October 4, if an airplane flew faster than the speed of sound it won't explode. How fast can sound waves travel at the absolute zero? Isn't it amazing how God created everything so perfectly, like sound waves, even down to the tiniest detail? Even the smallest bone in the body, located in the ear. How is the speed of light related to the speed of sound? The planes didn't explode they just broke apart. That is why they changed to delta shaped or swept back wings. June 15, As airplanes went faster and faster, the design of the wings created stresses that caused both loss of control and structural failure at the transition to speeds higher than the speed of sound. May scientific calculations are based solely on this number alone. It has a constant and finite speed of 186,000 miles per second. Light, on the other hand, is an electromagnetic force. Also, one can assume that if there is no media to transmit the wave then there is no sound. In water, sound travels approximately 4800 feet per second, more than four times faster than in air. See a flash of lightning then start counting. For approximately every five seconds the sound travels is one mile. The old lightning/thunder trick offers a good example. The speed of sound through air at ground level is approximately 760 mph, or approximately 1100 feet per second. Simply put, the denser the material the faster the sound waves travel. Sound propagates through a medium (liquid, solid, gas), and the properties of those media determine the actual speed. The Bloomberg review was conservative and actual speeds may be higher.What is the number to break the speed of sound? The speed estimates were based on how fast the jet traveled between two points and didn’t take into account wind direction or other atmospheric conditions. Bloomberg’s computations give a rough idea of how fast it was flying through the air by taking into account its horizontal speed over the ground as well as how fast it was descending. If it isn’t available for some reason, aerodynamic experts can perform extensive analysis to more closely estimate speed.įlightradar24’s data includes the jet’s speed, but it’s measured horizontally across the ground. The crash of an Ethiopian Airlines 737 Max in 2019 was traced back to a sensor on the plane’s nose, but the sensor was never found after the jet hit the ground at a high speed, according to a preliminary report from that nation.Īccident investigators should be able to find more precise speed data from the jet’s flight recorder. and installed on the plane when it was new, according to company spokesman Adam Kress.Ĭrash investigators have over decades perfected the examination of wreckage in search of clues, but some impacts can obliterate evidence. The two recorders on the China Eastern 737-800 - a cockpit voice recorder and another that captures flight data - were supplied by the aerospace division of Honeywell International Inc. Searchers won’t be aided by a beacon or “ping” from the devices because they are only activated underwater. Zhu Tao, an official with the Civil Aviation Administration of China, said at a briefing on Tuesday that the recorders had not been recovered. “But I would suspect it would be O.K.” No beacon activated “It’s probably embedded in the ground somewhere,” he said. But data can usually be extracted even if they’re damaged, he said. The circuit boards storing the data often break loose from the recorder’s protective exterior. “The hard part is going to be finding it,” Cash said.
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National Transportation Safety Board’s chief technical adviser for recorders. Modern black-box recorders, which store data on computer chips, have a good record of survival in high-velocity crashes, said James Cash, who formerly served as the U.S. Do the flight data recorder or cockpit voice recorder or quick access recorder - do any survive? I just don’t know the answer.” “It looks like it literally evaporated into a crater. consultancy, who did not participate in the speed analysis. “It was an exceedingly high-energy crash,” said Bob Mann, president of R.W. The speed data is consistent with videos appearing to show the jet diving at a steep angle in the moments before impact and indicates that it likely hit the ground with huge force.