YouTuber Hires a Helicopter to Solve 2014 US Physics Exam Question

It is not fiction; it happened in real life. A YouTuber hired a helicopter to discover the answer to a question that appeared in the 2014 US Physics Olympiad team qualifying exam. Derek Muller, a YouTuber, rented a chopper to solve this physics question that went viral because no one could stick to one answer. For many years, he has run a well-known YouTube channel called “Veritasium.”
In the video, he started reading the question from the qualifying exam for the US physics team. The question is, “A helicopter is flying horizontally at a constant speed. A perfectly flexible uniform cable is suspended beneath the helicopter. Air friction on the cable is not negligible. Which of the following diagrams best shows the shape of the cable as the helicopter flies through the air to the right?” He described the answer in that video. He stated that “When flying along at constant speeds, these forces must be perfectly balanced by the tension in the rope.”

The video demonstrated that a man is lowering a cable from the chopper with a kettlebell to check how it flies. After this experiment, he came up with the answer D. However, he was not satisfied and went on to try another experiment. As per the section posted on the American Association of Physics Teachers (AAPT) website, “since there is air friction on the cable, then there must be a horizontal component to the force where the cable attaches to the helicopter.” But according to Muller’s experiment, the answer is likely to be changed based on the attached dangling rope. He said, “You could get answer B, C, or D,”

Previously, he uploaded a video on his channel displaying how Blackbird, a wind-powered vehicle constructed by Rick Cavallaro, has the ability to outturn the wind itself. The moment a physicist at the University of California, Alexander Kusenko, watched the video, he immediately wrote to Muller by telling that his claim was wrong.