FOR THIS AVIATION DAY… COULD YOU IMAGINE TRYING TO PLAY TENNIS ON A PLANE?
Saturday August 19th, 2023 is Aviation Day! To celebrate this event, we have a cool historical example to use in a fun discussion for your physics classroom!
The story:
One day in November 1925, two famous daredevils and wing walkers took to the sky for an unusual stunt. Gladys Roy and Ivan Unger were going to play a game of tennis… on the wings of an airplane! The plane took off, and at 1000 meters (~3280 ft) in the air at around 80 miles an hour, these women played a game of tennis. Now, from what people could dig up from the past, it seems like these two didn’t really play tennis, though they were actually standing on the wings of the plane, moving the rackets back and forth, with no harnesses. The news reports at the time joked that they would have to land to retrieve the ball from out of bounds, but other than this, why would the daredevils not be able to use a ball? Here is where you can ask your students to discuss the topic!
Forces Forces Forces
So why couldn’t these two use an actual ball and play tennis? Because of forces! In order for the ball to go from one player to the other, it would have to be going way faster than the airplane itself, otherwise it would just go backwards as soon as one of the players hit it. The women would have to accelerate the ball at a superhuman rate to overcome the force created by the moving plane. You can ask your students as a group to label all of the forces involved in this image, and talk about which forces would be greatest!
If you have a group of older students that are working with F=ma equations,, you could even get them to calculate the forces necessary to accelerate the ball fast enough that it would go from one player to the other, instead of simply flying backwards the moment it was released.
All in all, this is just a fun activity to use for students to think about how forces work, and why this tennis game, though amazing in itself, is a bit of a stretch!
For a bit of extra fun, our amazing illustrator recreated this image using our characters. What do you think? You can even get this design on some YGBVERSE Swag in our swag shop!
