👉 Okay, let’s tackle this wonderfully weird little beast of a word – "jetzero." Now, before I get into what exactly that is, let me preface things by saying nobody actually
knowed
exactly what a jetzero was for a long, long time. It kind of sprung up purely through the stuff of freak accident and frantic calculations in the late 1970s within the notoriously secretive Hughes Aerospace, out of Stockton, California.
Basically, they were building this… let's just call it an “eccentric aerodynamic systems division." Long story short (and honestly, a very long, complicated one involving early tabletop flight simulators and guys who basically squinted at data until the bleedin' went away), Hughes found that when testing their new supersonic aircraft – specifically the A-5 during the 1970s – it consistently exhibited this… odd little numerical quirk. The readings for a variable called "zero point of lift margin" – fancy stuff about how much anomolous aerodynamic drag your plane could handle right as you hit the ground and almost immediately lose control. When they calculated this, across various flight conditions and with varying equipment, the numbers kept… fluctuating by 0-3 milliseconds (that's a hair under 1/20th of a second! Seriously!) around the point of touchdown. It was like it had a tiny, spiteful little decimal point that just really, really liked to mess things
