"Stratogale: April 23rd, '57. Cape caught in a jet turbine."
— Edna Mode, The Incredibles
Like Helicopter Blender but with running jet engines. The key difference is that a living being is sucked into a jet engine and doesn't come out in pieces afterwards (unless those pieces are really, really tiny) — it gets reduced to a Pink Mist. Likewise, a non-living object comes out in tiny shiny shreds. Due to how horrific this is, characters who die from this almost always have a Cruel and Unusual Death.
Very definitely a Truth in Television, as the jet engines most people are familiar with are the high-bypass turbofan engines on commercial airliners, which draw in a tremendous volume of air
and thus produce hurricane-force winds in the region near the engine inlet. The spinning item at the very front of the engine is a very-unforgiving ducted fan made of titanium blades spinning at thousands of RPM, which will rapidly render an animal as large as a person into something akin to liquefied beef. Ground crew that must work near active jet engines must keep anything not tied down (including themselves) some tens of meters away, outside the hazard zone, or else risk becoming, well, ground crew.
Any type of foreign object that strikes an aircraft (either the airframe or the engines) and damages it is called foreign object damage, of which the most typical type are "bird strikes," although ice/hail damage is also common. To a certain limit, airliners must be able to strike birds, and engines must be able to ingest birds, without causing the airframe or engine to fail. In the case of engines, this means the engine must be able to be struck by a bird up to a particular size, blend it, and pass it out the exhaust (usually by bypassing the engine's core) all without damaging the engine to the point it loses function. In essence, part of the purpose of the fandisk is being specifically designed to blend objects, if only to protect the rest of the engine. It's worth pointing out that an airliner is also intended to be capable of a controlled landing with one of its engines non-functional (assuming it doesn't explode or anything), so even a larger impact might be survivable, but it's still a risk no one wants to take. In fact, larger birds such as geese have been known to damage airliner engines to the point of failure (as with the US Airways Flight 1549 incident in 2009). This is where the trope tends to deviate from reality, as typically when it is used the jet engines continue functioning with no problem whatsoever after consuming a full-sized human or more.
Note that the turbofan (jet) engine is so called because it contains a turbine (at the very back of the engine) which turns a fan (at the very front of the engine). The bladed disk at the front of the engine is a fan, not a turbine.
It must be noted, though, that the aircraft design includes tuning airflow around aircraft so that incoming objects are drawn away from fragile parts. As a result, despite dirt flying well above the height of an airplane, it flies past the engine inlets. Ideally, incoming birds should be redirected away from the engines.
Fun fact: the scientific term for remnants-of-bird from bird strike is "snarge", as it was probably the cleanest word to come out of the mouth of the first jet-engine mechanic to encounter it.
Might happen to some superheroes that fly a little too close to a plane. Especially when wearing a cape.
Subtrope of Deadly Rotary Fan.
Examples:
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Advertising
- Strongly hinted to in a commercial for Ratchet & Clank where a group of people are testing out the Gravity Boots. They turn out to be more effective than they expected, leading to one poor sap being flung into the sky. As the others try to reverse the process, one notes that a plane is passing directly ahead.
Anime & Manga
- The fourth episode of Mnemosyne, where Rin gets mulched in a jet engine. She gets better... after 20 years of regenerating. And comes back with amnesia. We don't really get to see how realistically the engine processes a human-sized object, because she fell in during a grapple with an android, and the turbine didn't handle that as well as it did Rin.
Comic Books
- In the first issue of All-New Wolverine, Laura has Angel drop her onto the fuselage of a drone in-flight, and she begins to slide down towards the prop. Fortunately, she's able to stop with her claws just short of falling into it, as even with her Healing Factor such a thing would very likely have been fatal since she lacks the unbreakable bones of her predecessor.
- A Love Like Blood: Jacques finishes his father Karkossa by kicking him out of his private plane into a jet engine.
- Hunter's Hellcats: In Our Fighting Forces #108, a Nazi major, enraged at the Hellcats for having blown up the submarine pens he was in command of, attempts to tackle Lt. Hunter before he can reach the plane that has just landed to extract the team. Hunter ducks and the major flies over the top of him and straight into the plane's props.
- Attracted by Steve's courage, Man-Thing's threat to the cast of Micronauts ends when he steps in the blades of a swamp buggy and his muck-encrusted form splatters around the swamp.
- In PS238, Captain Clarinet starts out with a pathological fear of flying, due to having repeated nightmares of being sucked into a jet engine. It doesn't particularly improve matters when Zodon 'helpfully' reminds him that his invulnerability ensures that, should that happen, he'd come out on the other side unscattered... while the plane plummets to the ground in flames with the passengers aboard.
- ...And then Zodon plays a 'practical joke' on him that results in it happening in real life. It backfires spectacularly in that it ends up curing the good captain of his phobia instead of compounding it when is forced to use his flight to put the damaged plane down safely.
- In one of the first issues of her third series, She-Hulk (as Jen Walters) and her associate Mallory Book are investigating the death of a man who got sucked into a jet engine. As they're looking around the test lab, someone switches the engine on and seals the lab so the two can't escape. Jen figures at the last minute that if she hulks out and shields Book with her body they'll make it through the blades alive. They do, but both their suits are shredded.
- Transformers: Generation 2: As a member of the Rotor Force, Ransack (who transforms into a biplane) can launch his spinning propeller to invoke this trope at long range, which he first demonstrates on some unfortunate inhabitants of the planet Tykos◊.
Film — Animated
- In 9 it's how the Winged Beast gets dispatched.
- Happens to Lyle Tiberius Rourke in Atlantis: The Lost Empire, though the fact that he had been turned to crystal beforehand prevents it from being as gory as it could be.
- The Incredibles:
- During the "no capes" montage, Stratogale has just leveled out a Boeing 707 from a dive, flies up in front of the wing and waves at a male passenger only to be sucked into the engine when her cape gets pulled into the turbine intake. The passenger looks on in alarm and must have been scarred for life (if the plane was able to land safely) because while the audience is allowed a Discretion Shot, he obviously wasn't...
- The Big Bad Syndrome suffers the same fate at the end of the movie. In this case, the engine explodes followed by the entire plane.
- Subverted in Rio, where Nigel appears to be hit by an oncoming plane propeller, but he is shown to be okay in a mid-credits scene, albeit with several missing feathers. Come the sequel, he gets a sweater to cover up.
- Wreck-It Ralph: Once inside Sugar Rush, Ralph's escape pod from Hero's Duty goes down to cotton-candy cloud FOD in the traditional smoking-turbine fashion.
Film — Live Action
- Happens to Major Grant in Die Hard 2. He gets plenty of time to slowly lose his grip, too.
- Unusually, in Eraser the antagonist and his mooks manage to get the plane back on the ground in one piece, smoking turbine and all.
- In Fast & Furious 6, Han throws Shaw's henchman Adolfson into a jet engine during the finale.
- Flight Of The Living Dead has this happen to the "boss" zombie (who used to be the unethical scientist who caused the whole mess) when the emergency door is opened. The Stinger shows him to be not quite dead.
- In Hitman: Agent 47, a squad of Elite Mooks are shredded by a turbine engine in the same vein as an accident kill in Hitman (2016).
- James Bond:
- In On Her Majesty's Secret Service, a mook falls into the path of a roadway snowblower. Bond One-Liner: "He sure had a lot of guts."
- In A View to a Kill, Big Bad Corrupt Corporate Executive Max Zorin throws a Russian spy into an underwater turbine headfirst at Zorin's power plant.
- In Licence to Kill, henchman Dario gets brutally killed by being dropped into a cocaine grinder. His screams of pain combined with the red dust and the music playing during this scene only make it worse.
- In Die Another Day, Big Bad Gustav Graves gets sucked into his plane's engines, after Bond presses the button on Graves' cyber suit which causes Graves to electrocute himself and lose his grip of the plane window. The engine makes a heavy grinding sound as it rips Graves to pieces.
- Marvel Cinematic Universe
- A Mook in Captain America: The First Avenger is taken out by the propeller of a flying bomb; unusually for a superhero film, there's no Gory Discretion Shot and he explodes into a red mist right there on-screen.
- In The Avengers, Iron Man repairs one of the Helicarrier's turbines and gets caught in it as it restarts. He makes it out in one piece, though his armor is pretty chewed up and it's retired for the next model soon afterward. His whimper of "uh oh" as he's flattened against the accelerating blade behind him and the subsequent clanging and screeching as he's repeatedly battered and dragged around by the blades is side-splittingly hilarious.
- In Captain America: The Winter Soldier, The Winter Soldier punts a S.H.I.E.L.D. technician into a Quinjet engine, which explodes.
- In Black Widow (2021), the shady Russian equivalent of a Helicarrier (and a much bigger facility, too!) starts collapsing once Melina makes one of its turbines explode from falling debris.
- In the Night Watch Film of the Book, a crow flies into an airplane engine, causing a severe accident the protagonists have to deal with.
- The Predator: Nebraska sacrifices himself by throwing his body into a turbine on the Ultimate Predator's ship, damaging it and causing the ship to crash.
- In Raiders of the Lost Ark Indy fights a Giant Mook on and around a Nazi flying wing whose engines are running. Its wheels become un-chocked during the fight and it starts to rotate around. Indy dives for cover, Giant Mook looks behind himself, and cue Gory Discretion Shot.
- Resident Evil: The Final Chapter. Our heroes enter the Hive via an air intake, which requires easing themselves between the blades of a giant turbine. The power starts to come on while they are doing this, but surprisingly all of them make it through; however Wesker sees what they are doing on the cameras and reverses the turbine, sucking a Mauve Shirt into the spinning blades before the power goes out again.
- In a Deleted Scene from the denouement of Serenity the Operative asks Mal how he went on after losing the Battle of Serenity Valley. Mal just kind of shrugs.
Mal: If you're still standing there when that engine starts up, you never will figure it out. (walks up the ramp, then, sotto voce) What a whiner...
- At the beginning of Sharknado 2: The Second One, this happens to a shark as the plane Fin and April are on is flying through the storm. This starts a chain of events that results in Fin being forced to make an emergency landing after the pilots are killed.
- Averted in Slipstream (1989). An unstoppable Made of Iron android is coming for the villain in a Roaring Rampage of Revenge, so he tries to take off in his Edgley EA-7 Optica. The android throws himself at the Optica's windshield to stop it, only to slide over the top of the cabin into the ducted fan engine behind. Instead of getting sliced and diced, he proceeds to rip out every wire he can reach, then tears his way into the cockpit to settle matters with the pilot.
- Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace:
- A Pit Droid is sucked into what looks a lot like a jet engine when one pod comes in for a pit stop, which utterly destroys the engine and puts the pilot out of contention. Not only does the sucked-in pit droid ruin the engine, but it also gets spat out the other end, with no apparent damage at all.
- Sebulba, being the dirty cheater he is, pulls out a hydrospanner or somesuch tool from his pod's glovebox and throws it behind him. It hits the engine of one of his pursuers and is promptly sucked in, tearing the craft apart.
- During the 'Dragon' sequence in Sucker Punch, one of the orcs tries to smash its way into the cockpit of the plane. Amber shoots him in the face and he loses his grip: falling into the prop where he is turned into a fine grey mist.
- US Airways Flight 1549 (the Real Life incident of the plane that ditched in the Hudson River after striking a flock of geese) was dramatized in the film Sully.
- Tenet. In order to break into the secure duty-free vault at Oslo airport, the protagonists crash (on the ground) an entire 747 into the building. During the heist however they get into a fight with an inverted (he's moving backwards in time) Gas Mask Mook that ends with him being suddenly sucked out of the building, whereupon a runaway jet turbine on the burning 747 erupts into flame. However when done Once More, with Clarity it turns out this trope never happened. What actually happened was the runaway turbine exploded, blasting the inverted man through the roller shutter, but from the view of those watching in normal time, he appeared to have been sucked out of the room, followed by a big explosion.
- Played with in The Thing (2011). Two of our heroes are walking across the hull of a huge Flying Saucer when it starts to power up and they realise they're standing on the air intake vents, which start flicking one-by-one to a vertical position. They run like hell for the hatch, but the woman doesn't make it in time and falls screaming into a vent. She wakes up unharmed inside the spaceship, however, and the incident only serves to split them up in the kind of horror movie where that trope is an even more bad idea than usual.
Literature
- In the non-fiction book Aftermath, the author describes the process of cleaning an airplane's engines after this happens. Unfortunately, the incident described in the book involves a human being- an airport employee killed during routine maintenance. The engine has to be disassembled and every piece cleaned by hand by a specialist crew in biohazard suits. It takes two weeks.
- In the Alex Rider book Eagle Strike, the Big Bad Damian Cray dies when he is pushed out of a plane about to take off on a metal trolley. Cray's remains are described as a "cloud of red gas" that immediately disappears into the atmosphere, but the trolley tears the engine apart on impact, causing the plane to crash.
- In one Animorphs book, an enemy helicopter is equipped with a tracking device that proves very dangerous to the Animorphs. In the middle of a plan to destroy the helicopter, the Animorphs get lucky enough that a seagull gets sucked into the helicopter's turbine, and the helicopter blows up.
- Catch-22: McWatt accidentally flies too low and catches Kid Sampson with his airplane's propeller, instantly killing him. This horrifies McWatt so much that he promptly intentionally flies into a cliff.
- Flight of the Intruder features a near-miss. It eerily parallels the real-life event below, as it also involves an A-6 Intruder and the unfortunate mechanic also has the stroke of luck of being hung up before his head hit the blades.
- Mindstar Rising: Greg Mandel is being pursued by mooks in a hovercraft, so he throws a metal pole into the fan, causing it to tear loose and shred the occupants.
- The Big Bad of Seven Ancient Wonders dies by getting thrown into the jet engine of a 747. Or, more accurately, getting pulled in by his safety rope getting thrown into the engine.
- X-Wing Series: A prequel Short Story features Corran Horn, living incognito on the Planet of the Week after escaping Corellia, somewhat annoyed at being unable to fly after he inadvertently sucked a large bird into one of his X-Wing's engines.
Live-Action TV
- Happens in 9-1-1 to an airport baggage handler who stops a runaway luggage cart by ramming it with another one, but is too busy revelling in the cheers of those who witnessed it from the airport window to realise he's stepped into the reach of an active turbine until it sucks him in. It ends up being subverted when he survives because a passenger's bag of brand new golf clubs (which were the cause of the runaway cart and whose owner faints dead away in horror when he sees them) that got sucked in just before him jammed the engine's inner workings before he could be sliced to ribbons. He still requires medical attention though and the emergency crew make it clear that his survival is nothing short of a miracle.note
- Air Crash Investigation: In the episode on United 811, it's mentioned that human remains were found in the right inboard engine.
- Happened on Bones, where the victim of the week was accidentally pushed into a running turboprop propeller.
- Catch-22: McWatt buzzes his group of friends at the watering hole with his airplane a few times as a prank. Playing along, Kid Sampson grabs a pole and pretends to joust him. When making his final pass, McWatt dips too low and accidentally catches Sampson in his propeller, instantly blending him.
- The Colbert Report: Happened to Air Colbert in real life, putting her out of commission for a while.
- One of the CSI episodes had a chopped-up victim who turned out to have been pushed into one.
- In the Defiance series finale, Nolan throws Kindzi into the reactor chamber of an Omec ship right before she's about to bite him. She gets sucked into a turbine with gory results.
- Firefly: Mal kicks a thug into his Cool Ship's running turbine after the man threatens to hunt Mal down and kill him. The next thug immediately agrees to Mal's offered terms. When the thugs' boss comes after the group looking for revenge, Jayne mentions he might be sore over having his minion thrown into a starship engine.
- Invoked and then averted on JAG. Rabb attempted to sabotage a stolen F-14 with his belt, only to find that it was intentionally lost to plant a computer virus. He then had to sneak back in and remove the belt so the plane remained intact.
- Happens to one of the passengers at the beginning of Lost, upon which the jet intake explodes.
- MythBusters showed that an airplane propeller can cut metal to ribbons.
- The X-Files. In the first season episode "Roland" an engineer is murdered by being sucked into a turbine engine he was developing.
Newspaper Comics
- The Far Side had a bird reporting on a plane crash, with a caption something like: "Details are sketchy, but we have heard that the name of the bird sucked into the jet's engines was Harold Meeker."
Radio
- Near the beginning of the Cabin Pressure episode "St. Petersburg", one of GERTI's engines is destroyed by a bird strike. The rest of the episode revolves around how perpetually impoverished MJN Air manages to get a replacement engine.
Video Games
- In Amateur Surgeon: Christmas Edition, moronic surgical genius Alan Probe accidentally flies his private jet right into Santa Claus' sleigh, and one of the reindeer is ground up in one of the turbines, causing him to crash.
- In Dead Rising 3, a plane crashes, and some zombies get sucked into the engines.
- In Dead Space 2, a player can optionally choose to destroy the otherwise invincible Hunter by shooting it back into a turbine. Because the player is running to complete a Timed Mission, though, it's unlikely to be seen.
- In Dead Space 3, you face multiple regenerating Necromorphs towards the end of the space segment of the game, where you can use a set of big guns to knock them into turbines to finally kill them.
- Grand Theft Auto V:
- This is the unfortunate fate of Molly Schultz; when she realizes that Michael is chasing after her, she (understandably) freaks out, and in her panicked attempt to get away runs in front of an active jet engine. The player is then treated to a lovely view of Molly salsa spraying out of the back of the engine, much to Michael's disgust.
- Subverted by what can happen to anyone else - because the game relies on Ragdoll Physics and Molly's death is scripted, nothing else gets sucked into jet engines, but if you're particularly careless when exiting or walking around near a helicopter or propeller-driven plane (both of which take several seconds for their engines to stop in the case of the former scenario), they'll get you killed instantly.
- In Halo: Reach, making contact with a Falcon's twin rotors will result in an instant kill. It's tricky, but possible, to weaponize this.
- The first Bloodbath Challenge in MadWorld is the Turbinator, which is about throwing mooks into a gigantic turbine to reduce them to bloody clouds. Probably justified, since the turbine was likely modified specifically for the event and is larger than any normal turbine.
- This also happens to Von Twirlenkiller after he's defeated, namely by getting punched up into the air and liquefied by one of his own turbine arms that got hacked off in the battle.
- In MechWarrior Living Legends, battlearmor players attempting to ride on the Hawkmoth VTOL are relatively safe if they ride on the wings and the pilot is careful. Woe be to battlearmor players that stand near the Hawkmoth's central turbine as the pilot is throttling up, as it has a tendency to shred the battlearmor into a fine red mist.
- Plants vs. Zombies 2: It's About Time: Used by the Zombot Sharktronic Sub to suck your plants in and kill them.
- Saints Row 2's "Crowd Control" diversion has you protecting celebrities from their crazed fans by picking them up and throwing them into various hazards, among which the still-running turbine of a jet plane.
- Spiderman 2: Take care around the various helicopters touring the city. Swinging into the rotors isn't necessarily fatal, but it will send Spiderman flying with a massive chunk of health chopped away.
- In Terranigma, Beruga tries to pull a Villain: Exit, Stage Left after the heroes send his flying fortress to crash, but his jetpack malfunctions and he gets sucked into a propeller. The screen fades to black while he's giving his death speech which doesn't even finish.
- Twisted Metal: Black: In Billy Ray Stillwell's ending, Calypso provides him with the opportunity to get revenge on the pilot who ruined his life by driving into him with his own biplane and ripping him to pieces with the propeller.
- In Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine, captain Titus is riding a Valkyrie gunship when an Ork stormboy lands on the cockpit. Titus shoots him, but his corpse lands in the ship's port engine, causing it to crash.
Webcomics
- Bug Martini wanted to have kill marks for birds sucked into his engine, but this idea was shot down.
- Dan and Mab's Furry Adventures has a winged individual get in the path of a plane.
- The Savage Chicken in Freefall has occasionally attempted to kill Sam Starfall by asking him to stand in front of the turbines for an engine test.
- The xkcd page "A Hypochrondiac's Nightmare" (sic) shows a character quite pissed that he wasted so much time worrying about illness when what's actually about to kill him is an accident with a jet engine and a Banana Peel.
Web Original
- In the AlternateHistory.com story A Man is Finished When He Quits, SAM 26000 flies into a flock of geese, which results in, among other damages, three of the plane's engines being crippled. The resulting crash kills Vice President Lodge and severely injures Secretary of State Rockefeller.
- Happens at least once in Happy Tree Friends, a particularly famous instance being what happens to Cuddles in the very first episode.
- Happens in a Cutaway Gag on Nameless (2005), where Cripple Boy's obsession with Lost led him to a plane crash that he survives... until he gets sucked into the engine and comes out in blood splatters.
Western Animation
- In one of the episodes of the final season of I Am Weasel, I.R. Baboon tries to jump onto a grounded (but still moving) airplane after rescuing a cat from a tree. He gets caught in the engine and shredded. The engine then catches flames and causes the airplane to skid onto a hill in the background, where it explodes.
- Mega Man (Ruby-Spears) has one of these in the first episode. Subverted in that it only flings Protoman out the other side—into a brick wall. This is justified in that Protoman is an extremely well-built robot. Harder to explain is that he neither gets stuck nor tears fan blades and other shrapnel out of the engine.
- Punch!: In one episode, Jordan goes to interview the people on the island from Lost, Tom Hanks runs in front of the still-running jet turbine from the crash plane and calls out for Wilson. He's sucked into the turbine shortly after.
- Robot Chicken:
- One sketch involves Launchpad McQuack and seventeen seagulls being sucked into the turbine of the jet engine of the US Airways Flight 1549 airplane. This resulted in an emergency landing and Darkwing receiving an ensuing lawsuit that forced him to donate his body to a Chinese restaurant to pay for his daughter Gosalyn's kidney transplant.
- A parody of The Grim Adventures of Billy & Mandy has the trio on a plane and Grim working up the courage to kill Billy and Mandy by throwing them into the turbine.
- The Simpsons:
- Played for Laughs after Totally-Not-Mary-Poppins leaves the Simpsons via magic parasol. Homer is asked if they'll ever see her again, and he says he's sure they will. A few seconds afterwards, while the family is looking the other way, she gets sucked into a jet turbine.
- When a shipping mix-up causes a jetpack to be sent to Chief Wiggum, he dubs himself the "Sky Police" and makes up his own theme song. One part of it has him using the massive turbines on the jetpack to grind up a pair of punks tagging a wall.
- Subverted by the titular hero at the end of one episode of Underdog, where during his Every Episode Ending speech he somehow flies into the engine of a flying jet plane, and moments later he crawls out of where he went in, unharmed, and finishes his speech.
- Just one of the means in which Hank and Dean of The Venture Brothers manage to get themselves killed.
Real Life
- In addition to bird strikes (which are quite common, according to FAA documents released in April 2009), there have been a handful of cases where a human body has gone into a jet engine, with the results being just as gory as you would expect. The engines in these cases are invariably disabled.
- United 811, 24 Feb 1989 — Explosive Decompression caused by a failed cargo door lock sucked nine passengers through a hole in the side of the plane, at least one of whom fell through an engine.
- 16 Jan 2006 - A Boeing 737-500 at El Paso, which was to be used on Continental Airlines Flight 1515 was sitting at El Paso during maintenance when a mechanic who was standing too close got ingested by the engine. Photographs of the aftermath exist and are particularly gruesome.
- During a training flight in a BAE Hawk, the single-engine plane ingested a bird, causing the engine to fail. Pilot and trainer ejected, both survived with varying injuries.
- Awesomely subverted in the Miracle on the Hudson (January 15, 2009), where US Airways Flight 1549 was losing altitude due to multiple bird strikes that took out all of the plane's turbines,note but the pilot managed to land the plane on the Hudson River without a single passenger or crew member dying and even walked the cabin twice to make sure no one was still inside.
- In 2015 an unfortunate Air India technician was killed this way at Mumbai Airport after the pilot fired up the engine too early.
- United 811,
- Awesomely subverted in Real Life by (former) Petty Officer J.D. Bridges during the Gulf War. This is the guy who was famously sucked into the intake of an A6 Intruder's jet engine — and survived. Turns out he got wedged inside the intake, just in front of the turbine, and his helmet/clothing destroyed the delicate internal fan of the engine before it could kill him. note
- This is the reason why Naval aircraft with large air intakes are referred to as "sailor inhalers."
- Most military jet aircraft (unfortunately, not airliners) have long intake ducts with guide vanes and other obstructions. These are designed to keep the airflow to the engine regular (ducts often have odd shapes and twists that disrupt the flow, which is bad for the engine) but might serve to catch an article of clothing.
- Astronaut Ted Freeman, who died when a goose was sucked into the intake of his T-38 training aircraft. He ejected but was too close to the ground for his chute to properly open.
- In the early 1950s in the Soviet Union, an early-production MiG-15 ate a test pilot. Because of the MiG's "pig nose" intake design, it was an extremely messy scene. The commander wanted to bury the plane to cover it up and give the pilot a "decent" funeral, but some objected and recommended to clean and reuse the MiG. However, the mechanics were too disgusted to take the plane apart, so in the end, the wings, tail, guns, and parts of the cockpit were salvaged and the rest was buried along with the bloody mess that was what was left of the poor guy.
- Averted (luckily) at Beauvais Airport north of Paris, France. Due to the design of the terminal building (large glass-panelled hall with no installations outside, designed originally for smaller propeller planes), people have to embark or disembark the plane just in front of the building, while the next airliner taxis to its parking spot 10-20 meters away under its own (reduced, just above idle) jet power. Until now, no jet engine has yet swallowed a hat, purse, bag or unfortunate passenger.
- Real jet turbines are actually tested by firing the carcass of a bird into the running engine to see if it can withstand the force. The carcass is sometimes frozen, but usually not. An urban myth revolves around some idiots forgetting to thaw frozen birds.
- Many fighter jet hangers have Danger zones marked under the parking jets, to make sure technicians don't become this trope. Example of such setup◊: note the yellow fan marked on the ground.
- Similarly, many aircraft have markings on the body of the plane to identify where the engine intakes are. On multi-engine propeller planes, the body of the plane may have markings parallel to the propellers, which can be very difficult to see while the engines are turning, so that ground crew has some point of reference when working near a running engine.
- In an example of how age doesn’t necessarily make you smarter, an incident exists where a particularly foolish elderly woman destroyed a jet engine at Shanghai Airport by throwing handfuls of coins at the plane as a supposed good luck gesture. The coins were ingested and tore the engine to shreds.
- There's a story of one poor sap that was just in the wrong place at the wrong time as an E-2 Hawkeye approached him from behind. Fellow crew members tried to warn him of the approaching blades of death, but he turned around just in time to get out the "oh" in Oh, Crap! before the Hamilton Standard Propellers turned him into Yellow-Shirt Hamburger. Another E-2 had to be wheeled out to take the place of the one that was scheduled to depart, and flight operations were suspended for an hour as the crew cleaned up the mess, and policed the deck to make sure no part of him could damage another aircraft.
- Subverted in the Finnish Air Force with the auxiliary mechanics' "Draken Man's Oath" on the Saab J35 Draken. The soon-to-become-mechanic conscript would climb in the air intake scoop on one side, crawl through the air intake channel, swear an oath in front of the turbine inside the fuselage, and come out of the scoop at the other side of the airplane. The turbine would naturally not be running while doing this.
