So I'm curious about how much acceleration
does a pilot, or the pilot and the plane,
experience when they need to take off
from an aircraft carrier?
So I looked up a few statistics
on the Internet, this right here is
a picture of an F/A-18 Hornet right over here.
It has a take-off speed of 260 kilometers per hour.
If we want that to be a velocity, 260 km/hour
in this direction, if it's taking off from
this Nimitz class carrier right over here.
And I also looked it up, and I found
the runway length, or I should say
the catapult length, because these planes
don't take off just with their own power.
They have their own thrusters going,
but they also are catapulted off,
so they can be really accelerated quickly
off of the flight deck of this carrier.
And the runway length of a Nimitz class carrier
is about 80 meters. So this is where
they take off from. This right over here
is where they take off from.
And then they come in and they land over here.
But I'm curious about the take-off.
So to do this, let's figure out, well let's just
figure out the acceleration, and from that
we can also figure out how long it takes
them to be catapulted off the flight deck.
So, let me get the numbers in one place,
so the take-off velocity, I could say,
is 260 km/hour, so let me write this down.
So that has to be your final velocity
when you're getting off, of the plane,
if you want to be flying.
So your initial velocity is going to be 0,
and once again I'm going to use the convention
that the direction of the vector is implicit.
Positive means going in the direction of take-off,
negative would mean going the other way.
My initial velocity is 0, I'll denote it as a vector
right here. My final velocity over here
has to be 260 km/hour.
And I want to convert everything to meters
and seconds, just so that I can get my,
at least for meters, so that I can use my runway length
in meters. So let's just do it in meters per second,
I have a feeling it'll be a little bit easier
to understand when we talk about acceleration
in those units as well.
So if we want to convert this into seconds,
we have, we'll put hours in the numerator,
1 hour, so it cancels out with this hour,
is equal to 3600 seconds.
I'll just write 3600 s. And then
if we want to convert it to meters,
we have 1000 meters is equal to 1 km,
and this 1 km will cancel out with those kms
right over there.
And whenever you're doing any type of
this dimensional analysis, you really should see
whether it makes sense.
If I'm going 260 km in an hour,
I should go much fewer km in a second
because a second is so much shorter
amount of time, and that's why we're dividing
by 3600. If I can go a certain
number of km in an hour a second,
I should be able to go a lot,
many many more meters in that same amount
of time, and that's why we're multiplying
by 1000. When you multiply these out,
the hours cancel out, you have km canceling out,
and you have 260 times 1000
divided by 3600 meters per second.
So let me get my trusty TI-85 out,
and actually calculate that.
So I have 260 times 1000 divided by 3600
gets me, I'll just round it to 72, because
that's about how many significant digits
I can assume here. 72 meters per second.
So all I did here is I converted the take-off velocity,
so this is 72 m/s, this has to be the final velocity
after accelerating. So let's think about
what that acceleration could be, given that we know
the length of the runway, and we're going to assume
constant acceleration here, just to simplify things
a little bit. But what does that
constant acceleration have to be?
So let's think a little bit about it.
The total displacement, I'll do that in purple,
the total displacement is going to be
equal to our average velocity while we're accelerating,
times the difference in time, or the amount of time
it takes us to accelerate.
Now, what is the average velocity here?
It's going to be our final velocity, plus our initial velocity,
over 2. It's just the average of the initial and final.
And we can only do that because we are dealing
with a constant acceleration.
And what is our change in time over here?
What is our change in time?
Well our change in time is how long does it take
us to get to that velocity? Or another way to think about it is:
it is our change in velocity divided by our acceleration.
If we're trying to get to 10 m/s, or we're trying to get
10 m/s faster, and we're accelerating at 2 m/s squared,
it'll take us 5 seconds.
Or if you want to see that explicitly written in a formula,
we know that acceleration is equal to
change in velocity over change in time.
You multiply both sides by change in time,
and you divide both sides by acceleration,
so let's do that, multiply both sides by change in time
and divide by acceleration.
Multiply by change in time and divide by acceleration.
And you get, that cancels out, and then you have
that cancels out, and you have change in time
is equal to change in velocity divided by acceleration.
Change in velocity divided by acceleration.
So what's the change in velocity?
Change in velocity, so this is going to be
change in velocity divided by acceleration.
Change in velocity is the same thing as your
final velocity minus your initial velocity,
all of that divided by acceleration.
So this delta t part we can re-write as
our final velocity minus our initial velocity, over acceleration.
And just doing this simple little derivation here
actually gives us a pretty cool result!
If we just work through this math, and I'll try to
write a little bigger, I see my writing is getting smaller,
our displacement can be expressed as
the product of these two things.
And what's cool about this, well let me just
write it this way: so this is our final velocity
plus our initial velocity, times our final velocity
minus our initial velocity,
all of that over 2 times our acceleration.
Our assumed constant acceleration.
And you probably remember from algebra class
this takes the form: a plus b times a minus b.
And so this equal to -- and you can multiply it out
and you can review in our algebra playlist
how to multiply out two binomials like this,
but this numerator right over here,
I'll write it in blue, is going to be equal to
our final velocity squared minus our initial velocity squared.
This is a difference of squares, you can factor it out
into the sum of the two terms times the difference
of the two terms, so that when you multiply these two out
you just get that over there, over 2 times the acceleration.
Now what's really cool here is we were able to derive
a formula that just deals with the displacement,
our final velocity, our initial velocity, and the acceleration.
And we know all of those things except for the acceleration.
We know that our displacement is 80 meters.
We know that this is 80 meters.
We know that our final velocity, just before
we square it, we know that our final velocity is
72 meters per second. And we know that
our initial velocity is 0 meters per second.
And so we can use all of this information
to solve for our acceleration.
And you might see this formula, displacement,
sometimes called distance, if you're just using
the scalar version, and really we are thinking only
in the scalar, we're thinking about the magnitudes
of all of these things for the sake of this video.
We're only dealing in one dimension.
But sometimes you'll see it written like this,
sometimes you'll multiply both sides times the 2 a,
and you'll get something like this, where you have
2 times, really the magnitude of the acceleration,
times the magnitude of the displacement,
which is the same thing as the distance,
is equal to the final velocity, the magnitude of
the final velocity, squared, minus the initial velocity squared.
Or sometimes, in some books, it'll be written as 2 a d
is equal to v f squared minus v i squared.
And it seems like a super mysterious thing,
but it's not that mysterious. We just very simply
derived it from displacement, or if you want to say distance,
if you're just thinking about the scalar quantity,
is equal to average velocity times the change in time.
So, so far we've just derived ourselves a kind of a
neat formula that is often not derived in
physics class, but let's use it to actually
figure out the acceleration that a pilot experiences
when they're taking off of a Nimitz class carrier.
So we have 2 times the acceleration
times the distance, that's 80 meters,
times 80 meters, is going to be equal to
our final velocity squared.
What's our final velocity? 72 meters per second.
So 72 meters per second, squared,
minus our initial velocity.
So our initial velocity in this situation is just 0.
So it's just going to be minus 0 squared,
which is just going to be 0, so we don't even have to
write it down. And so to solve for acceleration,
to solve for acceleration, you just divide,
so this is the same thing as 160 meters,
well, let's just divide both sides by 2 times 80,
so we get acceleration is equal to 72 m/s squared
over 2 times 80 meters.
And what we're gonna get is,
I'll just write this in one color,
it's going to be 72 divided by 160,
times, we have in the numerator,
meters squared over seconds squared,
we're squaring the units, and then we're
going to be dividing by meters.
So times, I'll do this in blue,
times one over meters. Right?
Because we have a meters in the denominator.
And so what we're going to get is this
meters squared divided by meters,
that's going to cancel out, we're going to get
meters per second squared. Which is cool
because that's what acceleration should be in.
And so let's just get the calculator out,
to calculate this exact acceleration.
So we have to take, oh sorry, this is 72 squared,
let me write that down. So this is, this is going to be
72 squared, don't want to forget about this part
right over here. 72 squared divided by 160.
So we have, and we can just use the original number
right over here that we calculated,
so let's just square that, and then divide that by 160,
divided by 160. And if we go to 2 significant digits,
we get 33, we get our acceleration is, our acceleration
is equal to 33 meters per second squared.
And just to give you an idea of how much acceleration
that is, is if you are in free fall over Earth,
the force of gravity will be accelerating you,
so g is going to be equal to 9.8 meters per second squared.
So this is accelerating you 3 times more than what
Earth is making you accelerate if you were to
jump off of a cliff or something.
So another way to think about this is that the force,
and we haven't done a lot on force yet,
we'll talk about this in more depth,
is that this pilot would be experiencing
more than 3 times the force of gravity,
more than 3 g's. 3 g's would be about
30 meters per second squared, this is more than that.
So an analogy for how the pilot would feel
is when he's, you know, if this is the chair right here,
his pilot's chair, that he's in, so this is the chair,
and he's sitting on the chair, let me do my best
to draw him sitting on the chair, so this is him
sitting on the chair, flying the plane, and this is the pilot,
the force he would feel, or while this thing is accelerating
him forward at 33 meters per second squared,
it would feel very much to him like if he was lying down
on the surface of the planet, but he was 3 times heavier,
or more than 3 times heavier. Or if he was lying down,
or if you were lying down, like this, let's say this is you,
this is your feet, and this is your face, this is your hands,
let me draw your hands right here, and if you had
essentially two more people stacked above you,
roughly, I'm just giving you the general sense of it,
that's how it would feel, a little bit more than two people,
that squeezing sensation. So his entire body
is going to feel 3 times heavier than it would
if he was just laying down on the beach or something
like that. So it's very very very interesting, I guess,
idea, at least to me. Now the other question
that we can ask ourselves is how long will it take
to get catapulted off of this carrier? And if he's
accelerating at 33 meters per second squared,
how long would it take him to get from 0
to 72 meters per second?
So after 1 second, he'll be going 33 meters per second,
after 2 seconds, he'll be going 66 meters per second,
so it's going to take, and so it's a little bit more
than 2 seconds. So it's going to take him
a little bit more than 2 seconds.
And we can calculate it exactly if you take
72 meters per second, and you divide it by 33,
it'll take him 2.18 seconds, roughly, to be catapulted
off of that carrier.