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Snowboard/Ski Jump Landings

IVIR

Entry posted by IVIR

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All my life I have skied and snowboarded in the winter, frequently hanging around the terrain parks at Bristol. Early on I would watch in awe as people went off the biggest jump at Bristol called the "booter", and eventually I started to hit the jump as well. It is quite scary as it propels you tens of feet in the air and keeps you flying for multiple seconds, but it is completely safe all because of the landing. It is common knowledge that bending your knees can help reduce the impact of a fall or jump as impulse = Force x Time, so increasing the time of the impact decreases the force. The same applies for landing a jump on skis or a snowboard, but it gets to a point where you are so high in the air that just bending your knees will do little to help land the jump. For a jump straight up and down on a flat surface, the momentum right before the person hits the ground is equal to the impulse (change in momentum = impulse and momentum in y plane is going to 0 on a flat surface), so the velocity is proportional to force with the mass and time being constant, so the higher one jumps or is falling from, the larger the force of the impact will be.

Imagine being 30-40 feet high. The force of the impact would be too large to handle even with bending your knees, yet ski jumps can propel people even higher and people land without injury all the time. This is because the landing of the ski jumps are angled downward, so the y component of the momentum is not becoming zero like it would on a flat surface, rather some of the skiers momentum in the y plane is conserved. Therefore, the change in momentum is decreased, so within the same landing time, the impact force is decreased. This doesn't seem like too big of a deal until you ever experience overshooting the landing to a jump, or coming up short and hitting the knuckle of the jump. From experience, I realize that overshooting a landing and hitting the flat surface (even if you are still on your feet) hurts more than failing to land the jump, but still falling on the landing. 

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