In the following video, there’s something that you don’t see everyday – a car falling out the back of an airplane:

Looks like fun. Everyone ejects safely. But the obvious question is this: what happens to the car? The answer can be seen in this video:

In other words, you drop the car over an low-population area, and it crashes into the ground.

It turns out that dropping cars out of airplanes is not that unusual. In fact, some people do it for sport, sort of like a gigantic game of lawn darts. In the following video, the guy has to get the car to land within a one-kilometer circle after releasing it from an altitude of 14,000 feet:

He must have practiced once or twice before.

One thing you may notice in the latter two videos is that the cars are tumbling. But in the first video the car falls relatively flat, with the top of the car always pointing up like it would on the road. How did they do that? If you look closely in the first video, you will see that they put a sheet on the bottom of the car to smooth it out, and they have attached air deflectors to the front and back of the car. Pulling out the engine might also help. The change of shape apparently is enough to get the car to “fly” something like the Apollo capsule during re-entry.

So how much energy does a car have when it hits the ground? Let’s say the car weighs 2,000 pounds and its velocity is 100 MPH at impact. The energy at impact is about a million joules. That’s roughly equivalent to half a stick of dynamite.

Would it be possible to save the car? For example, could it have its own parachute and float to safety rather than crashing? It could have a ballistic parachute like this:

But these systems cost about $20,000 per plane. It’s much cheaper to buy a junk car for $1,000 and let it crash.

See also: Joe Jennings’ Demo Reel

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