Film / Just Plane Wrong

Examples of Just Plane Wrong in film.

Films — Animated

The Incredibles: Elasti-girl's radio dialogue when the missiles are closing in on her plane is actually accurate, since her use of "Buddy Spike" makes sense in context since she believes the island to be friendly and the term is used to warn the "spiker" that the radar lock was from a friendly and can be disregarded. The only goof is that it was a ground radar, and the proper term for a ground radar threat indication is "Mud" followed by a clock direction. Also, the tail number — IG99 — is invalid for an American-registered aircraft.
Toward the end of Rock-A-Doodle, the rodent character refers to a large, twin-rotor helicopter the main characters apparently stole as a Sikorsky, but in real life, Sikorsky never manufactured any twin-rotor helicopters at all. If anything, the depicted helicopter bears more of a resemblance to Boeing's Chinook with comically-oversized engines and the side door moved back about halfway along the fuselage.
Somewhat averted in the Disney World War II film Victory Through Air Power; the fictitious heavy bombers taking off from Alaska to bomb Japan bear curious resemblance to real life B-36 Peacemakers, though they were in reality not produced until after the war. Of course, Alexander Severskey, who was the narrator for the film, was himself a major aviation pioneer and is said to have insisted on technical accuracy for even the fictitious planes depicted in the film.

Films — Live-Action

The Messerschmitt Bf108 Taifun trainer shows up playing German fighters in several 1960s war films, including 633 Squadron, Von Ryan's Express and The Longest Day. 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. Notably averted in The Great Escape, where a Bf108 is used to portray an actual Bf108 which two of the escapees steal from a training field.
The A-Team
- In The Teaser, Murdock flies a helicopter as if it were a plane, notably performing a barrel roll with apparent ease—which the Huey really can do, there's just no sane reason why you'd ever want to^note—angling the nose of the helicopter upward to "pull up" and stalling to the point of tumbling out of the air, but managing to recover. Which is precisely to point out how insanely badass he is. The best part is, in order to evade a heat-seeking missile, Murdock switches off the engine of the helicopter for a moment — the fact that there would still be a significant heat signature notwithstanding.
- The fight scene with the Reaper drones is utter nonsense. A Reaper couldn't intercept the A-Team's plane to begin with: the normal cruising speed of a C-130 is 336 mph (540 km/h) but the Reaper tops out at about 300 mph (482 km/h). Also, they aren't armed with machine guns, only missiles (and air-to-ground missiles at that), nor are they capable of the dogfighting-level maneuverability seen in the tank scene. They're designed for long loiter time in low-velocity flight, and are known to lose their connection to the satellite if they bank too hard to right or left.
In Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls, the opening sequence features Ace climbing some Alpine-looking mountains, dressed in suspenders and shorts often stereotypically portrayed on Swiss alpinists, and there is a helicopter flying around him painted in crimson red with a white cross at each side — the symbol and flag of Switzerland. The aircraft's tail number (license plate)? Canadian registration. Location shooting indeed.
Air Force One:
- The titular presidential VC-25 features an escape pod, something that the real plane used as Air Force One does not, and could not possibly, have. President Clinton is said to have commented on that inaccuracy when watching the movie.
- One scene featured some F-15s switching on their afterburners. This caused these fighter jets to instantly jump from subsonic speeds to Mach 2, like Han Solo turning on the hyperdrive. Real afterburners simply provide a greater force of thrust, allowing the aircraft to smoothly accelerate past the compressibility range until it attains a supersonic airspeed—they don't cause Newton's 2nd Law of Motion to be temporarily suspended.
- Also regarding the Eagles, they repeatedly get missile locks with the Sparrow and AMRAAM radar-homing missiles at ranges far too close for the missile to guide properly. This doesn't apply to the enemy MiG-29 Fulcrums, because they were firing infra-red homing AA-8 "Aphid" and AA-10 "Alamo-B" missiles at AF1. They were just about at the known minimum distance for those missiles.
- When AF1 charges through Ramstein AFB after the failed landing attempt, it not only wouldn't have gotten back in the air, it would have been torn apart by the overstressing of the landing gear and wings. 747s, especially military E-4s and VC-25s, are tough, but they're not that tough.
- During the same scene, the terrorist trying to get AF1 back in the air is steering around Ramstein by turning the yoke like a steering wheel. Airplanes move on their horizontal axis by pushing foot pedals. If turning the yoke like that would have actually worked, the wings would have smacked the ground.
- When the refueling attempt results in a fire involving the KC-10's "flying boom", it would not cause the Extender to explode. They have fuel cutoffs and fire-suppression equipment built into the refueling system to prevent just such an accident. In fact, it's been standard on all USAF tankers since the midair collision between the KC-135 and B-52 that dropped five (still-safed) H-bombs around Palomares, Spain in 1965. That accident began when the two aircraft "bumped" during an in-flight refueling exercise. The Air Force tries not to make the same mistake twice.
Done deliberately in Airplane! where the eponymous jet is accompanied by a propeller sound effect which is both incongruous and a Shout-Out to Zero Hour, the B-movie it was based on. The directors did this because the studio wouldn't allow them to use a propeller-driven aircraft, and even admitted that the dissonant effect it created was funnier.
The Concorde: Airport '79 (also known as Airport 80 because it wasn't released until 1980 in some countries) was full of such howlers:
- When the Concorde is being chased by heat-seeking missiles, George Kennedy opens a window in the cockpit, then leans out into the onrushing supersonic air and fires a flare gun. The force should have ripped the window housing open, and torn Kennedy's arm off.
- In the course of dodging the heat-seeking missiles, the Concorde's engines flame out. The plane immediately nosedives straight down, plummeting like a rock. In the real world, when an airliner (even a supersonic one) loses power, it becomes a glider. It won't have the best glide performance in the world, but it's still going to be gliding, not falling (this was how Air Canada Flight 143 managed to make it to the decommissioned RCAF Station Gimli runway while out of fuel).
- It also lines up with the runway a few kilometers short of threshold, and only then does anyone (including airport tower) notice there's a multicoloured hot air balloon over the runway. Or the F-4 Phantom pilot somehow failing to shoot down an airliner with either missiles or guns for four entire minutes. Or a civilian runway equipped with barricade webbing large enough for an entire airliner. Or continuing the flight a few hours after two independent attempts to shoot down the plane (one a supposed accident, but the other involving a fucking fighter plane going after it) plus making an emergency landing and barely averting a runway overrun. Or the magic door-opening machine that punches in an access code by making the keypad push itself. Or that the same device also somehow operates the Concorde's fuel jettison pumps from the cargo bay.
- There's also the Call a Rabbit a "Smeerp" of the "Buzzard Attack Drone." We generally call a target-seeking UCAV which carries a single warhead a missile, guys (unless we're playing Star Fleet Battles).
In the low-budget film American Warship, CGI of a South Korean fighter desperately evading attack switches repeatedly between being an F-15 and an F-16. Also shown is stock footage of a C-130 Hercules dropping bombs... from a ventral bay. The C-130, is of course a cargo plane and, aside from literally shoving the near-car sized BLU-82 "daisy cutter" directly out the back of its cargo bay, can't drop bombs at all.
Are You Being Served?: When the Grace Brothers staff board the plane, it has wing-mounted tanks, however, they disappear when the plane takes off.
The Canadian film Arrow used a very accurate fiberglass replica of the real CF-105 interceptor built by an enthusiast. A rumor at the time claimed that, when the completed prototypes were being destroyed in the movie, which would be 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. In reality the replica just hasn't been publicly displayed in years.
Asteroid. A laser (judging by its size, geodesic; and of course, with the ray visible in space) fastened onto an F-16, manually aimed at a megameter or so, which blows up the big asteroid. Made even worse by the comment in-film that the lasers had to be fired from within the atmosphere to be aimed properly, as though having all that air in the way made it easier to target something in space. Though one could argue that it would be silly even with the Pentagon's "realistic" solution — an experimental laser cannon on a Boeing 747, which at least could take out missiles or aircraft. As opposed to the plain and sane original idea: arrange meeting of damn stone and little fusion device, the higher orbit the better, then watch some Stuff Blowing Up.
The CGI flying sequences were were spot on, but the scriptwriters for The Aviator just used random aviation terms in any dialogue between Howard Hughes and Odie. Interwar-era biplanes did not produce reverse thrust, for example.
Downplayed in Battle of Britain. British aircraft were portrayed by actual Spitfires and Hurricanes, though typically variants that entered service later in the war. On the German side, the Bf-109s and He-111s were played by HA-1112s and CASA 2.111s, respectively - Spanish-built copies whose most noteworthy difference from the original designs is that they were both powered by the same Rolls Royce Merlin engines as the British planes!
In Battlefield Earth, the heroes find a hangar full of Harriers, all of which aren't used for a millennium. Nothing should be working after about a millennium, it takes years and not weeks to learn to fly a plane (much less a VTOL-capable plane like the Harrier, which got trainees killed at a rather regular pace), none of them have flight-suits and yet they're all stunt dogfighter material. On the positive side, they do mention that Harrier jets can hover. Note that Harriers are so unreliable that the fact that they can even be repaired is implausible.
The Beast of War: a French-built, Israeli-operated Aérospatiale Super Frélon stands in for the Soviet Mi-8 "Hip".
A less egregious but more obvious example is from Beyond The Time Barrier, where the F-102 changes side numbers between takeoff & landing. (The effects of jumping ahead in time?)
In The Bourne Legacy, Aaron Cross and Marta Shearing take an American Airlines flight from New York to Manila. Not only does American not fly to Manila, there are no direct flights from New York to Manila. This flight also uses a Boeing 747, a type that does not form part of American's fleet (also, external shots of the plane are of a 747, whilst the internal ones are of a 777).
A Bridge Too Far: Harvards (better known as T-6 Texans or SNJs) with bits glued on were used to represent fighter bombers. The C-47s used for that film were real C-47s, however.
Averted in Catch-22: The legendary Hollywood stunt pilot Frank Tallman put together an entire squadron of 24 B-25 bombers for the film. Even the camera plane was a B-25 with a special optical glass nose. It's been said that part of the reason so many B-25s are still flying today and not scrapped is because they were made flyable for this movie. The one that burned in the "crash" scene was a barely-flyable hulk; they flew it to the filming location wheels down.
Charlie Wilson's War used stock footage to depict Soviet fighters getting shot down. In several scenes, the fighters are obviously either F-16s or foreign variants, not Soviet planes.
Coffee Tea Or Me: The stewardesses take off in a 727 and land in a 707.
In Con Air: The plane that transports federal prisoners is depicted as as a flying prison, with cells for disruptive inmates. The real planes involved in the "Con Air" transport system are little different from regular commercial planes, and there are no cells. Inmates are shackled during flight, but safety regulations prohibited shackling them to any part of the plane.
In The Day the Earth Stood Still (2008), the "sphere" and robot sitting in Central Park are attacked by Predator UCAVs, armed with Sidewinder air-to-air missiles and Hellfire anti-armor missiles, said UCAVs being flown by U.S. Army operators. First of all, the Army doesn't fly Predators^note, they belong to the U.S. Air Force (and the CIA, but we don't talk about that). Second, when the order to launch is given, the operators fire the Sidewinders, which are infra-red homing air-to-air missiles with relatively small annular blast-fragmentation warheads intended to shred fighter aircraft like a duck hit by birdshot. Not only are such light warheads useless against what is pretty obviously a pair of heavily-armored targets, they aren't generating enough heat to let the missiles' infra-red guidance systems lock on to them to begin with. In such a situation, the Sidewinder will "go dumb", and probably miss, and even if it hits, it won't accomplish much. And since the operators were supposed to be from the Army, you'd think they'd know enough to use the Hellfires, which are intended for use on heavily-armored ground targets (like tanks, for instance) when shooting at the equivalent of a small warship.
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 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 Bulletproof Boeing.
Die Hard
- Live Free or Die Hard's F-35 sequence. Just look at the list of goofs. The F-35 is shown with two guns, when it really has one (and they haven't been able to make that one gun work yet). It also uses its VTOL capacity to make a hovering attack. You could do this, but you'd run out of fuel really fast. Also, in a few HUD shots, the MASTER-ARM is set switched to SIM, which means the F-35 couldn't actually fire its gun or missiles.
- Die Hard 2 (i.e. Die Hard in an Airport) also features plenty of this.
Averted in, of all things, Dr. Strangelove: not only was the B-52 correct in exterior shots (save for casting the shadow of a B-17^notethe shadow of the camera plane), 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, Kubrick and his crew were familiar with B-17s and B-29s from the War and had simply done an amazing job of extrapolation.
Executive Decision features what is apparently an F-117 stealth fighter that has somehow been modified to hold a sort of air-to-air docking collar while still having space for half a dozen armed commandos and the pilot, making the passenger compartment at least as large as the entire fuselage, leaving no space for engines, fuel tanks, or anything else. Apparently, the USAF has developed TARDIS technology.
In the film Fail Safe, planes are ordered to hit their afterburners. The film then cuts to stock footage of what is clearly a bunch of planes firing missiles instead.
From the Steven Seagal movie Flight Of Fury:
- They used so much stock footage that the type of aircraft varied between almost every scene, as well as having the stock footage of the SR-71 and the F-117 be fuzzy because it was not filmed in high-def, and changing from day to night and back again in a few minutes of flight time. But the worst parts were the aircraft Traveling at the Speed of Plot, with the only consistency being that higher real-world top speeds somehow translated to longer trips in the plot:
- A C-130 (max speed 410 MPH or 675 km/h) travels from Bakersfield, California to northern Afghanistan carrying SEALs, and does so in 3 hours (noted by the timestamps of the various shots) without re-fueling.
- An F-117 (max speed 617 MPH or 1,003 km/h) makes the same trip in less than 6 hours, again without re-fueling.
- An SR-71 (max speed classified, but listed as 2,193 MPH or 3,540 km/h) makes the same trip in 48 hours, but requires re-fueling.
- All of them fly west over the Pacific and China, which would have added a few thousand miles to the trip over taking the polar route (a distance of 13,000 miles or 21,000 kilometers).
Full Metal Jacket is a minor offender - the helicopter which transports Joker and Rafter Man to Hue is British built Westland Wessex - a licensed variant of the Sikorsky HUS-1/UH-34 used by the USMC in The Vietnam War, but powered by turboshaft engines and thus with minor yet visible visual differences.
Godzilla (1998):
- Apache helicopters have fixed, side-mounted guns (as opposed to the swiveling nose-mounted gun of a real Apache) and Sidewinder anti-aircraft heat seeking missiles - while the Apache can mount them, they never do, since in any engagements where the Apache would be expected to carry air-to-air munitions for defending against other aerial targets, it makes more sense to carry four AIM-92 Stingers rather than two Sidewinders. The Apaches in the film also have longer stub-wing pylons, each with an extra hardpoint mounting two more Hydra rocket pods, as well as a span-like structure going from the engine cowlings to the wing pylons, giving them a rather strange Hind-like front profile.
- Towards the end of the film, Godzilla is attacked by an F/A-18 using Harpoon anti-ship missiles. While Godzilla may be large enough for a radar guided missile like the Harpoon to lock onto, the missile would certainly not work over land. ^note There is a land attack version of the Harpoon that would be well suited for a target like Godzilla, but it entered service two years after the movie was released.
- In the follow-up strike on the "hatchlings" at Madison Square Garden, the cockpit dialogue regarding the missiles is even more inaccurate. The lead pilot states they are using the laser (designator) and "going with LGBs" (Laser-Guided Bombs, aka "Paveways") - but the weapon select display clearly shows and says "Harpoon Armed". Then, just before launching, he says, "Use the Mavericks" - which is an entirely different air-to-surface missile. What come "off the rails" on all three Hornets, though, are indeed Harpoons.
- The "Russian" twin-rotor helicopter that picks up Nick Tatapoulos from Chernobyl is an American Piasecki H-21 "Workhorse". It is dated to the 1950s, and it was one of only two flyable ones left in the world. Today, there are exactly four—all in museums. And no, no Russian bird, not even a twin-rotor, ever looked very much like the H-21, often nicknamed the "Flying Banana".
The Great Raid: In order to provide a distraction so the Rangers can get into position to attack the prison, the USAAF sends an aircraft in to buzz the camp and hold the attention of the Japanese garrison. Truth in Television. However the aircraft is portrayed by a Lockheed Hudson bomber, a light bomber/attack plane primarily used by the RAF. The Hudson was a relatively conventional-looking twin-engined aircraft. The plane chosen to assist the actual Cabanatuan raid was a North American P-61 Black Widow, a heavily-armed, radar-equipped night fighter with a much more unusual twin-boom fuselage not unlike the P-38 Lightning.
In The Great Waldo Pepper, two relatively common Tiger Moth biplanes were wrecked in the crash scenes, standing in for the much rarer Standard J-1. Ironically, most sources about the film mistakenly identify the Standard J-1s actually used in the movie as the smaller (but more famous) Curtis JN-1 "Jenny". Tallmantz aviation, like most real Barnstormers, preferred the Standard because it was larger, stronger, and used a more reliable engine.
In the film The Guns of Navarone:
- The good guys get strafed at one point by a German fighter plane. The actual plane was an F4U Corsair, which was an American fighter plane mainly used by the Marines in the Pacific.
- At least in the close-up shots, the aircraft are models of Ju-87 Stukas, precisely the type of dive-bomber that would have been used at the time. The recce plane that spots the heroes earlier on, however, is definitely American rather than German, since the production had the help of the Greek army and navy — who happened to have a lot of surplus American hardware on hand.
In Home Alone, 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.
In the film version of The Hunt for Red October, the crash of an F-14 Tomcat is depicted using Stock Footage of an F9F Panther from the Korean War. 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.
The Korean War drama The Hunters 1958 uses repainted F-84F Thunderstreaks (which entered service too late to see action in Korea, though previous versions with unswept wings did) to play MiG-15s. Those -84s have been popularly known as "ThunderMiGs" ever since.
F-4 Phantoms stood in for MiG-21s in Ice Station Zebra, at least during shots where actual aircraft were used - shots filmed using miniatures used models of actual MiG-21s.
Pedro Almodóvar's Im So Excited (Los amantes pasajeros) has got almost everything avation-related glaringly wrong.
- The aircraft where the main part of the film takes place is in peril because one of the landing gear won't retract; the cause is given to be a wheel blocker left accidentally in place by the ground crew. Such thing would cause serious problems during taxiing and/or takeoff roll and would be instantly noticed by the pilots.
- When the landing gear indicator is shown in close-up, there are three green lights and one red. This indicates the exactly opposite situation as the one we're told about, as green light indicates the gear is down and locked and red light means it is completely retracted.
- The pilots state that they can't land because no airport would accept them. There's absolutely no explanation as to why no airport wants to allow an emergency landing, which is an obvious violation of regulations. ^note Furthermore, even if the Spanish airports are unavailable for some convoluted reason, with the amount of fuel they have onboard - the flight was from Madrid to Mexico City - there are literally dozens of alternative airports capable of dealing with an A340 in peril within their range - Rome-Fiumicino, Milan-Linate, Lisbon-Portela, Paris-CDG/Orly/Le Bourget, Frankfurt, London-Heathrow, Zurich-Kloten, Vienna, Prague, Warsaw-Chopin are just some examples.
Independence Day:
- RAF-marked F-16s in Iraq? The Air Force using F/A-18s in the climactic battle at the end? The Israeli Air Force (IAF) with F/A-18 Hornets??
- 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 existed at any point in history, even after the aliens shot down the entire first counterattack earlier in the movie) for the finale.
- The novelization is a little more realistic in this department. Eagle squadron (the one the President commands) is formed of F-15s found stored at a "satellite" base that's part of the Area 51 complex. They are in a grave state of disrepair and several have to be cannibalized to make the others flightworthy, so that only about 8 fly in the actual battle. The rest of the force is formed from what ever they can find, including Russian fighters (acquired through various means during the Cold War for study at Area 51, Truth in Television actually), and even World War II fighters (a P-51 is mentioned). During the battle the planes are split into two groups: the shooters, modern American planes, and the decoys, Russian and other planes for which weapons and ammunition did not exist on base. The latter group was meant to go in first, attract the attention of the alien fighters and draw them off, allowing the former group to close in and open fire.
- During the film's climax, Eagle Twenty announces "Fox Two", which is NATO code for the launch of an infrared guided missile, but the missile shown is an AIM-120 AMRAAM, an active radar guided missile that would be launched with "Fox Three."
- The attack on the alien ship with AMRAAMs and Sidewinders in itself is another example, considering the sheer size of the target. Even the biggest air-to-air missiles in reality only have a 75-kilogram warhead - not much threat to a ship the size of a city. Air-to-ground weapons are closer to 500 kilos... or since the F/A-18 is cleared for the whole gamut of US Navy aircraft weapons, they could have led with something even bigger. Not that this would really have helped, since supposedly the entire nuclear arsenal of the world could only vaporise less than 1% of the volume of one of the saucers. There's also the question of whether or not the missiles' guidance systems (programmed to look for airplanes) could actually recognize the damn thing as a target to be engaged rather than a mountain to be avoided.
- The original ending for the film sees Russell being denied a place in the final counter attack against the aliens. So he takes one of the Air Force's missiles, straps it to his biplane and sends it into the cannon. If this was to be attempted in reality, the plane would stall on its way up, making it the most awkward self sacrifice in history.
Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade:
- The German Fighters shown in the film are not period planes but Swiss-made Pilatus P-2 aircraft built after World War II. Likely an Enforced Trope: the Pilatus P-2 looks a lot like the Arado 96, the standard Luftwaffe advanced trainer of the war years (probably because after the war, several of Arado's designers went to Switzerland and were hired by... you guessed it, Pilatus). And quite a few Ar-96s had bomb racks and twin synchronized 7.9mm machine guns in the cowling, as shown in the film, for armaments training. The use of a pair of armed trainers for the mission (shooting up the Jones boys) may just have been a case of a training unit being the closest available air asset when the orders came down the chain of command.
- A more glaring issue is the crash of one of the planes; it attempts to follow Indy and his father into a tunnel, but unfortunately the tunnel is just slightly too narrow for the plane, resulting in its wings getting sheared off. Then, through some miraculous act of momentum, the plane, sliding on its belly, actually manages to overtake the car it is chasing and exit through the other side of the tunnel before conveniently exploding. Apparently it was customary back then to coat the roadway within tunnels with vaseline.
Interceptor 1993. There are supersonic, highly-agile F-117s that launch Sidewinder missiles out of the nose gear wheel well and have folding wings, which can deploy in flight after falling out of the back of a C-5. Also, the engines can somehow start by themselves without pneumatics, AND somehow not have a compressor stall during the aforementioned free fall. Then there's the KC-10 that the bad guys use to board the C-5 in flight, by sliding down the inside of the refueling boom and cutting through the fuselage above the crew rest compartment. Then there's the C-5, where 90% of the movie takes place. Apparently they were allowed to film the scenes on a real C-5, but no C-5 has all the air ducts and crawlspaces that this one has. The terrorists also siphon fuel from the 5 to the 117s from inside the cargo bay, in flight. And at the climax, it is blown up with a Sidewinder. Empty fuel tanks notwithstanding, a C-5 has taken a missile hit on takeoff in real life, and only lost the engine the missile was locked on to. It circled around and landed safely.
Interceptor Force 2: The Russian fighters are called MiG-29s. They're really MiG-25s.
Iron Eagle: The lower-budget Air Force knockoff of Top Gun that, unlike the latter, wasn't Backed by the Pentagon? But of course:
- The first movie has a scene in which a motorbike races against a Cessna 152 which obviously has full flap deployed and the throttle almost closed. Given that the Cessna cruises at around 107 knots, almost 200 km/h, this was necessary to make the contest look even remotely fair.
- The movie also has Kfirs play as MiG-23s, a rather glaring error since MiG-23s are swing-wing, whereas Kfirs are delta-wing. This gets noteworthy when you consider that some Real Life Arab nations operated Mirage V fighters, which the IAI Kfir is visually almost indiscernible from, being an upgrade of an unlicensed copy of the Mirage V - so why not the Bilyan Air Force?^note
- The F-16s were provided by the Israeli Air Force, and while sporting American national insignia and USAF-like markings, they retained Israeli green-sand-brown camouflage on upper surfaces, which is very different from the USAF (or almost any other F-16 operator's) gray color scheme.
- In Iron Eagle II, one of the heroes hears planes approaching, starts screaming and yelling "...they're goddamned Soviet MiGs!" and runs out onto the tarmac — to look at a flight of F-4 Phantom IIs, one of the most distinctive American designs out there. The differences between the MiG-29 and the F-4 are glaring from the side and rear (MiG-29s are twin tailed while F-4s are single tailed), but perhaps from the front they looked similar enough to justify their use (i.e. the droopy nose and twin intakes^note).
- In Iron Eagle IV, the protagonist is shot down by "MiG-29s" (again, played by F-4 Phantoms)... carrying air to ground Maverick missiles.
James Bond films:
- Thunderball makes a couple errors with the plot-important Avro Vulcan strategic bomber.
  - The Vulcan only has a range of 2600 miles. Even assuming the jet was fully fueled when it was hijacked, that puts Fake Derval ditching in the Atlantic 1600 miles short of the Bahamas (where the bombs would have been both unrecoverable due to depth, and well beyond the range of helicopter searches from the Nassau area). The Vulcan famously did make 4,000 mile round trips several times during the Falklands War about twenty years after this film (traveling from Ascension Island to strike the Argentine-held Port Stanley airfield), but it required midair refueling.
  - When Bond dives the sunken Vulcan bomber, he enters the cockpit through a small door via the bomb bay. It is not possible to access the bomb bay of a Vulcan from the cockpit due to being separated by bulkheads, the nose gear and a fuel tank.
- In You Only Live Twice, for an American Gemini rocket launch they used stock footage of an Atlas-Agena (probably carrying a weather satellite) despite having stock footage of a Gemini - which they used for a Soviet rocket launch.
- For Your Eyes Only 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.)
- A View to a Kill: the Soviet helicopter that chases Bond in the pre-title sequence is a (West) German MBB-105.
- Moonraker. The sequence in which a space shuttle blasts off from the aircraft carrying it.
  - The shuttle is never carried with fuel or live batteries. Even if Drax somehow arranged for them to be onboard, the Shuttle is basically a glider — its engine and onboard fuel aren't enough to fly it any great distance as if it were a regular jet plane.
  - It is also impossible to carry a shuttle on the back of a normal 747, even if you could add a cradle on top. The turbulence caused by it renders the normal rudder basically useless (the NASA 747 used to ferry the shuttles had additional vertical steering surfaces installed at the ends of the horizontal tail surfaces for this reason). The other problems can be hand-waved with this being something more like an earlier design, which included air-breathing jet engines with a significant internal fuel store. You'd still never get enough fuel on board it without it being noticed to be overweight when it was loaded on the carrier, or at the very least when the carrier was being pre-flighted and the crew noticed the landing gear was reading thousands of pounds more weight than it should be. Additionally, if the shuttle firing its engines while attached to the 747 causes the latter to explode, why does the 747 have an indicator in the cockpit for 'Shuttle Ignition' as if they were expecting it to happen sometime?
- GoldenEye
  - The real Eurocopter Tiger cannot survive an EMP and cannot lock missiles onto itself. The MC at the demonstration where it is stolen announces it as a prototype with new features.
  - The MiG pilot killed when his unresponsive aircraft augurs in after the first EMP (hammering his fist on the canopy in a vain attempt to escape) should have pulled his ejection handle. Aircraft ejection seats are specifically designed to function with no power source of any kind, and are largely immune to EMP, the phenomenon being reasonably well-understood as an effect of nuclear weapons detonations. Even systems with electronic initiation have a backup system. As a rule, much more concern is spent making sure the ejection seat doesn't go off when it shouldn't, such as when the plane is on the ground.
- Tomorrow Never Dies
  - The Chinese planes that attack the stray British ship are repeatedly described as "Chinese MiGs". Although China does have MiGs, these aren't them; the aircraft are clearly recognizable as Q-5s, an indigenous Chinese type (admittedly partly based on MiG-19 technology, but very different in appearance). Apparently a case of the special effects department doing better research than the scriptwriters.
  - And a Qian-5 that drops a torpedo would be an extraordinary beast. They should have used the Chinese Harbin-5 bomber, based on the Ilyushin-28.
  - In the teaser, when the Royal Navy frigate fires the cruise missile at the terrorist "flea market", M tells 007 he has four minutes to get clear. The target is 400 miles from the ship. A Tomahawk cruise missile (as shown) has a top speed of about 550 miles per hour. It should have taken the missile about 43 minutes to get there. The novelization blows it even more thoroughly, with a Harpoon missile being launched, and traveling 800 miles in 4 minutes 8 seconds. First of all, a Harpoon (an antiship missile) has a maximum range of less than 100 miles, and second, it travels at about the same (determinedly subsonic) speed as the Tomahawk. To do 800 miles in 248 seconds, it would have needed to achieve about 11,600 miles per hour, or about 3.2 miles per second - about half of Earth's escape velocity. Also, any object traveling that fast at low altitude would burn up like a meteor hitting the lower atmosphere - plus what the shock wave effects would do to anything along its path on the ground.
- Casino Royale (2006)
  - One scene features a prototype "Skyfleet S570", possibly intended as a Bland-Name Product version of the then-new Airbus A380. The actual plane we see, however, is obviously a Boeing 747 (specifically, the decommissioned 747 that lives on the Top Gear test track) with external fuel tanks hanging from the wings, which makes very little sense for any civilian aircraft.
  - Also, a Czech Airlines plane is seen. That airline did not operate flights to Miami in 2006 (no doubt due to the scene being filmed at Vaclav Havel Airport in Prague, where the airline is based).
Jurassic Park:
- Jurassic World: Dane County Airport is a regional airport. They don't offer flights to Costa Rica from there, although you can get a flight to an international airport where you can get on a flight to Costa Rica. Or you could just drive to Chicago and save the cost of the first flight.
- Kayla Watts, a major supporting character in Jurassic World Dominion, 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. Also, C-119s— especially civilian ones— were never equipped with ejection seats the way Kayla's is.
The Last King of Scotland has Israeli hostages at Entebbe rescued using a Soviet-built An-12 transport plane. The actual operation used American C-130s.
Mega Shark vs. Giant Octopus actually has a shapeshifting fighter jet due to the poor use of stock footage. In one shot the jet is an F-15, in another shot it is an F/A-18, and in yet another shot the same jet is an F-22.
Memphis Belle:
- The film is another example of an intensive effort being made to bring together actual vintage aircraft for an accurate filming—in this case, most of the world's surviving B-17s. Note you never see more than 3 actual (as opposed to models or CGI) B-17s at a time. If one watches carefully, you can at times see that many of the bombers have two separate sets of nose art and markings — one on each side of the fuselage — allowing each plane to play two different bombers in the formation.
- P-51 escorts are glimpsed in the aerial battle scenes; they did not arrive in-theater until November 1943, six months after the film's date in May. Moreover, they have to turn back halfway through the trip, which is ridiculous because the entire reason they took over the role of bomber escort in reality was because they did have the range to escort a B-17 all the way to Germany and back.
Midway (1976):
- The film 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 engine propeller-driven SBD Dauntless dive-bomber, but crashes onto the carrier's flight deck as a McDonnell Banshee jet fighter.
- Other aircraft that appear in the film but are completely out of place are F6F Hellcats frequently shown in place of the F4F Wildcats actually flown by the Navy and Marines during the time of the battle, FM-2s (a license-built, late-war variant of the Wildcat first appearing in 1944) for hangar and flight deck scenes, a different SBD Dauntless turns into a F4U Corsair in the middle of a bombing run, and a TBD Devastator (actually depicted by a SB2U Vindicator) turns into a TBM Avenger and in the next shot becomes another Hellcat. Almost all of the Japanese aircraft in the film were the same modified T-6 trainers used as Weapons Understudies for Tora! Tora! Tora! a few years earlier. All the scenes of TBD Devastators and SBD Dauntlesses flying in formation are actually SB2U Vindicators.
Midway (2019):
- Very few of the B5N torpedo/level bombers used by the Japanese were armed, carrying only a flexible gun for defense. However they are shown joining the Zero fighters strafing the American fleet at Pearl Harbor.
- Two important aircraft from the battle are missing entirely:
  - The Japanese D3A "Val" dive bombers, which were used extensively at Pearl Harbor and Midway, including causing severe damage to Yorktown in the first wave of Hiryū's counterattack. They briefly appear for a few seconds during the Pearl Harbor attack scene (the fixed landing gear gives them away), but they never appear afterward.
  - More egregious is lack of the American F4F Wildcat fighters. As much as the devastating blow to the Japanese fleet, Midway was important as a turning point for the Navy's fighter pilots, as it was the first opportunity for Thach to use what would become the Thach Weave in a major combat with the Japanese.
- Doolittle's raiders are shown flying B-25Js. This later model was distinguished by the top turret having been moved forward directly behind the cockpit. The historical Raiders flew the earlier B-25B, which had the dorsal turret located much further aft.
- Dick Best's Dauntless is accurately painted with the number B1 and two diagonal white stripes on the vertical stabilizer, as shown in this◊ color plate. The other Enterprise SBDs and TBDs show a similar marking scheme (such as Scouting Six's Dauntlesses using an S# fuselage number). However this was only the aircraft's markings at the time of Midway, but is used throughout the film. As shown here◊, from 1941 through May, 1942, US Navy aircraft featured red and white stripes on the rudder, and red disks in the middle of the roundel. The red was removed to reduce the chance of American gunners mistaking the red disk for the Japanese Hinomaru, (aka, the "Meatball") and prevent friendly fire incidents. Additionally, Enterprise's air wing adopted comically oversized national insignia for the first few months of the war as a result of the loss of several aircraft and their crews to friendly fire when they arrived at Pearl Harbor in the aftermath of the attack. None of the aircraft in the film are shown with these early markings.
- 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 however this was carried out by B-17s (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 intentional by saying "[the Americans] are not that brave," but doesn't mention the more infamous incident of the B-26, Suzie-Q, which 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.
In Pacific Rim, 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. More egregiously, there's no sane reason for an F-22 to ever get close enough to a ground target that it crashes into it: even if we assume it had expended whatever missiles or bombs it had started with, the M61 Vulcan cannon it carries has an effective range of half a mile.
Pearl Harbor:
- At one point in the eponymous battle, a character states that "We can't outrun Zeros, we'll have to out-fly them!" The American P-40 could easily outrun the Zero, but didn't have a prayer if they tried to out-turn the Zero, one of the most amazingly maneuverable (but relatively slow) fighter aircraft of the war. Note however that U.S. Airmen were remarkably ignorant about the Zero's capabilities in 1941; accurate reports out of China were dismissed as exaggerated. About the only correct thing they did know about the Zero was its "Type 00" designation, the "Zeke" Reporting Name not being issued until late 1942. And the Zero wasn't that much slower than the P-40 in level flight, only in a dive. Basically, P-40s taking off under fire, in a low-energy state (low and slow) would be torn apart by Zeroes...which is exactly what happened in real life.
- In addition, the CGI P-40s' control surfaces didn't move. Possibly the other aircraft too, but there were a number of gratuitous beauty shots of the P-40s that made it obvious.
- 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, even more maneuverable, Nakajima Ki-43, called the Hayabusa (Peregrine Falcon) by the Japanese and "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.
- The B-25s for the Doolittle raid are wrong too - in several scenes they have the dorsal turrets well towards the front as in all B-25s past the G model. The Doolittle raid used the earlier B model; the B-25G was not produced until a year after the raid. Also, while the B-25 is a fairly easy aircraft to fly, the real pilots/copilots were all experienced multi-engine bomber pilots with hundreds of hours in B-25s and a thorough knowledge of exactly how they flew and handled under every imaginable condition, not single-engine fighter pilots who didn't even bother with Type-Transition training. The takeoff sequence includes a dramatic scene of a B-25 dropping below view and almost crashing before lifting up. With one exception, every B-25 was lifting off before reaching the end of the flight deck (the one exception had the flaps set incorrectly), due to the aircraft carrier travelling at 25 MPH into a 40 MPH headwind; the B-25 has a stall speed of 80 MPH, meaning they only needed an additional speed of 15 MPH to take off.
- The "Battle of Britain" scene is full of glaring errors. The Spitfires used are clearly Mk.V or Mk.IX Spits, the former of which did not reach frontline service until 1941, by which time large-scale air raids such as the one depicted would have ceased. The cannons are a dead giveaway, especially since the Hispano II cannon was not introduced until 1941 either. Secondly, they are all marked with "RF", designation of No. 303 Squadron, one of the most prominent Polish squadrons in the Battle, yet here, there are multiple American and British pilots! Regarding the American pilots, only seven were officially active during the Battle, anyway, and they would likely have been split between several squadrons. At one point, an He-111's cockpit explodes after being hit with just a single shell. Moreover, none of the Spitfire pilots are actually wearing their oxygen masks, which contain their microphones, so any communication would be incredibly difficult. When Affleck fires his guns, he only uses the cannons despite standard practice being to correct your aim using expendable machinegun fire before spending cannon shells. The Bf-109s that attack them are clearly not the standard Bf-109 E, since the Bf-109 E had distinct flattened wingtips not seen on the plane in the film. A lot of the fighting is done at obscenely close range, when in reality, RAF standard procedure was to open fire between 250 and 500 yards (200m to 400m) from their target, though the Free Polish airmen of 303 Squadron were noted for being more aggressive and got in closer. (The legend at the time was that British pilots generally wanted to shoot down their German opponents, while the Polish exiles wanted to kill them. In reality, it was because the Poles were trained to get much closer before opening fire because the Polish air force flew much slower aircraft, but it gave them such a reputation for fearsomeness the legend went uncontested.)
Plane is accurate on one point: the flight crew arguing with dispatch about fuel. Literally everything else is hilariously off, even without getting into the airplane being an MD-80 with an A320 cockpit and Boeing yokes.
Rambo: First Blood Part II and Rambo III: The Soviet helicopter is a French Aérospatiale SA 330 Puma, fitted with cosmetic modifications (most obviously the stub wings with rocket pods) to a decent semblance of a Mil Mi-24 "Hind A." The fake front fuselage apparently made it stunningly hard to actually fly. This ended up being carried over to all of the video games, licensed or fan-made.
SA 330s stood in for Hind-As in Red Dawn (1984), though they actually got close to early model Hinds at least in the forward fuselage. Check out the early model Hind◊ vs the fake Hind◊ from Red Dawn.
Red Tails:
- The all-black 332d Pursuit Group is depicted as upgrading from their older Curtiss P-40 Warhawks to shiny new North American P-51D Mustangs. In Real Life, they transitioned first to the Bell P-39 Airacobra (for all of a month or so), then to the Republic P-47 Thunderbolt, and then to the North American P-51C Mustang. The most identifiable difference between the C and D models of the Mustang is that the C has a conventional "razorback" canopy more reminiscent of the P-40 Warhawk, while the D has the bubble canopy that the fighters are most often depicted with.
- Red Tails also provides the curious insight that you can open a B-17's bomb bay doors by setting the fuel mix for the number 3 engine to the idle cutoff position. The real bomb bay door control is not in the cockpit or particularly dramatic looking.
- The Me-262s like the one flown by Pretty Boy during the final battle were armed with four 30mm cannon, firing explosive shells. If Lightning had been hit by even one of those rounds in Real Life he would have been turned into a red smear all over his cockpit, much less the dozen or so that fatally wounded him in the movie.
The Rock: The flight of F/A-18 Hornets identified as from the Air Force are sent on a bombing mission when it appears that the heroes have failed to neutralize the threat. The Air Force does not use F/A-18s in real life; only the Navy and the Marine Corps do. This was strange considering that the rest of the movie focused on the Marines and Navy. The closeups of the F/A-18s display the squadron logo of VMFA-314, a Marine Corps squadron,^note yet also have "U.S. Air Force" painted prominently on their sides.
Stealth
- The F/A-37s would never be able to take off from a carrier. Aside from being based on a somewhat dubious concept aircraft which would likely have trouble transitioning between wing angles, there's the minor issue that they're apparently all but VTOL-capable, swing-wing CATOBAR aircraft with comically gigantic missile loadouts and utterly insane range; there's no way an aircraft with such a laundry list of capabilities would be able to take off from a standard Nimitz catapult, and it's doubtful if it could do so at all, especially not with the stated empty weight of nine metric tons for a 70-foot aircraft. And even if all that weren't true, there's the small matter of their rear landing gear being secured to the carrier's deck with tie-down chains when they're on the catapult. Although it's worth mentioning Northrop-Grumann believed the aerodynamic concept might be feasible and as such has taken steps to ensure they had complete control over the forward swept swing wing design for the next two decades by patenting it in 2000.
- There's also the infamous exploding plane scene, where Jessica Biel punches out seconds before her plane explodes. Next, the pilotless-but-still-in-one-piece plane twists around and starts barreling after her like she insulted its mother (although it had been twisting around before she hit the eject). Then it explodes, and an enormous cloud of wreckage chases her down. The "Ludicrous Gibs" level of debris rather suggests she was carrying a Lockheed C-130 troop transport in her missile bay.
- Slightly less obvious but equally hilarious is how the F/A-37s are shown to outfly Su-37s using exactly the kind of cool supermaneuver those very Su-37s introduced in real life. Somehow, the Russian pilots only know how to fly in straight lines.
- Made even worse when you know that those very same maneuvers are reserved for airshows and technology demonstration, and that no competent pilot would actually be stupid enough to attempt one in an actual dogfight. Made even more worse (worser?) that they are in a dogfight at all, when both sides are equipped with Beyond Visual Range missile technology, which means dogfighting is your last resort, not your go-to strategy for an engagement.^note Or the fact the non-stealth Faux-37s weren't even detected until they were only 25 miles out, etc. There's also the fact that these Su-37s are shown as two-seaters, when the only two Su-37s in the real world only have room for the pilot.
- The F/A-37's cockpit has more elbow room than do passengers on commercial jets. A bit more forgivably, the joystick is in a between-the-legs placement; most American jets since the F-16 have a side stick.
In the Japanese film Storm Over The Pacific, the Zeroes are painted green. This did not happen until 1944, 3 years after Pearl Harbor.
In Street Of A Thousand Dreams, a man takes a flight from the US to Baghdad. The plane which takes off is a three rear-engine 727, while the plane that lands is a four winged-engine 707. From there, he's taken to the local Baghdad airport to take a small plane to Basrah. All of the planes there have N numbers, which is the designation applied to US planes.
In Sudden Death, the villain's JetRanger tilts back and goes vertically down into the stadium with its tail straight down and nose up in one of the silliest-looking copter crashes ever filmed. This is impossible with the rotors still spinning. Since they provide lift, upon going nose-up the JetRanger should've just spun out of control backwards due to the force of the rotor wash now pushing horizontally instead of vertically. In addition, the rate of descent is slow - a full 58 seconds from when it first starts descending to when its tail first hits the ice.
In Superman Returns, Lex Luthor is stranded on an island with an out-of-fuel helicopter, and wishes he had just a quart of gasoline. The helicopter in question, however, was an AW109, which has twin turboshaft engines. Turboshafts are to helicopters what turboprops are to airplanes, and like the latter, they run on Jet-A (kerosene), not avgas (gasoline). Besides, a single quart of fuel would barely be enough to warm the engines up to proper operating temperatures, much less take off and fly for any appreciable distance.
Tears of the Sun's finale has some pretty terrible issues with the F/A-18s that show up for the Gunship Rescue at the end. The jets switch between clean (no ordinance) to carrying HARMs (anti-radar missiles - against infantry, no less), then back to clean. And then when they do fire, they shoot missiles...that turn into cluster bombs...that are napalm. There are cluster missiles, but not for aircraft, and cluster napalm hasn't been a thing since WW2 incendiary bombs. Oh, and the rescue helicopters show up moments after the jets, despite the jets being several times faster.
Downplayed in the 1938 film Test Pilot. One of the planes used was a Y1B-17 that crashes in the movie and the studio got permission from the United States Army to use one for some, but not all, of the scenes. They had to use a modified DC-2 as a stand in at times because the Army was quite understandably skittish about letting a movie studio have free reign with a very expensive heavy bomber prototype that was still under evaluation. The first production B-17 wouldn't make its maiden flight until over a year after the film was released.
3 Idiots: The Airbus A321 in the opening scene has a different registration number on either side of its fuselage. Then, in a view from right under the aircraft, when the landing gear come out, each bogie has two axles, while shots from a distance (correctly) show one axle for each bogie.
Top Gun:
- The US built 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 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 This may be 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 and MiG-31, which kind of looks like an F-15 if you squint. (The US did actually have real MiGs at the time, but they were classified.)
- A pilot uses the missile release button on his control stick to fire his guns, instead of the bright red gun trigger clearly visible any time one of the pilots is shown jerking the stick for a violent maneuver.
- For Rule of Drama, the pilots gain a missile lock by flying the lead-calculating reticle for the gun onto the target. Suffice it to say, anything in the missile seeker head's field of view (i.e. anything in front of the plane) can be locked simply by selecting the target and letting the missile's software do its thing for about a second, and on an F-14 would be done by the Radar Intercept Officer, not the pilot.
  - Additionally, the lock tones vary depending on the missile used. Radar-guided missiles like the AIM-7 Sparrow, AIM-120 AMRAAM, or the now-retired AIM-54 Phoenix (which only the F-14 could carry) indicate a lock with a continuous low-pitch ringing tone. For the AIM-9 Sidewinder, it's a continuous low-pitched "growl." The movie's "beep-beep-beep-beep-booooooop" is never heard in a real cockpit.
- In the climactic dogfight, Iceman is hit twice by enemy cannon fire, both times leaving a short, neat line of holes in his plane. In reality, fighter cannons fire in bursts of 100 rounds or so to facilitate use in high-speed engagements. A solid hit to the fuselage as depicted, let alone two, would almost certainly have destroyed Iceman's plane. And, of course, cannon shells have explosives inside; that's what makes the gun a cannon!
- 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 was enforced by the filmmakers: the Navy at one point asked the crew to at least try shooting air combat at realistic distances, but the result was that nobody could see anything on film.
- The A-4 Skyhawks flown by the Top Gun trainers like Viper and Jester are described as being faster than the F-14s flown by the students. The A-4 was a subsonic ground attack plane first flown in 1954. Even the later variants produced by the time of the film were incapable of supersonic flight except in a dive. The Tomcat has a maximum speed of ~Mach 2.3. They also have much lower thrust to weight ratios than the F-14 as well and thus lower acceleration as well.
- To say pilot chatter in the final battle is laughably inaccurate would be an understatement.
- In the final battle a rescue helicopter is dispatched to pick up one of the F-14 crews 150 miles from the carrier, which is roughly that helicopter's top speed. By the time the battle is finished and Maverick/Iceman land their planes, the helicopter should be just arriving at the crash site, not returning with them.
Top Gun: Maverick
- The sequel repeats the predecessor's 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 Airstrike Impossible 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 Weapons Understudies approach of the original film, at time of release, only 16 Su-57s had been built due to Troubled Production and Russia's financial issues, ten of which were test models and the other six being in Russian Air Force hands.
- Enforced with the choice to use the F/A-18 Super Hornet in the film over the F-35C Lightning II. The In-Universe reason for this choice is that the target is protected by GPS jamming. This is 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 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 and that the Navy couldn't spare any for filming since they had only entered service in February 2019.
Transformers Film Series:
- Despite the support of the U.S. Military, Transformers (2007) contains a number of errors. An AC-130U Spooky gunship is used to take down the Decepticon Scorponok using "105 sabot rounds". The AC-130 is armed with a 105 mm howitzer, but there is no such thing as a sabot round for this type of weapon.^note Later, F-22 Raptors were used to attack the Decepticons during the final battle using laser guided air-to-ground missiles. In real life, the F-22 cannot carry any laser guided missiles; it is designed to use GPS-guided glide bombs for air-to-ground attacks. Also, freaking jet powered Predator. While the C variant of the Predator is jet powered, it also has substantially redesigned wings and fuselage. Putting a jet engine in a Predator B frame and putting it through the maneuvers it goes through in the movie would probably have snapped the wings off. The first scene in the film also has an army spec-ops team return to base on V-22 Ospreys but the interior shots appear to be from a CH-47 Chinook. On a more minor note, a lot of the military procedures shown, especially during the AC-130U scene, are on a massively condensed time-scale (it would have taken an hour at least to get all the military assets depicted on station), but this is at least somewhat understandable since, if it took a realistic time scale, Scorponok likely would have finished off the entire squad and levelled the village before the first air asset even has visual.
- Transformers: The Last Knight: Before the TRF go to attack the Ignition Chamber and save the Earth, Lennox explains how crazy their plan is by stating that the Osprey has a flight ceiling of 12,000 feet but they would be launching them from "almost double that", requiring what is best described as a mass controlled crash-landing as the Ospreys apparently cannot generate enough lift at those altitudes. In reality the Osprey has a flight ceiling of 25,000 feet, perfectly capable of reaching the TRF's target. A better issue to bring would be that the Osprey would have trouble getting through the literal maze of Cybertron chunks to the Ignition Chamber.
True Lies: The portrayal of the AV-8B Harrier jet is highly erroneous.
- Harriers are not designed to hover as long as it did in the film, are not bulletproof, and would be unflyable if it got its instrument panel shot up like it did.
- Also, exactly how does Arnold avoid getting sucked into the intake & FODing the damn engine?
- If a man were to be snagged on the forward fins of one of its missiles, it would immediately be directed downward by the weight pulling on it. Said weight would also ensure that the missile wouldn't have anywhere near the power or maneuverability to bring itself back on course, and would most likely slam into the ground.
- Also, despite doing so in the film, the real world AV-8B cannot use any of its weapons, even the gun, when configured in any way for hovering.
HBO's The Tuskegee Airmen erroneously depicts the 332d Pursuit Group flying P-51 Mustangs from the very start of the film. The Tuskeegee Airmen historically started out on the P-40 Warhawk.
In WarGames, General Beringer's order to "scramble two F-16s [single engine, one tail and rather small] out of Galena" in response to a phantom Soviet bomber apparently gets garbled somewhere along the way: the aircraft seen moments later are unmistakably F-15s [two engines, two tails and markedly larger than the F-16]. In the early 1980s, when the movie was made, the air force unit likely operating from Galena, Alaska, was the 21st Tactical Fighter Wing (headquartered at Elmendorf AFB, which exercised control over the airfield at Galena as well), part of the 11th Air Force. At this time, 21st TFW was indeed operating the F-15A, having transitioned to the type from F-4 Phantoms in 1982.
Where Eagles Dare uses a Bell Model 47—an American helicopter that hadn't even been built when the movie takes place—to represent a German helicopter, possibly meant to be a Flettner Fl-282.
Wonder Woman 1984 has a Panavia Tornado that the lead characters commandeer and apply magic to in order to create Wonder Woman's iconic invisible jet. However, it's shown to have side by side seating, whereas in real life, the Tornado has tandem seating with the co-pilot behind the pilot. A Tornado also has nowhere near the range to make a flight from Washington, DC to Egypt, much less make the same trip in reverse, without having to refuel in mid-air.
A downplayed example in X-Men: Days of Future Past. While the Gulfstream II, the plane the X-Men use to fly to Paris, was first manufactured in the 1960s, the winglets^note seen on this particular example were not part of the original design and were first available as an aftermarket retrofit in the 1990s (though much like the Blackbird^note this is justifiable by Xavier's immense personal fortune and Hank's engineering know-how allowing for a custom, one-off modification). Also, the plane's tail number of N540EA reveals that it was manufactured in 1975, two years after the setting of the film.

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