Question

An American Red Cross plane needs to drop emergency supplies to victims of a hurricane in a remote part of the world. The plane is traveling horizontally at 100.0 m/s at a height of 50.0 m above the ground. What horizontal distance does the package travel before striking the ground?

Answer 1

2 Steps to solve:

(1) The time taken to fall is only dependent on the vertical motion. Therefore, you only need to concern yourself with gravity acting on the box. The falling box has 50 m to go.

Free fall: h = 0.5 * g * t^2 <-- solve this for the time 't'

(2) Now that you know the time 't' to hit the ground, you can find out how far the box will travel horizontally in that given time.

Displacement: x = v * t <-- simply the product of the speed horizontally and the time