Free Fall
Calculator

They describe the motion of an object falling under gravity alone, with no air resistance: distance fallen grows with the square of time, while speed grows linearly with time. Both use g, the acceleration due to gravity (about 9.8 m/s² on Earth), as the constant driving the motion.

No — in true free fall (no air resistance), all objects accelerate at the same rate regardless of mass, since gravitational acceleration doesn't depend on the falling object's mass. The common intuition that heavier objects fall faster comes from air resistance affecting light or oddly shaped objects (like a feather) far more than dense, compact ones (like a hammer), not from gravity itself treating them differently.

Because distance depends on time squared, an object falls much farther in each successive second than the one before — for example, in the first second it falls about 4.9 meters, but by the end of the second second it has fallen about 19.6 meters total, four times as far, not twice. This accelerating pattern is why longer falls become disproportionately dangerous.

No — it models ideal free fall, where the only force is gravity, which is accurate for compact, dense objects falling relatively short distances (like a dropped tool or a thrown rock) but increasingly inaccurate for light or large-surface-area objects, or for long falls where terminal velocity comes into play. For a skydiver or a sheet of paper, air resistance eventually limits speed regardless of how much further they fall.

Terminal velocity is the constant maximum speed a falling object reaches once air resistance grows large enough to balance gravity, at which point acceleration stops entirely — this calculator's equations assume no such limit and would keep predicting ever-increasing speed indefinitely. For real long-distance falls through air, terminal velocity calculations (which factor in drag, shape, and air density) are needed instead of pure free-fall kinematics.