The Final Countdown corrections

There are two F-14s that deal with the yacht and the two Zeros. They are respectively numbered 202 and 203 prominently on both sides of their forward fuselages. But when one fires a missile to down the second Zero, suddenly it is number 200, a jet that hasn't been launched. See more...

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The USS Nimitz was based in the Atlantic during filming of this movie. When the ship pulls into Pearl Harbor past the USS Arizona Memorial, it is actually the USS Kitty Hawk not the Nimitz. See more...

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The Final Countdown (1980) - 4 corrections

Comments made in brackets are corrections from other visitors. As such, any aggressive/abusive corrections (and I get quite a few) written as if they're comments I've made myself will be ignored. To submit your own corrections for mistakes, just click the edit icon under an entry, then choose "correct entry". Some entries have "duplicated entry" after them - these are entries which were already listed on the main page, but were submitted again. I occasionally leave these online for a while, just in case they were moved in error, so don't worry about pointing them out to me.

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Right before the end credits, you see the black limo driving down the pier, away from the Nimitz. Though she is supposedly docked in Pearl Harbor, the pier in question is actually "Pier 12" at Norfolk Naval Station and if you note the direction the chauffeur is headed, the occupants are about to get very wet... he is heading the wrong way... off the end of the pier! [The limo is simply heading toward a less congested portion of the pier so it can turn around safely. The camera pans away long before it runs out of room to do so.]

Corrected by John W Rosa

The F-14 shoots down a Zero with a Sidewinder missile. The Sidewinder is a heat seeker designed to home in on jets. The Zero's air-cooled piston engine would not have been hot enough for the missile to lock onto. [There are a number of different models of the Sidewinder missile. Testing of the seeker head is done on deck before takeoff using a special flashlight type device that it can scan. The Sidewinder missile could lock on to a car engine, or even a dark colored tent on a hot summer day. Anyway, point being, at that close of range, the seeker head could have easily tracked the Zero engine.]

In the scene where the two F-14s are refueling, the shots from the plane's cockpits are actually of KC-135s - not the KA-6Ds which are shown taking off from the carrier and which would be the real aircraft which would refuel Tomcats. The successive shots keep switching from KC-135 to KA-6D and back again. The KC-135 is an Air Force aircraft that could not be launched from a carrier. [The cockpit view during refuelling certainly does NOT show a KC-135 Stratotanker. They are based on the old Boeing 707 and are 4-engined and considerably bigger. The shots DO look like the underside of the KA-6D Intruder - engine exhausts/nozzles in the right place close to the body, plus four underwing racks/pods/tanks.]

When Senator Chapman (Charles Durning) is landed on the Nimitz, he asks his assistant, "what kind of machine was that that they picked us up with?" He is referring to the helicopter. Yet helicopters, although primitive, existed in the early 40s, and most people in America were familiar with autogyros, which had been around since the late 1920s. [If the Senator knew anything about autogyros, it would be obvious to him that this was not an autogyro (they can't hover). The 1st single main rotor helicopter did fly in 1939, but the 1st production helicopter was not produced until 1942 (see: http://www.sikorskyarchives.com/timeline.html). As the events in the movie happen in late '41, it is quite reasonable that the Senator would be unfamiliar with helicopters.]

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