If you jump at the front of the plane, the plane will keep moving but you won’t, and you’ll splatter on the back wall. DO NOT DO IT.
Absolutely not.
Edit to explain: If you’re in a plane going x miles per hour, then you are also moving that fast. So jumping doesn’t slow your body down to some super low speed while the plane around you continues to move at its normal speed.
WTFO?
PSXer… someone will be along with enough energy to explain why, when you jump, you continue to move at over 300 MPH, just as the plane does, and will land pretty much at the spot you jumped from, give or take an inch.
Unless you can somehow stop your forward motion – in excess of 300 mph – I think you are pretty safe.
Just throw something in the air next time on a plane.
How soon does your friend need to know?
It never occurred to you that it isn’t particularly windy in the passenger cabin?
The Earth is travelling around the Sun at nearly 30 km per second. Under no circumstances ever jump in the air. You will be left behind in the vacuum of space and will die a horrible death.
nm
This is actually an interesting question. It all hinges on the fact inertia works: “A body in motion will remain in motion, going the same direction and at the same speed, unless acted upon by an external force.” This means that when you jump in an airplane, your body keeps going in the same direction as the aircraft and at the same speed, because there is no force acting upon it to change its velocity or direction. The same reason explains why people who jump into the air don’t fly away from the Earth, which is moving around the Sun at a substantial velocity.
This is also why it takes quite a lot of energy to leave orbit: Something tossed out of the International Space Station, for example, will tend to remain in orbit close to the ISS because it still has nearly all of the momentum it gained from being on the ISS in the first place. In order to chuck your tool belt down into the Indian Ocean, therefore, you’d need to give it a massive kick to cancel out the massive kick it got from the craft that launched it into orbit, so it no longer has the inertia to resist gravity’s pull towards the center of the Earth.
Is the plane on a treadmill?
Stupid ≠ Interesting.
No, it’s when you jump in front of a plane that the splatter usually happens. I know, it happened to a friend of mine.
I think all of you are confused. The splat happens when you jump off an airplane.
Derleth: What if you gave the monkey wrench a good heave perpendicular to the current direction of travel? Would it spiral inwards? I mean, I get that the wrench would still have the ISS’ orbital speed no matter which way you chuck it, but it seems to me there are a couple velocities (i.e. speed and direction) that would take the wrench away from the ISS fairly quickly.
Oh, so that was the reason why Santa did not give me presents this year!
Um, not that, either. The splat comes when you land, not when you jump.
In low earth orbit, where the ISS is, you’re moving at around 8 km/s. I guess if you could throw a baseball at 90 mi/hr = 1.5 mi/min = 1/40 mi/s = .6/40 km/s = 1/24 km/s and if you threw it directly backward, you’d remove 1/200 of the speed. Maybe that would be enough to get it into an orbit that would increase atmospheric drag a significant amount, but it would still likely be in orbit quite a while.
Sure, the object would move in relation to where you threw it, but it wouldn’t really change its orbit significantly.
Well, if you just dropped something off the space station, it would no longer receive the small boosts it needed to maintain orbit; even at 300 km up there’s a tiny bit of atmosphere slowing you down. It would spiral in eventually, just like Skylab and Mir, but would take quite a while.
I heard someone on telly say they thought the best way to survive a plane crash would be to do a jump just before the plane crashed into the ground, thus avoiding the impact. The secret, of course, was to jump at juuuust the right time…
I’ll take New Year Newbie Nyuck, Nyuck for $200, Alex.