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 entered my life as Shirley Temple, who was exactly my age and wrote a letter in the newspapers telling how her mother fixed spinach for her, with lots of butter.... I was impressed by Shirley Temple as a little girl my age who had power: she could write a piece for the newspapers and have it printed in her own handwriting.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)
“Journalism is popular, but it is popular mainly as fiction. Life is one world, and life seen in the newspapers another.”
—Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874–1936)
“Education must, then, be not only a transmission of culture but also a provider of alternative views of the world and a strengthener of the will to explore them.”
—Jerome S. Bruner (20th century)