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Terminal velocity?
Recently there was a young man on the TV who had survived a suicide jump off the golden gates bridge, how near to terminal velocity would he have been when he hit the water, and has anyone survived a bigger drop(discounting tangled parachutes etc.)
3 Answers
- Andrew WLv 41 decade agoFavorite Answer
You increase in speed approximately 20 miles an hour for each second you fall. So about ten seconds to terminal velocity, probably doesn't take that long to fall from golden gate, so he was only about half way there.
During WW2 pilots allegedly fell from 35,000 feet into large snowdrifts and survived. They would have been at terminal velocity.
- PointyLv 71 decade ago
To solve this problem using the principles of Physics, we need to know the height from the point he jumped to the surface of the water.
Given this, we can easily solve for the velocity when the man hit the top of the water.
- Anonymous1 decade ago
i heard a story, u'll have to check how true it is, of a woman who fell out of a plane (can't remember height but it was high enough to get terminal velocity) who curled into a ball and survived, despite a ball being a position that would give you a high terminal velocity.
heres a similar story from WWII: