Air+Force+One

A plane takes off with a bearing of 32 degrees east of north. After 65 miles it changes its bearing to 28 degrees west of north and travels for 43 miles. Plot the course of the plane with all angles shown, determine its displacement from the starting point, and determine the bearing from the starting point.

In order to solve this problem we drew a scale modle of the plane taking off. We took a piece of graph paper and used a quarter of an inch to represent 2 miles. The hypotnuse of the triangle turned out to be 77 miles. This value is also the total displacement of the airplane. Our group used the Law of Cosines which was the equation a(squared)=b(squared)+c(squared)-2(b)(c)Cos(A). This gave us the value CosA=.8297. We then used arccosine of .8297 to find the angle bearing of the starting point which came out to be 34 degrees.