[screaming]
No. A helicopter cannot fly 90 degrees
on its side like that.
That's crazy.
Hey, fly peeps.
I am Vernice "FlyGirl" Armour coming at you.
And back in 2003,
I became America's first Black female combat pilot,
serving two tours in Iraq.
Today, I'll be looking at helicopter scenes in movies
and judging how real they are.
Man: It's too much weight!
All right, drop them!
An attack helicopter, on average,
can only handle so much weight.
When I was going in combat,
sometimes we couldn't even carry the full amount of fuel
because we were carrying more rockets and missiles.
So the weight of that semi
well is beyond the 2,000 to 4,000 payload,
let alone the other vehicles that were attached to it.
Totally unrealistic.
I think they were trying to simulate
the helicopter working so hard against the vehicles
to not be pulled,
but that just wouldn't happen.
When a helicopter is pulling more weight than it can,
the engine isn't going to blow out like that.
It's just going to slow down the transmission,
and the helicopter just won't be able to lift.
It's going to drag it down, but it wouldn't explode.
Man: Sir, the weapons are back online.
Goodbye.
A missile or rocket actually has to arm,
and there was absolutely not enough time
for a missile to be able to come off.
Any shot where you're going to shoot something
within 50 feet, basically,
50 to 100 feet, unrealistic.
And if they did get it off, it's not going to explode.
It's just going to be a chunk of metal,
for the most part, that hits the ground.
And if it did explode,
the shrapnel is -- the metal from the ordnance
is going to come up and impact the helicopter,
which would probably take it down.
I'd give it a 3.
Different missiles arm at different distances,
but not within 50 feet.
[alarm beeping]
Alarm: Pull up. Pull up.
So, the descending spiral happens
when there's more torque
on a certain part of the helicopter.
That's why there's the tail rotor,
'cause if there was only the rotor at the top,
the helicopter would spin,
so the rotor at the back keeps it from spinning.
So that meant something was out of balance.
Could he get it back in control?
Mm, yes, absolutely.
I didn't see any real reason
on why the helicopter was nosediving.
And as soon as you pull up
and the rotor blades switch position,
it should automatically
pitch the nose of the aircraft up,
whether the engine is running or not.
That, just aerodynamically, that's going to happen.
Why he couldn't pull the nose up, I'm not sure,
unless he had a hydraulics malfunction
in which the controls weren't responding.
But that wasn't the case,
because at a certain point he pulled the stick up
and he flew off, so.
Unrealistic.
Unless the guy's just a horrible shot,
helicopters just don't maneuver superfast.
There's no way to get out of bullets like that.
A helicopter doesn't react like a jet.
There's a little bit of a lag.
So if I were to do the stick back and forth,
my helicopter, it would rotate on its axis,
but it wouldn't have necessarily
had time to move left or time to move right.
So you would see it dip and come back up,
but it wouldn't have necessarily moved
out of the line of fire that quickly.
Just doesn't happen like with a jet.
Immediately, it'll fly off to the left or the right.
[laughs] Yeah.
No one would've survived that.
That cabin, that helicopter,
the frame would not even be intact
by any stretch of the imagination.
Totally destroyed as soon as the blades hit.
And that showed it rolling.
It would have been an explosion.
The gas is right inside of the helicopter.
Yeah, no. That's the impossible, I guess.
When your aircraft is going down,
you're actually flying the aircraft down.
There's this thing called an autorotation,
which, when you have a fan, and it's just in the window
and a breeze blows through the window
and the fan starts turning,
that's the basics of a rotor.
Well, when you're in the aircraft and it's coming down,
basically falling out of the sky,
let's say you've lost power to the engine,
it's just a big fan at the top.
So a few feet above the ground,
you pull up the collective
while it's still flying a little forward,
and that resistance can cushion the landing.
In this case, there was no cushion,
there was no controlled descent.
It was catastrophic. There wouldn't have been anything left.
I'd have to give it a 1.
You can't fly through something like that.
Unrealistic.
Rotors would've already fallen off the aircraft.
As hard as rotor blades look,
they're very sensitive and finely tuned and balanced.
And as soon as it impacts an object,
you're not going to be able to fly the aircraft after that.
Hurry up!
Because it's The Rock, could've been realistic
with him hanging on the side.
It's like hanging on to a car, right?
Because most of the downward push
of the wind from a helicopter
is on the last third of the blades.
It's not in the very center.
So, the wind shear
wouldn't have pushed him out of the middle.
Totally unrealistic.
It's just like the wheel of a car.
It's never in one position, it's constantly moving.
Where'd he get the piece of metal to even fix it?
When they showed it in that clip, it was just stable.
He's actually able to hold it, and the rod,
and it's just not going to be stable like that.
[screaming]
No. A helicopter cannot fly
90 degrees on its side like that.
That's crazy.
I would give it a 1.
Guns at the front of the attack helicopters,
is that realistic?
Absolutely.
I had a 20-millimeter Gatling gun, three barrel.
It rolled around and delivered lots of bullets
very fast on target, so, yes, 100% realistic.
Only the pilots would fire that weapon.
You see two rocket launchers left to right,
then two missile launchers left and right.
There are 26 rockets in each one of those pods,
then there are four missiles on the end board.
That is actually a standard payload
for an attack helicopter.
The rockets are called 2.75-inch rockets.
So they're about this big around, right, 2.75 inches,
and they're pretty long.
The rockets are just like bullets.
You aim, you shoot, you pull,
they go wherever, wind shear impacts them.
The Hellfire missiles are laser-guided, right?
So they're guided by laser to a particular target.
A rocket impacts a small area,
let's say it's 20 feet, 30 feet.
These rockets are basically just, you know,
as soon as they hit, they explode, and it's a point target.
The missile has
a lot more explosive power to it.
You could shoot a tank or a building. It's going to explode.
There are heat-seeking missiles
and missiles that can fly to catch a jet, per se, right?
But those aren't the kind of missiles
that, No. 1, were on this aircraft,
and, No. 2, helicopters don't normally carry them.
And they don't
follow humans.
And I doubt his jet pack had enough heat coming off,
'cause it probably would have burned up his legs
if that were the case.
There would have been no way they could just glide
into going through the vortices of the helicopter.
I could easily see them being blown down
50 to 100 feet [snaps] just like that.
The payload, that was actually realistic.
The heat-seeking missiles, not so much.
I'm going to give it a 7.
Flying in formation in helicopters is very common.
We practice it a lot.
We will land together, we'll take off together.
And in an environment like this,
where you have that mission where you're dropping off,
say, a flight of soldiers in this case,
yeah, that would absolutely happen like that.
Just everything about that combat maneuver,
the insertion, them dropping,
that's why we don't do static things
like that anymore in combat,
because of the vulnerability.
And the helicopter has pretty much
no maneuverability when you're in that close
to be able to get out really quick.
A helicopter just doesn't move quick.
A helicopter has to build up momentum
and get going, right?
RPGs are a huge threat to helicopters,
especially if we're flying what we call low and slow.
But I remember flying in combat, and we just saw,
and it was early on in combat,
and I just saw these gray clouds of mist,
and we were trying to figure out, like,
what are those clouds of mist?
And they were RPGs that had been programmed
to explode at 200 and 300 feet,
and some of my buddies were impacted by RPGs.
Huge threat.
So, the one, I would say, unrealistic part of that clip,
when that RPG hit the tail rotor of that aircraft,
I thought it would've been spinning a lot faster,
and it wasn't gliding down without power.
And at the very end,
if he tried to cushion the landing a little bit,
which we're taught to do in that kind of situation,
with a loss of tail rotor,
we would've tried to circle around
in the direction that it's spinning
to have a little control.
But it wouldn't have just landed flat
like you saw in that video.
So, the guys in the back, hopefully they're tied in,
or they would just immediately be thrown out.
Just like a car accident that twirls over
and everybody gets ejected out of the vehicle.
The reason, I think,
they show or film more helos
getting hit in the tail rotor
is just 'cause it's more dramatic.
You get hit in the tail rotor,
you're immediately going to start spinning
and go out of control.
If you get in the main rotor,
you just explode and fall out the sky.
Which one's more exciting?
On a scale of 1 to 10,
9.
My only thing would be right here.
Why is the helicopter out of control?
Nobody's touching the pilot.
There're just two guys fighting in the back.
It wouldn't be hard to fight and move around
in the back of an aircraft.
It would almost be like an elevator without walls.
Do not do a barrel roll.
Oh, my God. [laughs] It's so -- no.
An extended turn at a large degree,
it would just have too much weight lost off of the rotor.
A helicopter is pulling on this small little pole.
There always needs to be weight on the rotor system
from the aircraft, right?
So all of those little,
the barrel roll he did at the end
and the inversion flight,
that's just completely unrealistic for a helicopter.
There is the Red Bull helicopter
that is capable of doing things like that.
But for the most part,
99% of helicopters out there
can't do things like this.
You would never want to go past 50, 60 degrees.
I'd have to give it a ...
3.
Countries have different helicopters,
and this was foreign.
Like, definitely had a lot more stability,
'cause it had those kind of semi-wings, right?
It could carry a lot more armament.
With attack helicopters here in America,
we have the Apache in the Army
and the Cobra in the Marine Corps. Very similar.
It's like comparing the Mustang to the Camaro, right?
There are going to be a lot of similarities,
but there are also going to be some differences.
What you'll see in attack helicopters
is you'll have the tandem,
which is pilot, copilot; front, back.
Or you'll have side by side,
as in the Black Hawks.
And the Apache is actually tandem as well,
just like the Cobra.
[screams]
When you're flying a helicopter
that actually has what we call door gunners,
right, in the back,
the pilots know how to maneuver the aircraft
to get the target in the right place
for the door gunners to be able to shoot at that target.
It's Rambo. Not sure how much training
he's gone through as a pilot, right,
with door gunners.
But you get it in position,
and the door gunners take care of business.
The crew chief would say, "Come left," or, "Come right."
Or, you know, they would give them
very specific instructions,
especially if their environment is changing
and it's over on the right side
but the left-seat pilot can't see it, right?
So they're in constant communication the entire time.
I'll give it a 6.
Fire the missiles!
Come on, come on.
We go cold!
[missiles boom]
Yeah, there wasn't much realistic about that clip
at all, whatsoever.
Let's say the heat-seeking missile was coming after us.
Just when you shut the engines off,
the engines are still hot.
So the heat-seeking missiles would've still found them.
There's no situation where I would cut an engine off.
The rotors aren't going to stop turning like that,
and just the fact that it was flying through the air,
the rotor would never be not turning,
even if it didn't have power to it.
Pilot: Restart. Restart.
Woo-hoo!
They were literally 1,000 feet above the ground.
You're not going to get the rotors turning again.
And then fast enough to get the aircraft back in control
to be able to lift it up.
That was completely, 100%, unrealistic.
A helicopter is not like a plane.
So you're not going to glide.
Radio: General Tuco. You are currently engaged
in warfare on United States military forces.
Helicopter-to-helicopter combat
is just not common at all, whatsoever,
because when you think about helicopters,
that's up close and personal. Troops in contact.
The only time you've seen helicopter versus helicopter
is in a movie like this,
where the bad guys are chasing the good guys, and that's it.
If a helicopter is caught up in a dogfight,
something has gone drastically wrong,
'cause it just shouldn't happen.
We do have training,
but the training is actually focused on
a jet chasing us, not another helicopter.
If we were to get into a situation like that,
looks a lot like what you see on the TV, right,
where you're yanking it to the left,
or pushing those over, pulling up on the collective,
coming up, flying around.
The more you're moving around,
you're a harder target to hit,
versus a straight line, where they can track you
and then take you out of the sky.
Just, helicopters are very vulnerable.
We don't move that fast.
So if you're caught in that kind of a situation,
the odds aren't exactly with you.
But all the other "tricks" and things they did,
just unrealistic.
This is just going to have to be a 2.
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