When faced with violently high winds, do you back down, or do you face them and fly? On September 17, 2025, 22 Friends School students ditched their classes to do just this, going indoor skydiving!

But not out of collective defiance. Rather, it was a planned field trip for the first time in Special Topics history.

Their mission? To have fun and to enhance their learning in their unit on Drag Forces and Terminal Velocity.

Thanks to the efforts of their teacher, Vik Polyak, the students got the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to go sky high at iFLY. Well, almost. Students were lifted off the ground in a wind tunnel, facing gusts of up to 121 mph. Guided by instructors, they learned to float, discovered how to move their hands to control their direction, and rose up to 20 feet in the air. The experience lasted a bit over an hour, with each class taking turns in the wind chamber.

Physics students applauded the experience. Some even called it the best field trip they had ever attended.

This demo and interaction accompanied valuable lessons in Physics and the engineering that went into designing these “wind chambers.” From the physics side, students learned that when falling through an atmosphere, any object will eventually stop accelerating, at which point it will fall at a constant “terminal” velocity. After they’d taken turns flying, students participated in a lab that allowed them to calculate and derive the formula for their own terminal velocities.

The students ended their visit with an experiment involving balls and objects of different sizes, calculating and predicting which would rise first.

As they learned, indoor skydiving not only allows for testable experiments, but also for anyone to experience the sensation of skydiving.

“Without plummeting to your death!” joked Nate Lin.