Earlier today I had to take a cab from the commercial terminal
to another airport nearby where there was no commercial airline
service, but where the airplane I was to fly was parked. I had
the most interesting cab driver; we covered a few interesting
topics on the ride over. For example, he asked me at what
altitude we flew the Citation X, and I told him 51,000 feet
(though we don't usually fly that high). He was very surprised,
and I told him that the commercial airliners usually fly in the
upper 30,000 foot range, and at the altitudes above are a lot of
business jets. Then he told me about a show he watched about an
experiment in the 60s. Now, I vaguely remember a long ago
experiment of a guy jumping of an insanely high altitude. But
the cab driver said he thought it was like 140,000 feet and it
had taken the guy 27 minutes to get down. So he was curious, if
they said the guy was traveling at up to 650 miles per hour, why
did it take so long to travel this distance (1 mile = 5280ft, so
140,000ft = about 26