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Meteorite Bowling
La Camiseta writes "According to this article from the Guardian Unlimited Observer, some members of the Salt Lake Astronomical Society want to drop bowling balls from airplanes onto the Utah salt flats to simulate meteorites falling. Unfortunately, it's hit a few snags."
Yeah, I thought the same thing when I saw that. Of course his name is Wiggum, not Wiggins.
An object falling through wind shear accelerates up to the speed of the air mass, like a boat in a current. How quickly it does so depends on the object's mass and drag. A bowling ball is pretty dense (hard to accelerate) and low drag (hard to accelerate), and it won't even be in the air very long. Airplanes are mostly air, thus lots of cross section, so they pretty much instantly become part of the air movement. However, they also (hopefully) have more than enough thrust to pick their own heading.
The big deal with the Norden bombsight was its oversold ability to compensate for airspeed (the inital velocity and vector of the bomb) and wind speed/direction after the bomb was released. The same would be true of the bowling ball. I'd think the meteor would have a higher terminal velocity -- some of them are basically chunks of metal.
Incidentally, the Bernoulli effect is only a percentage of a wing's lift. I figured out recently that the textbooks make this hard to understand by always depicting the airfoil at a zero angle of attack, at which few planes could stay aloft. Military jets and aerobatic planes and paper airplanes don't rely on it as much, and most planes can fly upside-down provided the gas and oil keep flowing....
Calculate the altitude that a bowling ball will reach terminal velocity, add 100 ft. or so, then just launch it that high using a trebuchette (better than a PC), a rocket, or something like that. I would guess that it would only take 100-200 ft to reach terminal velocity anyway, so what do you need the airplane and the extra altitude for
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Small meteors slow down to terminal velocity as they fall. Big ones don't slow down that much. I'm pretty sure that bowling balls qualify as small for this purpose.
Meteorites don't exist until something large and round hits the ground.