History Main / JustPlaneWrong

** Even something as sizeable and lumbering as a commercial passenger jet can glide for several dozen miles ([[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_Transat_Flight_236 Air Transat Flight 236]] managed unpowered flight for over 100 miles before making an emergency landing - there were no fatalities) before having to crash-land, and even calling it a "crash landing" in this case can be a misnomer, as a skilled pilot can land a plane in this manner ''without'' it exploding into an explosive fiery fireball explosion of flaming exploding death.
** Also the [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gimli_Glider Gimli Glider (Air Canada Flight 143),]] [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Airways_Flight_9 British Airways Flight 009,]] and [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/US_Airways_Flight_1549 US Airways 1549 ("Miracle on the Hudson").]]

* An airplane that loses a wing as the result of an accident or combat will roll towards the absent wing. Both wings produce lift; if one disappears, the asymmetric forces will cause this rotation. Now that you know this you will never be able to watch ''King Kong'', ''Flyboys'', ''Pearl Harbor'', or any other movie with CGI air combat sequences again without cringing.

* A [[http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/4935429/BNP-uses-Polish-Spitfire-in-anti-immigration-poster.html 2009 leaflet for the British National Party in the UK]] (which also had all the "supporters'" pictures be of people who weren't actually British or who had called them a bunch of racist douchebags) had a picture of a Spitfire. However, the letters "RF" were clearly visible on it. This quickly identified the aircraft as from [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No._303_Polish_Fighter_Squadron 303 Squadron]]. That's right — the BNP were campaigning against Polish migrant workers, using an aircraft which was manned by Polish ace pilots.

* Combat between modern aircraft is often depicted in fiction as taking place within a spitting distance of each other. In reality, the aircraft are generally several miles apart. Even worse, most missiles wouldn't work at the insanely close range depicted by Hollywood. The short-distance missile that most U.S. fighter jets use is the Sidewinder, [[ArbitraryMinimumrange which still has a minimum range of 0.6 miles.]] That's right: Their "emergency shotgun" close-distance weapon is still only good at more than a half-mile away.[[note]] Most modern fighters have a gun, which operates when the range is too close for missiles. And even those guns tend to have a range of a kilometer or more.[[/note]]

* In ''Film/HomeAlone'', the [=McCallisters=] take a morning flight from Chicago to Paris. While airlines do have direct flights between the two cities, flights from the United States to Europe take off in the evening in order to take advantage of the time zone difference.

* ''VideoGame/BomberCrew'' is a crew management simulator of a British Lancaster (and in a DLC campaign, an American B-17) bomber. Aside from only having a pilot with no co-pilot or auto-pilot, causing the plane to begin to plunge to the ground whenever he steps away from the controls, it also features the ability of the crew to climb ''out on the wing'' to fix damaged engines - [[RealityIsUnrealistic which did indeed happen once]], in an incident that earned [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_Cyril_Jackson the sergeant involved]] a Victoria Cross and a whole forest of AluminumChristmasTrees.

* ''Series/BlackSheepSquadron'' used slightly-modified North American AT-6 trainer aircraft (different cockpit canopies) as Mitsubishi [=A6M=] "Zeros"/"Zekes". The AT-6 is a noticeably larger and somewhat differently-shaped aircraft than a Zero.
** The T-6s were ones originally rebuilt to "impersonate" [=A6M2=] "Zekes" for the 1970 movie ''Tora! Tora! Tora!''. Those "Zekes" got around; they later showed up in the 1980 time-travel movie ''Film/TheFinalCountdown'', which had the nuclear carrier USS ''Nimitz'' warped back to the late afternoon of December 6, 1941, just west of Hawaii...

* Mostly averted in the ''VideoGame/AceCombat'' series, though there are occasional oddities — in the real world, the [[RareVehicles Su-47 Berkut]] is a tech demo, and only one exists. In the games, multiple Su-47s are flown in battle by the various sides, all the way up to whole squadrons using the model, like Gault in ''The Belkan War''. Also subverted on occasion, however; for example, both the X-02 Wyvern and the ADF-01 Falken superfighters, which look implausibly cool, have been modeled in the realistic flight sim X-Plane and successfully proven to be airworthy under modern flight knowledge limitations. This far from stops fanboys of Glorious Mother Russia insisting in Website/YouTube comments that no pesky American jet should be able to keep up with their beloved [=MiGs=] and Sukhois, never mind score a gunkill.

* In ''VideoGame/MetalGearSolid3SnakeEater'' Volgin has a great number of Mi-24 Hind helicopters under his command, but the game takes place in 1964, six years before the helicopter went into production and even the first prototype was still very early in development. To give the designers some credit, the helicopters are the early Hind-A version with the polygonal canopy, instead of the iconic bubble canopy of the Hind-D and later models, making it an example of [[RareVehicles Rare Helicopters]]. It's also worth noting that the game explains that Volgin has priority access to what was at the time the cutting edge of Soviet equipment, and in a Codec conversation you find out that this is the first time anyone from the West has encountered the design, with Snake being the one who initially suggests the "Hind" callsign based on the fact that it looks to be a sleeker derivative of the Mi-8 Hip (although that potentially opens another can of worms when you consider the Mi-8 wasn't actually adopted by the Soviet military until '67).

** The 2012 Christmas episode opened with a fake commercial making fun of Northwest Airlines, 4 years after Northwest ceased to exist after merging with Delta. Might overlap with WereStillRelevantDammit.

This trope is most certainly not limited to aviation—for the naval equivalent, see ArtisticLicenseShips, for railroading examples see JustTrainWrong, and for military vehicles and regular cars see TanksButNoTanks and ArtisticLicenseCars respectively. A subtrope is EveryHelicopterIsAHuey.

* ''F/A-18 Hornet'' had you fighting Soviet [=MiG=]-27s and Su-27s in the Persian Gulf. The only time [=MiGs=] were used by Iraq was during the 1985 Iran-Iraq War; during the Gulf War, they had Su-25s, but not -27s. On the US side, the F-16 Fighting Falcon featured in later editions is sometimes seen taking off from or landing on an aircraft carrier, which it is incapable of in real life (the Navy only ''very'' briefly considered adopting a navalized variant of the F-16, the Vought Model 1600,[[note]]the US Navy does operate a handful of F-16s, but only in [[WeaponsUnderstudies adversary squadrons]], and they're emphatically ''not'' carrier-capable.[[/note]] before settling on the Northrop YF-17 instead).

* In the ''Literature/{{Animorphs}}'' book "The Deception", Ax (in a human morph) uses an F-14 fighter carrying a nuclear bomb to threaten the Yeerks. The F-14 isn't, and never was, capable of carrying nuclear weapons-- it was developed as an interceptor, and it was only late in its career that it gained the ability to carry any bombs at all.

** Kayla Watts, a major supporting character in ''Film/JurassicWorldDominion'', is a pilot of a C-119 Flying Boxcar cargo plane. In real life, the last airworthy C-119s were scrapped or donated to museums starting in the late 1990s, with the very last one being retired in 2004. The movie, however, is set in 2022.

** The US built [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northrop_F-5 F-5E Tiger II]] stood in for [=MiGs=], just as various models of Sikorsky helicopters with wings stuck on have had to stand in for Soviet/Russian Mi-24 "Hind" gunships. And the aircraft was called a [=MiG=]-28 — no such bird exists due to naming conventions.[[note]]Mikoyan have always built fighters. Back in the Cold War days, in addition to indicating the design bureau ("[=MiG=]", "Su", "Tu", "Yak", etc.), Soviet designations made the distinction between fighters and other aircraft; odd numbers were fighters, even ones bombers and everything else (though with specialized ground attack aircraft like the Su-25, the difference did get fuzzy at times, and the iconic "Bear" four-engine heavy bomber inexplicably ended up with the Tu-95 designation, used internally by the design bureau, instead of the official Tu-20 designation issued by the Red Air Force). So there was a [=MiG-27=] and a [=MiG-29=], but no -28. There was at the time no [=MiG-33 or -35=] (the former was a WorkingTitle for the [=MiG-29, the latter a MiG-29=] variant that didn't fly until 2007), so either of these names would've been better for a fictional [=MiG=].[[/note]] Additionally, there were no fixed-wing Soviet naval aircraft in service at the time other than the Yak-38, an underpowered Harrier knock-off.[[note]]It was supposed to just be a technology demonstrator for VTOL but Soviet Premier Leonid Brezhnev ordered it built as a production fighter for no adequately explained reason.[[/note]] This may be [[AcceptableBreaksFromReality somewhat justified]], since the alternative of calling the Tigers by the name of a ''real'' Soviet plane would arguably be worse--though one plane that ''could'' have been used here would have been the Soviet Air Force [=MiG-29=], which kind of looks like an F-15 if you squint.

** They got actual flying Zeroes with the proper engines and everything - then painted them ''with Imperial Army markings.'' The Japanese army ''never'' flew the Mitsubishi [=A6M=], instead favoring the lighter, [[UpToEleven even more maneuverable]], Nakajima [=Ki-43=], called the ''Hayabusa'' (Peregrine Falcon) by the Japanese and [[ReportingNames "Oscar"]] by the Allies. Moreover, the Zeroes present in the attack on Pearl Harbor (when they're not shifting into [=D3A1=] "Val" dive-bombers between camera angles) are painted green; the real Imperial Japanese Navy painted Zeroes grey in 1941, with the green paint scheme not being used until '43. %%Which army markings are they given, American or Japanese?

* As it's prone to doing, ''TabletopGame/{{Warhammer 40000}}'' takes this UpToEleven. While there are plenty of spacecraft, dropships and SSTO airplanes (ahem Thunderhawk) that belong in the ArtisticLicensePhysics category, the Imperial Navy's air fighters deserve a very honorable mention on this page. Most of them are modelled to resemble WWII propeller fighters but with jets instead of propellers, yet they supposedly can achieve speeds in excess of Mach 2. With leading edges a scale foot thick, real world aerodynamics would conspire to prevent this (though tough 40K materials in turn would conspire to prevent real life aerodynamics). Brute force can make anything fly, however it has rather greater trouble making anything ''turn'': one doesn’t put the engine in the front in supersonic fighters, because that moves the center of weight fore of the center of pressure, and would make the fighter so stable in supersonic flight that no amount of control force would allow it to maneuver. Let's not even get started on the Orks, Chaos and Dark Eldar aircraft, especially since the latter two belong in the ArtisticLicensePhysics category by working on magic and very advanced technology, indistinguishable from magic as per Clarks Law of Science Fiction. The only aircraft that could maybe achieve their stated performance, and that's a very big maybe, are the Eldar and Tau.

* In ''VideoGame/SwordOfTheStars II'', both the [[http://sots2.rorschach.net/File:Zuul_Shut_Shut_2.jpg Horde]] and [[http://sots2.rorschach.net/File:Liir_Shut_Shut_2.jpg Prester]] Zuul have ''rotors'' on their trans-atmospheric assault shuttles. Bad enough. But the Prester Zuul's [[http://sots2.rorschach.net/File:Liir_HvyShut_Shut_2.jpg Heavy Assault Shuttle]] takes it UpToEleven with diagonally-canted rotors. There are no words.

* '''ViewersAreMorons:''' As previously stated, most people won't be able to tell the difference between different aircraft types, or don't care. The only commercial aircraft that anyone in the audience can reasonably be expected to recognize are the Boeing 747 and Airbus A380, which (especially in older films and shows) tend to go to glamorous faraway places; other commercial aircraft are relatively interchangeable, and more likely to be headed somewhere pedestrian. Most of the time, the number of engines, wing configuration, or manufacturer won't even have to match what the actors are calling it—what airplane was in the background shot is not something most viewers are going to question (or are going to care to question).

* In ''Film/PacificRim'', the F-22 Raptors are shown firing two guns, but the production craft only has one (on the right side). At least the tracer rounds are coming from the right spot.

** {{Enforced}} with the choice to use the F/A-18 Super Hornet in the film over the F-35C Lightning II. The InUniverse reason for choice is that the target is protected by GPS jamming. This is [[{{Handwave}} a fairly threadbare excuse]]: the F-35C is quite capable of using the same laser-guided munitions that were employed in the film, and its stealth features would make the approach significantly easier. The [[RealLifeWritesThePlot real-world reason]] is that the F-35C is unsuitable for filming actors in a real aircraft because it doesn't come in a two-seat model ''a la'' the F/A-18F (which Phoenix and Payback fly in the film),[[note]]A few foreign buyers including Israel have proposed creating a two-seat variant of the F-35A, but the US Navy is the only customer for the navalized C variant: only the US, France, and China operate CATOBAR aircraft carriers, all of whom build their own naval aircraft.[[/note]] and that the Navy couldn't spare any for filming since they had only entered service in February 2019.

* ''Film/TopGunMaverick'' is better about this, though not perfect. It repeats the mistakes with fighter cannons acting like machine guns and absurdly short combat ranges, though the latter is mitigated by the fact that the pilots are practicing for and then implementing an extremely low-altitude AirstrikeImpossible mission. Additionally, the film uses CGI Sukhoi-57s to represent the "fifth-generation fighters" of the again-unnamed enemy country. While this is better than the WeaponsUnderstudies approach of the original film, at time of release, only 16 Su-57s had been built due to TroubledProduction and Russia's financial issues, ten of which were test models and the other six being in Russian Air Force hands.

** Most of the school/practice battles in ''Top Gun'' have planes within rock-throwing distance of each other, an astoundingly unsafe situation as well as being too close for missiles, sensors, guns, and engines to work any more. The plot-crucial engine flameout should've happened about twenty times before it did. Remember that your plane's engine(s) can't breathe exhaust any better than you can. This example at least has some justification: Originally the crew shot fight scenes at realistic engagement distances...only to realize that said scenes would look incredibly boring on film.

* Averted in, of all things, ''Film/DrStrangelove'': not only was the B-52 correct in exterior shots (save for casting the shadow of a B-17 [[note]] that B-17 shadow is of the camera plane[[/note]]), the B-52's cockpit avionics, especially the arming console, were so accurate that the Air Force freaked out (the bomber's interior was still classified). As it happened, [[Creator/StanleyKubrick Kubrick]] and his crew were familiar with B-17s and B-29s [[DuringTheWar from the War]] and had simply done an amazing job of extrapolation.

* Averted in, of all things, ''Film/DrStrangelove'': not only was the B-52 correct in exterior shots (save for casting the shadow of a B-17), the B-52's cockpit avionics, especially the arming console, were so accurate that the Air Force freaked out (the bomber's interior was still classified). As it happened, [[Creator/StanleyKubrick Kubrick]] and his crew were familiar with B-17s and B-29s [[DuringTheWar from the War]] and had simply done an amazing job of extrapolation.

* The [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Messerschmitt_Bf_108 Messerschmitt [=Bf108=] Taifun]] trainer shows up playing German fighters in several 1960s war films, notably ''633 Squadron'' and ''Film/TheLongestDay''. The [=Bf108=] is a relatively common civil aircraft (they continued to be built in France after the war as the Nord 1000) that bears an unmistakable family resemblence to the [=Bf109=] fighter.

** If you freeze-frame during the part of the final battle when all the fighter planes are forming up, you can see a couple of Harriers, A-10s and F-16s in the mix, however that's the only time you ever see them and they're way in the background. They only budgeted for one extreme-detail fighter CG-model, which was the F/A-18. That's why there was such a fuckload of just those (more than than have ever existedat any point in history, even ''after'' the aliens shot down the entire first counterattack earlier in the movie) for the finale.

* In the film version of ''Film/TheHuntForRedOctober'', the crash of an F-14 Tomcat is depicted using StockFootage of an F9F Panther from the UsefulNotes/KoreanWar. The crash being presented through a low-resolution CRT monitor and the footage focusing on the aircraft's burning nose section tumbling across the deck somewhat helps obfuscate this, but if you pay attention during the first second or so it becomes obvious.

** ''ForYourEyesOnly'' has a minor example. In the opening James Bond flies a helicopter with both hands on the same stick, a so-called cyclic stick (for directional control). He would need one hand to operate the collective/throttle lever. (Averted later on: contrary to most Cold War movies, the helicopter that transports General Gogol is an actual Polish-made MiL Mi-6, accurate for a Russian general in the early 1980s.)

** Army B-26s from Midway attack the Japanese fleet in a level bombing attack. Midway ''did'' contribute B-26s to the battle, however they were armed with ''torpedoes'', not bombs. There was a level bombing attack against the Japanese as well,[[note]]two, in fact: the very first action of the day unsuccessfully attacked the transports carrying the invasion force, and a second against the carriers later in the day[[/note]] however this was carried out by B-17s ([[RuleOfThree also]] entirely absent from the film). Interestingly, the movie does feature a notable event involving a crashing B-26 which almost struck one of the Japanese carriers, with the captain of said carrier dismissing a sailor's question whether it was [[RammingAlwaysWorks intentional]] by saying "[[the Americans]] are not ''that'' brave," but doesn't mention the more infamous incident of the B-26, ''Suzie-Q'', which [[BuzzingTheDeck strafed the deck]] of the ''Akagi'', killing two men, and supposedly contributed to Nagumo ordering another attack on Midway instead of holding his planes in reserve for anti-ship operations as ordered.

* Averted in Canadian film ''Arrow'' which used a very accurate fiberglass replica of the real CF-105 interceptor built by an enthusiast. Rumor has that, when the completed prototypes were being destroyed in the movie-- which is why no real Arrow survives today--the film crew actually cut up the replica they were using to pieces, to the dismay of the guy who built (and still owned) it.