Flight
I tend to enjoy studying aviation history, specifically accident investigations. It's just a fascinating subject to me, especially when you can watch experience and intuition turn into split-second heroics. After all, the "Miracle on the Hudson" was only a miracle because Sully made a snap decision to attempt a safe water landing, which had never been successfully done before, instead of going for either of two nearby airports.
A lot of heroics in aviation history comes from knowledge of prior accidents, though knowledge only helps if you can create a survivable scenario from it. For example, Alaska Air 261 seems like a no-win scenario under any circumstance; the MD-80 series of aircraft have a tailfin on top of the rudder instead of attached to the fuselage, since that plane has its engines mounted to the fuselage in the back. A giant screw would turn, causing the tailfin to move up and down and make the plane climb or descend, but in 2000 an Alaska Air plane's tailfin screw snapped due to a total lack of proper maintenance. Without the screw to hold the plane in place, the tailfin went upward as high as it could, acting like a giant air brake and causing the plane to plunge. The pilots were totally helpless, instinctively pulling back on their sticks to try to climb, without any way of knowing how futile that was, until the plane dived into the Atlantic.
If a pilot thought this happened to his plane, and had enough altitude to try a desperate maneuver to regain control, there might be one way to keep from diving straight down into the planet. If you somehow rolled the plane over, then while it was upside-down it would try to nose "up" into the air instead of down toward the ground. Of course, that would mean not only defying the pilot's natural instinct to pull up, but attempting to fly a fully loaded commercial airliner upside-down and hope to land it on its roof, which nobody has even tried before because you'd have to be either insane or high to even think of such a thing.
I'm not an insane pilot, so I never would've come up with such an idea, but the above is what went through my head while I watched this movie trailer:
A lot of heroics in aviation history comes from knowledge of prior accidents, though knowledge only helps if you can create a survivable scenario from it. For example, Alaska Air 261 seems like a no-win scenario under any circumstance; the MD-80 series of aircraft have a tailfin on top of the rudder instead of attached to the fuselage, since that plane has its engines mounted to the fuselage in the back. A giant screw would turn, causing the tailfin to move up and down and make the plane climb or descend, but in 2000 an Alaska Air plane's tailfin screw snapped due to a total lack of proper maintenance. Without the screw to hold the plane in place, the tailfin went upward as high as it could, acting like a giant air brake and causing the plane to plunge. The pilots were totally helpless, instinctively pulling back on their sticks to try to climb, without any way of knowing how futile that was, until the plane dived into the Atlantic.
If a pilot thought this happened to his plane, and had enough altitude to try a desperate maneuver to regain control, there might be one way to keep from diving straight down into the planet. If you somehow rolled the plane over, then while it was upside-down it would try to nose "up" into the air instead of down toward the ground. Of course, that would mean not only defying the pilot's natural instinct to pull up, but attempting to fly a fully loaded commercial airliner upside-down and hope to land it on its roof, which nobody has even tried before because you'd have to be either insane or high to even think of such a thing.
I'm not an insane pilot, so I never would've come up with such an idea, but the above is what went through my head while I watched this movie trailer: