Assuming it fits of course and there is an exit on the other end.
This is the sort of thing I mean: DCS Harrier: Slow But Steady Wins The Race - YouTube (video of player flying a Harrier jet through a tunnel in DCS World)* and its also depicted in the Ace Combat games I believe though I’ve never played those.
Basically flying through a railway tunnel or something wider than itself, I can’t think of any obvious reason why it would not be possible given someone insane enough to try it but maybe there are aerodynamic forces at work that I’m not taking into consideration?
from checking around for one example a F16 would be too big to fit in a road tunnel like the Holland Tunnel in NJ/NY . There may be smaller jets and bigger tunnels where it would work.
Digression–there’s a subplot in the WWII novel “A Piece of Cake” about whether the British Hurricane pilots can fly under the arches of a French stone bridge.
SPOILER
If I remember correctly one does, or says he has, and later another pilot dies in the attempt
I am not an engineer but I infer from the Quora answer that Johnny L.A. quoted that if the cross-sectional area of the plane is too large compared to that of the tunnel, the plane won’t be able to push the air out of the way fast enough, since the only place for the air to go is out the end of the tunnel, and drag will exceed lift.
This was a problem that had to be designed around for the tunnels under the English Channel – that’s one of the purposes of the cross-connecting passages between the main tunnels. I think something like this is common in long transportation tunnels.
Chord. I would have just said ‘chord length’, but since the guy is an engineer he may have wanted to be unambiguous. (Though why anyone might assume the horizontal stab chord is beyond me.)
‘Harry Remmington’ does not appear in the crew list on IMDb. He mentions ‘208’. There is a Cessna 208 Caravan, but it didn’t fly until 1982 and was not approved until 1984, and you can’t mount a camera on the nose. He might mean a Bell 208, but that was a one-off prototype in 1965. He also doesn’t know how to spell ‘hangar’.
So to wrap up: Corkey Fornof, the pilot on Octopussy, says he did it. The Bond website says he did it eight times. SGOTI claims to have filmed the scene, and that it was simulated. My conclusion is that Fornof did fly the BD-5J through the hangar, but many parts of the sequence were achieved with non-flying aircraft and miniatures.
Thanks for that, you would think such a famous sequence was documented thoroughly without conflicting reports! I worked with a pilot that knew Jim Bede who was from the Cleveland area.
You can send the report on the Jaguar over to the “Should I buy this Jaguar” thread.
My dad was building a BD-5A. He was approached by a friend who had access to a turbine engine that would fit. Dad called Bede and asked him if he could put a jet engine in the plane. Bede told him no way would that ever work. And then a year or two later he came out with the BD-5J.
if something that happened only about forty years ago, that was filmed extensively and with probably hundreds of eyewitnesses is so uncertain it does make you wonder how much faith you can put in the reports of historical events hundreds or even thousands of years ago.
(I’ve heard the same thing mentioned about the famous ‘shoe banging’ incident by Nikita Khrushchev at the United Nations, there is no clear consensus on whether or not he did actually bang his shoe on the lectern)
