Superheroes often catch falling victims at the last second. The classic movie example is from the 1978 Superman, when Lois Lane falls from a helicopter (1:04):
Superman seems to do a decent job of decelerating Lois in a plausible manner. In the (infinitely weirder) 1995 Batman Forever, however, Batman catches Chase Meridian and Robin by hooking them to steel cables, which immediately arrest their falls with gut-wrenching immediacy (1:01):
The 2002 Spiderman does a decent soft-catch with MJ, but catches a bus-full of kids with a hard stop that seems like it would break some bones (0:40):
Mr. Incredible, in 2004, instantaneously stops the downward momentum of a falling victim, also adding some hard horizontal acceleration (and causing minor injuries) (0:10):
In 2012, the Hulk takes on catching Iron Man as he falls from space, tearing up a building to provide some deceleration that makes the catch seem more plausible (though we won’t get into how metal things falling from space usually go fast enough to catch fire and burn up...) (2:28):
In 2013, Batman saves Rachel Dawes with a nice soft catch and his batwing parachute thing (2:25):
In 2016, Superman saves Lois again, this time with a very soft catch (1:20):
This isn’t an exhaustive list (thank you to Blakely and Barry, superhero consultants, for immediately coming up with these scenes off the tops of their heads), but it shows how movies have generally gotten better and better about adding a deceleration phase to the catching of victims.
Last time we talked about the 2017 novel Renegades by Marissa Meyer, which shows that not everyone has gotten on the soft-catch bandwagon. A non-flying Superman-like hero standing on the ground casually catches a falling damsel after a fall of “hundreds of feet,” after which he sets her aside with no injuries and continues the fight.
We left off with a graph showing how fast a victim would fall from a given height, but we left out wind resistance!
Wind resistance makes a difference. Skydivers know about this, and they’ve found that air will keep you from going faster than 121 MPH in a belly-to-earth position (with as much wind resistance as a person can manage). If you tuck your arms and legs, you can skydive at up to 200 MPH. These are the “terminal velocities” of skydivers, and you can find more info on them here.
The thing is, wind resistance is disproportionately stronger the faster you’re going, so it doesn’t make much difference in the early stages of falling. It doesn’t balance gravitational forces until you’ve fallen about 1500 feet (belly-to-earth) or 4500 feet (arms and legs tucked).
How much does wind resistance come into play in a “short” 300-foot fall? Not so much. Wikipedia has some equations for exactly how much (which I won’t bore you with). Here are the results in a graph:
Last time we talked about the 2017 novel Renegades by Marissa Meyer, which shows that not everyone has gotten on the soft-catch bandwagon. A non-flying Superman-like hero standing on the ground casually catches a falling damsel after a fall of “hundreds of feet,” after which he sets her aside with no injuries and continues the fight.
We left off with a graph showing how fast a victim would fall from a given height, but we left out wind resistance!
Wind resistance makes a difference. Skydivers know about this, and they’ve found that air will keep you from going faster than 121 MPH in a belly-to-earth position (with as much wind resistance as a person can manage). If you tuck your arms and legs, you can skydive at up to 200 MPH. These are the “terminal velocities” of skydivers, and you can find more info on them here.
The thing is, wind resistance is disproportionately stronger the faster you’re going, so it doesn’t make much difference in the early stages of falling. It doesn’t balance gravitational forces until you’ve fallen about 1500 feet (belly-to-earth) or 4500 feet (arms and legs tucked).
How much does wind resistance come into play in a “short” 300-foot fall? Not so much. Wikipedia has some equations for exactly how much (which I won’t bore you with). Here are the results in a graph:
So if Thunderbird (the victim superhero) fell a mere 200 feet, she would be going 77 MPH (with no air resistance) or 70MPH (with maximum air resistance). If she fell from 300 feet, maximum air resistance would slow her down from 95 MPH to 81 MPH.
That’s pretty fast. Hitting the ground at 70MPH is physically about the same as getting hit by a train moving 70MPH. Getting caught in someone’s arms can’t be much better… but Captain Chromium could have decelerated Thunderbird over a distance of 2-3 feet to help lessen the impact.
How much force would that require? Would it be enough for Thunderbird to walk away unscathed? We’ll look at that next time.
Can you think of another unrealistic-seeming hero-catches-a-victim scene? Let me know in the comments.
That’s pretty fast. Hitting the ground at 70MPH is physically about the same as getting hit by a train moving 70MPH. Getting caught in someone’s arms can’t be much better… but Captain Chromium could have decelerated Thunderbird over a distance of 2-3 feet to help lessen the impact.
How much force would that require? Would it be enough for Thunderbird to walk away unscathed? We’ll look at that next time.
Can you think of another unrealistic-seeming hero-catches-a-victim scene? Let me know in the comments.