it was SO MUCH FUCKING FUN - explanation points and capitalizing words and vulgarity don’t even come close to describing how cool it was.
but!
i have a question. when you jump out of the airplane, you don’t get that ‘stomach dropping into your underwear and snuggling with your genital’ feeling that everyone knows and loves from rollercoasters.
why not? it would seem to me that falling out of a plane is a lot bigger a drop than anything ‘batman: the ride’ has to offer. the instructor explained that it had to do with the fact that you go sideways (in the direction the plane was going) as well as down so you dont notice it, or something, but i cant figure out how that would affect anything.
if anyone could clear this up it would be greatly appreciated - i would like to sound like an expert when i am explaining my weekend to my friends on monday. : )
It has to do with the terminal velocity of the human body. The feeling you get in your stomach riding a rollercoaster is from experiencing less than 1 g.
The human body’s terminal velocity is about 120 mph, which is about 55 m/s. While gravity does accelerate you towards the ground, air resistance prevents you from going faster than your terminal velocity. When you first jump out of the airplane, you’ll be moving at terminal velocity in the direction that the plane was moving, but within a few seconds, your speed will remain the same while the direction of your movement will be nearly straight down.
To reiterate — the funny feeling comes from acceleration, not speed. No acceleration means no funny feeling.
I doubt it’s the acceleration alone. A free-falling body going straight down would certainly be accelerating faster than one on a slope.
I think the difference is that your body on a coaster is not traveling uniformly. You tend to “brake” with your feet and tense your back against the seat. This puts your stomach in a position of “floating” up against your lungs, and your diaphragm becoming extended.
Nope. If you’re going ~45 mph on a rollercoaster, and hit a downslope, you’ll accelerate. If you’re in freefall at terminal velocity, you won’t accelerate.
Just saw the thread title and was truly astonished. I just went skydiving today for my first time. It was incredible.
Punoqllads: It takes 9 seconds to reach terminal velocity (111.14 mph. YMMV somewhat of course). That is a long period of time for freefall, for inexperienced jumpers. (This is from my nifty parachuting manual and jump log I got after my jump.
As for the cause of stomach distress, it’s certainly associated with jerking and looping around, while a skydive is fairly smooth. But hell, when the chute opens and grabs you, you get a little jerk, and I’ll bet some people get a little jostled is the guts when that happens.
Just to muddy the waters further, I DID get that plunging feeling in my stomach when I went skydiving. Just for an instant, at the moment of true weightlessness when I left the plane.
I did a “tandem” jump with an instructor because I wanted a long freefall. Maybe a static line jump makes a difference? The drag of the line may be enough to stop you going completely weightless.
A static line opens the chute as soon as you clear the door. No freefall. (If I ever get a scanner, I’ll post the pic my dad took of his boot toes and the ground below…at 3,000 feet)
While there isn’t, strictly speaking, a freefall period in a static line jump, the line is long enough such that you fall probably about 15 feet before your parachute begins to open. The line does cause drag even before it pulls your chute, but it’s pretty close to freefall speeds for about a second or two.
It’s really about a 50-foot fall on a static line-- 8-foot static line (or 16 ft on a C-47, to clear the tail), then 40 feet of risers and the canopy itself coming out.