ELI5- Can someone the physics behind Zero-G flights (Parabolic flight) ?
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Let’s be physics students for a minute and ignore air friction😊 Imagine a thrown baseball (on earth). It flies in a parabolic arc under the influence only of its own inertia plus the force of gravity. From the pov of a bug on the ball, the ball and bug are both in an identical free fall situation. This feels just like it would if there was no gravity (or lots more gravity – the “free” fall is about not resisting gravity.)
Have you seen videos of astronaut trainees inside the Vomit Comet? They are in the same situation as the bug on the ball.
In practice, since we’re doing this in the air, it takes a pilot and engines and wings to control the arc of the plane to match the arc you’d get if there were no air.
As it happens, my father flew many such missions as pilot. It’s hard to control the flight arc precisely, so they needed a very sensitive instrument to tell if they were flying above or below the correct arc. He designed it: a golf ball, suspended on a long rubber band stretching horizontally across the cockpit. The slightest deviation from the right arc moved the ball up or down in a very easy way to see. He basically “flew to the ball”. (These were not vomit comet flights. They were done in a NASA Learjet.)
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