Movies

Having had so much time off during the pandemic, I’ve spent an alarming amount of it watching streaming services such as Amazon Prime and Netflix – and what better way to keep current than with an aeroplane movie? But the cockpit does not look the same to Hollywood producers as it does to pilots, chiefly in the sense that we are governed by SOPs and the laws of physics. So, join me as I don my anorak and try to find the economy, business and first class of Hollywood’s aviation movies. By First Officer Tori Bottomley 7500, 2019 Genre: Action thriller Rating: As you might expect from the title, this film involves a hijacking. Departing from Berlin, it starts slowly, but realistically. Checks are done, a brief is given, and the RT is mostly there. So far, I am impressed with the attention to detail and authentic portrayal. As they roll down the taxiways, the pilots are told there will be turbulence on take-off. There is no reaction to this or the risks involved. As a member of a profession that is risk-obsessed, this bothered me – but I guess an audience can only tolerate so many SOPs before they lose interest. This is when I began shouting for him to ‘just do something!’ Being taken alive is one of the many nightmares that keep us up at night, so Joseph Gordon- Levitt’s reactions as first officer Tobias Ellis are understandable. Unfortunately, they are tediously slow. Ellis starts off well and regains control of the aircraft fairly quickly, but he makes the mistake of engaging with and watching the terrorists through the monitor, witnessing horrific acts of violence and delaying their arrival. This is when I began shouting for him to ‘just do something!’ With a terrorist in the cockpit, a dying captain next to him and people being murdered in the galley, he is not in an ideal working situation, but surely one you would want to be out of ASAP. With the stress of the situation, Ellis appears to lose all sense of time, and any form of decision-making or prioritisation is neglected. When he arrives at Hanover, there is little planning besides a quick mumbled brief to himself and, of course, when they arrive it is very bumpy. By this point, Ellis’s left arm – which was stabbed during the scuffle – has given up, so he has to persuade one of the terrorists to operate the thrust levers. Although stressful to watch, the main omissions were little things, such as buttons not illuminating when engaged and a warning siren that definitely does not belong on an Airbus. The actor playing the captain was formerly an airline pilot, which may explain why this film is more convincing than many others. Generally, it was pretty representative, and Gordon-Levitt’s performance was as close to realistic as you can expect from Hollywood. Flight, 2012 Genre: Drama thriller Rating: The question I am left with after watching this film is: can an airliner fly upside down? According to aircraft manufacturers, the answer is categorically no. A drug-addled captain, ‘Whip’ Whitaker, begins a flight from Orlando when disaster strikes. With no way to prevent a crash landing, he tries to avoid colliding with a highly populated area by flying the MD-80 upside down until they can reach a field. The rest of the film takes us through the court proceedings with NTSB that follow. Although he saves the day, Captain Whitaker seems like a nightmare to work with. After a worrying entrance that makes the first officer doubt the health of his colleague, they take off into severe turbulence and the captain ignores pretty much everything the first officer says from there on in. Whitaker ignores pretty much everything the first officer says Whitaker then chooses to level off and descend to 6000ft to chase a gap in the weather. His theory, I assume, is to get to the gap below where the clouds expand and envelop it, but “punching through it”? Surely Vturb is a more appropriate speed than Vmo! Later in the flight, a loud bang is followed by a loss of vertical control, and they enter a dive. This part of the flight is loosely inspired by the Alaska Airlines 261 MD-83 crash in 2000. After a failure of the horizontal stabiliser trim system, the crew lost control of the aircraft and entered a series of vertical dives as the crew tried to re-establish stable flight. They found themselves inverted and then tried to re-enter the inverted state. The transcript says, ‘gotta get it over again... at least upside down we’re flyin’.’ Less than 20 seconds later, the transcript stops. The pilot adviser for the film justified the sequence by claiming the aircraft could sustain inverted flight for ‘a little bit’, which I doubt would extend to the minute or so that Whitaker did. Despite this, I found myself wanting to put these inaccuracies aside for what becomes a compelling story with some complex characters. Left behind, 2014 Genre: Action thriller Rating: If you could buy seats in the cargo bay, this film would be the equivalent. I’m not quite sure what I was expecting when I saw Nicolas Cage was the lead, but, at a minimum, I hoped it would be entertaining. Unfortunately, I don’t even think I can say that after putting myself through the painful experience of watching it. Even heart-throb Chad Michael Murray was unable to redeem this performance. Slated by critics as one of the most moronic films ever made, Cage exhibited the level of cockpit familiarity often seen in six-year-old children at an aeroplane museum. The premise of the film is that, during a flight from New York to London, a biblical rapture occurs and half the world’s population vanishes into thin air, including some of the passengers and crew. Cage, who was about to cheat on his wife with the cabin manager, captains the aircraft after the first officer vanishes and somehow manages to save the day, despite doing nearly everything wrong. The captain arrives at the airport without a briefcase or luggage, despite going on a long-haul flight with a layover. Furthermore, although operating single-pilot for the majority of the flight, Cage leaves the cockpit multiple times and wears his headset for less than a minute during the entire movie. When he eventually loses the autopilot, he still does not interact with the controls, and thrashes the throttles around like an impatient toddler. HF radio communications can be tough at the best of times over the Atlantic. Luckily for Cage, he is met with silence instead of a sassy reply when he uses the wrong phraseology. However, with the controllers and the pilots of an oncoming aircraft “missing in action”, Cage soon finds himself with a TCAS alert. Of course, he takes no action until it is too late, and they have an airborne collision. The impact punctures a fuel tank and damages the elevators, which is met with little more than a shrug when finally noticed by the pilot. When the fuel leak is also discovered, he decides to just “see what happens” instead of undertaking any kind of procedure, even though they are flying over the Atlantic Ocean. Thankfully for the passengers, not all of the fuel is lost and they reach a landing site. With no way to see it, though, he asks his daughter to illuminate the threshold of a makeshift runway, leading him to fly a fuel- soaked aeroplane through a line of flames before he hits the tarmac. To summarise: I wasted two hours of my life so that you don’t have to. Next time this is playing, I sincerely hope I am left behind. When the captain loses autopilot, he thrashes the throttle around like an impatient toddler MOVIES stegdoowyllwroon gaHbotuatahvi Wation