The curse of an overly active mind

I very, very, very rarely do any social media, so perhaps a mistake to do a post here that is not in direct support of others, but thought some might be interested in this little finding from the popular movie Top Gun: Maverick, where this finding may have escaped your notice, if you were not watching with your mind in an "overly active" state. The problem was that I was watching this moving without also working on some other hard problem at the same time, a consequence of having a full week off with no pressing work assignments (which honestly, perhaps is for the first time in maybe 10 years!) 

I decided to watch the movie Top Gun: Maverick given many were telling me the flight scenes were amazing, so I got over the fact that the movie was starring Tom Cruise (although I do note that Mr. Cruise is quite a good pilot in real life) and gave the movie my full attention. At just over 7 minutes into the movie, the character Maverick is taxing the experimental aircraft for takeoff in an attempt to hit mach-10 speed. He radios the controller and indicates, "…taxing with information alpha", and the controller responds, "...clear to taxi runway 21, winds 21010...". Given my own piloting, I took notice given this kind of request and controller instruction are pretty much as you would experience at any towered airport.

Since Maverick was given clearance to taxi to runway 21 for takeoff, I was curious if there was an airport in the Mojave desert with a runway 21 (the movie started with Maverick in his hangar in the Mojave desert). I took a screenshot of the field that was shown in the movie after the jet took off and Maverick “looks back” to acknowledge having flown over the highly annoyed admiral (see Figure 1). I used this image to search google images (a cool Google search feature that sometimes works) and one of the top hits was the image depicted in Figure 2, which Google indicated was an image of the Naval Air Weapons Station at China Lake in the Mojave desert (airport code KNID).

KNID has 3 runways, two of them are concrete (runways 03-21 and 08-26), and one of them is asphalt (runway 14-32). What you notice as Maverick starts his roll down the runway is that the runway is asphalt (blacktop-like). What you also notice from Figure 1 and then a better-annotated Figure 3, is that after takeoff and the “look back”, the jet clearly is departing from the asphalt runway that is aligned with runway heading 140 (i.e., runway 14). Thus, it is clear the jet departed runway 14, not 21 as instructed.

Now I know this may seem trivial, but if you’re given instructions to taxi to one runway for takeoff and you instead taxi and takeoff from a different runway, well that is a very big no-no.

Curious if anyone else picked up on this:-) And yes, I know it is time for me to either up my faculty time at Mount Sinai or focus on the many papers others are waiting for me to help finish off, instead of watching any more movies! I’m on it!!