I’m watching Die Hard II for the first time in years. The weather has closed Washington National Airport and we are at Dulles handling all of the traffic. The terrorists take over causing mayhem. Isn’t National Airport now much safer? Pick up the phone and tell them to reopen and get some snowplows out.
Is this a plot hole or did I miss something?
ETA: Or Baltimore, or Philly, or some regional airport.
Or Andrews AFB, or any number of other airports that can handle bad weather landings.
*Mad *magazine used to ask such questions, and then answer them with something like, “What do you wanna do, make this into a 20 minute movie?!”
They’re on the East Coast. I’m sure there are a large number of airports which can each handle a portion of the load, especially if you imagine that a large airplane which planned to land at Dulles might well have enough fuel to make one of the Podunk regions, like Northern Virginia or Maryland or, and this might be stretching it, Delaware.
Yeah, yeah, I know. Delaware. Fate worse than death.
Die Hard 2 has problems, but I don’t think that’s one of them. You think the folks at National Airport just said “screw you guys, it’s Christmas Eve, I’m going home”? If they could have stayed open, they would have, even before all the systems at Dulles went down. Plus, National’s longest runway is about 7,200 feet; Dulles has four runways over 10,000 feet. There are planes that are just too big to land at National.
Plus, we’re led to believe that the reason the planes over Dulles don’t divert to other airports isn’t that all the airports are closed, but that the pilots on those planes don’t divert because they don’t know they’re supposed to. The people they’re talking to who they think are Dulles controllers tell them to hold, so they hold.
The massive, glaring problem with all this is that the Dulles chief engineer says he’s got to find a transmitter so they can talk to the planes. He even gets ambushed going to a transmitter in a new part of the airport, an obvious target. Uh, dude, every plane on the ground at that airport has a transmitter on it. When they talk to the tower on it, they can all hear each other.
It’s also rather odd that some South American dictator would be extradited to the U.S., brought on a foreign plane, to a busy civilian airport, on Christmas Eve, but I suppose that’s not completely impossible.
Why are you watching a Christmas movie in June?
Couldn’t the equipment at National talk to the planes? Say, “Don’t listen to anything from Dulles. The terrorists have taken over. Land here, or if you need a longer runway, go to Baltimore, or Philly, or Andrews or a farmer’s field”?
Of course. A couple of phone calls from Dulles and it would be all over. Not to mention that when the bad guys crashed the plane as a warning it would have shut down the airport completely. NTSA, FAA and about a dozen other alphabet agencies would have been all over the place.
And of course even if the terrorist’s plan had worked, what would stop the air force from scrambling some fighters and shooting down a slow and defenseless civilian jet?
A fun movie but one of the least plausible plots of any blockbuster I’ve ever seen.
The first DH has problems, but they’re problems you can ignore and enjoy the film. The basic idea is sound, it’s just some of the execution that is rough.
DH2 is just stupid to the core. The movie is flawed at the foundation. You couldn’t fix it without starting from scratch.
I haven’t rewatched it since it was new. Don’t screenwriters have a basic grasp of logic?
Hey, Dover AFB would have been a good alternate. 12600ft and 9600ft runways, big planes (C-5 Galaxy) use it all the time.
Well, ATC radios operate on different frequencies so you can talk to just the folks you want and not hear everyone within a 100 mile radius. The radios on the planes can tune to the right frequency to talk to who they need to. I’m not sure if it’s that easy for the controllers to retune their radios.
Well, yeah, there would be investigators, but I don’t know that they’d shut down the whole airport, especially if there were other planes which, having used up much of their fuel reserve, had to land there.
But there is a problem with the way they crashed that plane. As far as I know, the ILS that they tampered with is aimed and calibrated by physically moving the transmitter. The only way to make it look 200 feet lower would be to dig a 200 foot deep hole and put the transmitter at the bottom.
Of course, it is true that a line of jet fuel sprayed in the snow for hundreds of feet will behave exactly like a trail of gunpowder in a Bugs Bunny cartoon.
I had a problem with the scene, but different.
I am not an airline pilot, but why couldn’t the pilot look out the window, and assuming there is some visibility, see that the runway was a lot closer than the system was indicating? Couldn’t he just manually fly like normal, or do a go around?
The pilot is the ultimate commander of the plane. The machine may help, but the pilot has the right to override, and if you do not grant him that right, you have brought us down to the level of the machine. Indeed, you have elevated that machine above us. He must have that right! In the name of humanity, fading in the shadow of the machine, I demand it. I demand it!
Perhaps the OP is in Phoenix right now…
There’s also the problem that the team they send in to go after the terrorists is a U.S. Army Special Forces team (Green Berets) which even before the whole conflict of interest going after another former Green Beret who they personally knew, there’s the whole “Green Berets aren’t exactly the people suited for this mission.” Right next door in Quantico you have both the FBI Hostage Rescue Team and FBI SWAT who are basically exactly the people you want for this type of mission. Or if you really want to make sure the terrorists are dead, send in SEAL Team Six who are also based nearby. Imagine the horror on the terrorists faces when they realize instead of the secretly friendly Special Forces who are on their side, they immediately start getting gunned down from a half-mile away by DEVGRU snipers.
The ILS doesn’t control the plane, it just provides radio signals that keep the plane in line with the runway and descending at a constant slope. The aircraft has a radio that receives those signals and shows the results on a gauge on the instrument panel. The pilot watches that gauge, and others, while descending through the clouds. If he can’t see the runway by a certain height, he applies power and goes around.
I think the idea of the scene in the movie is that the pilot thought he was at 300 feet (which is still above his decision height) when he was really at 100 feet, so he continued the approach. By the time he knew where he really was, it was too late to properly land.
I wonder if those guys had a plan for if the weather hadn’t been sucky on the night they had to do all this.
I never got to work on ILS systems myself, but I recall that I was in Army training for ground controlled approach radar, NDB, IFF, radios, etc., around the time this movie was out, and one of my course instructors told us exactly how the ILS system could be tuned to give a wrong signal. Of course, I don’t remember any of the details after these many years.
Saw it for the first time last night.
Not even fun.
This, right here. This was the stoopidist movie I have ever seen.
I… I… I just don’t know where to start. So I won’t.
There, uh, **was **no visibility, not until it was way too late to abort the landing. That was, like, the whole point of conducting the operation in shitty weather, y’know?
(And yes, the terrorists were damned lucky that the storm coincided with their timetable!)