Posts Tagged ‘airplane’

An airplane traveling horizontally at 160km/hr and a altitude of 800m drops medical supplies to an island.
A) How many seconds prior to the plane being directly over the island should the pilot release the supplies ?
B) What is the horizontal distance traveled by the supplies?

A small plane is flying directly west with an airspeed of 30.0 m/s. The plane flies into a region where
the wind is blowing at 10.0 m/s at an angle of 30° to the south of west. In that region, the pilot changes
the directional heading to maintain her due west heading. (a) What is the change she makes in the
directional heading to compensate for the wind? (b) After the heading change, what is the ground
speed of the airplane?

Speed is measured relative to a stationary object. Velocity is determined by calculating the time it takes to travel a known distance from a stationary object. A cars speedometer measures speed relative to the stationary ground it is traveling on. An airplane measures speed by the same thing, by how long it takes to travel between points of a known distance on the ground.

So when it is said that a spacecraft is hurtling at 46,000 miles per hour beyond the orbit of Pluto towards the next star, what is that speed being compared against? In that part of space, there is no stationary object to calculate velocity. Is it still being compared to a stationary object on the surface of the Earth? At that distance, the Earth is traveling through space in orbit around the sun, which is traveling in orbit around the galaxy, which is traveling through space around who knows what.

So, what is the spacecraft traveling at 46,000 miles per hour from or towards that can be measured?