A friend of mine recently returned from a trip to Australia. While in Australia she tried skydiving a few times. In her frighteningly brief training session, she was told that it is dangerous to skydive in the rain. the reason she was told is that landing on (or catching up to, whatever) the pointy end of raindrops can actually break the skin. At first I was sure she’d been suckered but having never sky dived I’m now not so sure. Does anyone know if this can actually happen? Wounding yourself on the pointy end of a raindrop?
I don’t know about the ‘pointy’ end of a raindrop (I thought they were spherical, except for Disney cartoons) but riding unprotected on a motorcycle in the rain can hurt a little bit. This is at fifty five, sixty miles per hour, on small patches of exposed skin (neck, forearms, forehead…) I’ve even made it back with very small, raindrop sized red pseudowelts.
How fast do you fall skydiving? How does that speed compare with a raindrop?
The Galileian ideal of bodies falling at the same rate doesn’t hold completely for friends and raindrops, as I’d assume the drops smaller size and weight allows friction from the wind to slow them down more than a suited jumper. Any other thoughts?
As I understand it, raindrops are actually spherical rather than teardrop shaped, so there is really no pointy end. Of course, the terminal velocity of a raindrop (~15mph) is a whole lot lower than a persons (~125mph). Basically, you will be hit by raindrops travelling at a speed in excess of 100mph (from your frame of reference), I can’t imagine that this would be a pleasant experience.
Dangerous? I’ll leave that up to the skydiving (or motorcycle) experts to discuss.
This is quickly getting hijacked, and I apologize in advance…I’m one for the raindrop as teardrop camp, as I remember reading about the GM EV1 along the lines that it was shaped like the most aerodynamic thing in nature (that being the teardrop shaped raindrop).
Welcome to the boards! I don’t think I’d ask Cecil just yet. I’m pretty sure there’re a few skydivers around the boards… no doubt they’ll shed some light on this. FWIW, I’m guessing the pointy-end of the raindrop thing was either her pulling your leg, or her spin on whatever they told her.
I haven’t been skydiving, but my experience with open cockpit flying tells me that traveling through rain at high speed can smart. Never went faster than 70 mph in the open planes, but even at that speed rain is not fun. It certainly feels pointed, even if it’s not.
I would think another problem with jumping in rain is visibility - I dunno know about clouds having silver linings but some of them definitely contain aluminum. Moving at high speed when you can’t see where you’re going isn’t healthy in the long term, and can lead to painful encounters with passing aircraft.
Then, you can also have some pretty violent turbulence associated with rain which may take some of the fun out of the ride.
Hitting raindrops at 100mph might be painful, but I can’t imagine it being seriously dangerous except to soft parts like the eyes.
it can’t be worse than what a motorcyclist travelling at 100mph in the rain experiences (and yes, there are actually people in the UK that do this), however a motorcyclist would have a full-face helmet and leathers in that situation.