A pilot’s review of the movie “The Incredibles”

by philg

Inspired by David Letterman’s bringing a dentist from New Jersey to review the epic film “Reds”, here is an airplane nerd’s review of “The Incredibles”:



Elastigirl is flying an airplane right at the top of a cloud layer, more or less in and out of the clouds, and calls an air traffic control facility saying that she is “VFR on top”.  Visual Flight Rules would generally require at least 1000′ of clearance above the top of any cloud and 2000′ horizontally from clouds.


[The dentist’s sole comments on Reds related to the fact that the dental work visible on screen was anachronistic and not representative of what dental care would actually have been like in early 20th century Russia.  If you do see the Incredibles, look for a scene in which the wife is upset at the idea that her husband is cheating on her and then gets slapped a few times by a fashion designer.  This scene was animated by my cousin Doug Frankel.]

8 thoughts on “A pilot’s review of the movie “The Incredibles””

  1. Phillip, how many cousins do you have???? I didn’t realize you had a Catholic-style family.

  3. That’s nothing. If I can suspend belief when the CSI channel shows an Investigator zooming in to see distant lettering on the wall using the photo from a camera phone…

  4. Michael: Both my mother and father have one sibling. I have two first cousins on my mother’s side and three on my father’s. Doug is one of those five.

  5. Just because the regs say you need 1000 feet of clearance above clouds to be VFR doesn’t mean that’s the way some pilots do it.

    I follow the rules and I bet you do also, but there are those who don’t, and they make it more dangerous for everyone else. Fortunately the redundancy of pretty much complete radar coverage here in the Northeast and the “big sky” theory keep us pretty safe.

    Peter

  6. Elastagirl’s violation of class A volcanic airspace while on an IFR flight plan have been reported. She did not file a NASA ASRS form within 10 days, so her license and type rating will be suspended forever.

  7. I thought the only rule in film making was that it has to sound cool!

    But if you think that was bad, I remember some hilarious Dutch subtitles for aviation shows on the Discovery channel. My favourite one used to be from a show about fighter pilots where the pilot said something like: “Flying hard bleeds a lot of energy”, the Dutch translator turned this into “flying fast uses up a lot of fuel”.

    But then that was topped by the translator on a show called “Flighdeck”. You see and hear the non-flying pilot going through the checklist and saying “gear down”, which according to the translator meant switching to a lower gear, in the same way you’d do in a car.

    So if you ever have a Cloggie in your plane and he wonders where the clutch and gear stick are, now you know why…

  8. At least Elastigirl didn’t get blown up by a coyote or dropped off a cliff – but then both the Coyote and RoadRunner were gender neutral. OK, how about Pepe LePew? Obviously a chauvinist and sexist, no?

    I didn’t have a clue what she was talking about, but it sounded great. Surprised she had all those flares on board without any other offensive weapons…

    Just great entertainment!

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