Question: What’s the best floor of a building to throw a cat from? Answer: Any of them above the seventh floor. The Proof: Higher than the seventh floor, it doesn’t really matter how far the cat falls, as long as its oxygen holds out. Like many small animals, cats have a non-fatal terminal velocity – in cats this is about 100 kph or 60 mph. Once they relax, they orientate themselves, spread out, and parachute to earth like a squirrel. Terminal velocity is the point at which a body’s weight equalises against the resistance of the air and it stops accelerating – in humans it’s nearly 195 kph (about 120 mph), reached in free fall at about 550 metres (1,800 feet). There are cats on record that have fallen thirty storeys or more without ill effects. One cat is known to have survived a forty-six-storey fall, and there is even evidence of a cat deliberately thrown out of a Cessna aircraft at 244 metres (800 feet) that survived. A 1987 paper in the Journal of the American Veterinary Medical Association studied 132 cases of cats that had fallen out of high-rise windows in New York. On average they fell 5.5 storeys. Ninety per cent survived, though many suffered serious injuries. The data showed that injuries rose proportionally to the number of storeys fallen – up to seven storeys. Above seven storeys, the number of injuries per cat sharply declined. In other words, the further the cat fell, the better its chances. Other Odd Facts: The most famous human free-falls are Vesna Vulović, who fell 10,600 metres (34,777 feet) when a terrorist bomb destroyed her Yugoslavian airlines DC-10 in 1972, and Flight Sergeant Nicholas Alkemade, an RAF tailgunner who leaped from his burning Lancaster in 1944, falling 5,800 metres (19,000 feet). Vulović broke both legs, and suffered some spinal damage, but was saved by the fact that her seat and the toilet booth it was attached to took the impact.
Posted on: Thu, 08 Aug 2013 23:19:08 +0000
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