Faster Than Falling

If you fall from a sufficient height, you will reach terminal velocity in just under five seconds. Terminal velocity is the top speed (for a human, it's about 120mph) of a body moving through a fluid (usually our atmosphere) and varies by the density of the liquid and the mass and cross-section presented by the falling body. By "cross-section presented" I mean how UN-aerodynamic can a falling body make itself in order to present as large a surface area as possible to the atmosphere? This is why cats regularly survive falls from great heights. Even above 30 floors, the mortality rate is only about 10%. Cats, you see, upon reaching terminal velocity, relax. This causes their legs to spread, and their skin spreads out rather like a flying squirrel's. This is mostly why their terminal velocity is half of a human's. Granted, 60mph still means a sudden stop, and cats usually don't walk away from these falls without a bit of a limp as a souvenir. I had a cat once that fell four stories down an air shaft. Of course, the cat can't reach terminal velocity in such a short time, so she didn't have time to reach the relaxed phase of the fall and was still experiencing the "oops" response. Had she fallen six stories instead, she might have relaxed, let nature pull the ripcord and walk away unharmed. Instead, her foreleg was broken. And she was, already, in the opinion of our vet at the time, "easily in the top three" of the most difficult animals he'd ever had to treat. No matter what you did to her at the vet, she made sounds that hell's hoariest demons must make when Satan is flaying their skin for the 12,234,844th time. You would have thought the vet was trying to saw her in half with a broken bottle, when, in fact, he was only trying to stick a piece of smooth, sanitary piece of glass up her ass.

All that is a long way to say that this guy is going 151mph! On skis.