These questions have been bugging me, so here goes:
Strangers on a Train: could a merry-go-round accelerate to the speed shown given the way they’re constructed? I’m guessing IRL, they couldn’t speed up even if you wanted them to. And what’s with that cop firing into the crowd and killing the operator? Nobody seems to care!
No Country for Old Men: Chigurh opens locked doors by ramming out the lock with his captive bolt thing. How does blasting out the key mechanism retract the dead bolt?
Catch Me if You Can: Can you really get to the landing gear, and get outside the plane, by crawling under the sink in the lavatory?
Any additional questions are welcome. The answer “it’s only a movie” is unacceptable
In the book (a true story), Abagnale does exactly that. I don’t remember the type of airplane it was, but he was very familiar with it from his experience masquerading as an airline pilot. If I recall correctly, the whole toilet unit was mounted on hinges for ease of maintenance.
Most (if not all) wide-bodied airliners have more than one deck. If you can gain access to the lower level(s), I imagine you can reach just about any compartment if you’re not flying at high altitudes (Frank pulled it off as the plane was coming in to land at JFK, as I recall).
If the lock cylinder is removed, you can turn the mechanism without needing the key. A common way to get through a locked door is to “drill out” the lock cylinder, shearing the pins, and then rotating the cylinder by hand, since the pins are no longer there to stop you. His little air-pressure doodad does almost the same thing, although he might have to use a screwdriver to retract the bolt. Maybe they thought that wasn’t interesting enough to show.
In the scene I remember, it wasn’t a dead bolt anyway. It was a lock on the door knob, meaning he would only have to turn the door knob after removing the lock, right? (I don’t know if it was plausible for the pneumatic gun to be powerful enough to blast out the lock).
Almost certainly not. In a modern plane the pressurized cabin simply doesn’t connect to the landing gear wells, which are non-pressurized. The best you could even in theory do would be to get into the cargo compartment, which is part of the same pressurized compartment as the passenger cabin, and even then you’d have to wait for the ground crew to open the cargo bay doors before you could escape.
Clark Kent does the same thing in Smallville just by poking the lock out with his finger. I always figured it was shenanigans that he was able to just turn the handle after that point and open the door. Go figure.
