Physics For Phill

We will work on a kinematics problem today. Yes, Claudia, we are going to be ignoring air resistance (I only took two beginner level physics courses, take it easy on me). I apologize Megan for making the last problem too easy, I will try and pick more challenging ones. And Jared, about being .1 N off. "Almost" only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades, both of which involve physics, so I think you are ok here. And Jenny, Physics is NOT boring, so I will continue to post physics problems.

Question

An airplane accelerates down a runway at 3.20 m/s2 for 32.8 s until is finally lifts off the ground. Determine the distance traveled before takeoff.

Answer

Let's start with our givens. We are given that acceleration (a) is 3.2m/s2 and time (t) is 32.8s. Also, implied in the problem is our initial velocity (vi) which is 0m/s because the plane is initially at rest. We need to solve for distance (d).

Now, we plug and chug.

Using the equation d=vi*t+.5*a*t^2, we can easily solve this problem

d=(0*32.8)+.5*(3.2)*(32.8)^2
d=1720m

Nicely done folks.