Just Plane Wrong: Difference between revisions

Several factors conspire to vex aviation fans:

* '''Cost and Availability of Aircraft:''' Sure, scoring a four-seater Cherokee or Cessna might be as easy as walking down to the nearest airfield and saying "Who wants to be in a movie?", but larger or older aircraft, especially [[World War II]] era, are expensive, rare, and require special care and insurance. Before the advent of CG, most movie makers resorted to modifying or painting more commonly-available training aircraft to play the part of warbirds in movies (see [[Weapons Understudies]]). Availability can also be affected by the period during which the work was filmed—it's not like the Air Force was just gonna give you the keys to their high-altitude spy planes during the [[Cold War]] and the Soviets wouldn't let you touch theirs. Thus many films rely heavily on [[Stock Footage]].

* On shows that ''do'' focus on aviation heavily or primarily, all aspects of aviation, especially aerodynamics, can and ''will'' take a backseat to:

** [[Improbable Piloting Skills]] and its cousin, [[Ace Pilot]]

** [[Bottomless Magazines]]/[[Hyperspace Arsenal]]

* Most of the times, '''[[They Just Didn't Care|they just don't care]]'''. This is more evident in illustrated or animated media, where aircraft are depicted with unspeakable levels of carelessness and thoughtlessness—even when everything else is depicted in a realistic and accurate manner.

** Oh, and any aircraft with one engine and two or four seats is a Cessna according to the news, regardless of its actual manufacturer, although this may have a lot to do with [[Popcultural Osmosis]], in the same way that a vacuum cleaner is always referred to as a "hoover" in the UK, for instance.

 

This trope is most certainly not limited to aviation—for the naval equivalent, see [[Artistic License Ships]], for railroading examples see [[Just Train Wrong]], and for military vehicles see [[Tanks but No Tanks]].

 

== General ==

** [[Fridge Brilliance]]: given the movie's theme of humanity uniting in the face of extraterrestrial aggressors, the idea of Britain operating its air force out of Iraq seems less ridiculous: one has a target, the other has the necessary hardware, and it's either [[Enemy Mine|co-operate in the name of survival]] or [[Divided We Fall|hang separately]]. But that doesn't explain the F-16s, though, which the RAF does not (and has never) operate.

*** Again the novelizations gets this right. The RAF pilots where flying Saudi marked Tornadoes, which they where delivering to the Saudi Air Force before all hell broke loose and they where forced to land on a dry lake-bed in the middle of the dessert together with fighters from every Air Force in the Middle East. The [[Fridge Brilliance]] is lampshaded in the book when one of the RAF pilots remarks on the impressive and impossible sight of Israeli F-15s parked next to Syrian Migs, and Iraqi fighters parked next to Iranians, when just two days before everyone of those fighters would have shot at every-other fighter present, except, maybe, those belonging to his Air Force.

* Toward the end of the rescue in the 1986 movie ''The Delta Force'', a Boeing 707 is shown practically bulletproof in that it takes fire from Kalashnikov rifles as it is taking off only to have the bullets [[Bullet Sparks|apparently glance off its metal skin]]. In real life, such a plane's relatively thin aluminum skin would be perforated and the plane rendered unsafe or unable to fly. There's also the issue of supposedly USAF C-130s having Israeli Air Force numbers (since the C-130s were leased from the Israeli military for the film), but that issue is quite minor and easily overlooked compared to the [[Immune to Bullets|Bulletproof Boeing]].

* ''[[Midway]]'' was made with essentially no special-effects budget. One effect of this is that flying scenes are done with whatever [[Stock Footage]] they could get their hands on. It's common for airplanes to change model in mid-flight; the most [[Egregious]] example is an airplane that makes its landing approach as a twin-propeller-engine dive-bomber, but crashes onto the carrier's flight deck as a single-engine jet fighter (a McDonnell Banshee).

** Heat seeking missiles target the hot metal of the aircraft, not the exhaust, so turning off the engines wouldn't do anything.

*** Modern heat seeking missiles are all-aspect (meaning they can target an aircraft from any angle). Early heat-seeking missiles, like many versions of the Sidewinder (the AIM-9B, 9D, 9E, 9G, 9H, 9J, 9N, and 9P), were rear-aspect missiles, meaning they had to lock onto the exhaust of an enemy aircraft to provide the best chance of hitting. They were very easily distracted by flares, or even the sun. Therefore, if the missile were one of the older rear-aspect types, it is possible (but unlikely) that turning off the engine and doing a hammerhead stall would have caused it to lose its target lock. The mystery is how Murdock would have known the missile was a rear-aspect type. For the sake of completeness, note that the AIM-9L was the first all-aspect Sidewinder, followed by the -9M in 1982 and the -9X in late 2003.

** Specifically, it's the decommissioned 747 that lives on the ''[[Top Gear]]'' test track.

** In fairness, it does differ from a normal 747 in that it has only two engine nacelles, each holding a pair of engines, and the external fuel tanks. They did try.

** In one episode, it is clear that the people making the show believe that any twinjet in an American Airlines livery must be an A300.

* In ''[[The Comic Strip Presents]]'' episode "Four Men in a Plane", our heroes take off for the middle east in a four-engined airliner, but when they land it's only got two engines. (It's not the plane of the title, by the way—that is a single-engined light aircraft.)

* Bizarrely, [[The BBC]] adaptation of ''[[The Machine Gunners (Literature)|The Machine Gunners]]'' changes the downed bomber from which the machine gun is stolen from a Heinkel He 111 to a Junkers Ju 52. Guess which one of these German aircraft ''wasn't'' in service as a bomber during 1941.