Just saw it first time on DVD. Here is the complete crash scene. (Uh, spoilers?)
Director Zemeckis also did Cast Away, which also had an amazing jet crash scene.
I read this in CS thread on negative-G forces shown on airliner (impossible).
What was at least plausible? What was most/least plausible? Including co-pilot freaking out.
Best,
Leo
The co-pilot freaking out was pretty damn distracting. It struck me as implausible while I was watching, but I don’t know if it was.
I’m not a commercial pilot (and we have a few who will probably be along shortly), but it looks reasonably well done. A few things I noticed:
The co-pilot does get pretty flustered, but he doesn’t completely lose it; to the end he is providing information and carrying out commands. The flight attendants also get pretty agitated. From everything I’ve heard on the subject, airline crews usually respond more calmly in emergencies. The captain, on the other hand, is almost too cool. He even thinks to tell Margaret to leave a message for her son on the voice recorder. All of that is probably to further the larger plot of the movie. I haven’t seen it, but I gather it’s necessary to show Denzel as the clear leader and hero in the accident, to contrast with what is to come for him.
Depending on how fast they were going, I might have expected more damage to the control surfaces than what was shown. One of the landing gear doors is shown getting blown back, but they extend the flaps, retract them, and extend them again. I suspect those could have easily been damaged by extending them the first time while diving. The director may have just done it that way because the audience would know what landing gear is, but not flaps and spoilers.
Assuming that the problem was with the elevator stuck in a nose-down position, rolling inverted would arrest the dive. (Subject to the factors discussed in the other thread.) But after the engines stop they roll right-side-up and glide normally. I don’t see any reason why the elevator would have fixed itself while they were upside-down.
Not sure if there is a control on the floor like the one he has the flight attendant turn, or what it’s supposed to have done.
Don’t know what you meant by impossible with respect to negative Gs on an airplane. Part of an aircraft’s certification includes an allowable rating for positive and negative G forces. They handle negative Gs quite well, unlike the passengers.
I am not a pilot or an aeronautical engineer, but these are my thoughts.
The communication with the control tower at the beginning, including the readback, seems spot on with ATC recordings that I have heard on youtube and elsewhere. Hollywood usually doesn’t follow the correct procedure so that stood out as something they did right.
The bang being the first indication that something has gone wrong also seems spot on, or is at least consistent with all of the stories I’ve seen on the show Air Crash Investigations. The way the plane flies after that doesn’t seem at all consistent with a real aircraft problem though. They get weird bangs and the plane shakes, but what is causing that after the initial failure? Seems odd. They are in an uncontrolled dive, and the flight attendant casually walks up into the cockpit? Seriously? First of all, how did she so easily walk up the aisle when the plane is pitching uncontrollably, and second, what the hell is she doing in the cockpit during an emergency?
In real situations where they lost vertical control, the plane tends to fly like a roller coaster. It dives and picks up speed, and the increased speed increases lift and the plane climbs. As it climbs it loses speed and lift and begins to dive again, and the cycle keeps repeating. If a good pilot can recognize what is going on he can get some measure of vertical control just using the throttles to control speed. I have never heard of dumping fuel in that situation and I have never heard of them dropping the landing gear to increase drag. Dumping fuel also takes a LOT longer than just a few seconds.
If they lost all hydraulics they would also lose a lot more than just vertical control.
I don’t know what the “revert to manual control” means. Seems like something made up to me.
The alarms that they are getting are all wrong. You don’t get the whoop whoop pull up alarm until you are about to smack into the ground and they are nowhere close to that. You do get all other kinds of alarms, and there is a sink rate alarm, but it’s not a whoop whoop alarm.
I don’t know why Danzel calls for the flight attendant to operate a control on his side of the cockpit. They don’t have control so he can easily let go of the control column for a moment and lean over. It’s not going to cause the plane to spiral out of control if he does something like that.
In a real emergency I’ve never heard anyone say something like “oh no it’s going back into a dive!” It’s more like “it’s going back into a dive” in a much more controlled voice. The co-pilots overreaction is completely unlike anything that I have ever heard in any cockpit voice recordings of crashes. There was a plane that crashed due to icing on the wings, and the younger, inexperienced female pilot was criticized a lot by other pilots for screaming at the end when the plane had lost all control and was going to smack into the ground and there wasn’t anything more that they could do. As long as there is something to do, pilots just do it. The only time you hear screams and "oh shit"s is when they’ve completely run out of things to do and they are starting to hit the ground.
A pilot usually says “I’ve got control” when he is taking control away from the other person. I don’t see any reason for Danzel to say it as he begins the roll. In real emergencies the pilots also are both doing a lot more things at once and there isn’t enough time to reassure people or tell them to say something to their loved ones on the black box. Usually they are too focused on the actual emergency to think about stuff like that.
I’ve only seen the crash scene and haven’t seen the entire movie, but I don’t know any kind of failure that would make a plane fly like that. As I said though, I’m also not a pilot.
To be fair, sometimes pilots do panic a bit. When you’ve got an entire cockpit crew though usually one person remaining calm is enough to keep everyone else calm. It’s when you don’t have anyone who can tell you what to do and you’re out of ideas yourself that you tend to panic, as in these examples:
This guy got into clouds and lost control:
This woman has absolutely no control over her airplane:
Even though they are panicked, they don’t go into completely “oh no!” mode like the co-pilot in the movie.
ETA: Also, in real emergencies, there are emergency checklists that they pilots will often run through.
Any minor details they got right were far overshadowed by the nonsense that was front and center in that film.
“Quick, we have to SPEED UP to get through this rough air!” Yeah, OK.
And the grand finale… “Here’s the plan. We fly upside down. Then when we’re near the ground we’ll roll it over again and it will glide just fine. It’ll be like nothing happened. Except then we’ll crash.”
Pull the other one.
LL - commercial pilot and flight instructor.
A commercial pilot who was the film’s technical consultant actually gave some comments to CNN about the movie awhile back link.
I will say the article maybe is out of sync with the movie…they reference Washington’s character “leaving the cockpit during an emergency” when I don’t remember him leaving the cockpit at all during the emergency. I remember him being asleep in his chair when the emergency starts, and is woken up by the uncontrolled dive–and remains in his seat until the crash.
Watched it with my husband at home some time back. As the movie began, he jokingly asked me to “Bzzt!” every time some aspect was portrayed wrong.
I stopped bzzt-ing after the first few minutes, it was just too tiring. Usually aviation is done pretty badly in movies, but I’d have to say that this was one of the worst portrayals I’ve ever seen.
This.
The turbulence encounter just after take-off was incredibly unrealistic (not shown in the OP’s clip). I get that they wanted to show the captain as a break-the-rules type character who nevertheless has the experience and knowledge to get the job done safely but they had him doing something that no pilot in their right mind would do. In the scene the captain levels off and lets the airspeed increase to the barber’s pole (maximum) in order to “punch through this shit”. In real life an airliner has a rough air speed which is an airspeed you should target in turbulence, it gives a safe margin above the stall and below max certified airspeed at low altitudes and the high speed buffet at high altitudes. If you were slower than this speed you’d speed up and if you were faster you’d slow down. You wouldn’t level off because continuing to climb may be just as effective at getting through the turbulence as trying to find clear air horizontally. The rough air speed in the type I fly actually gives you the option of a lower speed at lower altitudes in order to improve your climb rate and help you continue climbing.
Just before they crash, after they’ve rolled level, suddenly the aeroplane can fly again. What happened to the control problems they had before? Normally the slower you fly the more you have to pull back on the controls to maintain the required lift to stay airborne. That means if they had a strong nose down force at cruising speed it would be even stronger at slower speeds.
engineer_comp_geek’s rundown is pretty much on the money. You wouldn’t get the “whoop whoop pull up” from the EGPWS at high altitude, you also wouldn’t get the “sink rate” calls.
I think they haven’t completely lost control so the captain does need both hands on the column and it is reasonable to get someone else to pull the manual reversion handle (which may or may not be real–don’t know) but it is not reasonable to make the flight attendant unstrap from her seat and do it instead of getting the FO to unstrap from his seat. All the FO would have to do is slide the seat back and unlock his shoulder harness.
Checklists consist of “recall” or “memory” items (different terms for the same thing) that are actioned without reference to the written checklist, think of them as first aid for the situation you’re faced with. For example, when you have a pitch control problem the memory items may call for you to pull the pitch disconnect handle to disconnect the co-pilot’s and pilot’s pitch control circuits from each other. If the jam or failure is limited to just one side of the control circuit then the other pilot will be able to fly using just their side. Once the memory item is complete and control is regained you can go to the written checklist and complete the procedure. In some circumstances though you may never get an opportunity to use the written checklist. The situation you have may not be covered by a checklist or you may not have time to use the checklist. I think it was reasonable for Washington’s character to not bother with the written checklist.
I assume this was based on the Alska Airline crash where the stabilizer actuator screw(?) stripped and the tail control surface stuck full down. I believe in the investigation scene in Flight they mention this as the cause.
If so, my reaction was the same as above - how come it nosedives upright, flies pretty good upsidedown (assuming the tilt down is now tilt-belly-up and balances the angle of attack) but still does not explain why when they roll upright again they don’t just nose down right away.
I also wondered about fuel feed. IIRC aerobatic planes have allowance for inverted flight, but I have trouble imagining a 727 designed for inverted flight.
Plus - I assume by now everyone knows the rules about flying drunk. I assume a copilot or flight crew ignoring the state of the pilot (a) puts their life at risk and (b) could face beng fird themselves. I don’t know, haven’t had a lot of exposure to alcoholics, fortunately, but the ones I did encounter - it was not hard to tell they were drunk. Can alcoholics really fool someone up close? Does a guy drunk on vodka really not stink like a used bar?
Alaska Airlines flight 261 was an MD-83 aircraft. The horizontal stabilizer was raised and lowed by a jackscrew. In order to prevent a single failure from causing a problem, it was designed with redundancy, but the redundancy was stupid. Instead f having completely redundant jackscrews, they used a single jackscrew with two different motors attached to it. This meant that the jackscrew itself was a potential single point of failure. It didn’t really have true redundancy.
Alaska Airlines skimped on the maintenance. They didn’t lubricate the jackscrew often enough and they went too long between maintenance intervals to inspect and replace the jackscrew as it wore out. The end result was that the jackscrew stripped its threads and failed. At first it just jammed. When the pilots tried to fix it, the threads gave way and the horizontal stabilizer threw the plane into its first dive. The pilots managed to get some control of the airplane back, but at this point the jackscrew mechanism completely came apart and the plane pitched down and crashed.
This NTSB video explains how the jackscrew mechanism worked and exactly how it failed.
Air traffic control recording of the incident (warning - this may be disturbing to some folks since it doesn’t exactly have a happy ending)
Here’s the CVR transcript of the crash along with more info.
Some interesting things going over the transcript.
CAM-1 is the captain and the # are expletives. That’s about the closest anyone in the transcript gets to the “oh no” panic of the copilot in the OP’s clip. If you read through the transcript though nobody ever panics. They just keep working the problem. They even have the presence of mind to steer the plane out away from populated areas, which the NTSB investigation would later commend them for.
They ask for a block of altitude, like Danzel does, but at that point they have the plane “kinda stabilized” where Danzel says he is still in an uncontrolled dive.
They also used speed brakes and flaps like in the movie, but here’s the actual exchange for the flaps (it’s quite a bit different than the panicked copilot in the movie):
And they did end up inverted. Notice how the pilot and copilot are working well together. Neither one is panicking. It’s very different from the movie.
I worked on an older version of the DC-9-30 years ago. I didn’t see the full movie nor have read all the comments so I might be repeating things here. I also couldn’t watch the YouTube video with sound on here at work. (looks like Engineer_comp_geek beat me to some of my comments)
It didn’t have a handle on the floor to pull up. I’m speculating that it disconnects the pilot’s and co-pilots’ control columns in case one is jammed. I know that in the older DC-9, if the pilot wants to go one way and the co-pilot another, the co-pilots stick will disconnect and the pilot wins.
The low oil pressure lights should not have come on. That engine as a dry sump oil system which should supply oil pressure no matter how the engine is positioned.
On the other hand the DC-9 does require positive G’s for the fuel tank fuel pumps to work for more than a few seconds. It doesn’t have a pump system or pickups designed for negative G’s while flying inverted like fighter aircraft do.
As far as the elevator problem. Earlier DC-9s only had one hydraulic primary flight control. This was a one way actuator to slam the elevator to the full down in case of a stall. This requires the control column to be held fully forward to work. This wasn’t the case in the video. I guess there could have been such a malfunction, but don’t know how.
What most likely would have happened would be the electrical trim actuator malfunction. It’s an electric motor that spins a jackscrew up and down to make slight changes to the aircraft heading and altitude. It’s used by the autopilot. There was a case of a DC-9’s elevator trim actuator stripping out it’s threads due to poor maintenance and a lack of lubrication over a few years. It the threads stripped, then the elevator could slam in the wrong direction. Then it might be possible for the elevator to slam back into the other direction after a while.
FWIW, the plane in the film wasn’t a DC-9 or an MD-83. It was the deliberately fictional JR-88.
Sure looks like an MD-80 series to me!