Question 6

Question

An airplane travels 78 m/s as it makes a horizontal circular turn which has a(n) 2.3 km radius. What is the magnitude of the resultant force on the 58 kg pilot of this airplane?

Answer 1

For this question, this is a question targeting centripetal acceleration and the force arising from that. If you recall what centripetal acceleration is, it's that the acceleration is equal of the square of the velocity over the radius of the curve or:

a = v²/r, where v is the velocity and r is the radius.

Since we know that's our expression for centripetal acceleration, we can directly use that in Newton's 2nd law to get the force due to the centrifugal force -- F = ma.

Inputting our centripetal acceleration into F = ma, we get:

F = m(v²/r), v = 78 m/s, m = 58 kg, and r = 2300 m (we convert this to meters because we're operating in meters per second)

After plugging in all the numbers in our final expression, we get 153 N of force due to the plane.

Hope that helps!