For all who don’t know, Mark Wahlberg is a real life scumbag:
But all that happened a long time ago. I suppose people can change, mature, and become more sensible. Most don’t. Cue Mr. Wahlberg. At first, he just said things that were merely delusional (ie. I could knock out Manny Pacquiao). Also note that link has him discussing fighting people at Jets games. He stated he kicked a guy in the lower back so hard, he “probably broke his back”. I suppose most of that stuff is somewhat comical so long as you never run into him in person.
Really Mark Wahlberg? Really? I know you think tuning up drunk guys at Jets games, and playing make believe in movies makes you a trained assassin, but this notion that you alone would have not only subdued several terrorists, but also landed the plane safely is preposterous. Even for a stupid, entitled actor. I have to give you credit for being from a poor area of Boston, and not choosing to become bank robber, but I think you have truly lost it sir. And if that were not enough, he doubles down with some weird stuff about how he doesn’t masturbate because he wants to lead a “clean and pure life”.
Mark was originally booked on flight 11. I can understand why he dreams of it.
Maybe it would have helped having someone bad tempered jump those bastards? If that encouraged the other passengers to join in then … maybe history would have been different. It only takes one guy to lead a revolt.
The passengers on the other plane did fight back, got in the cockpit and almost saved the plane. From what I read they came really close.
Yeah. I think he would have done exactly what everyone else did: stay seated, don’t say a word and hope for the best.
None of the passengers knew that the planes were going to crash into the twin towers. From the passengers’ perspective the planes were returning to Logan, or landing at JFK (I forget) and that one of the hijackers on each had a fucking bomb strapped to him. (Not a real bomb, but the passengers didn’t know that.)
I’m sure he would have tried his best on flight 93, because by then the passengers did know what was going to happen.
And what makes you think Wahlberg would have actually done anything? I suppose he could slapped those terrorists with his Dirk Diggler prosthetic penis, then jumped aboard the pod form Planet of the Apes, but I don’t think there is anything in Wahlberg’s background to support the belief he is capable of anything but bullying the weak and defenseless. This is a guy who bragged about kicking a guy in the back. A guy who blinded an Asian guy by beating him with a wooden stick in a racially motivated attack. Nothing in his character screams “selfless hero willing to get into real danger”. Not to mention that stopping the terrorists doesn’t land the plane. At least if John Travolta had made such a claim, he could rest on the power of Zenu and a commercial pilot’s license. Wahlberg just has a tough guy rhetoric.
For all of the nonsense in his statements, the part that puts it over the edge for me is that he works in the mention that he was seated in FIRST CLASS. Because that was really my concern, you know? What if the poor guy was stuck in economy?
I do sincerely have sympathy for anyone who was booked on one of those flights, it must be something that weighs heavily upon them. But his comments to the interviewer are poorly worded, at best.
As the *Mythbusters *have demonstrated, anybody can land a plane safely when being talked through the motions by a competent ATC. Especially a large commercial liner - unless I’m very much mistaken, their landings are fully automated these days. The pilot’s just there in case something important conks out or an emergency landing is required.
Patrick Smith, an airline pilot who has a column at Salon, has thoroughly debunked both the “autopilot doing all the flying” and “the anyone can land a plane with some instruction from the control tower” myths. I did see the Mythbusters episode about the latter, but Smith said that they oversimplified what such scenario would entail.
Meh, I think he’s overstating things a little.
Yes, autopilot definitely does not simply mean “press red button to initiate safe landing at nearest airport”, but even if there were 50 switches to toggle, somebody *can *tell you which switch to toggle to what when. As for aligning the plane at such and such altitude, such and such speed and such and such heading before the autolander can kick in - it’s not really rocket science once you’re told where the throttle is and which dials to read. Hell, you could even configure the autopilot to get you there, too.
So, yeah. I know it’s more complicated than “press button, relax” (Falcon 4.0 taught me that much), but it’s not “thoroughly impossible task that nobody could ever achieve without years of experience and a blood compact with a lower Celestial” either. At worst, it’s “teaching a computer illiterate grandmother to install Debian over the phone” difficult. Nothing to sweat, really !
And now I kinda want to try it for myself. sigh
Though I’ll certainly agree with him that for a complete non-pilot, opening a radio channel with the ground to begin with would be the big stumper.
This is what I came to say as well. I’ve heard others make such overstatements before though, and always wonder what is a specific example of a problem I would have a high likelihood of encountering that would likely cause me to crash the aircraft. Let’s assume I have a radio channel open, am a technical person who knows the basics of flight, has time to “get the feel” and learn some of the buttons, and even make a few passes to make sure I can line up and not drastically over or under shoot the runway. Forget about the autopilot. Do I really have zero chance? What are some examples of in-flight situations I’m likely to fuck up?
Remember that the mindset before that day was that airplane hijackers would have the plane fly someplace, it would land, the hijackers would made some demands, and eventually everything would be resolved one way or the other. Basically no one expected a jetliner to be hijacked to be used on a suicide mission. (I’m excluding a few mentions of the idea in fiction.) The passengers on United Flight 93 heard via inflight telephone calls that other planes had been hijacked for suicide missions and that’s why they fought back.
FTR, Wahlberg has already apologized and put $50 in the douchebag jar.
As for those bringing up his sordid past, it seems to me that he’s worked very hard to transform himself into a better person. He’s stayed out of trouble for many years and earned a reputation for being a dedicated, hard working actor. He speaks often of trying to be a good father to his kids. So I’ll give him a pass on this one.
You mean forget about using the autopilot? If so you will quite likely fail to manage the inertia of a large aeroplane travelling at 4 miles per minute. You would probably, at some point in the approach, get too slow and not pick it up in time to recover.
