I didn’t see the film, but…
… just spit-balling, wouldn’t it have been easier to de-pressurize the cabin and put them out due to hypoxia?
I think it says a lot about the Airport movies, that the parodies they inspired, the Airplane movies, are probably a lot better known, and probably more well regarded nowadays.
“Anywhere between zero and one” is one of my all time favourite lines.
Actually one of the engines was ripped off and was hauled out of the Hudson a week or two later.
OK, so intact-ish. 
I thought it was that everybody survived with only a small number of serious injuries.
Curiously, the origin of that expression aired about 6 months after the release of Airport '77.
Landing on smooth water in low wind you’d expect about what they got. An abrupt stop & not much more, maybe an engine tears off.
In more aggressive waves you might well tear the fuselage in half at some point, or drag a wingtip & cartwheel, which probably tears most of that wing off. The pieces will float less long than an intact airplane would have and anybody sitting within a couple rows of a fuselage tear is gonna have a very bad and perhaps final day.
To the degree Sully pulled off a miracle it was having the failure being in a place, speed, and altitude that could reach a river, and him having the presence of mind to go there instead of trying and probably failing to hit one of the nearby airports. Then in not missing a trick on the way to their quick, but not abrupt stop. Which left everybody intact enough for an evacuation and water rescue because that spot on that river at that time of day was luckily fairly full of large boats.
A lot went right that day by chance, and a lot went right by diligent effort of a bunch of people. Sully himself certainly to the fore.
For reference, here’s footage of the final seconds of Ethiopian Airlines 961, which was hijacked and ditched in 1996.
The original Airport was based on the fairly well-regarded novel by Arthur Hailey. So it had a bit of cachet totally missing in the sequels. It was actually one of my favorite books when I was a kid.
The big plot hole in the original Airport is that the cash-strapped bomber splurges on a ticket to Rome for his $150,000 insurance fraud. He couldn’t get a flight to Reno?
It had to be a trans-oceanic flight so the wreckage would never be recovered and the obvious bomb evidence never found. Chicago-Rome might not have been the shortest oceanic flight he could have bought, but it might have been the cheapest. Especially during winter.
The biggest flaw in Airport was that everyone else survived what would have been explosive decompression. The untenable physics was probably the biggest disaster of the movie.
I’d expect everyone to survive a decompression as long as the tail didn’t fall off. Lotsa hurt eardrums and maybe a ruptured lung or two. A few folks will get some joint soreness from a low-grade case of “the bends” over a couple of hours, but nothing life threatening; the differential pressure just isn’t that great, nor applied for that long once they start their emergency descent.
There’s nothing all that “explosive” about it, and the term has fallen out of use in aviation in favor of the more accurate “rapid decompression”.
I’d expect a much larger source of damage to passengers would be shrapnel from the lav and surrounding structure that’s blown inwards by the explosion into the last couple of rows of coach. The flow of explosive gasses and debris into the cabin from the lav is measured in milliseconds. The time for the rest of the air to escape from the cabin via the great big hole in the side is measured in seconds. Not a lot of seconds, but seconds nevertheless.
Whether a 707 would have held together with a bomb like that going off at that location is an interesting question. Lotta variables, including how big and good a bomb it was.
When Aloha Airlines Flight 243 underwent rapid decompression (to put it mildly), there was only one fatality – a flight attendant who was ejected.
Here are some vids of tests of bombs in cargo holds that are obviously unsurvivable. The airplane comes apart immediately. No way to know just how much explosive was packed where in these tests.
Airplane Bomb Test - YouTube & UK: BOEING 747 AIRLINER BLOWN UP TO TEST EFFECTS OF TERRORIST BOMBS - YouTube
That’s the one I was thinking of.
Watching it now I’m trying to figure out the dynamics that causes the wing to tilt upward - catching the wind like a sail? Did the wing spar snap or was the submerged engine dragging the wole wing down?
It looks like a crosswind landing (logical, parallel to the beach) so the one wing snagged the waves first. I suppose in hindsight there was no reason to adjust for crosswind - the ocean makes for a wide runway and “gear straight” is not an issue.
“Plot hole” to me is more like the old movie Broken Arrow (as I recall from over 25 years ago?) where the hero is left behind as they drive away in the desert, and then many miles later far down the road just appears out of nowhere to save the day without any obvious vehicle or explanation. What a car can cover in 10 minutes can take half a day to walk…
As to the second part, that wasn’t the crew flying then. that was the non-pilot hijackers, and they flat screwed up the landing / crash they wanted. Nobody was correcting for a crosswind or had any idea what proper ditching technique looks like.
As to the first part, I had to watch that a bunch of times to suss out what I think happened.
IMO … As the left side of the fuselage dug in, it rolled very quickly to the left. Which snapped the right wing spars near the root in overload in the negative G direction which is the weakest direction. Once the spars broke, the wing was still lifting, but only had its own weight to support. So it quickly climbed over the top of the wreckage.
As well, the yawing of the fuselage to the left at the same time served to accelerate and sling-shot the right wing into a higher effective AOA. As it came loose not only did the wing roll to the left, it pitched up to high AOA which quickly generated the lift to carry it up and not quite over the fuselage wreckage as that came to a stop. Of course as the wing continued to build AOA to a nearly flat plate condition, drag went up exponentially and it quickly ran out of energy and fell into the rest of the mess already sitting in / on the water.
All IMO.
This thread reminds me of the gi joe movie which involved an underwater base situated under an ice sheet. At some point an explosion happens on the ice sheet causing the ice to fall down and crush the base.
For Hollywood action that creates a failure for the viewer to ignore physics, I recommend the most recent Fast and Furious. (I forget which number it was -square root of minus one, perhaps?) Cars that flip and fly, people thrown or falling much too far to emerge unscathed, etc. This series has become progressively more detatched from reality.