Carter we aim to please…and welcome to the SDMB!
You’ll find that GQ is a great forum…you will truly be amazed at the amount of expertise that the people on these boards have.
So all I need is a superhero that can jump 100 feet up and he can do this trick? Groovy.
Naaahhhh, it still wouldn’t work. Scenario!
The Tick: Gadzooks! The car has gone over the cliff! Fortunately, I am nigh-invulnerable and have strong legs. I’ll just jump out before I hit!
(The Tick tries to jump. From the effort, his nigh-invulnerable feet go through the car floor, trapping him in the car as it hurtles downward.)
Tick: Oops!
(Car hits, crumples and disintegrates around the Tick, who is dazed but unharmed. Good thing Arthur wasn’t with him.)
What about if say you’re driving in an ambulence with the back doors wide open. Driving at say 25 mph? You also have a remote control airplace folowing behind. You drive the plan into the back of the ambulance, then shut the doors… If you’re standing in the back, would it seems like the plane is floating? What would happen?
A plane flies because its velocity through the air creates lift on the wings. When the plane flies in the back of your ambulance, it enters air that is moving with the ambulance, so it has no relative velocity of airflow over the wings and hence no lift (unless the front windows of the ambulance are open enough to allow free flow through the ambulance and the air inside is not moving relative to the vehicle, but that ends when you shut the back doors). Basically, this is just like a plane flying at 25 mph relative to the ground which suddenly encounters a 25 mph tailwind - no airflow over the wings, no lift, no flight. As far as the airplane is concerned, the important fact for generating lift is its airspeed (speed relative to the surrounding air) not groundspeed (speed relative to the ground). If the airspeed goes to zero then the plane standing still as far as the lifting surfaces are concerned.
The plane would encounter severe turbulence and a drop in airspeed from the bubble at the back of the ambulance and would probably stall and crash before flying in the back. If things like this were possible they probably would have tried it when they were testing Rube Goldberg contraptions like the XF-85 as a parasite to the B-36.
IIRC there have been light full size airplanes that have done at the least a touch and go from the top of a moving truck and trailer. Cant think of the specifics but I seem to recall a J-3 or Supercub. A similar stunt was done in one of the James Bond films.