Upper Fourth Indoor Skydiving Physics Trip
On Friday, a group of us went to an indoor skydiving wind tunnel in Basingstoke. We had a lesson with one of their staff about how the tunnel works and how it's all controlled, and learned that there's more to it than you might think. For example – wind tunnels don't blow, they suck. Also the wind goes round and round a closed circuit, but quite slowly – it only speeds up in the narrow bit where we are.
We had a team competition where we made wind-powered vehicles and raced them on a model road, then it was time to meet our instructor and find out what was going to happen in the tunnel. We dressed in flight suits, struggled with earplugs, put on helmets and away we went – actually flying.
Karl, our instructor, is trained to do the extra "High-Fly" manoeuvre, where you shoot 50 feet right up to the top of the tower. On the way home in the minibus, the world was still spinning...
