[Physics] Does a person inside a falling bus fall to the front of it

dragequivalence-principlefree fallnewtonian-gravityreference frames

So I was watching Final Destination 5 and something caught my attention. There's a part where a bridge collapses and everything falls apart, so there's this bus that has a person inside (unaware of what was happening) and it falls vertically (the front of the bus is now pointing down and the back points to the sky). As the bus is falling, the person is shown slipping through the seats and finally ending up on the front window at the front of the bus. My question is, would that actually happen if someone was falling inside a vehicle? Or should they be pushed to the back? Or should both fall equally?

Here's the clip of the movie: http://youtu.be/m01ICYfdLsA?t=1m7s

Best Answer

The bus experiences considerable drag, and will therefore fall more slowly than a person inside the bus. The scenario is possible in principle - but after carefully viewing the clip and doing some calculations, I believe that the details are inaccurate.

Assume the bus has a mass of 5000 kg (pretty light for a bus), and is 3 m wide by 3 m tall - so the forward facing area is 9 m2 (it will be more if the bus falls at an angle, but in the movie it seems to be dropping straight. Despite the initial angular momentum as it tips over!).

The drag force is

$$F = \frac12 \rho v^2 A C_D$$

For the dimensions given, after one second the velocity is 5 m/s and this force will be approximately

$$F(1) \approx 0.5\cdot 1.2 \cdot 5^2 \cdot 9 \cdot 1.15 = 135 N$$

(assuming drag coefficient of 1 - close to, but a little bit less than, the coefficient for a cube; That is not yet enough to make the bus go visibly slower.

We need to know how high the bridge is. It turns out that this scene was filmed at Lion's Gate Bridge in Vancouver. This has a clearance height of 61 m. That's roughly what I would have estimated based on this picture (screen shot from the YouTube clip at 1:11, with blocks added by me to show it's about 6 buses high. A typical bus is about 10 m long, so it all makes sense):

enter image description here

Now the actual drop takes from 1:10 to 1:20 in the clip - that would suggest there is some "temporal dilation" going on. Normally, dropping 60 m would take 3.50 s; but in the film it takes 10. This is a clue that normal laws of physics have been suspended for the scene.

For an object free-falling in the presence of drag, the terminal velocity is given by

$$v_t = \sqrt{\frac{2mg}{C_D\rho A}}$$

(About 95 m/s for this bus) and the "characteristic time" $\tau$ (used for the equation of motion)

$$\tau = \frac{v_t}{g}$$

The velocity as a function of height is

$$v = v_t \sqrt{1-e^{-2gh/v_t^2}}$$

This means we can calculate the velocity of the bus and the passenger as a function of height/time: plotting their relative velocity and the position of the passenger relative to the bus gives:

enter image description here

This tells me that the scene as shown in the movie does not follow usual Newtonian physics. Either the air was ridiculously dense, the bus was much lighter than it looked, or... they just did what they wanted because that's what the script called for. Movie physics.

Myth. Busted.