In the final showdown of Furious 6 when Shaw's crew go to escape on the plane that was described by Roman as "a planet" the entire showdown is on a continuous strait stretch of runway with Dom's crew either fighting on the plane or driving alongside it trying to stop it from taking off by firing harpoons at the wing flaps.

My questions is 2 fold.

  1. How long would this runway need to be for it to fit the entire showdown without any signs of ending. (i.e. at no point did I see any indication that they were running out of runway)?
  2. Does this match a/the real world location? If not, by how much is it off by to the closest real world example (for sake of realism, narrowed down to the country the scenes was supposed to be set in, which I assume was the US)?
  • The runway length corresponded to the typical number of bullets in a movie gun? – Andrew Thompson May 3 '16 at 13:21
  • @AndrewThompson well guns regained realism in The Last Action Hero but i'll reword that second part – Memor-X May 3 '16 at 13:23
  • This is like asking how long was that 1/4 mile at the end of the first Fast and Furious movie. Because the scene was longer than 10 seconds. – user25738 May 3 '16 at 13:25
  • "..guns regained realism in The Last Action Hero.." Great movie. Must watch it again. "How'd you know there was a guy in the closet? There's always a guy in the closet!" – Andrew Thompson May 3 '16 at 13:26
  • Here's video by Engineering Explained youtube.com/watch?v=CxxjcKcB2Fk because who need science if it can't debunk movies – SZCZERZO KŁY Jun 29 '18 at 7:59

Accoring to this article from the BBC;

Our best estimate after calculating plane speed, car speed and simultaneous action sequences is that the runway is 18.37 miles (29.6km) long. Which is still very long when you consider the longest paved runway in the world is the Qamdo Bamda airport in China, at around 3.5 miles (5.6km).

The full article goes into more detail about how they worked that out if you are interested, but in short the runway in Fast & Furious 6 was probably around 18 miles long, which is more than 5 times longer than the real-life longest runway in the world.

  • So did they film this in actuality on one big desolate street or in parts or not at all? – Napoleon Wilson May 3 '16 at 13:58
  • @NapoleonWilson Presumably in parts, but I don't have a source for that beyond the fact that no such runway exists, and that article has a cast member saying that the cars were traveling 115mph for one of the stunts. – Dr R Dizzle May 3 '16 at 14:04

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