# How can I estimate the power between the guide and the sky diver?

I would like to estimate the Maximum power/ tension that can be, between the sky diving guider and the "tourist".

In this picture what the max tenstion will be, I think it is maximum when the parachute is opened.

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## 2 Answers

To a good approximation the deceleration felt by the tourist will be the same as that felt by the parachutist. There may be some elasticity in the link joining the two, but I'd be surprised if this made much difference.

As always (is there anything not on Wikipedia) there are a couple of useful articles on Wikipedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parachuting#Parachute_deployment reports that the deceleration is 3 - 4G. However http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tandem_skydiving reports that tandem skydives use a drogue parachute to reduce the terminal velocity and hence reduce the deceleration.

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Given your tag of 'estimation' I would just use $$a=\frac{v-v_0}{t}$$ plugging in some numbers for terminal velocity $v$ and a 'safe' parachute deployed velocity $v_0$. Then assume ~$1\rm{s}$ for $t$ and we have an a, those wiki links should confirm whether your numbers are good!

For fun can I suggest calculating $a$ for $v=0$ and $t\approx0.5\rm{s}$ ;-)

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