SoldierDad, did you serve or does your kid serve? Either way, I think your faith in aeronautics should be nearly equal to your faith in God.
Of are you depending on angels to hold C-17's aloft? And dismissing fuel calculations as simple superstition?
IOW: I don't think you REALLY believe what you just posted.
Since no-one knows what I REALLY believe in except for me, I'll leave that for another time. There is much in science which can be and has been demonstrated though empirical evidence to be "truth". Aircraft going aloft, and fuel calculations would be evidence of this. But, there are areas of science which makes claims which have no empirical evidence to back them up. Then the "best guess" approach is used. Case in point: attempts to relate fossils found in one layer of strata as being related to fossils found in a different layer of strata because there are some micro-structural similarities - ignoring the macro-structural difference. These fossils have hundreds of thousands of years, if not millions, which separate each other from the strata in which they were found. Logic would suggest that there should be additional fossils in the record between each of these that would show additional micro-structural changes if one truly evolved into another. Well, this has never been shown to be the case in the fossil record - not anywhere - not with any animal in which the claim is that it became something else. Scientific principals related to chemistry, engineering, etc. does not fall into the same category as evolution.