Why skydivers don’t feel the big freefall feeling from the acceleration when skydiving if horizontal (X) and vertical (Y) motions are independent of each other?

Question

I’ve gone skydiving before, and you have maybe 1-2 seconds of that small drop in your stomach feeling before you reach terminal velocity at about 120mph. But that should only make sense if the plane you are jumping out of is going about 90 mph in the vertical direction right? I’m assuming it’s not, maybe flying 90mph in the horizontal axis. So can someone explain why there’s still not a huge change in acceleration to cause that drop in stomach feeling?

In: 3

Answer 1

The “freefall feeling” only occurs when nothing is pushing on you. When exiting an airplane, the relative wind is pushing on you, first from the front and then gradually more below, so while you do feel a bit lighter at first, you don’t get to feel weightless. For that, you need to jump from a balloon, helicopter or stationary object, or go on a rollercoaster designed to have air-time (wooden rollercoasters usually have lots of this).