Skydiving: Knowing The Physics Of Skydiving Shows The Gravity Of The Situation

If you want to understand all about the physics of skydiving – and who doesn’t?—then you need to know about gravity and acceleration. Having a healthy respect for gravity and acceleration will help your skydiving experiences be safer.

Gravity

Now, this is a no-brainer. Of COURSE you have to study gravity if you want to understand the physics of skydiving – YOU ARE DROPING OUT OF THE SKY. Just how far can you drop before you become road pizza? And, quite frankly, why doesn’t every body that plummets out of an airplane wind up road pizza?

Gravity was theorized long before the apple supposedly hit Sir Isaac Newton on the noggin, but he did come up with the laws of thermodynamics, including the forces involved with gravity. Leonardo da Vinci is attributed for trying to figure out why and how gravity works. We would not be able to successfully skydive today if it wasn’t for studying the works of Sir Isaac Newton to give us the physics of skydiving.

Basically, everything attracts. The bigger the object, the bigger it’s gravitational force on other objects. So, when a skydiver jumps out of a plane, he has much less of a gravitational pull than the earth. That is why the skydiver falls towards the earth and not the other way around. Wouldn’t that make life interesting if the planet leaped into space to meet every single skydiver taking a jump? This question can be answered with the physics of skydiving.

Acceleration

Now, when something falls, it falls at a certain rate of speed. However, if continues to fall, the gravitational pull on it becomes stronger, causing the plummeting object to fall even faster the further it goes.

For example, if you drop a penny a few feet from the ground, not much happens except the penny hits the ground. But if you drop it off of the Empire State Building, you can do some major damage to the very unamused New Yorkers below. Why? Because that feather light penny has speeded up (accelerated) so fast that it is now a lethal weapon. Why armies choose to rain bombs on enemies is beyond me – they could do significant damage just by dropping pennies.

This is why we have to have parachutes when skydiving. The physics of skydiving say that the farther the fall, the harder you will hit the ground. But the parachute significantly slows down your rate of acceleration, making your impact a lot less. Now, many skydivers still get hurt when they touch down (more like “slam down”) but at least they aren’t killed.