I may have attacked this proposition -- you know, helicopter, go up, hover, go down, Wow! We in Frisco man! -- from the wrong angle. The reason I persist in this, is that your site is designed to teach heliocentrists the error of their ways and win converts to geocentrism, but if you wish to succeed in this task, you have to hold your reader's attention beyond the first sentence and you will not do this if the first thing he reads defies reality. The fact that you can't see this will have no effect on the reader. He just sees you asserting something which cannot be defended by reason, logic or physics. So, while I don't support geocentrism, I have no desire for you to continue making statements which make you look foolish if I can help you to avoid that fate. So let's explore this journey and what would be necessary for your assertion to be true. USA is conveniently located to make certain numbers nice and round. Let us assume our journey begins in Chesapeake Bay on the East coast and ends in San Fransco on the West coast. Both these locations are very close to 37 deg North lattitude, with Chesapeake Bay at 122 deg West longitude and San Francisco at 77 deg West longitude. This means they are seperated by 45 deg of longitude which, at one hour per 15 deg, makes Chesapeake Bay three hours East of San Francisco. This means of course that if we hover motionless, we will need only three, not four hours for our journey. At 37 deg lattitude, the Earth has a circumference of almost exactly 32 000 km which, if the Earth were rotating once in 23h 56m (and a few seconds) would result in a surface velocity at that lattitude of 1337 km/h. In three hours travelling at this speed, we would cover just over 4000 km which I calculate to be the distance, as the crow flies, between our point of departure and our destination. Now if you are a heliocentrist, you are convinced that the Earth rotates and you are also forced to conclude that the atmosphere is also rotating at the same velocity (on average). You don't have a choice here, else we should be continuosly buffetted on the ground by -- at 37 deg lattitude -- 1337 km/h winds. Put aside for the moment, the matter of how it is 'stuck on' -- this can be explored later, with the help of the several examples in the solar system where atmospheres are 'stuck on' to bodies having rotating ground speeds much greater than 1337 km/h to show that it does happen. OK! It's departure time. We taxi our helicopter out onto a convenient bit of flat grassland, or a local airstrip or whatever, gun the motor and climb straight up to an altitude of 1000 m. Now it is your contention that at some point in this upward journey, if the Earth is rotating (with its atmosphere and the helicopter) at 1337 km/h, the ground beneath us will begin to rush by to the East, the airspeed will increase to 1337 km/h as we lose our initial 1337 km/h by some unmentioned mechanism and the Sun will appear to be fixed in the sky, moving neither East nor West. First problem. A helicopter cannot fly at greater than about 300 km/h. It has to do with the maximum speed of rotation of the rotor relative to the air through which it is flying. But we will ignore this and keep flying somehow, overcoming the enormous drag with our woefully inadequate engines. We settle down to 2h 45m flying before we need to buckle up in preparation for landing. And I do mean buckle up! Sandwitches and coffee will help to pass the time. Now we see San Francisco coming up -- time to make preparations for landing. The pilot locates the airport, and makes a small adjustment to his heading, faces into the wind (well not actually -- he's been doing that doubled in spades for nearly three hours!) and begins the descent. But, as we near the ground, he notices that the ground, with the local tall buildings attached, is rushing by beneath us at 1337 km/h -- that's 370 metres every second! Man has not made a vehicle which will withstand such an impact and he will not survive such an impact should it occur. So the problem with this scenario is three fold. First, how does the helicopter lose the initial 1337 km/h velocity; second, how does the helicopter fly faster than it is capable of flying, and for three hours; and last, how does the helicopter survive being struck by the ground and the attached buildings moving past below at 1337 km/h as we try to land? What matters here is that your individual reader will mostly understand these matters and dismiss your assertions out of hand. If you want to convince people of the truth of your large pitcture, you must first ensure the truth of the details upon which you rely. Paul D ____________________________________________________________________________________ Yahoo!7 Mail has just got even bigger and better with unlimited storage on all webmail accounts. http://au.docs.yahoo.com/mail/unlimitedstorage.html