This is a canopy drift musing
Was reviewing old posts of mine from DZ.com
I threw out some numbers that said an 8 mile canopy drift was possible.
then showed a line from the flight path crossing the Columbia to Tena Bar, and said around 8 miles
(the attachment from then has a pin saying 2015. The explanation of that is below)
I'm surprised I didn't draw the line from Tena Bar to the closest point on the flight path. That might have made more sense.
We got into debate about the wind direction down there that night. There were old reports with surface winds at PDX, but I think things weren't definitive.
In fact, my post says I was a fan of SE winds down near PDX..so that would align with my drawing
old post:
I'm a fan of predicted SE winds down there, although that's debatable. (edit) remember I had posted stuff that suggests SE might be right.
..
I'm going to assume we don't have accurate wind data down near PDX, and instead think about might make it work.
I was interested in whether an 8 mile or so canopy drift was possible. Assume winds were at 60 knots at exit, linearly decreasing to 20 knots at ground level. Can use 40 knot average then. Maybe also throw in 5 knots if the round chute somehow got some forward speed? So 45 knots total (avg) during the ride.
That's .75 miles/minute, right? (edit) just noticed I used wrong conversion here...45 knots would be .86 miles/minute. 40 knots is 0.77 miles/minute. I'll leave my old numbers below.
A 10 minute canopy ride would get you 7.5 miles.
(maybe the exit altitude was >10,000 ft down near PDX?)
See attached photo for a canopy drift possibility I was measuring way back in the thread. Swing it a bit to shorten it from the flight path, and you can see that 8 miles is interesting.
This is assuming 1000ft/min. descent rate
<snipped musing since we now know it's unlikely the NB6 had canopy mods, since Hayden's emergency rig>
(edit) the pt labelled "2015 guess" in the picture really isn't 2015..that's an old guess from before Ckret gave us the radar tick flight path detail. 2015 is closer to the columbia.
(edit) also remember there could be 0.5 mi to 1 mile error in the flight path recorded that could work favorably. The paper on comparing gps to radar suggested to me the 0.5 nm error prediction back in 1972 might be "light". Plus there is transcription error to map?
Poll