First, the phrasal verb is indeed take off, which means:
take off (phrasal verb) To leave the ground and begin flight; to ascend into the air
Second, you can use a preposition after a phrasal verb:
The plane took off from the runway.
Third, we need to be careful about omitting the prepositions, because sometimes phrasal verbs can mean different things:
take off (phrasal verb) To remove
So, without a preposition, we could say:
The bulldozer took off the runway, leaving nothing but brown dirt.
Fourth, it is possible to use the same preposition found in the phrasal verb immediately after the phrasal verb; it's not "incorrect." So, if you really wanted to, you could say:
The plane took off off the runway.
However, I'd recommend rewriting that, for a couple reasons:
- Although English doesn't have a rule strictly prohibiting identical consecutive words, they can still be awkward, so it's probably best to avoid them when possible
- Since we know that airplanes normally take off using runways, adding the phrase "off the runway" doesn't really add much useful information
That said, there are other examples I can think of where the last word of a phrasal verb might match the proposition immediately following it:
The hotel was filling up fast, but we checked in in time to get a room.
He came around around twenty minutes ago.
I passed out out by the meadow.
She had no one to root for for the rest of the tournament.
Like I said, though, there are often simple ways to improve such sentences – which is probably one reason you don't run across them very often. For example, you can change the prepositional phrase or the verb:
- The hotel was filling up fast, but we checked in early enough to get a room.
The hotel was filling up fast, but we arrived in time to get a room.
He came around about twenty minutes ago.
He wandered by around twenty minutes ago.
I passed out over near the meadow.
- I fainted out by the meadow.
Or sometimes you can simply rearrange the sentence:
- For the rest of the tournament, she had no one to root for.
Best Answer
Yes, taking off in an airplane is the verb used to describe when an airplane leaves the ground. Landing is the opposite- when an airplane touches down on the ground again.
One of the running joke among pilots is the admonishment to make sure that the number of take-offs logged remains equal to the number of landings logged.
"For Tokyo" is the shortened version of bound for Tokyo- the airplane's destination was Tokyo.