Question: In one of the last scenes, when Kyle and her daughter hide in a little compartment and survive the explosion, somebody who answered another question in this page said it was the hold of the plane, but I thought it was the black box when I saw it. So which one was it? And is it possible for a person to fit in the black box of a plane?
Question: Can someone please explain to me who those men were that Jodie Foster saw out of her daughter's window in the beginning of the movie if they were not the individuals on the flight?
Answer: It was the men seen early in the film who murdered Foster's husband. When her daughter disappeared on the plane, Foster suspected the Muslim passengers were the kidnappers, believing they looked similar to the men she saw when her husband died. However, they were never involved in the plot. Because Foster was under extreme duress and somewhat irrational, she jumped to a politically incorrect assumption based on their ethnicity.
Question: Several questions. 1. What was Carson's relationship to Stephanie? They obviously knew each other. 2. Why didn't Carson ask the morgue director for the code? It would have been much easier. 3. The plane is to escape, but would they really allow an air marshall to just stroll on the plane even if his plan was successful? And how would he get Stephanie on? 4. Was Carson enjoying himself with his convoluted plan? He wants $50 million, but there are so many easier ways to get that such as robbing a bank.
Answer: 1. They appeared to be lovers. 2. I would classify this as a plot hole. However, if he had done that, there would be no movie. This a literary device known as a "suspension of disbelief." That is, the audience just accepts that certain aspects of the plot are unrealistic so the story can be told. 3. It is highly unlikely Carson would be allowed to stroll onto the plane. It was not revealed how he intended to get Stephanie aboard, but he could not leave her behind. 4. There's no way of knowing if Carson was enjoying himself. Yes, he could rob a bank, but he has no experience doing that. He is utilizing his knowledge and expertise as an air marshal to execute a complicated plan that places him in the center of what is happening, giving him some control over how events unfold. Carson has created an atypical scenario and knows the police cannot respond as if it was an everyday bank robbery. Also, successful bank robberies typically result in a relatively small amount of money being stolen, not $50 million.
Why would there be no movie if Carson asked the morgue director for code?
Answer: Carson wanted to make Kyle the terrorist so that he could live peacefully even after debarked. His plan was to blow up the plane after evacuation. If he did that, there would be nothing left to prove him guilty. When Kyle asked him to get into the plane, he would have run towards FBI and blasted the plane. That would have been more ideal.
Answer: 2) the morgue director doesn't have the code as was explained at start of film 3) the G3 plane was never intended to be used. Carson was going to kill (shoot) Kyle and blow up her daughter. Therefore he wouldn't need to escape, as no-one knows he is bad.
2) It's never explained whether the morgue director has the code or not. It's only explained that Kyle has the code; Carson and Stephanie don't. Plus, given that he was the morgue director, he would have had the code too. When they said Kyle was the only one who had the code, they didn't necessarily mean that Kyle was the only person in the world who had the code, they meant she was the only person, besides the morgue director, who knew the code.
The morgue director does not have the code. Kyle is the only one in the world who knows the code. The morgue director had Kyle enter the code to say her final goodbyes. She leaves with the coffin still open. This is presumably when the morgue director plants the bombs.
2) Then how did he plant the explosives inside the casket?
Question: Where did the hijackers hide Julia?
Answer: They hid her in the avionics section. Stephanie would have made sure that she "searched" that section since she is one of the hijackers.
Which part of the avionics section? The nose of the plane?
The avionics section can be much larger than the nose of the plane. On a 747 for example, it's "1.7 metres tall, and about 60cms wide, but goes the full width of the plane." A photo is here, and you could easily stash a child in it. Http://www.billzilla.org/aviationpage3.html.
Actually if you look at the shape of the interior where they hid Julia you can tell that it's the nose of the plane, and it would have been far too full with all kinds of equipment to put a child inside.
OK, well there's already a mistake mentioning that, so there's your answer. In the plot they hide her in the nose, but in the real world that's impossible.
Question: If Carson's plan indicated he was smarter than Kyle, given the way it was set up, then why did it fail? I know Kyle worked out he was a terrorist, what I don't get is what made her eventually become suspicious of him. Was Carson arrogant or something? Did he make mistakes in his plan, if so what? What mistakes did he make that made his plan fail?
Answer: This was a conspiracy involving a number of people, so it was not Carson's plan alone. Any plan, no matter how well plotted, will have flaws and unexpected variables. Kyle didn't suspect Carson until the very end when she was talking to the captain, who thought she was a terrorist extorting money. Not every detail of how she fully realised Carson's involvement is explained, but when Kyle saw she was being framed, and as Carson nervously attempted to leave the plane, knowing the plan was unraveling, Kyle cobbled together various clues and made an accurate assumption that Carson had been orchestrating the events during the flight.
How realistic would Carson's plan be anyway?
Question: What was the purpose of kidnapping her daughter? Was it to make Kyle look crazy? Or was it merely for the purpose of trying to make her open the casket? Because I find that very hard to believe.
Answer: The endgame was to get Kyle to open the casket during a search for her daughter. That is where the explosives and the detonator were hidden. They were counting on a frantic mother searching in every possible place on the plane for her daughter, including her husband's casket. If she hadn't done that on her own, no doubt Carson would have somehow compelled her into doing it.
How would Carson propel into opening the casket? By threatening to kill her?
Question: How did the hijackers know who Kyle was in the first place? Kyle doesn't appear to have known them prior to meeting them on the plane so how did they know Kyle was an engineer and that David was her husband and that Julia was her daughter prior to killing her husband?
Answer: Carson was not the sole person who engineered the plot. There were others involved, and Carson would have been given the necessary information about Kyle in order to carry out his part of the plan.
Who would have given Carson the necessary information about Kyle? The only people involved in the plot besides Carson were Stephanie and the morgue director. Kyle doesn't appear to have known either Carson or Stephanie, and the only time she met the morgue director was at the beginning of the movie. So, where would Stephanie and the morgue director have gotten the information about Kyle?
Is it possible the hijackers tricked a coworker of Kyle's into giving them the information about Kyle and her family?
I thought he got the information about Kyle by hacking into files containing information about avionics engineers and their families.
Answer: There may be many unidentified others involved in the larger conspiracy - some individual or individuals killed Kyle's husband, possibly the coroner and/or police involved in the investigation into his death, airport security (why no cameras were referenced), and someone with access to the passenger manifest. There may be an insider who knew about Kyle's role as an engineer and pulled up info regarding her family, all to further the plot of framing her and unbalancing her. It's a massive plot hole.
Question: How could the conspirators possibly imagine that their plot would work? Their confidence that none of over 400 passengers might happen at some point to fix on Kyle and her daughter, perhaps even have a whole conversation with them, either at the gate or on the plane, seems unwarranted. They had to have been awfully sure that no one would notice them boarding at the call for passengers with small children. They had to assume that once the plane had leveled off that the girl wouldn't spend half an hour traipsing tirelessly up and down the aisle dragging her bear along and saying hi to everyone. And then there's the coffin. When Kyle did open the coffin, it made no sense that she did! So how in the blazing sun would the plotters have expected that she would do that at some point?
Answer: They most likely would have had contingency plans in place. For example, if the conspirators saw someone talking to Kyle, they'd interrupt to distract that person. Or initiate their plan earlier if the daughter started getting noticed. Of course, since the script didn't call for any of these contingency plans, we can only speculate. And they basically manipulated Kyle into opening the coffin.
Question: Why did the villains kidnap Jodie Foster's daughter? The item they were smuggling was well hidden in the casket, and they could easily retrieve it after they landed. Nabbing the kid only drew attention to what they were doing. Can anyone explain this?
Answer: The bad guys needed Jodie Foster to open the casket (combination locked) to get to "the goods" (a bomb they needed in mid-air, not smuggled goods - it would be useless after landing). They concocted a plan to kidnap the daughter but make it look like the daughter never existed. This was the only way that the casket would be opened without reasonable suspicion on the bad guys.
They wouldn't have needed to worry about suspicion among them if they asked mortician for the code, the mortician would have known the code too, not just Kyle.
Question: Out of the hundreds of people on the plane, not a single passenger or flight crew saw Jodi Foster's character bring her daughter onto the plane? Was everyone supposed to be in on it? That would just be too weird and next to impossible.
Answer: Firstly, the flight wasn't full. Secondly, there were already several children on board. Thirdly, 2 people did see her bring the child on board - both the hijackers. Fourthly, Jodie and her daughter were the very first people on the plane and were greeted by the female hijacker. Then her daughter was seated until going to sleep. No one had a chance to see her. If a person is able to remember the face of every single passenger on a plane, then they should be onstage with a memory act. On many flights I've been on, I couldn't even recall the people sitting around me, let alone the rest of the plane.
"Then her daughter was seated until going to sleep" Kyle fell asleep the moment her daughter fell asleep which means the hijackers would have had to somehow take Julia out of her seat in order to kidnap without waking Kyle up, and that would have been extremely difficult to do, if it could be done at all.
Question: I understand the 2 men staring into the window in the beginning were not the same as the Arab men on the plane, but they were actual spies working for the hijacker right? I still think that was very suspicious and not a coincidence that people were spying on them the day before the incident.
Answer: Considering as they appear as the same actors who played the Arab men on the plane, this may have been done as unreliable narration for the audience (she is actually seeing the two men differently than what we are shown) to cast them as red herrings. Also, considering she was under enough stress to imagine her dead husband several times, it is entirely possible that she was being paranoid and imagining the two men in her mind, when there was really no-one in front of the window staring at her apartment. Either way, it's only a plot device to create a red herring later in the film.
Question: Surely military people and special needs people would have gone first before her and her daughter? If that's the case there's no way no-one would have seen the daughter. Or are there different policies in Berlin?
Answer: It's unlikely it's different in Berlin, and it would be an airline policy, not a government one. The fact that no-one else was on the plane when Kyle boarded with her daughter or was not seen by one of the flight crew is simply an implausible plot device. This would never happen that way in real life.
Question: When Kyle defeats Stephanie by punching her and Carson realises he has been fooled and tries to come down, he falls and gets up injured. Did he accidentally shoot his leg when falling or break his ankle or something? After realizing that Stephanie escaped the plane, he walks but uses his arms as well. How was he injured?
Answer: He sprained his leg.
Question: How come Julia wasn't listed on the flight manifest?
Answer: It is never explained. Stephanie, the flight attendant who was in on the conspiracy, claimed that only Kyle's name was on the manifest and the seat next to her was unoccupied. Whether she somehow manipulated the manifest or someone else in on the plot was able to remove Julia's name, is unknown.
There is probably no way she could have manipulated the flight manifest since you can't access it from on board a plane.
Wait a minute, I thought a passenger's name wasn't put on the flight manifest until he or she boards the plane.
It's possible someone off the plane hacked into the flight manifest sometime after Kyle, and Julia boarded.
Question: What was the point of getting two FBI agents on the plane if Carson needed the plane cleared to kill Kyle and Julia? Or was that something he was lying about? If so, why did he proceed to get off the plane?
Answer: Carson would not have any authority to prevent the F.B.I. from boarding the plane, and it would be highly suspicious if he in anyway tried to interfere with their investigation. He needed to act as if he was following normal procedures, otherwise his part in the plot would have immediately been exposed.
Question: Why would Carson have the morgue director send a fake certificate that claimed Julia has died if his goal was to get Kyle in the hold so she can unlock the casket? Wouldn't that interfere with doing so?
Answer: The goal was to make it look like Kyle was so unhinged that she was imagining that her daughter had not died. The fake certificate was to convince the captain that Kyle must be hallucinating. Carson knew that Kyle would not be fooled and would continue to search for her daughter on the plane, eventually looking inside the casket.
Question: How did the morgue director put the explosives in the casket? I thought only Kyle knew the combination.
Answer: He would have planted the explosives into the casket before the body was put in it and when Kyle was not present. Being that he was the mortician, he would have access to the body and the casket to prepare it for transport back to the USA.
Question: Why would Kyle assume that her daughter was hidden inside the casket? Only she knew the code.
Answer: I don't think Kyle was looking for Julia in the casket. The crew and air marshal were convincing her that she was delusional. They had also told Kyle that Julia died with her husband. I believe she was looking in the casket to see if it was Julia's casket instead.
Answer: Because after searching the entire plane for her daughter without finding her, it was the last place left she hadn't looked in. It was a desperate, last-ditch attempt to try anything to find her. By now, Kyle may have been suspecting that her daughter's disappearance was something more than a missing child on a plane.
Actually the last place she hadn't looked before the casket was the avionics room in the nose of the plane, which is where Julia was hidden. And to be honest, I have no idea why Kyle didn't assume her daughter was hidden there, and search there before the casket instead of near the end of the film especially knowing it didn't have a lock, unlike the casket.
No kidding. I mean how in the world did she miss that? She's an avionics engineer. She designed the darn plane.
Answer: No, it's not possible. The 'black box' (which actually isn't black, but is instead brightly coloured to make it easier to find) is a data recorder, packed with all the attendant electronics required for that task; it's far too small for anybody to fit into.
Tailkinker ★