Performance scale
I can tell Julio is joking here. And not just because I’m the one who drew him, but because an event registering a 9 on the Richter scale would mean an energy of approximately 2 Exajoule (2.000.000.000.000.000 Joule) would have been released. Even fully loaded and with an engine conversion, the Cessna 172 would have a hard time achieving that.
And that, children, is how you spoil a joke by overanalyzing!
in the interests of overanalysing – Mr Richter has been superseded – it’s the moment magnitude scale! 🙂
Yes, I noticed that! Of course I knew the thing about the 2 Exajoule by heart (hum hum), but just to make sure, I looked at the Wikipedia page and saw the reference to the moment magnitude scale. I guess it’s been around since the 70s, but as a layman who only concerns himself with earthquakes when they appear on the TV news, all I ever hear about is the Richter scale. It’ll probably stay like that for a while, just like the “horsepower” which still hasn’t really been replaced by kWh.
The funny part about this joke is that IT HAPPENED YESTERDAY!!! One of my classmates was flying yesterday and around the time he was landing, a 5.7 earthquake happened in the city… we all joked about him “porpoising” and producing earthquakes!
Reality again…
Regards,
Gonzalo (from Santiago, Chile)
Oh, the Boeing landings! After that, the plane just keep “boeing, boeing, boeing”… My flight instructors had some bad times with my landings.
Not sure about the moment magnitude scale, I’ve never heard of it, but the Richter scale is base 10 logarithmic. Anything approaching a 9 is natural disaster range, the largest ever recorded hit 9.5. Exaggeration is what makes the joke IMO. =)
Chuck also gave a 9, a Cooper Harper 9.