Parachute Payload Experiment: Drop an Egg Three Ways

Three ways to save an egg, and only two of them work the way most people think. A parachute slows the fall: a 40 cm chute brings an 80 g payload down at about 2.4 metres per second instead of 7. A streamer slows it a little. An airbag does not slow it at all. It arrives at full speed and survives anyway, because squashing bags stretch the stop from two millimetres to thirty, which cuts the peak force by roughly fifteen times. Running this parachute payload experiment with all three systems and a stopwatch separates two completely different ideas that usually get lumped together.

Key Takeaways

• You’ll drop identical egg payloads from the same height three times, with a parachute, a streamer and inflated-bag airbags, and time every fall.
• The two mechanisms are different: drag reduces the speed you arrive at, while cushioning increases the distance over which you stop.
• Numbers to compute: free fall from 2.5 m takes 0.71 s and arrives at 7 m/s. A 40 cm chute on an 80 g payload should reach about 2.4 m/s.
• Best for ages 8 to 14. An adult does all the dropping, outdoors, with the landing area cleared.
• The usual failure is a parachute that doesn’t open in time. From 2.5 m there is barely enough fall to deploy, which is itself the most useful finding.

What You’ll Need for the Parachute Payload Experiment

Item	How much	Where to get it	If you don’t have it
Eggs	4, plus spares. Allergen note: egg	Fridge	A water balloon of similar mass, which bursts instead of cracking
Zip-top sandwich bags	10	Supermarket	Cling film wrapped tightly, with tape
Paper or plastic cups	4	Kitchen	Cut-down plastic bottles
Bin liner or thin plastic sheet	1	Kitchen	A supermarket carrier bag, cut flat
Thread or thin string	3 m	Sewing kit	Dental floss
Crepe paper or plastic streamer	1 strip, 10 × 150 cm	Party supplies	A strip cut from a bin liner
Masking tape	One roll	Hardware drawer	Any tape
Tape measure	1	Toolbox	String marked at 2.5 m
Kitchen scale	1	Kitchen	Weigh the assembled payload once
Phone with slow-motion video	1	Pocket	A stopwatch, with repeated drops averaged
Tarp, old sheet or a patch of grass	1	Garden, cupboard	Several layers of newspaper outdoors

Time: prep 30 min, drops 30 min, cleanup 15 min Cost: a few eggs and a bin liner Mess level: do this outside

Do the Experiment

Step 1 — Build four identical payloads

Seal each egg inside a zip-top bag, squeezing out the air, then tape the bagged egg inside a cup so it cannot move. Weigh one payload and record it, probably 70 to 90 g. All four must be the same mass, because mass changes terminal velocity and would wreck the comparison.

Step 2 — Make the vented parachute

Cut a 40 cm square from the bin liner. Tape a 30 cm thread to each corner and tie all four to the payload. Then cut a 4 cm hole in the centre of the canopy. That vent looks wrong and is essential: without it, air spills out from alternating edges and the chute swings violently instead of descending.

Step 3 — Make the streamer and the airbag payloads

Streamer: tape one end of a 10 by 150 cm strip to the second payload. Airbag: part-inflate six small zip bags, seal them, and tape them around the third payload so they stick out about 3 cm on every side. Leave the fourth payload bare as your control.

Step 4 — Set up a safe, measured drop

Outdoors. Mark 2.5 m up a wall or a post with tape. An adult holds the payload at the mark, with the landing area on grass or a tarp and completely clear of people, pets and anything breakable. The child stands at least 2 m away with the phone, filming.

Step 5 — Drop, time and record

Three drops per system, filming each. Count frames or use the stopwatch to get the fall time, then divide 2.5 m by that time for average speed. Record whether the egg survived, and if it cracked, describe how: a star crack, a hole, or a complete break.

Step 6 — Combine the two mechanisms

Fourth drop: parachute plus airbags on the same payload. Predict first. A chute brings arrival speed down by about three times, and airbags stretch the stop by about fifteen times, so the combination should be dramatically gentler than either alone.

What you should see: The bare control egg breaks, usually with a hole in one side, and it falls in roughly 0.7 seconds. The parachute payload takes 1.0 to 1.5 seconds, giving an average speed of 1.7 to 2.5 m/s, and the egg nearly always survives. The streamer makes a much smaller difference, often shaving only 10 to 25% off the speed, and the egg survives maybe half the time. The airbag payload falls at full speed, lands with a slap, bounces, and survives. If your parachute fails, you will almost certainly see why on the video: it had not fully opened before impact.

What the Parachute Payload Experiment Measures

System	Fall time from 2.5 m	Average speed	Mechanism	Egg survives?
Bare payload (control)	~0.7 s	~3.5 m/s average, 7 m/s at impact	None	No
Streamer	0.8–0.9 s	~3 m/s	Modest drag	Sometimes
40 cm vented parachute	1.0–1.5 s	1.7–2.5 m/s	Large drag area	Nearly always
Inflated-bag airbags	~0.7 s	~3.5 m/s	Longer stopping distance	Nearly always
Parachute plus airbags	1.0–1.5 s	1.7–2.5 m/s	Both at once	Essentially always

Note the two rows that both save the egg while producing completely different speeds. That is the result the whole experiment exists to produce.

What’s Actually Going On

Two separate things can break an egg: how fast it is going when it arrives, and how abruptly it stops. The three systems attack different ones.

Drag handles the arrival speed. The force the air exerts on a falling object rises with the square of speed and in proportion to the area pushed through the air, which is set out in NASA Glenn’s drag equation. As an object speeds up, drag grows until it equals weight, at which point acceleration stops and the object falls at a constant terminal velocity, described in NASA’s page on a falling object with air resistance. Put the numbers in for your payload: 80 g, a 40 cm square canopy of 0.16 m², a drag coefficient near 1.4 for a shallow parachute, and air at 1.225 kg/m³. Terminal velocity works out at about 2.4 m/s, against 7 m/s for free fall from 2.5 m. Since kinetic energy goes with speed squared, that is about one ninth of the energy arriving.

Cushioning handles the stop instead, and the governing idea is impulse. Force multiplied by the time it acts equals the change in momentum, which the Physics Classroom sets out as the impulse-momentum theorem. The same change in momentum can come from a huge force for a tiny time or a small force for a longer time. A bare egg hitting concrete stops in perhaps two millimetres of shell deformation. The 1.96 joules of kinetic energy from a 7 m/s arrival then has to be absorbed over 2 mm, which implies an average force near 1,000 newtons. Give it 30 mm of squashing bags and the same energy is absorbed over fifteen times the distance, so the average force falls to around 65 newtons. The egg arrives just as fast and survives, which is exactly why cars have crumple zones rather than parachutes.

That distinction is worth stating plainly because the popular framing blurs it. People say airbags “cushion the blow” and parachutes “slow you down” as if these were two words for one effect. They are not. Only drag changes the speed. Cushioning changes the time and distance over which the speed is removed. In an aircraft ejection or a Mars landing, engineers use both, in sequence: drag first, then a crushable structure or retro-rockets at the end. NASA’s Mars landings have used exactly that layered approach.

One honest limitation of a 2.5 m drop. A parachute needs time and falling distance to inflate, and 2.5 m gives it under a second. You are therefore partly measuring deployment reliability rather than steady-state terminal velocity, which is why some chute drops fail and others work beautifully. If you can safely drop from a first-floor window with an adult and a cleared landing zone, the chute’s advantage becomes much more consistent.

How to Explain It to Your Kid

Ages 5–8: slow down, or land soft

Hold the parachute payload and a bare one at the same height and drop them together. One takes clearly longer. Then press the airbag payload into their hand and let them feel the bags squash. Two different tricks: get there slower, or have something soft to squash on the way to stopping. Ask which one they’d choose for jumping off a wall, and point out people use both.

Ages 9–12: speed and squash

Introduce the two numbers. Average speed is distance divided by time, so a 2.5 m drop in 1.25 seconds is 2 m/s. Then the squash idea: stopping in 3 cm instead of 2 mm spreads the same stop over fifteen times the distance. Have them predict which combination survives a drop from twice the height, then test it if you can do it safely.

Ages 13+: calculate terminal velocity, then measure it

Give them the terminal velocity relation and have them compute it for their own payload mass and canopy area, then measure the actual average speed from video. The measured average will be below terminal, since the payload starts at rest, and discussing that gap is better physics than getting the right number. Then have them compute the stopping force both ways using energy divided by stopping distance.

The question to ask: “If we doubled the egg’s mass but kept the same parachute, would it land harder? What about if we doubled the canopy’s width instead?”

Why Teaching This Early Pays Off

The separation between speed on arrival and abruptness of the stop shows up everywhere in safety engineering, and most adults have never had it spelled out. Seat belts, crumple zones, helmets, playground surfaces and running shoes all manage the stop rather than the speed. A child who has dropped an egg three ways has a physical basis for understanding why a helmet is thick and why a car bonnet is designed to deform.

It also gives a first encounter with terminal velocity, which quietly fixes a persistent misconception. Many children believe that falling objects simply keep speeding up forever, or that heavy things always fall faster. A parachute makes it obvious that drag can balance weight, and a payload that falls at a constant pace is visible evidence.

A note on evidence. Freeman and colleagues’ 2014 meta-analysis of 225 studies found that active learning improved exam performance in undergraduate science and engineering courses. That is undergraduates in formal courses, not an afternoon in a garden, and it should not be stretched into a claim about this activity. What it does support is the more modest point that doing and predicting beats watching. The National Research Council’s framework lists analysing and interpreting data as a core practice, and a table of five drop times is exactly that at a kitchen scale. For a version focused on capsule design rather than descent systems, try the egg drop challenge.

Before You Start: What Parents Should Know

Best age	8–14. An adult handles every drop at every age
Supervision	Constant. The adult releases the payload, the child films from at least 2 m away, and nobody stands under the drop
Real hazards	Raw egg carries salmonella risk, so keep every egg sealed in its bag, wash hands after handling, and never taste or eat anything from this experiment. Loose plastic bags are a suffocation hazard for toddlers, so count them and bin them afterwards. Do this outdoors on grass or a tarp with the landing area clear
Don’t	Don’t lean out of a window, climb on a railing or balance on a chair to get extra height. Don’t drop from a balcony over a path, a street or anywhere a person could walk in. Don’t substitute a hard-shell container for the airbags, because the whole point is that it squashes

When It Doesn’t Work

• The parachute doesn’t open before impact. Not enough fall distance. Pack the canopy loosely over the payload rather than folding it tightly, hold it by the canopy centre at release, and if possible increase the drop height with an adult and a cleared zone.
• The parachute swings wildly and dives. You skipped the vent hole, or the shroud lines are different lengths. Cut a 4 cm vent in the centre and measure all four lines to the same length.
• The egg survives every single drop, even bare. Grass is doing the cushioning for you. Grass stretches the stop over several centimetres, which is exactly the airbag mechanism. Drop onto a single layer of tarp over a hard surface instead, and keep the drop height modest.
• Fall times vary by more than 20%. Release technique. Opening a hand drops the payload cleanly, whereas throwing adds speed. Also check the payload is not tumbling, which changes its drag area throughout the fall.
• The streamer tangles around the payload. It is too wide or too short. A long narrow strip flutters and generates drag, a short wide one wraps itself up. Aim for at least fifteen times longer than it is wide.

Take It Further

1. Canopy size sweep. Build chutes at 20, 30, 40 and 50 cm square, same payload, and plot average speed against canopy area. Terminal velocity should fall roughly with the square root of area, so quadrupling the area halves the speed. That relationship is testable with four drops and a graph.
2. Mass sweep. Add coins to the payload in 20 g steps with a fixed canopy. Speed should rise with the square root of mass, which means a payload four times heavier lands twice as fast, and is the reason real parachute size is specified per kilogram of load.
3. Measure the stopping distance. Place a soft pencil mark or a thin layer of flour on the landing surface and film at high frame rate to estimate how far the payload travels while stopping. That measurement is hard, and attempting it teaches more about experimental difficulty than any successful result. Then compare with the folded-wing approach in paper aeroplanes as a real experiment.

What to Watch For Over the Next 3 Months

• Week 4: Distinguishing the two mechanisms in conversation. “It landed soft” versus “it came down slowly” as different statements.
• Month 2: Noticing stop-management in the world: playground rubber, bike helmets, bubble wrap, the way a cat lands. The giveaway is a comment about something being designed to squash.
• Month 3: Predicting with a reason rather than a guess. If your child says a bigger canopy will help because it pushes more air, the drag idea has taken hold. For a process-focused follow-up there is the reimagined egg drop challenge.

Frequently Asked Questions

Why does a parachute need a hole in the middle?

Without a vent, air builds up under the canopy and escapes unevenly from one edge, then another, which makes the whole thing rock and dive. A central vent lets a steady stream through and stabilises the descent. Real parachutes use an apex vent for the same reason, and the improvement is immediately visible on video.

Does the airbag payload really not fall more slowly?

Barely. The bags add some area and therefore some drag, but nothing like a canopy, so the arrival speed is close to free fall. It survives because the squashing bags extend the stop from about 2 mm to about 30 mm, which cuts the peak force by roughly fifteen times. Speed unchanged, force reduced.

Is 2.5 m enough height?

It is enough to see the differences and it is the safest option for a family. It is not enough for a parachute to fully stabilise, so some chute drops fail on deployment. If you can safely drop from a first-floor window with an adult and a cleared landing area, results become far more consistent.

Can we use something other than a real egg?

Yes. A small water balloon of similar mass works and bursts rather than cracking, which gives a clearer pass or fail and removes the salmonella concern entirely. A ripe tomato also works, though it is messier. Keep the payload mass the same across all drops whatever you choose.

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About the author

Ricky Flores is the founder of HiWave Makers and an electrical engineer with 15+ years of experience building consumer technology at Apple, Samsung, and Texas Instruments. He writes about how kids learn to build, think, and create in a tech-saturated world. Read more at hiwavemakers.com.

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Sources

1. NASA Glenn Research Center. The Drag Equation. Beginner’s Guide to Aeronautics. https://www1.grc.nasa.gov/beginners-guide-to-aeronautics/drag-equation/
2. NASA Glenn Research Center. Falling Object with Air Resistance. Beginner’s Guide to Aeronautics. https://www1.grc.nasa.gov/beginners-guide-to-aeronautics/falling-object-with-air-resistance/
3. The Physics Classroom. Momentum and Impulse Connection. https://www.physicsclassroom.com/class/momentum/Lesson-1/Momentum-and-Impulse-Connection
4. Freeman, S., Eddy, S. L., McDonough, M., Smith, M. K., Okoroafor, N., Jordt, H., & Wenderoth, M. P. (2014). “Active learning increases student performance in science, engineering, and mathematics.” PNAS, 111(23), 8410–8415. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1319030111
5. National Research Council. (2012). A Framework for K-12 Science Education. National Academies Press. https://doi.org/10.17226/13165
6. White, R., & Gunstone, R. (1992). Probing Understanding. Falmer Press.