does a pilot, or the pilot and the plane,

experience when they need to take off

from an aircraft carrier?

So I looked up a few statistics

on the Internet, this right here is

a picture of an F/A-18 Hornet right over here.

It has a take-off speed of 260 kilometers per hour.

If we want that to be a velocity, 260 km/hour

in this direction, if it's taking off from

this Nimitz class carrier right over here.

And I also looked it up, and I found

the runway length, or I should say

the catapult length, because these planes

don't take off just with their own power.

They have their own thrusters going,

but they also are catapulted off,

so they can be really accelerated quickly

off of the flight deck of this carrier.

And the runway length of a Nimitz class carrier

is about 80 meters. So this is where

they take off from. This right over here

is where they take off from.

And then they come in and they land over here.

But I'm curious about the take-off.

So to do this, let's figure out, well let's just

figure out the acceleration, and from that

we can also figure out how long it takes

them to be catapulted off the flight deck.

So, let me get the numbers in one place,

so the take-off velocity, I could say,

is 260 km/hour, so let me write this down.

So that has to be your final velocity

when you're getting off, of the plane,

if you want to be flying.

So your initial velocity is going to be 0,

and once again I'm going to use the convention

that the direction of the vector is implicit.

Positive means going in the direction of take-off,

negative would mean going the other way.

My initial velocity is 0, I'll denote it as a vector

right here. My final velocity over here

has to be 260 km/hour.

And I want to convert everything to meters

and seconds, just so that I can get my,

at least for meters, so that I can use my runway length

in meters. So let's just do it in meters per second,

I have a feeling it'll be a little bit easier

to understand when we talk about acceleration

in those units as well.

So if we want to convert this into seconds,

we have, we'll put hours in the numerator,

1 hour, so it cancels out with this hour,

is equal to 3600 seconds.

I'll just write 3600 s. And then

if we want to convert it to meters,

we have 1000 meters is equal to 1 km,

and this 1 km will cancel out with those kms

right over there.

And whenever you're doing any type of

this dimensional analysis, you really should see

whether it makes sense.

If I'm going 260 km in an hour,

I should go much fewer km in a second

because a second is so much shorter

amount of time, and that's why we're dividing

by 3600. If I can go a certain

number of km in an hour a second,

I should be able to go a lot,

many many more meters in that same amount

of time, and that's why we're multiplying

by 1000. When you multiply these out,

the hours cancel out, you have km canceling out,

and you have 260 times 1000

divided by 3600 meters per second.

So let me get my trusty TI-85 out,

and actually calculate that.

So I have 260 times 1000 divided by 3600

gets me, I'll just round it to 72, because

that's about how many significant digits

I can assume here. 72 meters per second.

So all I did here is I converted the take-off velocity,

so this is 72 m/s, this has to be the final velocity

after accelerating. So let's think about

what that acceleration could be, given that we know

the length of the runway, and we're going to assume

constant acceleration here, just to simplify things

a little bit. But what does that

constant acceleration have to be?

So let's think a little bit about it.

The total displacement, I'll do that in purple,

the total displacement is going to be

equal to our average velocity while we're accelerating,

times the difference in time, or the amount of time

it takes us to accelerate.

Now, what is the average velocity here?

It's going to be our final velocity, plus our initial velocity,

over 2. It's just the average of the initial and final.

And we can only do that because we are dealing

with a constant acceleration.

And what is our change in time over here?

What is our change in time?

Well our change in time is how long does it take

us to get to that velocity? Or another way to think about it is:

it is our change in velocity divided by our acceleration.

If we're trying to get to 10 m/s, or we're trying to get

10 m/s faster, and we're accelerating at 2 m/s squared,

it'll take us 5 seconds.

Or if you want to see that explicitly written in a formula,

we know that acceleration is equal to

change in velocity over change in time.

You multiply both sides by change in time,

and you divide both sides by acceleration,

so let's do that, multiply both sides by change in time

and divide by acceleration.

Multiply by change in time and divide by acceleration.

And you get, that cancels out, and then you have

that cancels out, and you have change in time

is equal to change in velocity divided by acceleration.

Change in velocity divided by acceleration.

So what's the change in velocity?

Change in velocity, so this is going to be

change in velocity divided by acceleration.

Change in velocity is the same thing as your

final velocity minus your initial velocity,

all of that divided by acceleration.

So this delta t part we can re-write as

our final velocity minus our initial velocity, over acceleration.

And just doing this simple little derivation here

actually gives us a pretty cool result!

If we just work through this math, and I'll try to

write a little bigger, I see my writing is getting smaller,

our displacement can be expressed as

the product of these two things.

And what's cool about this, well let me just

write it this way: so this is our final velocity

plus our initial velocity, times our final velocity

minus our initial velocity,

all of that over 2 times our acceleration.

Our assumed constant acceleration.

And you probably remember from algebra class

this takes the form: a plus b times a minus b.

And so this equal to -- and you can multiply it out

and you can review in our algebra playlist

how to multiply out two binomials like this,

but this numerator right over here,

I'll write it in blue, is going to be equal to

our final velocity squared minus our initial velocity squared.

This is a difference of squares, you can factor it out

into the sum of the two terms times the difference

of the two terms, so that when you multiply these two out

you just get that over there, over 2 times the acceleration.

Now what's really cool here is we were able to derive

a formula that just deals with the displacement,

our final velocity, our initial velocity, and the acceleration.

And we know all of those things except for the acceleration.

We know that our displacement is 80 meters.

We know that this is 80 meters.

We know that our final velocity, just before

we square it, we know that our final velocity is

72 meters per second. And we know that

our initial velocity is 0 meters per second.

And so we can use all of this information

to solve for our acceleration.

And you might see this formula, displacement,

sometimes called distance, if you're just using

the scalar version, and really we are thinking only

in the scalar, we're thinking about the magnitudes

of all of these things for the sake of this video.

We're only dealing in one dimension.

But sometimes you'll see it written like this,

sometimes you'll multiply both sides times the 2 a,

and you'll get something like this, where you have

2 times, really the magnitude of the acceleration,

times the magnitude of the displacement,

which is the same thing as the distance,

is equal to the final velocity, the magnitude of

the final velocity, squared, minus the initial velocity squared.

Or sometimes, in some books, it'll be written as 2 a d

is equal to v f squared minus v i squared.

And it seems like a super mysterious thing,

but it's not that mysterious. We just very simply

derived it from displacement, or if you want to say distance,

if you're just thinking about the scalar quantity,

is equal to average velocity times the change in time.

So, so far we've just derived ourselves a kind of a

neat formula that is often not derived in

physics class, but let's use it to actually

figure out the acceleration that a pilot experiences

when they're taking off of a Nimitz class carrier.

So we have 2 times the acceleration

times the distance, that's 80 meters,

times 80 meters, is going to be equal to

our final velocity squared.

What's our final velocity? 72 meters per second.

So 72 meters per second, squared,

minus our initial velocity.

So our initial velocity in this situation is just 0.

So it's just going to be minus 0 squared,

which is just going to be 0, so we don't even have to

write it down. And so to solve for acceleration,

to solve for acceleration, you just divide,

so this is the same thing as 160 meters,

well, let's just divide both sides by 2 times 80,

so we get acceleration is equal to 72 m/s squared

over 2 times 80 meters.

And what we're gonna get is,

I'll just write this in one color,

it's going to be 72 divided by 160,

times, we have in the numerator,

meters squared over seconds squared,

we're squaring the units, and then we're

going to be dividing by meters.

So times, I'll do this in blue,

times one over meters. Right?

Because we have a meters in the denominator.

And so what we're going to get is this

meters squared divided by meters,

that's going to cancel out, we're going to get

meters per second squared. Which is cool

because that's what acceleration should be in.

And so let's just get the calculator out,

to calculate this exact acceleration.

So we have to take, oh sorry, this is 72 squared,

let me write that down. So this is, this is going to be

72 squared, don't want to forget about this part

right over here. 72 squared divided by 160.

So we have, and we can just use the original number

right over here that we calculated,

so let's just square that, and then divide that by 160,

divided by 160. And if we go to 2 significant digits,

we get 33, we get our acceleration is, our acceleration

is equal to 33 meters per second squared.

And just to give you an idea of how much acceleration

that is, is if you are in free fall over Earth,

the force of gravity will be accelerating you,

so g is going to be equal to 9.8 meters per second squared.

So this is accelerating you 3 times more than what

Earth is making you accelerate if you were to

jump off of a cliff or something.