The Helicarrier: When Movies Ignore Natural Law

Big Compute

We’ve all been there – Sitting inside a movie theater, fully engrossed in the film, when suddenly something happens on screen that is so far-fetched that we suddenly remember we’re sitting in a theater seat. This is the experience Rescale’s Edward Hsu had back in 2012 when he was watching the movie, The Avengers. As an aviation enthusiast, everything was well and good until he saw the epic sea structure called the Helicarrier take to the skies, and it was blatantly clear to him that the incredible piece of high budget visual effects would probably – in fact – kill its own jet pilots. And while it was just a movie, the scene lingered in Edward’s mind for years, until the day Sandeep Urankar – an engineer with a knack for computational investigations – was able to run simulations to prove if Edward’s hypothesis was true, and consequently fueling the question – how accurate should big budget movies really be when it comes to natural law?