• Question: what would the force of two jet planes hitting be?

    Asked by Wokdabrij TGS to Connor, Jillian, Lidunka, Sarah, Steven on 15 Jun 2015.
    • Photo: Steven Thomson

      Steven Thomson answered on 15 Jun 2015:

      That depends how fast they’re going! The force required to stop an object is, roughly, equal to its mass multiplied by its rate of deceleration. Planes are heavy and would decelerate very quickly if they crashed.

      There’s no way to give a more precise answer – we’d need to pick a particular type of plane travelling at a particular speed and how quickly it would decelerate depends entirely on what the plane is made of. So the answer, I guess, is that it depends on a lot of things but either way, the force will be extremely large!

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