Okay I watched a TV series called Red Eye, which is a thriller mostly set on an aeroplane flying non-stop from London to Beijing, and I have to bring this thread back. There will be spoilers for the show but I don't think they matter much.
It gets a lot of little technical stuff right, including some of the medical stuff (not all of it), but there are some truly demented unforced errors:
1) The plane is told to turn around and fly aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaalllllllllllllllll the way back to London 8 hours into the 11.5 hour flight. The writers have a character ask if they have enough fuel for that, and we are assured that the plane "has a 17 hour fuel capacity" so it's fine.
NO! Stop it! That's not how planes work. They're not your car, mate. You don't just fill up the gas tank to full every now and then. You carry enough fuel to get to your destination, and then some for problems, like 30-60 minutes more - on a long flight I could easily see 60 minutes. But that's it! They do not have enough fuel to turn around from near the end of their journey and go back! Or really any distance much beyond half-way! Instead they would have diverted to another airport.
And this is a bad myth to spread too, because people have literally been killed over delusions about how much fuel planes carry (c.f. a hijacking in Africa where the hijackers insisted because the plane could technically fly to Australia, and had just taken off, it must have enough fuel to fly to Australia, even though it was doing a 3 hour domestic flight - obviously it did not have that much, and even though the pilot patiently explained this and showed them how the fuel gauges worked and so on, the hijackers resolutely stuck to this same dumb idea. Most of the people on board were killed when it crashed as a result).
2) The aeroplane, which appears to be like a 777 or something similar (it's never specified) has an insanely cavernous sort of "underbelly" which is accessed through a hatch in the cockpit (?!?!). I feel like you could get away with this if it was a 747/A380-type deal, but this is a twin-engine widebody, not some chonker like those. But maybe we allow that as artistic licence?
3) BUT then we have the wild issue where the pilot and co-pilot regularly leave the cockpit, at one point whilst there's an emergency, the co-pilot gets up, climbs down a ladder into the underbelly, and flips switches, and it's like... what?! What is supposed to be even happening? Do you really think one of the pilots might just leave during an emergency? Anything that can be dealt with, will be dealt with in the cockpit, this isn't like 1949 or something. Often the pilot is just sort of wandering around the cabin being a nuisance! I feel like they got their understanding of how planes work from the admittedly very fun 1997 Ray Liotta vehicle, Turbulence.
This is all stuff you could Google very quickly too. And like, this is the tip of the iceberg, there's a lot of other demented stuff, including people seemingly just be able to wander in to Thames House (where MI5 is based).
