Tonight I watched ‘Airport 75’ which I recorded from last night on Foxtel. It was interesting to see how things have changed in the last 30 years or so, and to pick up all the strange things that were shown in the film.
The movie started in Dulles Airport in Washington DC. This is an airport I have been to a couple of times, and looked familiar. Dulles was featured in Diehard II. Anyway it was obvious that this was from before they built the other terminals in the middle of the field since the carts for transporting people delivered them to planes, not to the other terminal.
The pilot of a light plane identified himself as 727Z, whereas his tail number was something like N7280Y… In other words the two did not line up at all. Something so obvious. Another thing was that the stewardess needed to use the autopilot a few times, and had never seen it before. She needed instructions, which pointed out that she needed to move a lever to the manual position. The problem was that neither of the two levers were marked with Manual.
Another issue was that a pilot got straight into a light plane and started the propellar without doing any checks, or waiting for his friends to get out of the way. I would have been hard pressed to start a car in the time that he started his plane…
Not a bad movie, but a few technical issues….
Airport 75
Dulles Start