Headscratchers / Fast & Furious 6

• It's shown that Fenix avoided shooting Letty at the last second, instead making her car explode. But why? It can't because he's squeamish. He had no problem shooting people in the face before.
  • Probably For the Evulz. He also seemed to be somewhat impressed by her Defiant to the End struggle, so he decided to try blowing her up. He did comment that he could only remember "her face burning", so maybe he was trying to set her on fire?
• Just how long would that runway have to be in the climax anyway? I'm thinking we're somewhere in the range of at least 20 miles...
  • Based on people's calculations, about 28-29 miles. For reference, the longest paved runway in the world is 3.42 miles long, and the longest partially unpaved runway in the world is 7.5 miles long.
  • The absolute lowest calculation I've seen, which takes a guess (a very generous guess at that) that some of the events in the climax happen simultaneously, still comes at an improbable 18.4 miles long.

• Why doesn't Shaw just stop the tank and pick the crew off one by one? Can't be because he needs to be caught so he can get the doomsday weapon, 'cause he could probably get it himself with the tank.
  • Because a tank isn't a precision weapon, so the crew has speed and mobility on their side to avoid the shots until they get out of range. Plus if he stops the tank it gives NATO more time to get ahead of him with anti-armour weapons. Since the tank itself is just to protect the chip within it his original plan would have been to make a detour after hijacking the convoy and vanishing. When he had to resort to using the tank he's still in a tank and pretty much has right of way and the tank has been modified to go twice as fast as a regular one, although wether or not he could have made it to whatever his destination was before NATO got air support out is another question entirely.

• Why does Han (and the crew) immediately assume Giselle dies when she falls off? Couldn't they have considered the fact that she would have been grievously wounded yet relatively alive?
  • Because she fell from a car going at close to it's max speed. Even if she survived the impact (which would be no easy feet considering the amount of momentum involved) she would be dead before anyone could get to her. People have died from being punched and their head hitting the concrete, falling off a car going at over 100 miles an hour would crack your skull wide up the second your head hit the ground.
  • And yet Hobbs can fall 20 stories onto the roof of an SUV and only end up in the hospital. Dom and his crew are virtually invincible until the plot demands otherwise.
• When Riley fights Letty at the subway station, why does Riley legitimately try to beat the crap out of then arrest Letty if they're both working for Shaw? None of the rest of Dom's team was there, so she could have easily let Letty get away, then tell the rest of the team that Letty was able to escape. That way, her status as The Mole still wouldn't be revealed, and you also wouldn't potentially have part of Shaw's team in Hobbs' custody.
  • She was putting on a show in front of a lot of witnesses, earning a few injuries in the process. Had she just let Letty leave there's always the chance that someone in the subway might tweet about it, or Dom's team could have gotten access to the subway cameras and found out that way. Plus Letty might find it strange that her pursuer was rather half-hearted about it, always the risk of her figuring it out.

• The whole finale makes no sense whatsoever.
  • They know Shaw needs this macguffin chip and they know which one he's looking to steal. So they try to drive it out? There was an enormous runway at the exact same base, why didn't they just fly the damn thing out? Shaw would have been completely screwed. It could have been justified if the team was using the convoy to bait Shaw into a trap, or if the "drive it" plan was suggested by The Mole, but it was apparently neither.
    • Shaw's resourceful and always been one step ahead. Flying it out might have always been the default plan, but they tried to used the plan after that. Alternatively they needed it gone now; you cannot prep a plane and get it airborne in a hurry without cutting a lot of corners designed to stop horrible accidents from occurring, helicopters are slower and can be shot down by someone with either the right equipment or enough skill (both of which Shaw has an abundance of), and boats run into similar problems. There really is no other choice but to either keep the chip there and hope whatever plan he has cooked up fails or try and drive it out of there before he knows what's happening.
  • What was the point of the tank, In-Universe? It wasn't manned, it wasn't even deployed, it was in a trailer. Since the chip is apparently small enough to be carried by hand, all adding the tank did was slow down the convoy because they needed to tow a tank.
    • As a last ditch effort they could take the chip into the tank and lock the hatch. A bigger question would be why this wasn't the plan to begin with; sure Shaw could eventually cut the hatch open, but someone would be in the tank to drive around and stall until backup arrived.
  • How exactly was Shaw planning to escape? That plane he was taking off was a C-5 Galaxy, which is fast but not that fast. The NATO commander was more than willing to sacrifice Mia to stop Shaw from escaping (and Shaw knew this), so what would stop him from blowing the plane out of the sky the second it was away from a populated area?
    • Presumably the plan was to keep flying over populated areas and bail in mid-flight. With the chip in a case all you'd need would be some parachutes or a long enough stretch of road to land again and bail out in one of the many cars kept in the loading bay, presumably to another safehouse to swap cars and lose the heat.