Tag: Mach 10

For many people, retirement opens up more free time which is often filled by taking up pastimes such as: traveling, golfing, bank robbery, pickleball, unicycling, glaring and muttering at teenagers who walk down the street glued to their phones, gardening, managing investments, collecting crystals (minerals), going to their grandkid’s sporting events and fixing stuff around the house. (Apparently even retired chimpanzees are fascinated by crystals.)

I do some of the above activities, especially fixing stuff but I also like to build electronic gadgetry, such as this little solar-powered beetle-like “robot” that makes its way toward sunlight and can navigate around objects. That thing is 30 years old and my oldest son vividly remembers playing with it. At some point in that 30 years the gadget stopped working and languished immobile in my workshop until I recently unearthed it and repaired it.

Now it’s as good as new and is in the possession of Felix, one of my grandkids.

Dad: What do you think, Felix?

Felix: “Pretty good”

This next video features a little, solar-powered wooden triplane that also languished in my shop until recently.

I was curious about exactly how fast the plane was going so I timed it and determined that it was making about 22 revolutions per minute. Knowing the diameter of the circle it was tracing, I reckoned that the plane was moving at about 4000 feet/hr, give or take. This works out to be about 0.8 miles/hour.

“Hmmm,” I thought, “I wonder what that would be in Mach numbers?” Mach numbers are typically used to rate the top speed of things like jet fighters and also possibly Tom Cruise’s top speed, when he does his trademark sprinting scenes in his movies. Why does he do that? I don’t know.

Mach 1 is the speed of sound. Mach 2 is twice the speed of sound. Mach 3 is three times the speed of sound. And so on. I looked up the speed of sound at sea level. It’s 767 miles/hour. Therefore, my little triplane at 0.8 miles/hour is going Mach 0.001.

I don’t know what Tom Cruise’s top end is when he’s sprinting. I know that in 2009, Usain Bolt clocked in at 27.8 miles/hour in the 100-meter sprint. His sprint only lasted 9.58 seconds. I don’t think Cruise can go that fast.

As I typed this, it occurred to me that maybe somewhere, out there, people have devoted themselves to an intensive study of Tom’s sprinting. And they have! Check out this Rotten Tomatoes site: The More Tom Cruise Runs, The Better His Movies Are: We Did the Math | Rotten Tomatoes

According to the article, the farther Tom runs, the higher his Tomatometer Score goes! No one knows exactly why, though. I swear on Usain Bolt’s jockstrap that I’m not bullshitting you. Read the article if you don’t believe me. It also says Cruise probably runs at about 10 miles/hour.

That’s Mach 0.0125, in case anyone asks you.

Anyway, here’s a list of the ten longest distances Tom has sprinted. The average Tomatometer score for these movies is 76.5% whereas the average score for sprints shorter than 500 feet is only 60.5%. Go figure.

Top Tom Cruise Movies (According to his pedometer)

1. Mission: Impossible III – 3,212 feet
2. Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol – 3,066 feet
3. Mission: Impossible – Fallout – 2,628 feet
4. Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning, Part One – 2,131 feet
5. War of the Worlds – 1,752 feet
6. Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning – 1,606 feet
7. Minority Report – 1,562 feet
8. Mission Impossible – Rogue Nation – 1,518 feet
9. The Firm – 1,241 feet
10. Edge of Tomorrow – 1,065 feet

Of course, in Maverick, the sequel to Top Gun, Cruise didn’t sprint much but he did push the envelope to Mach 10 in a hypersonic jet. In his defense, if I was in his flight suit, I would go for Mach 10 too.

All this talk about Mach numbers and suchlike got me thinking again so I started digging around to see who holds the current land speed record. The land speed record only includes contraptions that don’t go airborne. The current record is held by a now-retired British fighter pilot named Andy Green. Green set the record in what was basically a rocket on wheels known as the Thrust SSC. Green’s October 15, 1997 two-run average (out and back) in the Black Rock Desert was Mach 1.02. That record still stands.

Here’s what Green drove, I mean, almost flew.

That thing was powered by, and here I’m quoting, “two Rolls-Royce Spey turbofan engines, as used in British F-4 Phantom II jet fighters. The twin engines developed a thrust of 223 kN (50,000 foot-pounds) and burned around 18 litres of fuel per second.”

Andy to Mrs. Green: “Hey Hon, I’m going to get some milk. I’ll be back in 3.2 seconds. Unless I run out of gas.”

Eat that, Jay Leno! (In case you didn’t know, Jay Leno has 181 Collector cars and almost as many motorcycles in his 140,000 square foot garage.)

Well, here we are at the end. Some people (and primates) might think that converting the speeds of various people and things into Mach numbers or collecting cars or crystals is a waste of time.

Personally, I think it’s time well wasted.