"Morgans" wrote:
"Ron Garret" wrote
Actually, I was under the impression that the sucked-into-jet-engine
video was real. It's certainly plausible.

Real. The flash you see, as he goes in, is his helmet FOD'ing the
engine. His shoulders were wider than the intake duct, which stopped
him from going through the turbine.

Sore and bruised, but lucky.

Wow - the whole issue is a mess of fact and fiction. Consider:

1) There appear to a bunch of obviously faked videos on Youtube of
people getting "sucked" into jet engines. This makes it tedious to sort
out the legit from the bogus.

2) Some videos, like this one showing a helmet (cranial) getting sucked
off a guys head, seem perfectly legit:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OswpNAH9nrk

3) I believe the velocity of the suctioned air should fall off roughly
with the inverse square of the distance from the intake - and so the
suction force for a fixed area should be roughly proportional with
inverse cube of the distance from the intake. Meaning you have to get
dang close to suck in something as dense and heavy as a person! (I know
I have problems vacuuming up heavy "grit"! Experiments with a vacuum
cleaner are easy and I'm sure everyone is aware how quickly the suction
force drops off.)

4) Although circumstances would make it rare, it appears it may have an
been issue as long as a few decades ago because there appears to be an
article titled "Survival after suction into jet engine intake" by Ayres,
ML in the May 1973 journal "Injury":
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/4710924

This seems to indicate the article is case reports:
http://www.unboundmedicine.com/medli...engine_intake_