One Way to Avoid Paying Tolls

Since I have too weak of a stomach, I have made it my unofficial goal not to post stories to this blog where people are seriously injured or killed -- unless the story is just too intriguing, or the lesson learned too important. Fortunately this story includes a 'happy' ending where the driver escapes serious injury not only from jumping a toll booth, but also surviving the landing, and the ensuing fireball. Not that she was sober enough to notice...

First, check out this great article, video, and pictures of the aftermath:

This Is Not How You're Supposed to Fly Out of Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport - Dallas News

When I saw this video, all I could think of was how fast she must have been going. I mean, look at it, the video is only 12 seconds long, and she's not even in frame for half of it. Think about what your guess would be as to speed, height, distance in the air, and hang time, and compare to my estimates below. I'm no expert at analyzing video or identifying vehicles, but here's what I've calculated:

The white coupe she passes (one lane farther away from the camera) looks similar to a late model Toyota Corolla, which is about 14 feet long. In the closest to a full second as YouTube will let me pause at, the vehicle travels more or less five times the length of that neighboring vehicle, or 70 feet in on second. That only turns out to be 45 mph, which is surprising to me. Does it surprise you? Granted, these are all extremely rough estimates of length and time, but based on them, the math is at least accurate. I even consulted Wolfram|Alpha for the projectile path calculation, as I didn't trust myself to handle it myself.

The angle of the ramp makes a big difference in trajectory, or course. Having given all of my protractors away to the local needy children's protractor charity, once again I had to best-guess it. The ramp is basically a right triangle laying on the side opposite the right angle. I can clearly see that the angle opposite the takeoff angle is definitely more than 60 degrees, which would form an imaginary equilateral triangle. I'm going to say it's 70 degrees for the purposes of this calculation, but it could even be more. The takeoff angle definitely appears that it could be 20 degrees, which is the result of some geometrical postulate or something that I've long since forgotten in the nearly 20 years since I was in 8th grade. All I know is that the angles of a triangle add up to 180 degrees, and 180 - 90 - 70 = 20. This, then, is the 'best-case scenario', with lower takeoff angles resulting in less impressive outcomes. But who cares about being conservative with our estimates.

As you can see above, 45 mph at 20 degrees provides a pretty impressive flight path, although the lady probably should have cleared it with the tower first. According to this, she traveled up to 87 feet, with  maximum altitude of nearly 8 feet, with a hang time of 1.4 seconds. WOW! I would not have expected that kind of distance at such a relatively slow speed. How lucky that no one was in her landing zone, and that she escaped the resulting inferno!

By now you have come to expect more than math from me on this blog, so here is the lesson:

Anyone can be Evel Knievel, but that doesn't mean everyone should try to be.

...and even amazingly dumb drivers catch a lucky break every once in a while.

Got a story or photo of a Genius Driver? Send it to blog (at) metamorphilia (dot) com.