Ya never know when you're gonna need some flubber ...
Posted on 01/26/2008 10:13:45 PM PST by dayglored
My bad, I read the story earlier today so I didn’t re-read it here. I presumed it was like any other private airstrip. 7500 feet is a very large private runway - it’s almost 1000 feet longer than the long strip at Burbank (commercial) airport here in L.A. Still a tragic story.
These guys flew further than the Wright brothers. Their first flight was only 120 feet.
This could be a freshman physics question. To drop 70 feet takes sqrt( 70 ft/ (2 * 32 ft/sec2) ) = 1.05 sec
Then to go 200 ft in 1.05 seconds, the car had to be going 200 ft/1.05 sec = 190 ft/sec = 130 mph.
“That’s ballpark” as we say in the trade.
Ah, but alas, no helmets.
The piece says the runway is 1 1/2 miles long.
I'm assuming that you're calculating from the 85 foot top of the embankment to the 15 foot high impact with the tree, right?
IANAP (I am not a physicist), but I think there's a complication in that going up the embankment would have launched the car skyward from the 85 foot level. Depending on the steepness the embankment, the car could have gone significantly higher than the top of the embankment.
Why are your aerials photos so different from each other?
Never mind, the angle of the photos make it appear that way.
Fools. Probably not wearing their seatbelts.
Traveling that distance at that rate of speed, I don't think it would have mattered much.
By the Google Maps image, the north end of the runway sits on top of a mound which drops off on three sides to form the embankment.
Also, I erred by a factor of 2 ( Arrgh. ) s = 1/2 g t^2, so t=sqrt(2s/g) not sqrt(s/2g). That means it had about 2 seconds to go 200 feet, requiring a speed of only 65 mph, by this estimate. This is more consistent with braking and sliding after a high speed run.
Jumblo isn’t your normal airpark. Big money there. Built by the founder of Amway it has a 7550 ft long 210 ft wide paved runway and many have large jets that live there.
I live on an airpark about to hundred miles south and we too have nut jobs that drive their vehicles on our runway,
5 darwin award nominees.
The airfield owners are clearly liable for not having a properly fenced in area to keep errant car traffic from mistakenly entering the runway thinking that it was an on-ramp to the local interstate. :)
Probably not. The surviving families can try, but this is a Federally licensed airport. These kids were committing a Federal offense just being on the property....well beyond simple trespass.....
I had that problem once with powered paragliders coming onto my property and using my runway without my permission. All were prosecuted and convicted of criminal trespass.....
Probably better than shooting them claiming they were predatory birds.
Ah, thanks. Prior to posting this, I had searched on "five dead" (not "5 dead") and "airstrip", and come up blank.
Well, "flew" isn't exactly accurate for this accident. The Wright Bros. actually gained net altitude in their flight. What these kids did was "fall". It's just that they fell 85-15=70 feet vertically, while traveling 200 feet horizontally.
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