Ask the Captain: Is the movie 'Flight' realistic?

Question: Regarding the new movie Flight, can a jet like the one Denzel Washington is piloting be operated "inverted?" I haven't seen the movie but I think he's flying an MD80 or 717.

-- submitted by reader Paul in Maine

Answer: I have not seen the movie, and do not plan to. Hollywood provides entertainment that is not always based in fact. The likelihood of a jet transport airplane flying inverted for an extended period of time is very, very low. I have seen the promotional advertisements. The airplane is a MD-80 in one scene and some kind of regional jet in another.

The lack of realism is one of the reasons I will pass on viewing it.

Q: Can you deny or confirm whether a 747 performed a loop in the hands of a Boeing test pilot when it was being tested prior to receiving its first ever air-worthiness certificate?

-- Robert Baillie, Liverpool, U.K.

A: The direct answer to your question is no, to my knowledge a 747 has never been looped.

I suspect that the event you are inquiring about was the August 1955 roll of the predecessor to the B707, known as the Dash 80. Tex Johnson deliberately rolled the Dash 80 to show the strength of this new airplane. His boss was not happy. That roll is one of aviation's legends.

Q:In a previous column, Captain Cox stated that it was not possible for a passenger to be extracted from the cabin through a passenger window due to rapid decompression. But it has been documented, from wikipedia: "At 1640 local time on November 3, 1973, a National Airlines (NA) DC-10-10 aircraft (N60NA), while cruising at 39,000 feet experienced an uncontained failure of the #3 engine fan assembly. The cabin was penetrated by fragments from the explosion of that engine and that caused lost pressure.

One passenger, G.F. Gardner of Beaumont, Texas, was partially sucked into an opening left when a cabin window failed, after it too was struck by engine fragments. He was temporarily retained in that position by his seatbelt. Efforts to pull the passenger back into the airplane by another passenger were unsuccessful, and the occupant of seat 17H was forced entirely through the cabin window. His body was not found until two years later, when a crew constructing tracks for the Very Large Array radio telescope came upon his skeletal remains."

-- LeBonRobert

A: I am aware of the most unfortunate loss of Mr. Gardner. The #3 engine suffered an uncontained failure causing structural damage including the window. According to the NTSB report, the fan section suffered a serious overspeed condition causing a portion of the fan to disintegrate. Parts struck the right wing, number 1 and 2 engine nacelles, and the fuselage. The force of the fan components was very high. In this case, with the loss of an engine and the loss of a window there was an explosive decompression. The large quantity of air within the wide-body aircraft created enough force to eject the passenger. It was a very rare occurrence and I am unaware of another such incident. There was a British Airways BAC-111 that had a windshield depart the aircraft due to a maintenance error. The captain was partially pulled out. The windshield is larger than a passenger window and there is a low pressure area ahead of it. These two facts combined to cause a lot of force on the captain.

These two examples do show that in very rare cases it is possible to have a Hollywood-type decompression event. I appreciate the reminder.

John Cox is a retired airline captain with U.S. Airways and runs his own aviation safety consulting company, Safety Operating Systems.