Lucky me. My cubicle has a view of the outside world. One of the things I can see from here are parasailers. Looks like a terrific amount of fun, just let the breeze fill your really-cool parachute and take off for an hour or so of flight around a really steep cliff. OK. Cool. But what with the X-sports fans out there, isn’t it a matter of time before someone gets silly and tries to catch a breeze on a tornado & ride IT out?
What would happen if I lived in, say, Kansas (besides my wife leaving me). And I got bored doing whatever it is that people do in Kansas on a long Saturday afternoon. So I get myself a parasail and wait for the next big thunderstorm to pop up.
Can a parasail generate enough lift to fly me around in a gale?
2)Can I fly the outskirts of a tornado in relative safety (assuming I don’t do it in a T-shirt & shorts).
Severe thunderstorms are usually accompanied with golf ball size hail (or larger), which in turn, would be the ultimate buzzkill for some gen-Xer’s dream…
Anything in the air is at risk of being in the path of a lighting strike. It’s been demonstrated that planes actually trigger the lightning that stikes them, because they slightly ionize the air as they pass through it, due to friction. A skydiver would not produce such an ionized trail, but could still intercept a lighting strike if he’s in the wrong place at the wrong time.
The area around a tornado is extremely turbulent and full of debris. It would be like being in a blender full of glass shards.
Wind shear can drop a 747. Your little parasail would definitely be shredded.
Hail falls MUCH faster than man with a parachute. the wind load surface area of a hailstone, even a large one, is much smaller than the chutists, so it has a much higher terminal velocity.
On the plus side, you would almost certainly not need a sail to get into the air. Just drive a cheap car into the path of the funnel, and off you go!
The downside is that lighter objects would be blown faster than your relatively heavy body. This means rocks, sticks, glass, etc. would be constantly pelting you at extreme speed. Imagine a blunderbuss shot that never ended. Were you to wear a protective suit to shield you from this hail, it would probably shield you from the ice hail as well. However, as a consequence of lighter objects being blown faster than heavier objects you are also subject to colliding with debris heavier than you. This could include your car or an airborne tree. There is also a plethora of things the tornado did not lift off the ground to choose from, such as forests, buildings, and good old mother Earth. All of these are almost certainly fatal even with the protective suit.
This would apply less and less the farther you went from the funnel, but tornados are known to suck things into them…
Are you nuts??
Some rough turbulence can make a very bad day for a parasail; let alone the most violent meteorological phenomenon on Earth.
IF some Darwing Award candidate tries this feat my bet is that before 5 seconds he´ll be tightly wraped around the parasail and bouncing around.
You would be fucked like no-parachtuer who ever came before you:
you would have the pleasure of your parachute gettine ripped to hell and you getting yanked to ten thousand feet before you had anything to do about it.
But you wouldn’t need to worry about the balloon-line snapping, much less a parachute, because you’re pretty much still doomed to die. Screaming. In a can.
But…now that Kevorkian’s out of business, maybe you’d still have a niche market you could see the system to.
Lightning is effectively the same thing as a really big bug zapper. You don’t need to be tethered to be in danger any more than a bug needs to be tethered to get zapped, and when is the last time you saw a tethered bug (maybe a spider…).
The only thing in your favor is that compared to the size of the earth and clouds, you are a very small bug.
Right. The only requirement for you to be struck by lightning while in the air is that there be a potential (voltage) difference between you and some part of the storm. Cloud to cloud lightning and lightning within a single, large storm cloud are common events.