Beyond Belief for Pilots

Rating: 5/10 (19 March 2004)

Having seen the first, we rented the second. As the film played, my wife noted I was mumbling under my breath and making spluttering sounds. For a film to be effective, it has to "bring the viewer into it," and to do this, it must be convincingly realistic. This one isn't.
To pilots, this film is totally unbelievable. All airliners fly under Instrument Flight Rules, which means that they are in continual radio contact from the time they taxi before takeoff until after they've cleared the active runway at the destination airport. So presuming the tower at Dulles was taken over by terrorists and couldn't communicate, after a pilot tried to reach the tower (or more likely Approach Control), they'd merely switch back to en route control and advise them that they couldn't reach Dulles, and request to be vectored to another airport (with the snow conditions, Bermuda might have had a lot of visitors were that done).
Well, let's say that all the airline captains aloft were simultaneously struck with the stupids and decided to orbit Dulles in a stack. Without direction from a controller, just how are they supposed to get into a safe stack, and without running into each other? More likely, they'd talk to each other on the tower frequency and decide to go elsewhere. (A previous reviewer pointed out that any aircraft on the field could be used to transmit The Message McClain was trying to get to the pilots, so there was no real problem.)
The "electronically lowering the glidepath" trick wouldn't work, either. If it could have been done, the pilot before landing would check the altimeter(s) in the aircraft and would notice the height discrepancies. Nobody's going to plan a flare below ground level.
There's so much of that stuff in the picture that I was getting increasingly irritated as the film dragged on. Liked One and Three, but the errors are so glaring that I couldn't stand the thought of seeing it again.