Thursday, June 17, 2004

Relative speeds of movie dangers.

Boing Boing posted "Could you outrun a crossbow bolt? How about a 747?" linking to "The Reality of Running Away from Stuff" which lists the relative speeds of various dangers found in movies. I found this interesting because I watched "Behind Enemy Lines" last night. In it, a super hornet spends quite a while avoiding a surface to air missile (SAM).

To be fair, the movie did depict the missile as faster than the aircraft, but it was a close enough race to make it tense. According to the page, the missile is more than twice the speed of the F-15 Eagle. I looked up both aircraft and came up with different numbers, however.

The F-15's advertised speed is Mach 2.5+ (1,875 mph, 838.2 m/s), but the reality page says 715 m/s. The F/A-18 is listed as Mach 1.8+, which comes to about 612 m/s. The SAM (1180 m/s) catches up to both of these easily. Still, I wonder where the other numbers came from.

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