An airplane is at height of $10000$ feet. At what angle (rounded to whole degree), it must descend if the airport is $50$ miles away?

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Answer 1 · 2017-03-25T07:05:46

Airplane must descend at $2^@$ .

As one mile is $1760$ yards and each yard $3$ feet, we have $1760xx3=5280$ feet in a mile and

airport is $5280xx50=264000$ feet away. enter image source here

Hence tangent (equal to opposite side divided by adjacent side) of angle formed is $tanalpha=10000/264000=0.03788$

and looking at tables (or scientific calculator) angle $alpha=2.17^@$ , which rounded to degrees is $2^@$ .

An airplane is at height of 1000010000 feet. At what angle (rounded to whole degree), it must descend if the airport is 5050 miles away?