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Skydriving
SanLouBlues writes "Autoweek has this article about a group of guys in Arizona who will drop your car out of a cargo jet for $15k. Parachutes for the car are optional. Their ultimate goal is to drop a Greyhound with forty people inside. More pictures here and here)"
"There's no real science to it--it's hit or miss," says skydiver/skydriver Greg Gasson
I don't want to know what would happen if they hit, let alone if they miss. Hit what? Where?
(Although, I think this would make a neat little Junkyard Wars-esque competition.. or not)
If you have an 802.11b-equipped laptop in the car on your way down, are you then warskydriving?
I'd pay them $15K to drop a Greyhound bus packed with 40 people I don't like. Sounds like a great idea.
Looks can be deceiving. Or CAN they?
"I bet a funny thing about driving a car off a cliff is, while you're in midair, you still hit those brakes! Hey, better try the emergency brake!"
-Jack Handy
From the story: The hoods are duct-taped shut, since metal tearing off at terminal velocity could endanger the "drivers."
Boy, I wish I had a nickel for every time duct tape prevented someone's violent death at terminal velocity.
Use Ctrl-C instead of ESC in Vim!
I can totally blow the doors off of any Mustang, so watch out! My plate says "00wnzU".
Lets not forget the piano tossing trebuchets , inspiring crazy guys to throw big stuff since the middle ages.
Yawn.
Noone would want my car. ('89 Dodge Colt with 218,000 miles.) If this car gets me through 2 more years of college and these guys are still around, I think it would be a great way to pay my last respects to my baby.
The masses are the crack whores of religion.
maybe it's not such a hot idea to chase a cargo plane from below and behind, while a car is falling out of its ass?
"Look bubba, *click* that car *click* just keeps getting bigger and bigSMASH
"Their ultimate goal is to drop a Greyhound with forty people inside."
This has the potential to be the first 40-way Darwin Award...
If you smoke after sex, you're doing it too fast.
...to wake up a drunk friend.
How many times do the cars miss the ground?
Looking for an Information Security student project suggestion?
Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/
I don't think this is what they ment when they said we'd have flying cars in the future.
Jaysyn
There is a war going on for your mind.
But fast ROLLER COASTERS are the great, perilous danger from which we must protect the masses.
Riiiight.
Sometimes the funniest part of being American is comparing the things we can't do with the things that are perfectly legal.
crib
Please don't read my journal
140mph? Is that right? It seems awfully slow to me. I would have thought that the terminal velocity of a car would have been much higher than that.
Sounds about right to me, especially when you consider that in the normal belly-to-earth position, the human body will hit a terminal velocity of around 120 mph. Cars have more mass, but they also have a lot more surface area against which air molecules will press as they fall, balancing out the extra mass.
Incidentally, I am both a licensed skydiver (A-38847, getting my B before too much longer) and an engineer.
I pledge allegiance to the flag...
of the Corporate States of America...
If at first you do not succeed, then skydriving is not for you.
I'm the Devil the Windows users warned you about.
Why back when I was a kid people were sneaky about their homicidal intent. Nowadays they just say "my goal in life is to cram 40 people into a bus, drop it from an airplane, and watch it smash to bits." Hmph.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Just to clarify the "chuteless" jump, the stuntman who did its name is Greg Gasson. You can see the full video of it on the DVD called "Good Stuff", which you can buy from www.joejennings.com
During Freefall Greg was attached to the rig via an invisible harness and cable system.
However, upon deploying the parachute he disconnects the harness and alternates between hanging from his hands to his feet, then eventually climbing up and puts on the rig for landing. It's very cool, but if you think about it, no more dificult then much of the trapeze work done in circuses.
(yes, I'm a skydiver, with over 400 jumps to my name. I've always worn my parachute.)
_Am
140mph? Is that right? It seems awfully slow to me.
That's only because you've never hit the ground doing 140mph. If you had, you'd realize just how fast that is.
.
I'm a skydiver, I've got over 400 jumps to my name.
Joe Jennings and crew have been tossing stuff out of airplanes in Arizona for quite a few years now. Joe does it because he's a profesional cinematographer, he's the guy that filmed the skydiving scenes in most of the recent James Bond films, plus recently Charlie's Angels and XXX. If there's an ad that features skydiving, Joe shot it.
Joe films these, and puts them on DVD - his most recent one is called "Good Stuff" - and you can buy it from www.joejennings.com. Buy it. It's worth it. Lots of incredible (and funny!) work.
Geeks will appreciate this. One of the funnier scenes, Joe throws a living room out of the back of the Skyvan. (note the skyvan is a turbo-prop, not a "jet".) I said they threw a living room out. They did it twice, they rigged up sofa's and loveseats, table lamps, telephones, tv sets, bolted it togeather on a platform, stuck two skydivers in the loveseat, the rolled the whole contraption out the back of the tailgate. What made is so cool is the tablelamps actually WORKED, and the TV was turned on. The tv worked all the way to impact.
I chuckled to myself when I read in the article "There have been no close calls, near misses or injuries in any of the jumps." On one of the "living room drops", the living room landed 20 feet from the ground film crew. Overheard on the video is "fuck that was close..."
Anyways I hate to make a post that's largely a sales pitch for a DVD, but for gods sake check this out. It's called "Good Stuff", and you can get it on www.joejennings.com
Its got full video of all of the car drops, both living room drops, the "chuteless" jumps, and whole lotta other REALLY cool shit.
_Am
140mph? Is that right? It seems awfully slow to me. I would have thought that the terminal velocity of a car would have been much higher than that.
Yes. Cars fall EXTREMELY unstable. They tumble, literally. Sometimes they do rotations, sometime they do what we call "potatoe chipping", where they just teeter-totter back and forth.
They tend to fall generally with their axels to the ground, meaning their biggest flat surface area is creating all that drag.
A human body in a belly to earth position has a terminal velocity of about 120 MPH. Put that human body into a verticle position (very dificult to hold), and speeds tend to go up to about 180 mph, but can go as high as 300mph.
Yes, I'm a skydiver. 400 jumps so far, and a "D" (master) licence from the United States Parachute Association.
_Am
Mass is irrelevant. If you drop a bowling ball and an apple off a building, they will hit ground at the same time.
This is assuming no air resistance. Air resistance makes a pretty big difference; without air resistance, the concept of terminal velocity would not exist. A freefalling object would just keep accelerating and accelerating until it hit the ground.
As a quick demonstration of this, compare the real-world terminal velocity of a human body in the belly-to-earth position -- 120 mph -- with what it would hit on a typical skydive from 12000 feet, minus the parachute pull. I'll use an arbitrary weight of 190 lbs for the purposes of these calculations.
Gravitational potential energy = mass * g * height
Kinetic energy = (1/2) * mass * velocity^2
Energy is conserved between GPE and KE considering that we are assuming no air resistance.
Setting (190/32.2) * 32.2 * 12000 equal to (1/2) * (190/32.2) * v^2 and solving for v yields an impact velocity of 878 feet per second, or 599 mph. This is a far cry from the real-world result of 120 mph, so you can see that friction caused by air resistance makes an enormous difference. As for mass not mattering, mass only doesn't matter if you don't take air resistance into consideration because, as I demonstrated above, the mass is on both sides of the equation so it cancels out. But if you consider air resistance [sum of energy before = sum of energy after plus energy lost to friction], mass no longer cancels out. Incidentally, yes, different skydivers (IAAS) do fall at somewhat different rates, but 120 mph is the generally accepted standard. Different people have different masses and different surface areas, so their terminal velocities will be slightly different.
I pledge allegiance to the flag...
of the Corporate States of America...
"That'll show you how it's done!"
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