Problem:
The distance from to is kilometers. A plane is flying with constant speed, height and direction from to . Over a period of 1 second the angle changes by degrees and the angle by degrees. What is the minimal speed of the plane?
Problem:
The distance from to is kilometers. A plane is flying with constant speed, height and direction from to . Over a period of 1 second the angle changes by degrees and the angle by degrees. What is the minimal speed of the plane?
Solution:
Answer: kilometers per hour.
Let the plane be at height and a (horizontal) distance from . Let the angle be and the angle be . After 1 second, the angle is and the angle is . We have immediately that:
Eliminating , we obtain:
where . Hence
Similarly, eliminating , we obtain
At this point I do not see how to make further progress without approximating. But approximating seems reasonable, since and , are certainly small, at least when expressed in radians. For example, typical values might be 10,000 ft for and more than 10 miles for or and 500 mph for the aircraft speed. That gives miles, so and . So, let us neglect , , etc. Then we get the simplified expressions:
If , then we quickly obtain , , . Assume . Then we can solve for , substitute back in and obtain an expression for in terms of . It is convenient to divide through by and to write , . Note that since we are assuming , we require . After some manipulation we obtain:
Differentiating, we find that there is a minimum at , which is in the allowed range, and that the minimum value of is . By symmetry, we obtain the same result for and we notice that it is also true for . So in all cases we have that the minimum value of is .
We are assuming and are small, so we may take , . However, the question specified that and were measured in degrees, so to obtain the final answer we must convert, giving:
and hence
kilometers per hour.