Talk:3161: Airspeed

must be a heated competition 79.78.17.137 21:34, 29 October 2025 (UTC)

badum-tss! Barmar (talk) 22:17, 29 October 2025 (UTC)

It's actually worth noting that a quick google says that land speed records for hot air balloons are actually fairly fast, wikipedia claiming it clocks in at around 245 mph. Jet streams allow them to go pretty fast! 45.78.106.197 23:42, 29 October 2025 (UTC)

Airspeed is relative to the vehicle, and a balloon has no "front", so a gust in one direction is in theory indistinguishable from a lull in the opposite direction; both will appear as a momentary increase in airspeed until the balloon accelerates (in whichever direction) to match the local air movement. (I say "in theory" because if you consider your gusts and lulls relative to the overall movement of the airmass, it's plausible that one or the other will tend to be sharper.) The "gust that allowed them to coast", and the whole notion of "coasting", isn't really right. A non-zero airspeed means that the balloon hasn't re-stabilized with the local air movement, in whichever direction. In fact, "coasting", defined here as momentarily moving differently from the airmass as a whole, is actually an unlikely source of the 2MPH airspeed, because it requires that the balloon accelerate to match local air movement, before returning to the movement of the airmass as a whole. More likely is a localized change (a gust or lull), that causes the local air to be moving differently from the airmass as a whole, while the balloon is still moving with the airmass. Such a localized change might be present for a very small amount of time, not long enough to appreciably change the balloon's movement. But I'm not feeling like spending enough effort to distill that down into one sentence to update the explanation. Jordan Brown (talk) 23:59, 29 October 2025 (UTC)