Saturday, December 10, 2011

The science of plummeting: Solon students drop flour bag from airplane for class experiment

SOLON — A small plane descended toward a corn field three miles south of Solon on the morning of Friday, Dec. 9, 2011, as a group of teenagers watched from below and readied their cameras.

The plane passed over the group and flew about 230 feet past them, before an arm emerged from the window and dropped a small white object that hit the ground with a muffled thud. The students cheered as the plane gained altitude and entered a turn for another pass.

Back in the classroom at Solon High School an hour later, a video of the plane paused mid-turn on the projector screen and rewound a few frames so that both the plane and the ground were in view.

“There it is,” teacher Shawn Cornally said, pointing at the screen. “Can we tell the height of the airplane from this angle?”

This was critical information the class needed in order to tell explain the results of their experiment: to use physics formulas to predict the impact location of a bag of flour dropped from a plane.

It’s not always easy to demonstrate physics concepts such as these, but Cornally was able to with help of Solon senior Skyler Rath, 18.

Earlier in the school year, when the class was learning about velocity and projectiles, Rath mentioned that he was about to get his commercial pilot’s license thanks to a scholarship from the Green Castle Aero Club. What better way to demonstrate velocity than to drop something out of a plane.

It wasn’t quite that easy. Rath needed the license first, and the class had to cut through some red tape to get approval from the appropriate government agencies, such as the FAA and Department of Defense. Restrictions on dropping objects into populated areas ended up moving the site of the experiment to farmland south of the city

Inclement weather canceled the first attempt on Tuesday, Dec. 6, 2011, but the clouds parted Friday morning long enough for Rath and his friend, senior Cody Fritz, 17, to fly from Green Castle Airport in Oxford to the Solon field.


Teacher Shawn Cornally wrote more about the experiment on his blog.
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