magine a wind tunnel so large that a real airliner can be placed inside and buffeted by 100mph winds.

If you want to see how an airliner – a real, life-size airliner – copes with windspeeds over 100mph, then you need to come to Mountain View in California.

At Nasa’s Ames Research Center, the National Full-scale Aerodynamic Complex (NAFC) tests aircraft in a massive facility featuring six enormous fans – allowing them to carry out research which could not be undertaken anywhere else.

That includes, in the largest of the facility’s two wind tunnels, the ability to put objects as large as a Boeing 737 fuselage through their paces, instead of having to carry out tests on models and try and scale up the data for real-life conditions.