You also can’t move a glideslope signal without physically moving the transmitter. Hardly seems worth mentioning in context, anyway.
As an air traffic controller, while I can enjoy Die Hard 2 as an action movie, the aviation-related plot lines are high comedy. You guys have mentioned a lot of them:
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You can’t hack into an ILS glide slope to make it read below ground. I suppose you could change the angle, to make it flatter and more likely to hit obstructions on the approach, but not negative 200 feet.
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Even so, airliners at lower altitudes use what’s called a “radar altimeter,” which bounces a signal off the ground to tell them how high they are. If a glide slope was tuned to take them under ground, their altimeter would read the true altitude and they would climb out on a missed approach. Or, as mentioned above, if they broke out of the clouds to see the runway and realized they were in an unsafe position, they’d climb out and go around.
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When an airport is closed or below approach minimums, planes don’t just circle in holding until they run out of gas and crash. There are procedures, even without radio contact - at the very least, they would have an alternate airport in their flight plan to go to. The idea they’re helplessly trapped in the sky until they run out of fuel is the most hilarious aspect of the movie.
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Well. that and Fred Thompson’s speech on the control floor. I don’t care who you are, tower chief or not, controllers aren’t going to tell their traffic to shut up while I push back from my position to hear this message from Big Fred. Stack 'em, pack 'em and rack 'em, indeed.
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Yes, every aircraft on the ground at Dulles has a tunable radio that could contact every aircraft in the area. In our tower, we have tunable emergency radios that can broadcast on any ATC frequency. All commercial aircraft generally monitor the standard emergency frequency as well (although pre-9/11 this was not quite so widely followed). If the bad guys somehow jammed the local frequencies, that might be one thing, but just taking them over?
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Radios are not the only way to communicate with aircraft. There’s a system pilots use to get flight plans and communicate with their company that’s totally separate from ATC radios.
Take all that away, though, and you have a boring travelogue of airliners diverting to their alternate airports and Bruce Willis being hauled off to jail for shooting the guy in the luggage sorting area.
Colm Meaney’s airliner was *out *of fuel, but it burned spectacularly for hours. 