Pilot drops ping pong balls on interstate

Perhaps he spotted a guy in a red jacket talking to a moose, a rabbit, and a fellow sporting green denim trousers?
 
3000 ping pong balls would cause major hilarity to ensue.
 
Came here looking for the WKRP reference...left happy.

Jay's kids used to throw marshmallows on to the greens of golf courses from the Ercoupe.
 
Turkeys have no trouble flying.


It's the landing............:D
 
Might be an interesting alternative to flour bombing at the fly in...

Set up some 5 gallon buckets, and the pilots ping pong balls....
 
Reminds me of a candy drop I watched at a fly in. The local town's people brought there little kids to the airport to pick up candy after the candy drop. All went well until the pilot circled around and dropped another load onto the kids! :eek: It got ugly after that. I still laugh every time I think of those kids running off the grass strip holding their heads crying and screaming. :lol:
 
What altitude do you have to be at to hit the greens?

Probably a bit low, eh?
 
Wild turkeys fly quite well, the fat domesticated ones, not so much....
 
Humor aside, with something like this, you've got to do it right or not at all. Having spent almost 50 years on the highway, I can foresee all sorts of inappropriate reactions from drivers if it starts raining Ping-Pong balls, and some really bad consequences. We're probably lucky no accidents occurred on the road as a result, because don't need that sort of publicity about what the public would likely perceive as "those dam-fool little airplane pilots".

Yeah, I know, Ron's just being a party-pooper again, but flying is a privilege and it comes with the responsibility to consider all the possible outcomes and not do things where the risk isn't worth the return.
 
Ron Levy said:
Humor aside, with something like this, you've got to do it right or not at all. Having spent almost 50 years on the highway, I can foresee all sorts of inappropriate reactions from drivers if it starts raining Ping-Pong balls, and some really bad consequences. We're probably lucky no accidents occurred on the road as a result, because don't need that sort of publicity about what the public would likely perceive as "those dam-fool little airplane pilots".

Yeah, I know, Ron's just being a party-pooper again, but flying is a privilege and it comes with the responsibility to consider all the possible outcomes and not do things where the risk isn't worth the return.
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For a minute there, I thought that you were going to provide some insightful critique on how he could have improved his drop on the highway. Sadly, I was mistaken.

All sorts of bad things COULD happen from doing just about everything that we do. The reality here appears to be that the drop on the highway was unintentional, nothing dramatically bad happened, the participants likely learned from it, and no lecture is necessary.


JKG
 
What's the terminal velocity of a ping pong ball?

I mean... they are cheap enough.

EDIT: Found it in some website
The Terminal Velocity is about 9.5 m/s

98% of which is attained after falling 12.5 m. (Im not sure of the time it takes to get to this)
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So roughly 20 mph.
 
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If you've never done this before, wouldn't you make a dry run over some schlub's farm to see how they actually fall??
 
Ron Levy said:
Humor aside, with something like this, you've got to do it right or not at all. Having spent almost 50 years on the highway, I can foresee all sorts of inappropriate reactions from drivers if it starts raining Ping-Pong balls, and some really bad consequences. We're probably lucky no accidents occurred on the road as a result, because don't need that sort of publicity about what the public would likely perceive as "those dam-fool little airplane pilots".

Yeah, I know, Ron's just being a party-pooper again, but flying is a privilege and it comes with the responsibility to consider all the possible outcomes and not do things where the risk isn't worth the return.
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Here is a humorous article to prove your point about unintended consequences:
http://www.aopa.org/News-and-Video/All-News/2010/January/1/Never-Again-Online-Ashes-in-the-airplane
 
Captain said:
It's the velocity of the cars to consider, not the balls.
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True, but I was thinking of a ball falling on someone's head, not a car.

Any car I'm pretty sure would smash the ball with no damage (I do understand however that a driver might freak out and cause an accident).
 
JGoodish said:
For a minute there, I thought that you were going to provide some insightful critique on how he could have improved his drop on the highway. Sadly, I was mistaken.

All sorts of bad things COULD happen from doing just about everything that we do. The reality here appears to be that the drop on the highway was unintentional, nothing dramatically bad happened, the participants likely learned from it, and no lecture is necessary.
Click to expand...
The fact that the pilot got lucky and nothing bad actually happened doesn't excuse an apparently ill-considered decision to do this without making sure there was no chance of an off-range release. You gotta be smart about things like this and not just depend on luck or we all eat dirt over it. There's no way this news article does anything good for GA, and that's the unintended consequence of what this pilot did even though nothing bad actually happened.
 
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