Are You Smarter Than A Rocket Scientist?

Does a crosswind affect the distance a golf ball travels down the fairway? Does it affect the fuel burnt by a plane? Yes, and yes. I was in an aircraft dynamics class a year ago and developed a simulation to prove the first question was true, however, almost half of my classmates got the problem wrong despite writing their own simulations. How could so many 3rd-year aerospace engineering students disagree on a simple simulation problem?
Video Music: "Lone Wolf" by Dan Lebowitz
Outro Music: "Blast" from Bensound.com
(0:00) - The crosswind question
(1:01) - Basic equation
(1:38) - Two ways to calculate Drag
(2:29) - The source of the error
(3:10) - What the students did wrong
(4:40) - How to fix the simulation
(5:27) - But HOW does it affect distance?
(5:43) - Flying in a crosswind
(7:15) - Outro

[@ConHathy]

I thought this was an interesting problem, but the pacing of the video just didn't feel right. I could have redone the voice-over but I was already losing my voice and at some point perfect is the enemy of good enough. Hopefully, you all like it regardless :)

[@seasidescott]

Pacing is good as it gives time to parallel think along with you. I experienced classes where they'd get most of the math right but not be able to see the general picture (particle collisions were particularly amusing). Fortunately I'd had a couple of mentors that had real world experience and would always sketch out (round off/guesstimate) the problems first, look at other potential factors second, and crunch the math fourth or just let engineers do that (yeah, I was in physics). When I made an error one of these guys would say "you fell in the box" meaning that I was looking for 'the answer' and not trying to understand the problem.

[@matveyshishov]

At first I was "but in the vacuum, we would have perfectly additive components", but then I remembered that there is no wind in the vacuum.
Except, hmm, what if it's solar wind? We could be golfing on the Moon, sending the ball along the terminator line.

[@jimthefatjam2613]

You deserve more recognition.

[@JamesSeedorf]

That outro though

[@petersmythe6462]

I think people don't realize that drag has to be applied as a vector, not a bunch of separate scalars.

[@dsdy1205]

The intuition to have here is that drag and other path dependent forces hate mathematicians, and so you should never trust your math around them