I think you can really project yourself into that situation, because you wouldn't have any idea what's going on. You're just going along for the ride. Zemeckis made everything go wrong that could go wrong for the doomed Federal Express airplane. Not only was there decompression, but the plane went down into the eye of a raging storm. The scene occurs in real time, the time it would take for a small plane to dive 30,000 feet.
Hanks is alone on screen, with very few lines, for more than an hour of the movie.
This one would be different. If we can make this work, this would be really cool. It wasn't because we wanted to do this as an exercise. I'm sure, the challenge for Tom as an actor. He said he wouldn't have attempted it without the star power of Tom Hanks.