Just Plane Wrong / Video Games

• Mostly averted in the Ace Combat series, though there are occasional oddities — in the real world, the 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 YouTube comments that no pesky American jet should be able to keep up with their beloved MiGs and Sukhois, never mind score a gunkill.
  • Similarly, when they came out, multiple titles feature more Lockheed-Martin F-22 fighters serving in multiple air forces then were operational in the actual world, and with the decision of military spending in the United States, will probably ever be operational.
  • F-117s and tech demos like the X-29 and F-15 S/MTD are equipped with machine guns, which they didn't have in real life (and which the S/MTD couldn't have, since the right canard is right in the path of a regular Eagle's gun); some later games in the series do at least put the guns in gunpods under the wings or fuselage for craft that didn't/couldn't have an internal gun. The F-117 is also equipped with air-to-air missiles; the real thing was a dedicated attacker, despite the F-number designation,^note which was mostly for propaganda purposes, since even before it was officially unveiled the "stealth fighter" had already reached mythical status among the civilian public and only had room for two bombs.
  • Ace Combat 04: Shattered Skies added the Fox and other brevity codes for launching weapons, but most air-to-air special weapons are called with "Fox One", the term for semi-active radar-guided weapons, despite them being modeled after and programmed to act like active radar-guided weapons that would be called with "Fox Three". Ace Combat 5 fixed this (applying "Fox One" solely to the weapon identified as a semi-active weapon and using "Fox Three" for the others), but still has the issue of air-to-ground missiles using Fox codes instead of proper terms like "Bruiser" for the LASM; this too was fixed in Zero.
  • The most egregious - albeit deliberate - departure from reality is the missile armament on the planes - first, the planes can carry a ludicrous number of missiles (upwards of fifty on the low-end fighters early in the series, and up to more than a hundred in more modern games; real missile armaments, even on the most heavily laden of proposed fighters, such as the F-15X, max out at 22, and few planes currently in service can carry more than 12), and second, the standard heat-seeking missiles are able to lock on to, and are equally effective against, both fast-moving fighters as well as hardened bunkers and buildings. A lot of the special weapons are also more viable than in reality; while you still can't lock onto an air target with a dedicated air-to-ground weapon, ground and sea targets are given no such distinction, so there's nothing stopping you from destroying a fortified bunker with a Harpoon that shouldn't work as well as it does over land (the only difference between the "LAGM" and "LASM" is that one dives upon reaching the target and has a wider blast radius, while the other dives upon firing and focuses its full power on the target).
  • The in-game descriptions for the jets occasionally fall into this; for example, Shattered Skies refers to a number of the useable planes as having "forward-swept" wings — the above-mentioned Su-47 and X-02 are the only jets in the game that feature them. Apparently they mistook (or mistranslated) canards as "forward-swept wings", since a lot of the planes described as forward-swept designs do have canards.^note It wouldn't be the only such mistake in the game - turning ability in the game also seems to have been mistaken as "able to roll really well", where high-end planes like the Eurofighter and Su-37 can do a complete barrel roll in half a second but can only actually change pitch as well as the F-4E you start the game with.
  • In Ace Combat 2, an F-22's thrust vectoring is shown off at one point in the intro cinematic, but its engines point in different directions during a roll, which the real F-22's engines can't actually do (their thrust-vectoring is two dimensional, and only assists with pitch). There's also the issue of it and its Su-35 wingmate taking off from an aircraft carrier when neither of them are carrier-capable (nor are Russian carrier planes able to use steam catapults, since Russian carriers don't have them).
  • The first Air Combat utilized a Flanker that was referred to as the original Su-27 but was very clearly not one, having the canards of upgraded models like the Su-33 and original Su-35. Likewise for other planes that were still in development at the time of the games' releases; for instance, the F-22 was not actually an F-22 until Ace Combat 3: Electrosphere, every prior game (released before the production F-22 was finalized) using the YF-22 prototype, of which only two existed, and the Su-47 in 04 being noticeably different from the real thing due to a lack of proper sources to model it after, being more of a hybrid between the real Su-47 and the more fictional Su-43 from Electrosphere.
  • The main reason that the game can give a seemingly limitless supply of Super Prototypes and Tech Demonstrators to enemy and friendly fighter squadrons is because it takes place in an alternate universe that goes through at least two large-scale wars per decade (because nuclear proliferation doesn't exist to make such aggression the quickest way to turn the game into a Fallout clone), where the outcome of these wars very often hinges on the prowess of air support (Erusea in 04 is able to take over almost the entirety of Usea before the game starts simply by having an extremely effective anti-air defense system that reaches over most of the continent) and the possibilities of such aircraft entering active service with any military are as such perfectly reasonable. Although this then raises the question of why an alternate Earth with different geography and politics has managed to produce the same planes, credited to the same companies, as our world — and that's before you get into the issue of companies selling or licensing their designs to both sides of a conflict (granted, the latter fact actually becomes a plot point in the fifth game).
  • Ace Combat Infinity, set in the real world, has an alternate justification for why there are so many rare or obsolete planes still flying in 2019 - following the Ulysses asteroid impact and most governments' reducing military spending to focus on rebuilding, a company called Wernher and Noah Enterprises have taken up production of military craft, streamlining the process via "Advanced Automated Aviation Plants" to the point that planes can be built quickly, cheaply, and efficiently so long as blueprints for it exist. This makes mercenary squadrons like the players are in a very lucrative business (what with a surplus of planes but a shortage of pilots to fly them), but also allows terrorist groups access to vast amounts of military hardware. That said, it still stretches plausibility when you realize that both planes which didn't exist prior to the Ulysses impact in 1999, such as the Su-35S (first flight in 2008), the T-50 (2010), and the ATD-X (2016) and even fictional designs from the Strangereal universe, up to and including the R-101 Delphinus and X-49 Night Raven from Electrosphere (set in 2040, for context) are available with little explanation, the first handful handwaved as coming from an undefined "hostile country" before the descriptions for later ones straight-up forgot this game is set in an alternate universe.
  • Ace Combat: Joint Assault and Ace Combat 7: Skies Unknown pay particular attention to carrier compatibility. For one mission, if the plane you select has an extant naval variant (or for the former game, if you select either one of the 2 prop fighters), you start with a carrier launch; if it doesn't, you perform a mid-air refuelling instead. Similarly, when taking off from a beached carrier in the latter game, compatible aircraft will use the slingshot; incompatible ones start much further back on the flight deck and will need pretty much the whole length to get airborne.
  • Ever since its first appearance in Ace Combat 6: Fires of Liberation, the Su-33 Flanker-D has been depicted with a catapult connecting bar that isn't present on the real plane so that players can use it on missions that are restricted to carrier aircraft (which consistently use US CATOBAR carriers; the Su-33 is carrier-capable, but Russian carriers don't use a catapult launch system).
• Aerobiz: Though most aircraft have historically accurate phase-in and discontinuation dates, they don't feature accurate seating capacities or operational ranges. This is further exaggerated by the fact that the game does not allow airlines to make any alterations to the seating capacities or cabin configurations.
• The planes in Aero Fighters, despite being based on real-life ones, tend to be... off in terms of accuracy. The Vulcan and B-2 from the first game and the second respectively are both way larger than their real-life counterparts, while the second game has a pair of militarized Concorde airliners as the boss of the Paris stage. Then again, when you consider that one of your playable pilots is a dolphin that can talk in human languages...
• In Banjo-Pilot, the planes that Banjo and his friends fly slow down when they fly over terrain such as grass. This would make more sense in a car racing game due to friction.
• Battlefield games tend to have slightly silly flight models (the original's planes tend to practically leap into the air), while aircraft in later games are far tougher than they should be (Desert Combat's AC-130 can fly straight through the factory chimneys at El Al, while BF2's helicopters can survive a direct hit from a main battle tank) and with Easy Logistics in full swing (helicopters can re-arm by hovering over runways, planes just by flying over them; this is generally regarded as a fairly serious Game-Breaker since it means they require no support of any kind). The pilot of a multi-seat aircraft can also instantly teleport between seats; skilled players sometimes use this in helicopters to fire TV-guided missiles despite having no gunner.
  • In Battlefield: Bad Company 2, Haggard incorrectly identifies an Antonov An-124 that the game's Big Bad uses as the Antonov An-225. This example may be intentional, as the information Haggard recites off the top of his head (the Mriya name's meaning, "Dream", and carry weight of 253 tons) are things that one would have to have done quite a bit of research on the plane to have it on-hand like that; it's also surprising, both to the rest of the squad and the audience, for Haggard of all people to actually know that much about, well, anything (he responds to the squad's stunned silence with "What? I can know stuff!"). The fact that he's wrong makes it even funnier.
  • The Battlefield 3 mission "Going Hunting" places the player in the shoes of a Radar Intercept Officer aboard an F/A-18 Super Hornet, but there are numerous mistakes. For starters, the pilot and co-pilot walk out onto the flight deck without putting on their helmets until just before climbing aboard their craft - real pilots have hearing protection on long before they get that close to an active plane, because even when idle jet engines are loud. The pilot also misuses "bogies" to refer to aircraft they already know are enemies, and one of the objectives halfway through the opening dogfight tells you to "Take out the remaining MiGs", when the enemies are flying the Sukhoi Su-35S. On the other hand, even real Naval aviators have applauded the actual takeoff for showing the real speed and exhilaration of using a steam catapult to launch off the carrier.
  • The trailer for the updated version of the Gulf of Oman map for BF3 shows Marine variant F-35 fighter jets using their VTOL capability to act as impromptu attack helicopters. A real F-35 would be incapable of doing this without wasting a ton of fuel.
  • The same game's F/A-18E Super Hornet incorrectly has Marine Corps markings. The US Marines have refused to use the Super Hornet, so as to not endanger their purchase of the F-35B.
• Blazing Angels lets the heroic World War II pilots upgrade to flying the F-82 Twin Mustang, which first flew a month before the end of the war and didn't see combat until Korea.
• Bomber Crew 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 - which did indeed happen once, in an incident that earned the sergeant involved a Victoria Cross and a whole forest of aluminum Christmas trees.
• Call of Duty:
  • Call of Duty 4 features Mi-24 Hind attack helicopters in Chernobyl's vehicle graveyards. No such aircraft are present in the real graveyards.^note This is most likely a Shout-Out to S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl, which also erroneously features Hinds in the vehicle graveyards. Zakhaev's forces also use Mi-28N Havocs for air cover in the Chernobyl missions, at best a couple months before the prototype for that version even had its first flight. Especially odd is that, in the rest of the game, where the Mi-28N being ubiquitous would have been temporally possible, the Ultranationalists almost exclusively use the older Mi-24 Hinds while Mi-28N Havocs are reserved for the friendly Russian Loyalist forces.
  • In a rather minor example, the loading screen for the famous "Death from Above" mission features a wireframe model of the AC-130H "Spectre" (easily identified by two M61 Vulcan cannons), but the info given and what the player actually uses in the mission is a single 25mm GAU-12, indicating it's actually an AC-130U "Spooky". To go meta, most third-party sources state that the plane used is the Spectre based on the fifteen-second wireframe cutscene rather than the actual gameplay.
  • Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 has a chronic case of Easy Logistics, with probably the biggest example being the Havocs magically able to fly all the way across all of Europe and the Atlantic Ocean to show up in the American capital.
  • MW2 shows F-15Cs in "The Gulag" mission, but later refers to the Navy as bombing the gulag. The Navy uses F/A-18s and eventually will use F-35s for combat missions.^note Ironically, this mission is clearly influenced by The Rock, and yet it makes the exact opposite error that movie does. Apparently the developers didn't want to bother modeling another aircraft. It's also rather sad considering Call of Duty 4 correctly showed the Marines getting their air support from SuperCobras and Harriers - except in multiplayer, where again the F-15 carries out both their airstrikes and those of the SAS. A lesser goof is that the launching of AGM-88 HARMs, which no F-15 variant is compatible with, is announced with a call of "Fox Three", which is the brevity code for air-to-air, active radar-guided missiles. An anti-radiation air-to-ground missile would be fired with a call of "Magnum".
  • World at War gets this wrong on occasion. The worst example would be from the beginning of the Soviet campaign, where "German bombers" are seen flying over Stalingrad in a Blitz-style air-raid. Quite apart from the fact that the Germans did not use saturation bombing on Stalingrad at that point in the battle (what with their own men inside the city and everything), the planes featured are Focke-Wulf Fw 200s, which were primarily naval reconnaissance and patrol aircraft, and had small bomb bays. Fw 200s were deployed to Stalingrad, but only as transport aircraft making up part of Goering's idiotic "air bridge". They were likely used in the game because they had four engines, and thus looked more intimidating than the Dornier Do 17s and Heinkel He 111s that would actually have been used. If the Germans had ever been serious about strategic bombing, they would have used He 177 "Greif" heavy bombers (though notoriously unreliable they could at least carry large bombloads), certainly not maritime patrol aircraft.
    • The PBY Catalina the player mans the guns of in "Black Cats" has both Oerlikon 20mm cannons and Browning M1919 machine guns mounted on the bow. The cannons were often reported as a field modification to Catalinas in the Pacific, but they'd have to remove the machine guns to make the room for them - they weren't meant as an additional set of guns to support the M1919s but rather as straight-up replacements with better range and power. The Oerlikons are also depicted as part of a flexible mount to fire wherever the front turret is facing, when in reality they were on fixed mounts. Additionally, the player's Catalina is severely undermanned - the real things had a crew of ten (pilot, copilot, flight engineer, navigator, radio and radar operators, and four gunners), but the player's crew is at half that (pilot and copilot alongside only two gunners, forcing the player character to waste time clambering between individual guns, and one guy handling everything else), though in turn this helps answer the question of how your Catalina also has the room and engine power to carry up to six stranded sailors pulled out of the ocean over the course of the mission.
    • The opening depicts the start of the war in the Pacific by way of having Zeroes dropping bombs, where more logical choices for such a mission would have been the "Kate" torpedo bomber or "Val" dive bomber - not to mention that the "bombs" in question are actually external fuel tanks.
  • Call of Duty: Black Ops has U-2 spyplanes in multiplayer, which can be hit from the ground with small-arms fire. The actual U-2s were designed specifically to fly so high that then-existing anti-aircraft weaponry couldn't reach them. There is no in-game justification for why they would be flying so low, it's pure game balance.
    • It also features both NPC and player-controlled Hind gunships in Vietnam in 1968, a full year and a half before its first flight and four years before it entered military service, but that's one of the lesser anachronisms in this game. A less noticeable but even more anachronistic goof is that the in-game Hind also has a missile warning system for when enemies acquire a lock with a missile launcher, and an automated countermeasure system to redirect the first such missile fired at it; the real craft didn't have such systems until they started losing a handful of Hinds to Mujahideen fighters utilizing Stinger missiles partway through the Soviet Invasion of Afghanistan almost two decades later.
    • On the subject of helicopters, there are several Kill Streak rewards to call them in as support, but the model used depends solely on what kill streak is used rather than which side called them in, meaning it's perfectly possible for an American MACV-SOG operator to hop into the controls of a Soviet Hind helicopter while a Soviet Spetsnaz soldier fires a minigun from out the side of an American Huey. It's even stranger in the case of the Gunship kill streak, which calls in the player-controlled Hind, because the game does have the necessary models, animations and coding to have the Huey act in the same capacity - but it's only used for the opening of the final campaign level, multiplayer settling for the Hind with a Palette Swap depending on which team you're on (players on the user's team see it in tan while enemies see it in gray).
  • Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3's second mission starts with a transmission from F-22 pilots preparing for a bombing run, but the wireframe models and information on the screen, along with the planes that actually show up in the mission, are all once again F-15s. On top of that, the loadout shown for them tries to claim that an external fuel tank is a JDAM, and for the actual air strike they launch "JDAM Missiles", which A) don't exist (JDAMs are a conversion kit for unguided bombs), and B) are actually AIM-120 AMRAAMs, a dedicated air-to-air weapon.
  • The Spanish Civil War mod: The group of downed German pilots you rescue in one of the Nationalist missions counts at least 10 people, but the wreck of their plane is shown to be a two-seat dive bomber.
  • Zigzagged in the bomber level of United Offensive. B-17s were in fact used by the RAF's 90 Squadron under the designation Fortress I, and were flown by them on daylight raids over Europe... but they were the B-17C model, a plane with a dramatically different appearance than the "classic" look of the B-17E and F models depicted in the game. These models were only used by the RAF in Coastal Command roles, under the designation Fortress IIA and Fortress II, respectively. The bombers also appear to have a mix of British and American markings, wearing RAF roundels but USAAF tail codes.
    • The Spitfires seen escorting the bombers at the beginning of the above level appear to have sand filters fitted, unlikely for aircraft based in England rather than North Africa.
• Command & Conquer: Red Alert 2:
  • The standard Allied bomber aircraft is identified by name and icon as the AV-8 Harrier, and they appear as such in cutscenes such as a mid-mission one for the second Allied mission or the introduction to the Expansion Pack, but the actual voxel art used in gameplay more resembles the A-6E Intruder, which cannot take off and land vertically as the in-game craft does; earlier in development the craft was identified as an Intruder, with the name and icon change apparently happening midway through to fit better with it acting as a VTOL aircraft.^note Interestingly, the Traditional Chinese translation of the game does more or less properly call the Harrier the "Intruder" instead. The Aircraft Carrier also utilizes small, apparently-unmanned aircraft referred to as "Hornets", presumably meant to be the real F/A-18 Hornet despite it also being incapable of VTOL, and not even existing in a non-prototype in the game's time frame of 1972 (then again, this is a game where, as just one example, laser technology is utilized as a direct method of attacking hostiles in combat, so maybe it was developed earlier here).
  • The introduction to Yuri's Revenge is even worse. As above the CGI models are proper Harriers, but the cockpit view showcased on a few occasions is wildly inaccurate, depicting a control panel with a pair of gauges and two or three Big Red Buttons, rather than the array of several gauges and buttons that even the earliest Harrier variants had - to say nothing of the actual head-up display having apparently gone AWOL (unless we're meant to assume the in-game version has a helmet-mounted display system like the modern F-35). Then the first of the Harriers to get shot down by Yuri's gatling-based defenses has one wing torn off by a neat line of bullets cutting through it, but it rolls away from the missing wing and somehow still manages to home in directly onto another still-functioning Harrier to crash into it.
• Digital Combat Simulator largely averts this thanks to its very realistic cockpit and flight simulation, but the trope does pop up from time to time - some planes are modeled in a wonky way that allows them to accelerate far faster than they realistically could in a given situation, while others are able to maintain lift even when pushed beyond what would realistically be possible given their energy-management profile.
• MicroProse's F-15 Strike Eagle series regularly features F-15s taking off from and landing on carriers, which the real plane is not capable of - while a carrier-capable F-15N "Sea Eagle" was briefly considered in the 1970s, nothing came of it mostly because the initial proposed design was only armed with the shorter-ranged AIM-9 Sidewinder and problematic AIM-7 Sparrow, at a time when the Navy's air-defense strategy already revolved around the extreme range the AIM-54 Phoenix offered.
• F-19 Stealth Fighter was a combat flight simulator produced by Microprose in 1986. Its fictional plane used the same general appearance as the Testor Corporation's model kit, and was similar in capability to the F-19 featured in Tom Clancy's Red Storm Rising a few years earlier. Ironically the game was released on the same day that the U.S. military admitted the existence of the F-117, the Real Life "stealth fighter", which turned out to be quite a different bird. The 1991 sequel/remake added the real F-117, with real-world capability to match (flying the F-117 made for an easy mission, while flying the less-stealthy but air-to-air combat-capable F-19 made for a more exciting one).
• DiD's 1989 flight sim F 29 Retaliator has some rather odd quirks; for a start, the poster plane is actually the F-22, the game having been mis-announced by Ocean's notoriously fearsome CEO and nobody wanting to correct him (mirroring the urban legend about the SR-71's name). The YF-22 wouldn't fly until a year after the game came out, so the aircraft is based on concept art that closely resembles the much later MiG 1.44 prototype. But that's not even the start of the silliness.
  • You are still in full control of your plane after ejecting from it. You can even kill yourself by bringing the plane around and crashing it into the descending pilot sprite.
  • Landing gear raises instantly. It's possible to kill yourself the second a mission starts by pressing G (yes, a six foot drop is a fatal crash; apparently your plane is made from blasting caps and dynamite); have fun, since you want to press F and B to extend flaps and disengage the parking brake.
  • There is actually an "F-29" in the game. It's the X-29 research aircraft magically turned into a fighter without changing anything about it — even the paint scheme on the intro screen. The player is offered the choice between the not-F-22 and the F-29 at the start of the game.
• F/A-18 Hornet has you fighting Soviet MiG-27s and Su-27s in the Persian Gulf, neither of which are planes Iraq has ever flown. 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 adversary squadrons, and they're emphatically not carrier-capable. before settling on the Northrop YF-17 instead).
• The attack helicopters in Ghost Recon Wildlands are repeatedly referred to as "Apaches" despite the in game models being near-perfect representations of the Cobra, the Apache's USMC counterpart and predecessor in the US Army.
• GoldenEye (2010):
  • The Russian Federation does not use the Ch-53 (slightly dressed up and called the "Ludmila T1" here), as in Dam, or the AH-6, as in Tank. Granted, the former case is noted by Bond, even if it's more because he can somehow tell at a glance that it looks EMP-hardened, and so one of the objectives of the level is to take pictures of it so MI6 can help figure out why it's there. Also, much like the Eurocopter Tiger from the original movie it's taking the place of, the Ch-53 does not have an ejection system and cannot lock missiles onto itself (it doesn't even have missiles).
  • Also, the SAM launchers in Airfield are the American MIM-23 Hawk, rather than an actual Russian system like the SA-19/SA-22. Reloaded at least adds ZU-23-2 guns that Russia actually does use, but because they weren't there in the Wii version nobody is able to actually use them here.
  • Sky Briggs notes in Dubai that the pilots for the copter on display there used to fly Cobras for Blackwater. The AH-1 isn't in use with military contractors. The Blackhawk would probably be a better fit, since there is a civil variant.
• Tom Clancy's H.A.W.X. starts out with the retirement flight of the eponymous Air Force squadron - flying Navy F/A-18C Hornets. You don't even get a choice of what plane to fly for the mission if you replay it in New Game Plus.
  • The first game also prevented planes from slowing down to below 1000 km/h outside of Assistance OFF mode. Even though this could have exceeded the never-exceed velocity of some slower planes. Even includes all planes breaking the sound barrier, which in real life could have shattered some of them. The second game fixes that, allowing the plane to stall even in Assistance ON mode, though the flight computer still makes it difficult to do so.
  • When in Assistance OFF mode, the player is able to stall the plane out. It indeed does start plummeting near-immediately, but a stall is more likely to happen when the player is flying extremely slowly while turning a lot. Where it falls into this trope is that, if the player decides to stay in that state for the hell of it by keeping the plane level with the ground and holding the airbrakes, their plane will, going by the contrails still following them, start to fly backwards. This was fixed in the sequel.
  • Like Ace Combat, the planes are all given ludicrous amounts of missiles (this time the absolute minimum is about 88, flying a "Low Payload" craft on the highest difficulty which cuts missile counts, which as of 2022 is still four times as many as the most heavily-armed proposals can carry) that can target both fast-movers and stationary ground installations. The second game still gives planes at least three-fourths of a full ton worth of missiles, but the default ones are now explicitly-labeled "Heat-Seeking Missiles" that can only target other aircraft.
  • In a reversal of the original point, at one point the player character defects from the Artemis PMC back to the US military. He does so while defending a naval group, who suggests clearing a space on their aircraft carrier for them to land, even though it's possible (and likely, given the game's suggested plane for the mission) that the player is not flying a jet capable of landing on a carrier.
  • Every jet in the game with more than one variant uses the exact same model for each one, even when later variants add or remove extra seating, switch out the engines, or the like. The sole major exceptions are the F/A-18E Super Hornet, which has the proper wider fuselage than the other Hornet variants;^note appropriate, since the real Super Hornet has been described as closer to a new plane advertised as a variant for the purposes of not inviting budget scrutiny the F-15 ACTIVE, which lengthens the fuselage to fit a second seat in the cockpit (since you first fly it in a tutorial mission where the Guy in Back is actually acknowledge; even then, it omits the thrust-vectoring engines the real thing has, and the game fails to make the same modification for the F-15E); and the Su-32 and -34, which get the widened tandem-seat cockpit and longer tail than other Flanker variants. The only other exceptions are when a variant of a plane adds canards, but that's the only difference, and if you look at the textures, you'll note that for most craft with canards, like the aforementioned Flanker family, they're lazy enough about it that canards are textured even on variants that don't have them. The game even goes overboard on this sort of thing with the Mirage V, which is accidentally programmed to use the Mirage III's texture instead of its own.
• This trope is averted thoroughly in the World War II combat flight simulator series IL-2 Sturmovik. The demo of the same studio's next flight sim, Birds of Steel, doesn't do as well, though, with the narrator of the tutorial at one point telling you to fire the "afterburners" on your P-47 Thunderbolt, a single-engined propeller plane which, due to the mechanics of piston-engined planes, could never be fitted with an afterburner even if they had been invented when the game was set. In the studio's next game, War Thunder, putting a non-afterburning engine's throttle past 100%, and actually firing the afterburners on the jet engines that do have them, are both referred to more properly as War Emergency Power, or WEP for short.
  • While a "Jug" certainly couldn't have a "reheat", the afterburner was actually around back then. The Italian Caproni-Campini CC1 fighter prototype of 1940 used a radial engine to run a ducted fan (much like many modern radio-control flying models), and it did have a "thrust augmentator", which squirted aviation-grade gasoline into the duct behind the fans and ignited it. In other words, an afterburner. Early jet technology could get a little strange.
• In Jurassic World: Evolution, helicopters can lift sauropod dinosaurs without a problem. There is a chopper that can lift up to 80,000 pounds, but that’s clearly not what these are, and even so, many of the sauropods in game are twice that weight.
• In Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater 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. 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 game's designers deserve quite a bit of credit, as most of the 'wacky designs' for vehicles in the game (save the Shagohod, which is classically Awesome, but Impractical in traditional Metal Gear fashion) are drawn from rare but existing real life prototypes and models, such as the M21 insertion drone used by Naked Snake at the start of Operation Snake Eater (the in-game dates even match pretty closely with the real craft's first flight) and the Bartini Beriev WIG which appears in the ending scenes. Even the science-fiction-style hovering platforms used by patrols in some areas are based on real prototypes, proving once again that Reality Is Unrealistic.
• The planes in Pocket Planes travel much faster than they realistically should, with even the flights that take around 30 minutes to 1 hour in real life being completed in only a few minutes. The planes also always have their landing gear down, even while cruising, and you can't plan flight paths across the Pacific Ocean because the planes can't go beyond the map's edges.
• A carrier appears at the end of [PROTOTYPE] with F-35s and Apache helicopters shown sitting on the flight deck. The problem being the Apache is only used by the Army. The Navy also doesn't give up its flight deck space to the other services when they have their own aircraft to use. The Apaches could be handwaved as the Marines finally replacing the aging Super Cobra (rather than just upgrading it), but it probably isn't.
  • They also don't use Blackhawks, so the ubiquitous transports should be upgraded Hueys, or if it's really the future, V-22 Osprey tilt-rotors. There are also, incidentally, no Bradley IFVs in the Marine inventory. If the developers had just name-swapped the Marines in dialogue with the Army, almost everything except the carrier would work fine.
• One of the playable planes in Skies Of War is a C-47 Skytrain, which is used as a medium bomber, of all things, with a missile mount and two fixed forward facing gun positions on each wing in addition to the bomb bays. While versatile and no doubt capable of such a theoretical modification, the C-47 was a cargo and paratrooper plane, with a close support variant, the AC-47 "Spooky", mounting three gun positions along the port side. This is strange, as the B-25 Mitchell could have easily taken its place as the medium twin engined bomber.
• Splinter Cell has a few examples of playing this trope straight. In the first title, Georgia is depicted as having what looks like either a MiG-29 or a Su-27, neither of which are correct. Additionally, the depiction of the interior dimensions of the V-22 Osprey are noticeably generous to anyone who has actually stepped foot in one. Large computer bank on each wall with room to move comfortably in between? Not likely...
• In Sword of the Stars II, both the Horde◊ and Prester◊ Zuul have rotors on their trans-atmospheric assault shuttles. Bad enough. But the Prester Zuul's Heavy Assault Shuttle◊ has diagonally-canted rotors. There are no words.
• The Transformers (2007) Licensed Games has Dreadwing who takes the role of fighter jet enemy in the game. The problem arises because in a game that takes almost entirely in the United States,^note barring the first of the Decepticon campaign which takes in an American military base in Qatar, and the Bonus Level for both that takes place on Cybertron their vehicle mode is a Russian MiG-29. Granted, some private companies in the States do have MiG-29s that are used as targets for training exercises, but particularly with the film's sub-plot about the US thinking the Qatar attack was done by a foreign power with Russia, North Korea, China, and later Iran in a throwaway line being named-dropped. Three guesses which fighter jet all four of those nations happen to use.
  • The concept artist (at least for the Transformers) of the first two games reveals he was actually barred from modeling an American fighter jet for the game and he only went with the MiG-29 because if you squint it kinda looks an F-15.
  • The licensed game for Transformers: Revenge of The Fallen also has this issue. While the Autobot Breakaway having the F-35 Lightning II as a vehicle can be excused as it did have its first flight in 2006 and he is the only F-35 to appear in the game, and the Navy is properly using the F/A-18 Hornet in the carrier fleet level, the helicopters in the game are handled with the same attention to detail. Specifically, NEST uses the RAH-66 Comanche as an attack and transport helicopter. In reality, the Comanche was canceled in 2004 and, despite it having respectable firepower, was primarily meant to serve as a target spotter for the Apache. It also is incapable of carrying any passengers, let alone the three that are packed into the same helicopter in one mission. Also, any points for the Hornets can be taken away as the same level has CH-53 Super Stallions on their littoral combat ships. The Super Stallion is a Marine helicopter.
• Trauma Center: Under The Knife has an operation called "Miracle at 9,800 ft." ("Miracle at 3000 m" in the Japanese version, thus ruling out localization-related Unit Confusion), referring to the operation taking place aboard a passenger jet. However, 9,800 feet is far too low of a cruising altitude for such aircraft; they usually cruise at 30,000-40,000 feet. The only possible justifications for flying that low would be if the plane was ascending after takeoff, descending to prepare for approach, or had to hold that altitude for some urgent reason, none of which are stated. This error is averted in Second Opinion as the equivalent level is just named "Caduceus on a Plane" instead.
• The American fighters attacking the Walker in the Berlin level are not only able to drop an enormous bomb payload, far too large for this type of plane, but even several paratroopers in one flight.
• Averted by X-Plane. While flight sims are generally pretty good at getting it right, X-Plane's attention to detail and real-world flight physics is so incredibly accurate it can be used, along with the right hardware, for getting one's FAA certification. That's right, they've shown so much work that many countries' aviation regulators agree it's just like flying a real airplane.

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