Originally Posted by
The Ancient Geek
In still air the parachute will be directly above the aircraft and both will go straight down.
In a wind the parachute will above and ahead of the aircraft and both will decend at an angle. There are 2 vectors, horizontal and vertical, the aircraft will take longer to reach the ground, simple trigonometry.
Nope, you’re getting ground and wind speed confused. They are totally, totally, totally unrelated. You could be in a 50,000kts wind, if the air is stable then you’d be hanging quite happily, quite vertically, everything pointing to the centre of the Earth. It just so happens to be spinning below at a great speed.