!2004 Film
* None of these guys have any sort of survival instincts. A few examples:
** When it rains, no one bothers to attempt to catch any of the water after they've been doing nothing but rationing water the whole time. It doesn't even occur to anyone at any point.
*** They actually did, but then the lightning striking the plane happened.
** Horrible storm ahead? No problem. Fly directly into it.
** When the one guy is saying he'll walk out of the desert, everyone else convinces him that he'll wander around and get lost very easily and no one mentions the possibility of using a compass (which the plane would have aboard if no one else had one). Sure, the better choice would be to stay put rather than walk out into the desert, but it seems the writers were set on defeating the argument rather quickly.
*** I agree that these guys (i.e. the writers) are idiots, but using a compass is in fact mentioned. It's handwaved by way of supposedly magnetic mountains, and that the guy could completely miss his target, walking right past it.
*** It was mentioned in terms something like ''"See those mountains? They're magnetic!"'' I thought. OK no problem, you can use the ''mountains as a reference point!'', as you begin to get too far from them to see, ..then you can use the compass just fine.
*** Even using the mountains as a reference, Rady also mentions that even a small mistake in Towns' calculations would mean that even if someone did manage to walk the several hundred miles (exceptionally unlikely), they would pass by the nearest city without ever seeing it.
*** What sticks out is that no one even mentions navigating by the stars, humanity's primary navigational tool for millennia and which any scout would know to make a compass of. Even if you shoot it down with "what about sandstorms?", it should have at least been mentioned as an option!
*** Okay, did they have anyone among them that could actually do that, or do you just think they should have been able to do that because you know it can theoretically be done?
* It never occurred to the survivors to make a ''spark-gap transmitter''? They had all the materials needed (10 times over), and surely the pilot and some of the more technical people would know of them.
** Spark gap transmitters haven't been in common use since the 1920's and the type of signal produced by one has been banned since the 1930's. As for technical knowledge, these are petroleum engineers (plus two pilots and an aeronautical engineer), not electrical or radio engineers. There is no reason to think they would know how.