User Reviews

I happen to watch this movie last night... there wasn't much on TV and I felt like a disaster movie... Always been a fan of Annette O'Toole and like Robert Urich and John de Lancie (Q from Star Trek: The Next Generation)... So I thought why not...

I have to say... I liked it... it was far from brilliant but an ok way to pass the afternoon... a quick outline... A big commercial jet takes off and gets hit by a little aircraft causing the big jet to get into problems... won't go into the story any further to prevent spoilers...

The acting is alright and the ending predictable... however the story does have some nice twists which make the movie a little bit more interesting... If you want to see a great disaster movie watch the Poseidon Adventure or the Towering Inferno... if you want to have a nice evening... feel free to watch this movie...

6/10

**SOME SPOILERS** Taking off from the Seattle Airport Quest Flight #19 to Dallas Texas is almost immediately hit by a runaway private aircraft, N9478C, that strayed off course on the runway. Having the jumbo jets guidance system damaged in the collision the plane is unable to land but is forced to gain altitude with it's nosecone unable to be steered downward by the pilot and his fiancée and and co-pilot Capt. Glen "Lucky" Singer & Connie Phipps, Robert Urich & Annette O'Toole. It's now up to both Lucky and Connie together with Capt. Bouchard, John De Lancie, who's on the flight grading the flight Captain Lucky Singer to somehow get Flight #19 safely back down to earth with it's 219 passengers and crew. It would take all the luck, as well as a number of Canadian oil riggers on-board, that Lucky has to get the plane to change course. From reaching an altitude of over 30,000 feet and tearing apart and exploding in mid-air, to successfully land back at the Seattle Airport more or less intact with everyone on the plane safe. What Capt. Lucky Singer would have to do to achieve this almost impossible feat is to do it with his own smarts and skills and not with the planes state-of-the-art computer system that was rendered useless by the in-air plane to plane collision.

Better then you would expect TV disaster movie with most of the story concentrating around Capt. Singer and Connie as well as the USAF getting the passenger plane. To turn the plane south and land safely and keeping the usual sides stories, like the personal lives and problems of the passengers and their families, to a minimum making the very complicated effort in the film of shifting the weight of the plane via thousands of gallons of water pumped into the planes wheel section. In order to get it to turn it's nosecone down and thus be able to be landed by Captain's Singer & Boucard and co-pilot Phipps.

Tension packed and heart-stopping action as Lucky Singer & Co. try to get the disabled plane to land. Where at the same time Quest's CEO Ian Pryce, Ken Pogue, and the man who's the company's top engineer Henry Gibbons, Kevin McNuttly, looking at the bottom line and relying on facts figures try to trick the common sense thinking Capt. Singer into sacrifice some 40 passengers, the old the sick and the very young, by sticking them in the back of the plane. Where the oxygen will be the scarcest.

I took not Capt. Singer or his co-pilot Connie Phipps to realize what the devious Pryce & Gibbons were trying to pull and then have the unsuspecting Lucky Singer take the blame, and life-long guilt in the the purposeful death of 40 human beings. It was non-other then company man and all around butt-kisser Capt. Bouchard who got a sudden change of heart when he saw just how right Singer was. In relying on his god-given and flight experienced instincts and alerted Capt. Singer of his boss' cold-blooded plan.

Powerhouse finish as Capt. Lucky Singer threw the passenger liner into full throttle as it headed downwards towards Seattle Airport. With Lucky having the wheel-section opening up and the thousands of gallons of water gushing out giving the airplane just the right equilibrium to successfully land. While at the same time, at the split second of landing, having it's nosecone turn upward in order to prevent it from smashing head, or nose, first into the tarmac and exploding with everyone on-board.

I love these movies about airplanes in jep. It's as if Bog were a psychologist putting us in the experimental group of some cosmological study -- exactly how much repetitious nonsense can the human being take before it breaks apart. The control group is elsewhere, on some more placid planet.

None of the movies is identical to any of the others. They're all variations on a theme, but the theme is constant -- a couple of dozen people up at 30,000 feet in some mechanical contraption put together by some designer who was probably drunk at the time, and willy nilly that aluminum tube is coming down.

The variations are only there to disguise the intent of the Experimenter. Some of the movies delve into the history of the passengers and crew, often flashbacks. The focus may even be on the ground: the airport manager, the ground control, the radar operators, the guys driving the snowplow. There may be some dumb blowhard who gets in everybody's way and demands to know what the hell is going on. There may or may not be a pregnant woman or a desperately ill child aboard the airplane.

I know all this to be the case because while watching this iteration just now, I noticed that whenever I moved my joints creaked a little, and whenever I had a thought it flashed in my mind like a blown light bulb, and then the voices started again and I -- I -- I knew I was contributing my little bit to establishing the threshold of tolerance for junk. And, oh, how I regretted signing that informed consent agreement.

Well, it took me at least four attempts to get through the whole stinking mess, but I finally made it to the end! I can't imagine how anyone could have hatched such a feeble story line in the first place let alone write a script, and persuade so many well-know actors to have their names associated with, let alone participate in such a dog of a movie! Have they no shame? Have they no common decency? I think the reason it took me many attempts could be related to the fact that I felt absolutely nothing, zilch for any of the characters! So many cliches! So many "as ifs". Note: I would have given it a negative rating, but 1 star is the bottom of the scale! :(

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!