In Popular Culture
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In the 1986 film Top Gun, Lieutenant Pete "Maverick" Mitchell, played by Tom Cruise, suffers two flameouts caused by passing through the jetwash of another aircraft. During a training mission Maverick is caught in Tom Kazansky's (played by Val Kilmer) jet wash. Maverick enters a spin as a result of an engine flameout; his RIO and best friend Nick "Goose" Bradshaw is killed as they eject from the aircraft. In the second incident, he is with "Merlin" and they are caught in a bogey's jet wash. Maverick recovers from the flameout but is shaken up.
In the movie Pushing Tin, air traffic controllers stand just off the threshold of a runway while an aircraft lands, in order to experience wake turbulence firsthand. However, the film dramatically exaggerates the effect of turbulence on persons standing on the ground, showing the protagonists being blown about by the passing aircraft. In reality, the turbulence behind and below a landing aircraft is too gentle to knock over a person standing on the ground. (In contrast, jet blast from an aircraft taking off can be extremely dangerous to people standing behind the aircraft.)
Read more about this topic: Wake Turbulence
Famous quotes containing the words popular culture, popular and/or culture:
“Popular culture is seductive; high culture is imperious.”
—Mason Cooley (b. 1927)
“We live under continual threat of two equally fearful, but seemingly opposed, destinies: unremitting banality and inconceivable terror. It is fantasy, served out in large rations by the popular arts, which allows most people to cope with these twin specters.”
—Susan Sontag (b. 1933)
“The highest end of government is the culture of men.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)