To my knowledge only the Navy and Marine Corps use the F/A-18.* Does Air Force One remain the callsign in fixed wing aircraft even if the branch is different?
*Upon wikiing, Will Smith’s character is a Marine Corps pilot (his salute sucks BTW) from El Toro air station. That’s its own questionable detail, first because it’s usually a No-No for a commissioned officer’s wife to be a stripper. But second because Irvine is an hour away from LA. Is it normal for strippers to have such a long commute?
If I might be permitted a brief aside, what, exactly could they do about it if Lt. John Smith’s wife did turn out to be a stripper or a bohemian hippie or a similar “unbecoming” occupation? I can’t imagine they’re allowed to say “Sorry, Smitty, but the CO saw your wife at the Landing Strut last night, and now you’re not allowed to be an Officer anymore…”
I Am Not A JAG, but in the Uniform Code of Military Justice there is Article 133, Conducting Unbecoming an Officer and Gentleman (yes, really), and Article 134, the “we’ll get you for something” article.
Public association with known prostitutes and crimes of “moral turpitude” are common examples of Article 133 (obligatory About.com link). Strippers aren’t technically prostitutes, and maybe she’s only topless/no-touch, but it’s a grey area. Grey areas don’t really work in favor of the defense, especially on deliberately vaguely worded statutes.
That combined with Article 134, if the Marine Corps felt their aviator being married to a stripper was “prejudicial to good order and discipline” or “bring[s] discredit” upon the Marine Corps, then they could give him some grief over it if they wanted to.
Dude, he’s in the 3rd Marine Air Wing. Much looser over there, than in the Infantry Divisions.
Absolutely. My favorite bit about the first Die Hard was that the hero was just an ordinary cop in extraordinary circumstances and…this is the really important bit…scared shitless a lot of the time. An action hero the audience could empathize with. The ultimate “A man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do” plot.
John McClane, before jumping from the roof: *I promise I will never even THINK about going up in a tall building again. Oh, God. Please don’t let me die. *
Got me there, UncleBill. I’m East Coast. We flip shit if your bootlaces aren’t tight enough.
Difference betwenn Die Hard and ID4: I’ve seen lots of movies that were clearly “Die Hard on a train” or “Die Hard on a go-kart”. But ID4 is UNIQUE. No one’s tried to copy it since :D.
Any aircraft carrying the President is Air Force One.
The fact he was the pilot of the fighter may change that, I haven’t found anything about that.
Thanks for the info, Skylark! Useful stuff indeed. 
Should be easy enough, George Bush took the controls of a viking anti sub plane. Its call sign should have changed from what it was to AF1 if that was the case.
Declan
If we’re talking about selling a major movie with advertising than it starts with Jaws. Jaws is the birth of the event movie that everyone has to go see the first weekend. It was the first blockbuster if you will backed by significant television advertisements.
The difference being of course that Jaws is actually that good and wouldn’t need a first weekend boost but the strategy has been around a while.
I wouldn’t have liked it as much if I hadn’t seen Mars Attacks! the same year.
Incorrect, but an understandable mistake: Any air craft of the US Air Force carrying the President is Air Force One. There are two VC-25 aircraft that get the President’s paintjob, but only one of them is Air Force One at any given moment (the other, I understand, is a spare for when the other one needs maintenance). If you put the President in a C-17 or an F-16 or a KC-135 (the old 50’s tanker which, incidentally, is also the aircraft that the Secretary of the Air Force travels in, I think, though his is rigged out a little nicer, I’d bet).
Aircraft from the other branches of the armed services (Army, Navy, Marines, and presumably the Coast Guard) carrying the President would have branch specific prefixes, such as the real world examples of Marine One (Presidential helicopter), Army One (another Presidential helo, retired a while back), and Navy One (the aforementioned S-3 Viking).
ETA: I’d guess that typically, it’d depend on what branch the F/A-18 belonged to originally, but given the rather ad-hoc nature of the attack’s planning, and the state that the US Military was described as being in at the time, they might not have thought about such details and someone came up with a pithy unit callsign.
I always figured that Apple’s technology was based on the alien tech, so presumably Jeff Goldbloom just used a FireWire or parallel port in the alien fighter’s dashboard to plug his computer in. There is some implication that a lot of the humans’ current tech was reverse engineered to begin with.
And sure, there’s lots of details to nitpick. Why do you think we geeks love Babylon 5 and Star Trek so much?