They have an alerter device (a.k.a the “dead man’s pedal”) that the engineer has to push every 30 seconds or so if he hasn’t moved the controls. Eventually it sets off an alarm and after that it applies the emergency brakes. Trains would probably generally be okay, although there might be mayhem with yard switchers.
They did show one guy lying about the fact that in the future he was on the toilet reading a paper.
At a guess, I’d say I average about an hour a day of driving, mostly at highway speed. A random flashforward would have a 4 or 5 percent chance of happening while I was driving. I’m not sure how likely I’d be to die in such a crash, but considering the fact that there’s likely to be nobody to help me, the chances are probably pretty high.
So assuming everyone is like me ;), there’s probably a percent or two of the population that would die in such crashes.
That whooshing sound you hear may or may not be from a B-52… 
Smokers with cigarettes. wouldn’t set offices on fire, but a lot of apartment buildings could have fires start.
At least one of the office building fires in the show was caused by a helicopter crashing into it.
One character in the show saw himself sitting on the toilet; he amended this to saying he was in a meeting when he told others about it.
Yeah, anecdotally on approach to Atlanta if you look out the window it is not uncommon to see 2-4 other aircraft in what I would guess would be a bad place if the pilots took a two minute nap(that’s out the window, how many more can’t you see as a seated passenger). But I would guess that these kinds of deaths, and most commuter type deaths would fall really hard across three or four time zones and the rest of the world would have much lower fatality rates. Think if the difference in road congestion between 4:30 and 7:30 PM.
Some small percentage of smokers will catch their homes on fire with a lit cigarette.
Lots of gas station pumps will be careened into.
Active construction cranes in cities, and construction sites in general, will be bad things to be around – lots of heavy, powerful equipment in motion.
I bet that would be a bad day to be working at a steel mill.
Wonder how many people are actively traversing a flight of stairs at any given moment?
What about women in labor? They mentioned deaths in childbirth, but what happens if a woman in active labor passes out? Would her body keep pushing? Would the child die if it spent an extra two minutes in the birth canal? Of course then there’s the problem of all the newborns being carried by doctors and nurse who end up falling on them.
I don’t think helicopters have much in the way of auto pilot. My very limited reading about flying them suggests to me that the pilot has to constantly be using both hands and feet to keep them stable.
Also they generally don’t operate all that high off the ground. Just a WAG but I’d guess that at any given time most of them are under a mile up. That means that virtually all helicopters would crash well before the two minutes are up.
This alone should be enough to start a major fire or two in about every city over half a million or so.
This time of year in the western US you’d probably have 100ish forest fires raging in no time. I live in Carson City, NV and we have had .02" of rain since July 1st, we’re talking dry. If, for instance, you had three helicopter crashes in LA’s brush covered hills you’d have 3 out of control fires raging in just a few minutes. Given the state of the streets and highways there would be no fighting the fires for, at the best, a day or two and it would be extremely difficult for the population to get away.
You get a good wind blowing, have no way to fight the fires, have no way to evacuate the populace and you could end up a huge number of dead in just southern California along.
Anyway that’s my $.02
Cool. It’s not Aunt Millie and Aunt Mavis trying to one-up each other over their flashforwards, but then I guess that sort of thing would only work in the sitcom version of the show.
Over in Cafe Society someone with experience in this area offered the following on this question. Seems 800(ish) is somewhere close to correct.
Autopilots for helicopters do exist. The Bell 429 for instance has a 3-axis autopilot.
Doubt that would help much for, say, a traffic helicopter pilot as I doubt they’d have an autopilot engaged even if their helicopter had one. Also doubt the autpilot will avoid buildings.
Still, they do exist if you have the cash.
The Flashforward pilot showed telephone poles being knocked down by cars and trucks. That seemed realistic. What didn’t seem realistic is that stores still had power, cell phones still worked, and TV stations were still on the air. I’d think that if you took out a bunch of random power lines across the city you’d knock out most of the power in the grid.
Grid or no grid TV stations would still be on the air, but few people would be watching them.
The ones in the holding pattern would be on autopilot and so would the ones on approach, though the ones on approach would require pilot input at regular intervals (gear down, flap down, slowing down etc.) I think any aircraft within about 3 minutes of touchdown would be in serious trouble, the danger would then decrease as you get further out from landing.