Post created by Braden
Everyone likes a good action-packed movie, right? Well, the "Fast and Furious" saga is not short of any such action. In the seventh installment of the series, there is an incredible scene where Vin Diesel and his crew drive out of a plane onto a mountain. Yeah, they drive cars out of the back of a cargo plane and parachute onto the mountain while driving away. Now i did some research on this and actually, there is nothing that really says it could not be possible.
A couple things need to be clarified though. In order to slow the momentum of a falling car you would need one massive parachute. A typical muscle car like Vin's weighs roughly 3000lbs. In order to slow the decent to 10fps the parachute would need to be 207ft in diameter. That is 2/3 of a football field. The reason for this is because the mass of the car is much greater than the typical mass of a human. Therefore, the work that gravity does on car is immensely greater. A parachute takes advantage of the drag to slow the decent. The area and mass are related. If you take a given mass and make it smaller in area, the impact velocity will be greater due to less drag acting upon the system. However, if you can increase the area of the object and keep the mass the same, then the drag will greatly increase and resist gravity.
Two things that are very unrealistic are the time they are falling and the distance they put between each other. It shows Vin Diesel going out of the plane first and he falls for about 20 seconds before the next car leaves the plane, but immediately the cars are right next to each other, falling at the same rate and in control. If you were to wait more than 5 seconds in a normal dive between divers then there would be too much space and distance between you two to catch up. A plane moves at over 300mph and just seconds can mean the difference of a mile or two. As well, during all of the drama that is happening in the air, it shows it takes them about 2 minutes of free-fall from 14k feet. However, you would have to be nearly in space too free fall for this long. Although, in theory this stunt is plausible it is highly unlikely that driving a car out of a plane would end in a successful story.
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