There was a TV movie in the '80s called Starflight: The Plane That Couldn’t Land, about a hypersonic airliner which is sabotaged and accidentally goes into orbit. The physics in that one are beyond laughable.
wasnt there an airport movie where someone shot it down with a missile or something because he had some grievance against the plane company?
The Concorde … Airport '79?
While we’re on the topic of Hollywood Stupid, how about Die Hard where Willis drops a full floor down the vent shaft yet catches himself the next floor down, by the fingertips, on a horizontal duct opening? Ignoring, of course, that unless he failed to grip, it would have either ripped his fingertips off or the edge slice them off.
Again, this is Hollywood Stupid, not a plot hole. A plot hole would be if he dropped his gun down the shaft but came out the duct carrying a gun since that would be critical to the action. As opposed to a continuity error, which would be if he comes out of the duct wearing his suit jacket after leaving it on the roof above.
(Apparently there’s a classic show from the 70’s continuity error where the character goes into the revolving doors wearing a dress and she comes out the other side in a shirt and trousers. Or Han Solo being frozen in carbonite, unable to determine if he should wear his vest or not, as it appears and disappears with the angle of each shot - unless Lucas fixed that in the DVD edition)
There were several deliberate continuity errors in which … His Wife and Her Lover enter the bathroom to engage in trystery and their attire changes between the outside shot and the inside shot from ordinary looking clothing to solid white or red outfits.
The original Airport was better than any of the sequels IMHO. The air disaster was climactic to the story but not all there was to it. Still, all the sequels are a guilty pleasure of mine. I haven’t seen the Concorde one but if it ever comes on Prime or Netflix I’ll have to watch it at least once.
The scene at the very end of Airport, when he measures the hole, is a funny callback to the novel which you had to have read in order to get the joke.
If you did a full fuel dump before ditching, it would help. The fuel tanks are sealed . Would not fill with water and aid flotation. But fuel is only a small percentage of craft weight. 15 percent or so. It would help keep the craft higher in the water.
Fuel tanks are not sealed. If they were then as we pumped fuel out to the engines a partial vacuum would form in the tanks. Tanks are open to the air via a vent /overflow system
Fuel is lighter than water, but air is lighter yet. Having mostly empty tanks will aid flotation until water fills the tanks via the vent ports.
If undamaged the airplane would probably float longer, but much lower, with full tanks vs empty.
There do have to be vents of course.
But they may be located where water could easily intrude. They will be filtered. They may also only be open under certain states. To avoid unwanted vapour escape. Probably varies widely across craft. But you do not want stuff coming in through those vents besides clean air.
That one always troubled me, too. He missed the duct he was trying for and bounced off the wall, so as he was falling he’d be moving away from the duct that he did grab. And there’s no reason to have handholds inside the duct, so it would be damn hard to pull himself up and into the duct. I don’t know if it’s completely impossible, but it does strain credibility.
However, later movies in the franchise have even worse errors. In the second Die Hard, the air traffic controllers are looking for a transmitter so they can warn the planes in their area about what’s going on. No one seems to realize that every plane parked on the ground has a transmitter in it.
You can rent all of the series for $4 each on Prime.
Looks like there were 4 movies: Airport, Airport '75, Airport '77 and Airport '79.
'75 is a crash inti a small plane that kills the pilot
'77 is the hijacked underwater one
'79 is the Concorde going to the Moscow Olympics but has to dodge Russian air defense for some reason.
Once you fall a full floor, say 10 feet, my 50-year-old physics lessons say you’re travelling about 25fps. For Willis, that’s about 200lb at that speed. I don’t think your first two joints of your fingers can stop that momentum, even if there are no sharp edges to slice the fingers off anyway. Plus, being able to grasp in time, and the horizontal momentum… At 25fps, you have 2/25th (about 1/12) of a second to stick your fingers in.
But that’s just Hollywood Stupid Physics. A plot hole would be if he crawled out of the ducts the floor below and his same gun was sitting on a desk there waiting for him.
If it was a 3-meter fall, McClane accelerated to about 7.7 m/s in that time. He then has maybe 0.5 meters of arm length to decelerate, which takes 0.13 s. That’s 60 m/s^2, not counting gravity, which adds another 10. So a 90 kg McClane has to hold the equivalent of 630 kg for an eighth of a second.
It’s well beyond any weightlifting record, though those are over a longer period. And it’s only a small multiple beyond those. So while it’s still cartoon physics, it’s not off by a factor of 100 or whatever like so much other stuff.
The first three started streaming on Netflix in May, 2023. I assumed the appearance of the movies on Netflix and the start of this thread were not a coincidence.
I was an air traffic controller for many years, and Die Hard 2 is a laff riot (I do enjoy the movie for what it is, but the ATC/aviation scenes are breathtakingly dumb).
-
If an airport is closed/unavailable, arrivals don’t just circle until they run out of fuel and crash. In fact, FAA rules require aircraft to have an alternate airport in their flight plan and enough fuel to get there.
-
There are plenty of airports near Dulles, from Reagan National to BWI to Philadelphia … even Pittsburgh and New York aren’t that far away.
-
As you mentioned, every aircraft on the ground had its own radio transmitter, and ATC facilities have emergency transmitters of their own.
-
You can’t adjust the signal of an ILS approach to make the flight path end underground. I suppose you might conceivably, maybe, flatten out the glideslope so an arrival might hit an obstruction on the approach path … but that would take a lot more work than tapping a few buttons on the computer. The glideslope signal starts from the antenna based on the ground - you can’t make it magically come from under the surface.
-
Best of all, the tower manager’s little speech to all the controllers - “stack em, pack em, and rack em” - has every single controller desperately working this emergency situation in bad weather suddenly stop, turn away from their displays, and quietly listen. Did they just tell all their aircraft to “standby” for a few minutes while they were speeched at?
They do reference that in the movie. The airport manager says that other nearby airports are shut down because of the storm. I think he specifically calls out National.
I always suspected (but wasn’t sure) that the glide slope transmitter was hardware-based, not software. If you want to change the elevation by 200 feet (as they did in the movie), you have to go out and dig a 200-foot-deep hole and put the transmitter at the bottom.
ILS is 1940s tech. The current transmitters are of course solid state radios, and the current receivers are often software defined radios. But the signal topology and the antenna arrays are pretty much 1940s radio engineering.