Biggest Aviation-related Technical Blunders in a Movie etc?

[Rajay]

Kudos to Mustangdriver for a very entertaining thread on fictional pilot characters. While reading that thread, which mentioned Al Yackey (John Goodman) and Pete "Pete St. Pete" Sandich (Richard Dreyfuss) several times, I immediately thought of Pete's deadstick landing in the A-26 during which he started really sweating it when he lost his headwind. You know, 'cuz good pilots ALWAYS land into the wind!

(Of course, the "Pete, what do you need?" answer: "Glider practice." was a great line!)

Now c'mon. Given how flat his glide apparently was - based on the cockpit view of his approach to the field and clipping the trees - I've always (again) assumed that at THAT point you'd want a tailwind to make sure that you'd cover the ground and actually make it to the field. In that situation, GROUND speed was as important as AIRspeed.

I was at this point tempted to make a blanket but uninformed statement about the glide characteristics of a Douglas A-26 say in comparison to a C-172, but then I remembered where I am. Instead I'll just ask does anyone out there KNOW how well an A-26 glides?

In Blue Thunder (mentioned in that fictional pilot thread as well) I also can't help but feeling that the "Whisper Mode" that makes the helicopter too quiet to detect even when it is hovering right outside of your office window or right over the edge of the bridge that you're standing on just has to be complete bullshirt, too! You can put a "muffler" on a piston engine, but rotor blades are going to beat the air (into submission) regardless of any little button in the cockpit, don't you agree?

(Finally, also given the fact of where we are here, I'm sure that this subject has probably been addressed before at some point. Apologies to those of you who care about pointing out such things.)

[Nathan]

Pearl Harbor in which a CGI P-40 flew between two hangers. Clearly hollyweird at its finest.

[Ztex]

Have you seen 2012??

Iron Eagle 123456.... ??

[Rajay]

Have you seen 2012??
Iron Eagle 123456.... ??

No, just the movie trailers. Some kind of twin Cessna flying in knife edge an avoiding all of the falling debris or something like that? Is that specifically what you had in mind?

RE: Iron Eagle (dubbed "Tin Chicken" by those of us who were at ERAU in Daytona in 1986 when it came out), again can you be more specific about a technical detail that bothered you? Like maybe how the avionics was directly compatible with Doug's Sony Walkman? Heck, my dad's new Honda sedan is the first car he's had that interfaces with his iPod....

[Clifford Bossie]

George Kenendy firing a flare gun out the open cockpit window of the Concord in Airport 79? Or airplanes that don't fly by any known rules of aerodynamics. Then there is always the hotdog, that breaks every rule, can't follow directions (or orders), yet somehow saves the day. Yeah right. Blunders in movies are so common I am not sure I pay any attention anymore.

[John Dupre]

How about the Aiport movie where once the 747 sinks intact to the ocean floor they us the Navy's DSRV to rescue the survivors? I thought it was so much BS at the time that I have never seen it.

[dors]

The end of "Charlie Wilson's War" really annoyed me. When they were showing the Afghans shooting down "Russian" aircraft, and it was mostly US Drone footage.

Or the Skyraider that crashes in "Rescue Dawn" and magically turns into a T-6

[wacoykc]

FLYBOYS.....The Nieuports doing vertical rolls and all the Triplanes flying formation with the Zeppelin

[b29flteng]

How about Fighter Squadron? P-51s as ME-109s....

[Rajay]

How about the Aiport movie where once the 747 sinks intact to the ocean floor they us the Navy's DSRV to rescue the survivors? I thought it was so much BS at the time that I have never seen it.

Yeah, that one always bothered me too. People think that a pressurized aircraft has to be airtight. I had a college Physics professor that tried to tell me that is the reason why your ears pop on an airliner. Even then, before I started my A&P training at ERAU, I knew that aircraft pressurization was just a matter of pumping in more air than leaks out.

And as far as Airport 77 was concerned, they obviously had never heard of a negative pressure relief valve - if the outside "air" (in this case, ocean water) is at a greater pressure than the inside cabin pressure (which it most definitely is since the 747 is completely submerged - one of my reference books says a 747 is 63 ft tall; that = 1 atmo of air pressure + 2 atmos of water pressure at 60 feet = 45 psi outside and initially only about 15 psi inside), then it comes RUSHING in!

Come to think of it, maybe you're talking about a different movie. I don't remember a DSRV in Airport 77.... They just floated it to the surface with marine salvage balloons.

[Bearcat SA]

I have not seen Amelia but apparently in one one of the shots taken at Rand Airport (FAGM), masquerading as Miami, a long time resident at Rand, an Antonov AN-24 is visible

[Jack Cook]

Midway

[old iron]

It must have been the (original?) Batman movie. Don't remember the particulars, but there was a great big and hazardous balloon. So Batman came by in his big fast airplane and grabbed one of the cables and pulled the allon out of harms way ... gotta be a violation of the Law of Concervation of Momentum in there somewhere ...

[buffcc]

Somebody correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm pretty sure the opening scenes of the original movie "Airport" showed the landing gear of a B-52 closing up. Not exactly correct for a civilian airliner.

[Ztex]

As far as 2012 goes...How about a Cessna 340 knife edge pass between falling sky scrapers or out running a volcano blast just after taking off of a cratered runway and more...then there's the AN-225 (labeled AN-500) doing an out of gas, dead stick landing, intact, on a glacier, just after, successfully, dropping a Bentley full of people out of the (non existent) the rear cargo door.... and.... oh never mind.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1190080/goofs


Iron Eagle....It's been too long to remember specifics.