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Question

The air speed of an airplane is 600 km/hr and its angle of climb is 6.48°. What is its ground speed (to the nearest km/hr)

Answer 1

You can draw this as a right triangle. The hypotenuse is the air speed of 600.

The small angle of 6.48 is adjacent to the ground.

The ground is the horizontal part of the triangle.

Using trig we know that the cosine of 6.48 is adjacent / hypotenuse.

so cos(6.48) = ground speed / 600 or

ground speed is 600* cos(6.48) = 596.2 km/hr

Since the climb is very slight the ground speed is very similar to air speed.