I must begin with an apology. This post is not about chapter 19 of Ernest Hemingway’s posthumous 1964 memoir “A Moveable Feast” wherein he assuages F. Scott Fitzgerald’s fear of inadequate genitals. Most jokes aside, I have something much more serious we need to talk about.

For the last few years, I have been indulging in a brand of themed binging I refer to as “Shitty Movie Summer.” In the original iterations, this focused consumption was all over the place but has morphed into a deep soak of specific franchises. In the summer of 2024, I watched every Transformers, Mission Impossible, and Planet of the Apes installment (and still managed to squeeze my three favorite Paul Verhoeven movies in). My aim for 2025 was much more limited and joined by Ben Wojtyna was intended to look only at the Fast and Furious films, of which there are surprisingly ten. Amazingly, even watching shitty movies to watch shitty movies, my dedication was derailed by the fifth movie and I lost interest.

As the temperature has started climbing, and encouraged by Ben to get back into the quest, I watched the seventh installment of the series last night: Fast and Furious 6. I want to talk about the final set piece of this movie. It is a scene where “the family” is racing against the bad guy’s plan to escape by driving into a large aircraft and taking off from an army base. It could be argued that there are spoilers here, but I don’t think that they really matter. First, the movie is over 13 years old. Second, it is absolutely ridiculous.

If you have 14 minutes and would like to watch the scene for context before I get into it, you can do so here: Part One & Part Two.

The scene starts with a high-speed chase on a runway and is interrupted as a very large plane lands, opens its cargo ramp, and multiple vehicles enter before it attempts to take off and make a getaway with a stolen “computer chip” that will, I don’t know, end the world in the wrong hands? From the moment the cars pull onto the runway to when the plane is brought down and explodes, twelve minutes and 39 seconds pass.

I woke up with this crawling into my brain and polluting my subconscious. So, I had to do something about it.

As stated, the window of time we have to work with here is 12m 39s.

The plane is huge. Though I could not identify it with absolute certainty, it seems to be the same rough size and weight as a C5 Galaxy. Doing some online research, I found the landing speed of a C5 to be between 160-170 miles per hour and the take-off speed to be 185-195 mph. Averaging these two sets of numbers, I got 165mph and 190mph, respectively. Then averaging those for a mean continuous speed, I settled on 177.5 mph. For the rest of our calculations, this gives us a speed of 2.9533 miles per minute or 0.0493 miles per second.

Granting that the cars are not going this speed when they pull onto the runway (more likely they are averaging around 120 mph) but also taking into consideration that the plane likely slows down from the top landing speed for a period of the duration, I am sticking with the above calculations to determine my miles per second.

That said, twelve minutes at this speed equals 35.4396 miles. Thirty-nine second equals 1.9229 miles. This makes the total length (with recognition that according to visuals there was still some additional runway left at the end) 37.36 miles. The longest runway in the world is in Tibet and runs a length of 3.4 miles total.

In its article, Fast & Furious 6's Impossibly Long Runway, the website funfactz.com does it’s own calculations: “Assuming the cars and plane are moving at a conservative average speed of 120 mph during this extended chase, the math works out to about 26 miles.” In the cbr.com post “Fast and Furious Franchise Writer Addresses Fast 6's 26 Mile Runway,” Adreon Patterson quotes the film’s writer, Chris Morgan, as saying: “I always put myself where I started my journey with Fast, which is as a fan in the theater watching the movies. What gets me excited and makes me want to cheer? How do we use vehicles in a way we haven’t thought about before? There is a caveat to this, which is the old physics debate. We’ll bend physics, in fact, we’ll bend it a lot, but we won’t outright break it.” I am really, really curious to what the details and parameters around “the old physics debate” entail.

Writing for screenrant.com, Cooper Hood quotes a vulture.com article’s calculation of over 28 miles for the length of the runway in his article “How Long Fast & Furious 6's Ridiculous Runway Has To Be,” seeming to confirm both the screenrant and funfactz estimates. This number is references and confirmed by industry site aviationpros.com in the article “Just How Long Was That Runway In Fast And Furious 6?”

Though these are shorter than my estimates, I feel that they are more accurate than the calculation hack-website BBC News makes in its article “How long is the runway in Fast & Furious 6?” of 18.37 miles. Though, some consideration and respect should be given to how they arrived at this conclusion: “On the other hand, it's a movie - so when the hero is grappling with the villain on the plane, the film can cut from the fight to what is going on outside on the runway. Both these things are probably happening at the same time. So we looked at the sequence carefully and recalculated how long the plane is actually on the runway. It is difficult to be exact, but we think it is only for nine minutes.”

Personally I feel, and this may have something to do with my sympathy with and for writers, that director Justin Lin is more to blame for this choice over screenwriter Chris Morgan. Either way, and whatever length this fantasy runway actually was or the billions in concrete and work it would have taken to construct, Fast & Furious 6 has heroically launched me into Shitty Movie Summer 2026.