Review of Final Descent

WARNING! POSSIBLE SPOILERS at 12:00! Collision alert! The jist of the predicament Captain "Vegas" faces in this semi OK flick is that the mid-air jammed his elevator surfaces. Unable to move them to lower the nose, Urich has to keep it at full power to keep it from stalling, forcing them to climb dangerously high. Plane "frozen" in a nose high attitude for want of elevator(pitch-nose up & down) mobility, a rescue team is called up to pour water into the front section to weigh it down so they can go down the not-so-hard way. The whole predicament & solution is asking the viewer to believe that if a control surface can't move, neither can the nose. That if the elevators were stuck in the up position, that the nose would stay up & sacrifice airspeed in order to keep it in that direction. The aerodynamic facts are almost the exact opposite. The plane will adjust attitude to seek a given airspeed. The effectiveness of controls in any given position- jammed, trimmed or held manually-is variable with airspeed in such a way that in a stable airplane it'll be effective enough to balance nose-heaviness & stabilize at that respective speed & attitude. If that speed is above stall speed at full power, it should be able to maintain that air speed providing you reduce power gradually enough to allow the nose time to come down, allowing a delicately controlled descent at about the same- maybe even greater speed. Greater because in some airplanes, the prop or jet wash blows over the elevators, making them over-effective at higher power settings & under-effective at lower settings. If the "trim" speed is below stall speed at low power settings, increasing power will only make the plane seek that speed & stall at a higher attitude. If the plane is NOT stable, the nose would not "stick" at any attitude. You would need to move actively & continuously MOVE the controls to KEEP the nose from moving!! Either way, from where I'm sitting, in a nut-shell, I see no scenario that would have made the solution in this movie a viable one. Moving the control surfaces is NOT the only way to make a plane change attitude. The control surfaces were made for the airplane- not vice versa. If what I'm saying sounds too technical, think of scenes in other movies. For example, that scene in Bat Man Forever, when 2 Face put The Club on that helicopter's "steering wheel" to make sure the chopper stays straight. If you remember, the Club is for anti-theft purposes, not turn prevention. Or that scene in twister where Hunt & Paxton put that pickup on cruise control in the corn field. So promoting weird physics is nothing new to Hollywood. Some people seemed to have believed some of these notions. Apparently the last thing a certain driver evidently remembered before waking up in the hospital bed was putting his van on cruise control & going in back to pour himself a drink!