Fast & Furious 6 Runway Debate Solved

Since watching the sixth entry in the Fast and the Furious franchise, I have had a huge question regarding the plot (I know, clean storytelling in this film series is a lot to ask).  Needless to say, if you haven’t seen the movie and don’t want it spoiled, you probably don’t want to read any further.

 

Are you still here?  Okay then.  We will proceed.

 

The finale of the movie takes place on an airstrip with cars in pursuit of a massive cargo plane.  With stunt work, fistfights, car crashes, and explosions going on for nearly 13 heart-thumping, adrenaline-fueled minutes, once the credits rolled my first question to Joanna was, “Soooooooooo, how long was that runway?”

 

 

Apparently, I am not the only one that noticed the seemingly endless amount of concrete that allowed for the breathtaking moments found during the Fast & Furious 6 climax.  The Internet is littered with people ripping the movie for this exact question, along with another ludicrous stunt that involves jumping across a highway and catching a person in midair at 100 miles an hour (without even a broken bone or fractured rib to show for it).

 

During the final action sequence, the cars and plane travel in excess of 100 mph for approximately 12-and-a-half minutes, resulting in countless, and sane, viewers wanting to scream out, “No airstrip is this long!”  Likely the only reason they didn’t do so in the theater is that we save our condemnation for stupid filmmaking for the Internet, where infuriated reviews belong.  That way we don’t have to defend our opinions with reasons or facts, but can simply let loose for 150 profanity-laced words on a message board and there are no consequences to reckon with the next day.

 

Well, I pretty much let it go and chalked it up to poetic license in order to ramp up the action for a film series known for preposterous set pieces (i.e. dragging a safe the size of my dining room through Rio de Janeiro).  And I was willing to let sleeping dogs lie, but then they had to continue on with the franchise and after seeing Fast & Furious 7, I just had to look into this runway issue.

 

Like I mentioned before, I am not the only one who was curious about how long of a runway would be needed to support the amount of action that took place at the end of Fast & Furious 6.  Pop culture website vulture.com even took a crack at answering the question for those who were too lazy to do the actual research.  Their work can be seen here.

 

The problem with the linked article is that it doesn’t take into account that some of the action overlaps for multiple characters.  In fact, that brings us to the remarks made by those who defend the film’s ending.  The most popular defense is, “People need to realize that a director has to show so many things going on at the same time.  If you viewed everything at the same time it would show exactly what is happening all at once and extremely cut down the length of time the plane was trying to take off.”  Another way of wording that is from this poster who stated, “The runway wasn’t long actually.  LOL.  When you put all the scenes of the different actions together in real time it’s a total of about four minutes.”  There is even a video on YouTube that strengthens this point of view.

 

Another popular argument states, “All the complaints about the runway and people are guessing how fast the plane was going.  Until you know how fast it was going you can’t prove the scene was unrealistic.”

 

While Vulture did get some of the facts wrong due to not overlapping characters sharing the same actions at the same time during the movie, they did provide some helpful scientific information.  Thanks to cast interviews and information from the president of the Independent Pilots Association, we can calculate how fast the cars and plane were traveling at different points during the scene.  So with that information, and the research I did on my own with a repeated viewing of the film, I can safely calculate how fast the vehicles were traveling and how much distance the runway travels.

 

First I would like to thank Vulture for getting me the details regarding rate of speed, but knowing how fast each character was traveling at any specific moment in the movie is only half the problem.  You must also figure out how much screen time every character received.  Below is a list of the characters (including the plane itself as it gets some alone time during shots) and how much time they spend during the movie’s climatic battle:

Dominic Toretto (Vin Diesel) – 3 minutes, 12 seconds

Brian O’Conner (Paul Walker) – 4 minutes, 6 seconds

Luke Hobbs (Dwayne Johnson) – 3 minutes, 24 seconds

Letty Ortiz (Michelle Rodriguez) – 3 minutes, 9 seconds

Mia Toretto (Jordana Brewster) – 3 minutes, 54 seconds

Roman Pearce (Tyrese Gibson) – 4 minutes, 34 seconds

Tej Parker (Chris “Ludacris” Bridges) – 4 minutes, 36 second

Han (Sung Kang) – 3 minutes, 18.5 seconds (the half-second is because of slow-motion)

Gisele Yashar (Gal Gadot) – 2 minutes, 49.5 seconds (again, slow motion caused a half-second)

Owen Shaw (Luke Evans) – 2 minutes, 49 seconds

Riley Hicks (Gina Carano) – 2 minutes, 12 seconds

Klaus (Kim Kold) – 1 minute, 40 seconds

Vegh (Clara Paget) – 1 minute, 22 seconds

Henchmen in Car 1 – 2 minutes, 36 seconds

Henchmen in Car 2 – 3 minutes, 24.5 seconds (the final participants during slow motion)

Pilots – 1 minute, 20 seconds

Plane – 1 minute, 22 seconds

 

The way I figured this out was by renting the movie from Netflix and watching the finale, stopping and starting each time a new character was introduced.  I am very confident my calculations are correct, but you are more than welcome to do the same and see if I have made an error anywhere.

 

Going off the amount of time each character is seen during the finale, it turns out Tej Parker has the most screen time.  Who would have thought?  To give the naysayers as much benefit of the doubt as possible, we will assume that the longest possible time it could have taken for the scene to unfold in real-time with everything overlapping for every character would be 4 minutes and 36 seconds.

 

However, you can’t simply take that number and multiply it out by a certain speed because during the scene the plane is shown slowing down and speeding up.  To break this down even further, I have used the technical information from the Vulture article to show that Tej was traveling at 100 mph when the plane comes into view, 115 mph once the plane lands on the runway, 143 mph, which is the average speed of 115 mph and 172 mph as those are the speeds of when the plane was coasting on the runway to the minimum speed needed to take off, and finally 172 mph.

 

Tej was traveling 100 mph for a total of seven seconds at the beginning of the chase, 115 mph when the plane lands on the runway for 19 seconds, 143 mph for 120 seconds (again this is an average because the plane accelerated from 115 mph to 172 mph at a continuous rate), and 172 mph for 124 seconds.  The final six seconds of screen time was coming to a braking halt at the end of the runway.  We will get into that a little later.

 

Doing some calculations to show how far Tej traveled during each moment of the chase, he went 1,026.69 feet during the seven seconds he traveled 100 mph, 3,204.73 feet at 115 mph, 25,167.6 feet at 143 mph, and 31,281.48 feet at 172 mph.  This is a total distance of 60,680.5 feet traveled.

 

Okay, so now we need to add in the final six seconds of braking.  At 170 mph, which is how fast he was traveling when the plane came crashing back down to the runway, he would have traveled a minimum of 690 feet in order to come to a complete halt.  Since we are trying to come up with the shortest possible distance traveled to give those defending the outlandishness of the scene every benefit of the doubt, we will assume that is all that he traveled.

 

Adding in the 690 feet, we have a total of 61,370.5 feet.  Again, benefit of the doubt, I won’t even include any additional feet of runway, despite not knowing exactly where the runway began and seeing that there was about an additional 150 feet of concrete before a dead end once the cars came to a stop.  I could probably add about 500 more feet, but I think without it I will still prove my point.

 

The minimum amount of runway you would need to complete the scene shown in Fast & Furious 6 was 61,370.5 feet.  That means the plane traveled a little more than 11 miles before stopping.  According to Wikipedia, the longest runway in the world is Edwards Air Force Base in the United States.  It comes in at 39,600 feet, or 7.5 miles.  You’ve been scienced Fast & Furious lover.

 

Analysis:

I mostly did this study in film editing because I wanted to know for sure whether the amount of time during the climactic finale and the distance traveled during that time was excessively long or if it was just my imagination and biased animosity toward the franchise, but I also put in the time and effort for another reason.  That was to point out the flaws in fashioning an action scene like the one at the end of Fast & Furious 6 that drags on for nearly a quarter of an hour.  Not only did you defy the normal parameters of physics and logic, but the problem also becomes that it takes the viewer out of the story because of the absurdity of the storytelling.

 

By having multiple characters and so many different storylines going on simultaneously, the audience becomes overwhelmed and eventually gets bored with the excessiveness.  Michael Bay’s Transformers series runs into the same problem in that by the time you get to the finale, you have seen robot aliens beating up on one another for three hours and you just don’t care any longer.  We become desensitized to the conflict after a certain point and our mind starts wandering to other points of interest.

 

That’s not to say an action scene cannot go on for more than 10 minutes without letting up at some point, but there needs to be a sense of realism going on (if the film is supposed to be based in reality) and there has to be characters we care about.  After 12 hours of fast cars and furiously bad acting, most members of the audience don’t give a flip about the Toretto gang or why it is they are battling these villains in and outside of a cargo plane.

 

But thanks to some hard work and head-hurting calculations, we definitely know that there is not a runway in the world that would have supported that action sequence.