This year, the students in Darlington’s physics classes went on a field trip to iFly in Atlanta. The trip, which lasted a school day, used the experience to teach the math behind aerodynamics.

“They have these huge fans that move air, and they have a very very tall column,” physics teacher Barbara Kuckhoff said. “They’ve designed this so that… they can adjust that airflow to get that drag to be just equal to your weight and when they do that you get to float.”

While they were there, the students got to go into the skydiving simulator and experience the sensation of flight. Before getting to go into the tube though, the students calculated what they thought their falling speed would be. 

“We had a lab where we used stuff like our surface area and our weight to calculate our terminal velocity and then we went into the flying tube and we actually got to fly and move around,” sophomore Hayes Parsa said.

After the experience, they went back home, although on the way they ordered Domino’s Pizza.

“[It] was good. We got pepperoni pizza and we got those Nature Valley bars that crumble everywhere, but it was awesome,” Parsa said.

Kuckhoff hopes to do this field trip again, although she is limited by how many students will decide to do it again next year.

“I’d love to go back again and I’d love to fly again because that was my first time flying,” Kuckhoff said, “[Although] I’m not sure if it’ll happen next year. I really need to have a large group of people to go…we had 24 going this time.”