I just watched the first episode of Scorpion, a TV show centred around a group of highly intelligent misfits working for the US government. The episode is centred around the loss of all communication between the LA air traffic control system and aircraft in their network. Panic ensues, flights are delayed and, if not fixed, they may be stuck up there all night [sorry, couldn’t resist].
The Scorpions sorted it out with a mix of brain work, fast driving, earning the respect of the hot waitress with the gifted autistic son, stunts and implausible assumptions, but I got to wondering, there must be some default contingency measure to deal with collapse of electronic communications, at least in the commercial aviation world.
As a non-genius I would have thought something like piles of burning tyres next to the runways, or getting a fighter plane to intercept and morse with its brake lights. Can’t be that hard, surely?
Scorpion didn’t stop when it reached the bottom of the barrel of stupid–it kept on digging and at this point is somewhere near the Mohorovičić discontinuity.
I watched that first episode of that show when it first aired, and the whole plot line of connecting an Ethernet cable between the laptop computer in the car and the network switch or router in the passenger jet flying at a very low altitude above it, was so stupid that I never watched another episode.
How did they ‘lose all communication’? Aircraft radios are standard VHF, and you can listen to them with a $20 pocket radio. Communicating two ways just requires a portable VHF transciever, which are probably available all over the airport. For that matter, all the planes on the ground have radios capable of talking to the planes in the air.
Failing all that, the pilot can just use his cell phone, or borrow one from the passengers.
This was also a major flaw (among many) in Die Hard 2, which sounds like a very similar plot.
I also dropped out after the first episode, but I enjoyed reading snarky reviews of how horrible later episodes were. (I think possibly the recaps were on IO9/Gizmodo, but I’m not seeing them at the moment.) There is one particular episode where one of the group is testing something in a rocket on the launchpad. A storm comes up and the rocket is struck by lightning launching it into space. The lightning damages the parachute on the capsule so it won’t be able to land. And the guy is in orbit suffering from oxygen deprivation unable to be communicated with clearly. Eventually, they deorbit the capsule but since the parachute isn’t working, the guy has to jump out of it. One of his friends jumps out of a nearby plane sent to meet them to catch him and land them both with his parachute. He misses, and while the guy plummets towards the ocean, the team comes up with a Plan B where a nearby submarine explodes a missile underwater, aerating the water so that it is “soft” enough for the guy to fall on safely.
Did the later episodes also run out their budget? Because I’m pretty sure their capsule set is just a dentist’s office with some greebles on the walls.
I don’t think it is a sidetrack at all. The point is that the show is so profoundly bad that you should never even suspect that anything on it might be in any way remotely accurate towards anything.
All is forgiven for you and all other contributors to this thread.
A friend I told about the episode suggested they were probably all Mcguyver’s love-children courtesy of the many failed contraceptive devices he jury-rigged from shoe in-soles and dental floss.
