what is the angle ofdepression from the airplane to the airport.

Question

An airplane is at height of 2km above the ground. The distance along the ground from the airplane to the airport is 5km. what is the angle ofdepression from the airplane to the airport. a

Answer 1

what is the angle ofdepression from the airplane to the airport.
An airplane is at height of 2km above the ground. The distance along
the ground from the airplane to the airport is 5km. what is the angle of
depression from the airplane to the airport. a

The angle is determined by the tangent of the angle. This is
calculated by dividing the opposite side of the triangle (the ground
distance) by the adjacent side (the height).

tan a = 5/2 = 2.5

Feed that into the inverse tangent function to get the size in degrees.

arctan 2.5 = 68 degrees

Comments

Wouldn't the angle of depression from the pilot's point of view be arctan(2/5)?

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You are right. I was looking at the angle inside the triangle formed by the plane's altitude and the distance from the airport. The angle in question is actually the complement of that angle, measured from the horizontal line representing the plane's altitude, and the slanted line to the airport.