Flight of the Phoenix

Corrected entry: The crew crashes into the Gobi Desert, which is in Northern China. Yet the people are speaking Cantonese, which is the local dialect for Southern China (Quangzhou/Hong Kong area), instead of Mandarin (the official language) or any of the Northern dialects.

Correction: What people? They're in the middle of an empty desert. If you're talking about the nomads: well... they're nomads. That means they're from all over. They could speak any language, Chinese or not. Just because they currently live in the Gobi doesn't mean they're originally "from that area."

Phixius ★

Corrected entry: After the lightning hit the plane, A.J. comes running to see if the captain and Elliot are okay. When he is under the wing, he touches it. But after lightning has hit this wing, he never could have touched it, his fingers would have melted.

Correction: Like all metal framed aircraft the C119 is designed to survive lightning strikes by conducting the electricity through the main spar and out of the wingtips. Not being earthed, a lightning strike on an aircraft is nothing serious and this film hugely exaggerates the damage for dramatic effect. There might be a flicker of the instruments and a pretty impressive bang, but the temperature of the aluminium skin would definitely not increase.

One of the biggest misconceptions about electricity melting metal is that metal has to earthed for electricity to melt it. This is simply not true. Electricity can, and does melt unearthed metal.

First, metal doesn't have to be earthed, or grounded for electricity to melt it. That's just a common belief. Electricity can and does melt unearthed, and ungrounded metal objects. Second, the metal aircrafts are made of don't offer complete protection against lightning even though it's built to survive lightning strikes. They are built to survive lightning strikes by conducting electricity through the main spar, and their wingtips but their metal frame is not perfect.

Actually lightning can heat up metal objects whether their earthed or not contrary to the common belief that they have to be earthed for lightning to heat them up. Also while metal framed aircraft are designed to survive lightning strikes their not perfected. Lightning can and does damage or destroy them.

More for Flight of the Phoenix

Mistakes

Plot hole: This film is set in 2004. The thought that no search and rescue operations would be put in place after an aircraft disappeared from radar during a routine flight is absurd. The Chinese are paranoid about intrusion on their territory and the downed aircraft would have been located by a simple satellite search within hours of it crashing. Chinese military satellites crisscross the Gobi and they are equipped with optical cameras, microwave and infrared detectors and radar, so spotting a metal aircraft on the ground would be simple even if it was hundreds of kilometres off course. The crew would have been visited by Chinese military helicopters (and probably arrested!) as soon as the storm had died down.

PEDAUNT

Upvote valid corrections to help move entries into the corrections section.

Suggested correction: The Chinese government, for whatever reason, may have denied there was any crash at all if it suited their purposes, and the oil company that owned the plane would have little recourse. The Chinese have done this before. For the purpose of the plot, the survivors decided that they had to save themselves rather than wait for rescue and that was completely plausible.

Suggested correction: It's now 2021, and we still can't find Malaysian Airlines MH370. So this suggestion of planes always being found is laughable.

stiiggy

MH370 crashed into the ocean, and in fact some wreckage has been found. The Chinese military does not have the south Indian Ocean under satellite surveillance 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, unlike the Gobi desert where a crashed plane would be spotted within hours of it going missing.

More mistakes in Flight of the Phoenix

Quotes

Rady: Let me tell you a story. A rabbi and a priest attend a boxing match. They watch as the boxers come into the ring. The rabbi sees one of the boxers cross himself. So the rabbi turns to the priest and asks, "What does that mean?" The priest says, "Not a damn thing if the man can't fight."

More quotes from Flight of the Phoenix

Questions

Question: What are cowl flaps? What is their purpose?

Answer: Cowl flaps are used to adjust to volume of air that passes over the cooling fins of an aircraft piston engine. Under takeoff and landing these flaps are open to allow maximum airflow and under normal flight they are closed to maintain normal engine temperature.

Andreas[DK]

More questions & answers from Flight of the Phoenix

Join the mailing list

Separate from membership, this is to get updates about mistakes in recent releases. Addresses are not passed on to any third party, and are used solely for direct communication from this site. You can unsubscribe at any time.

Check out the mistake & trivia books, on Kindle and in paperback.