- #1
ConfusedMonkey
- 42
- 15
Homework Statement
Your airplane is caught in a brief, violent downdraft. To your amazement, pretzels rise vertically off your seatback tray, and you estimate their upward acceleration relative to the plane at ## 2 \hspace{0.1cm} m/s^2##. What's the plane's downward acceleration?
Homework Equations
The Attempt at a Solution
I don't think I need help with the math, but I do need help understanding what's going on here. I figure that we need to focus on the plane and not the pretzels because if we choose the reference frame to be inside of the airplane, then it isn't an inertial reference frame and so Newton's laws are no longer valid, correct?
So I figure that if the plane were to accelerate downward slowly, the pretzels would stay put, but if the plane were to accelerate downward very quickly, then the pretzels would jump up off of the tray. Since the pretzel's acceleration is ##2 \hspace{0.1cm} m/s^2##, then I need to find the maximum downward acceleration the plane can undergo without the pretzels jumping up, and I need to subtract ##2## from that (subtract instead of add because downward acceleration is negative). I just can't figure out how to get that number.
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