Mark Wahlberg on 9/11 Plane: I Would Have Beat Terrorists, Landed It Safely

[miss_elizabeth]

Mark Wahlberg asks that you say hi to your mother for him.

[Argent_Towers]

I think Wahlberg has been letting these action-hero roles get to his head. I think he makes a terrible action hero, honestly. I wish he had stuck to playing troubled and strange characters. I do not think that Wahlberg at all projects a “heroic” image in any of his roles; I wish he’d stop trying to be a Bruce Willis type actor.

[Kobal2]

@Richard_Pearse

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.

Agreed. Trying to land manually with zero flight experience is most probably a recipe for charred metal. Landing is the trickiest part of any flight, in any plane, because it boils down to a tightly controlled stall - stall too soon and you drop like a sack of bricks from higher than you’re really comfortable with. Stall too late and you’ll meet the ground at speed, which is a duel the ground usually wins. Plus it’s really counter-intuitive to have to regulate speed with the stick and altitude with the throttle.

In a fat arsed sky truck that can’t accelerate, slow down or climb worth a crap and handles like an anvil dipped in axle grease, I’d imagine the margin of error is even slimmer.

[Maserschmidt]

Do we even have anyone’s word other than Mark Wahlberg’s that he was booked on Flight 11? He sounds like a self-aggrandizing idiot.

[Richard_Pearse]

@Kobal2

Agreed. Trying to land manually with zero flight experience is most probably a recipe for charred metal. Landing is the trickiest part of any flight, in any plane, because it boils down to a tightly controlled stall - stall too soon and you drop like a sack of bricks from higher than you’re really comfortable with. Stall too late and you’ll meet the ground at speed, which is a duel the ground usually wins. Plus it’s really counter-intuitive to have to regulate speed with the stick and altitude with the throttle.

It doesn’t really work that way in a jet, you point the nose where you want it to go and you control speed with the power setting. It’s not really different from a small aeroplane, changes in thrust still effect altitude or glide path and changes in attitude affect speed, but I think due to the inertia of a bigger aeroplane it is more effective to control speed with thrust and flight path with the attitude.

In a fat arsed sky truck that can’t accelerate, slow down or climb worth a crap and handles like an anvil dipped in axle grease, I’d imagine the margin of error is even slimmer.

It’s not so much the performance, they perform quite well compared to light aircraft, it’s just that when things go wrong they go wrong very quickly and you need to be very positive taking corrective action. The big difference I noticed between a jet and a turbo-prop was that in the prop if I got 5 knots slow on approach I could bump the power up 5%, the speed would recover, then I could bring the power back to the approach setting (slightly higher than what I had before because that obviously wasn’t enough.) In the jet if you get 5 knots slow you need a fist-full of power to fix it and if you don’t, 5 knots slow very quickly becomes 10 knots slow and rapidly decelerating. That is something you can’t fix over the radio, by the time the guy on the radio finds out you’re too slow, you’re probably spiralling down into the ground. If all of the automatics are engaged it may help or it may not. It depends on the aeroplane of course. The machine I fly doesn’t have any kind of automatic power or speed control.

[pancakes3]

i know seth mcfarlane was booked on one of the flights that hit the towers.

[Quintas]

@Kobal2

unless I’m very much mistaken, their landings are fully automated these days.

nevermind.

[brickbacon]

@PunditLisa

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.

What makes you say that? He was bragging about “breaking a guy’s back” after kicking him in 2000. Lord only knows how many other people this guy has accosted. More importantly, his conduct shows that it’s money rather than maturity that has likely kept him on the straight and narrow. He doesn’t seem to have any remorse for his actions, nor has he suffered any negative repercussions. To quote the wiki article:

For these crimes, Wahlberg was charged with attempted murder, pleaded guilty to assault, and was sentenced to two years in jail at Boston’s Deer Island House of Correction, of which he served 45 days.[10][12] In another incident, the 21-year-old Wahlberg fractured the jaw of a neighbor in an unprovoked attack.[13] Commenting in 2006 on his past crimes, Wahlberg has stated: “I did a lot of things that I regretted and I have certainly paid for my mistakes.” He said the right thing to do would be to try to find the blinded man and make amends, and admitted he has not done so, but added that he was no longer burdened by guilt: “You have to go and ask for forgiveness and it wasn’t until I really started doing good and doing right, by other people as well as myself, that I really started to feel that guilt go away. So I don’t have a problem going to sleep at night. I feel good when I wake up in the morning.”

So not only does he only serve 45 days for nearly killing someone, he hasn’t even bothered to reach out tot he man he nearly killed to apologize or compensate him for his actions. But it’s nice the Wahlberg has found it in his heart to forgive himself for acting like a thug. Sorry, but I think it’s perfectly fair to bring it up given that he is still getting into fights years after he supposed changed.

[SciFiSam]

That airline pilot link has a link to this picture of a typical cockpit. I don’t think it would be easy at all for someone (an air traffic controller, who’d be your contact, not a pilot, unless they had time to get a pilot in to help before you crashed the plane - seconds can make all the difference) to direct a passenger around all those knobs and levers, even if said passenger managed to remain cool and collected in such a stressful situation.

It would also be more difficult if you were flying off-course and had to actually fly the plane to the airport as well as land it, as in the case of United 93. Hopefully you’d get to an airport with an Instrument Landing System for the runway you’re directed to head for, because if not then that’d up the difficulty level of the landing even more.

Not impossible, but with a high likelihood of failure. Hell, even that Mythbusters episode only had the ‘passenger’ succeeding on the second try, and in a real scenario you wouldn’t get a do-over.

[Tom_Tildrum]

@Kobal2

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.

In that context, I’ll offer the classic “Hello!?” scene from No Time For Sergeants.

[Ostrya]

Mark Wahlberg is walking down an alley when 2 tough guys ask Mark Wahlberg for his wallet. What does Mark Wahlberg do?

Mark Wahlberg gives them his wallet.

[Elendil_s_Heir]

Mark Wahlberg is an idiot and should stop talking about anything except his movies.

[Alessan]

If this guy couldn’t stop them, I’m pretty sure Marky Mark couldn’t, either.

[Broomstick]

@Kobal2

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.

We’ve been over this before in other threads. While it is theoretically possible, that is contingent on

1. ATC being able to talk you down. Most traffic controllers are NOT pilots. Even among those that are, most have never flown something like a commercial airliner. They wouldn’t know the procedures to follow to land one of those airplanes, and thus could not “talk you down”. It has nothing to do with their competence as controllers, as competence as a controller and competence as a pilot are two different things.

2. No, landings are NOT fully automated these days. A limited number of airports have the facilities required for a properly equipped airliner to “land itself”, but assuming that all airliners have that capability is nonsense. Besides which, you have to be able to program the autoland system. ATC is not going to know how to do that.

3. You’re assuming that an airplane that has already been hijacked, people killed, and the flight crew murdered will have nothing else go wrong? Um… really?

[Little_Nemo]

Mark Wahlberg’s a good actor. He just needs to remember that the stuff he does in movies isn’t real life.

[garygnu]

Still, a conscious person at the controls is better than the alternative.

[Alessan]

@Broomstick

We’ve been over this before in other threads. While it is theoretically possible, that is contingent on

1. ATC being able to talk you down. Most traffic controllers are NOT pilots. Even among those that are, most have never flown something like a commercial airliner. They wouldn’t know the procedures to follow to land one of those airplanes, and thus could not “talk you down”. It has nothing to do with their competence as controllers, as competence as a controller and competence as a pilot are two different things.

To be fair, most ATCs are located at airports. Getting a pilot to the tower wouldn’t be that difficult.

[rtutru]

Don’t forget the man he blinded was helping him hide from the police, in his house. Yep, you’re a real hero you piece of shit midget. I don’t think he’s paid for anything until we see that fight with Manny.

[cmyk]

He did save the world from pollen in The Happening. May his soul burn eternal in hell for that alone.

[Alka_Seltzer]

Mark Wahlberg wouldn’t have gone for a long walk in the snow, he’d have insisted that Captain Scott ate him.