Headscratchers / Die Hard 2

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• Why does Colonel Stuart specify that he wants a 747 cargo conversion for his escape? The 'plane ends up carrying nothing but passengers (luckily there are enough seats for them all). Does the freighter version have some advantage over a standard configuration?
• Those Glock 7 guns. We all know guns without metal parts don't exist, but even if they did, wouldn't the bullets inside the gun trigger a metal detector?
  • Why would someone go out of their way to create a gun not detectable via metal detectors...to then use metal bullets/projectiles?
  • The same reason that there isn't a gun without metal parts in real life, it's the only effective material (assuming you want the person you're shooting at to actually die - plastic won't cut it).
  • Glock has never produced a gun called the Glock 7, nor have they made one of porcelain. The pistol they're talking about (and holding) is the Glock 17, which is, by weight, 87.3% normal ordnance steel, and all the "plastic" parts (mainly the frame) are made of Polymer 2, which is radio opaque and therefore shows up on the X-ray screener. They are also all embeded with steel to increase functionality and accuracy. Also, Glock is Austrian, not German. Armourer Mike Papac, whose company Cinema Weaponry supplied all the weapons used in the movie, fought that line, and lost.
    • The line exists to emphasize the weapons they’re using are far more advanced than a civilian could get. Considering this was a secret mercenary group, it’s not impossible in the Die Hard universe they’d have access to more advanced guns.
    • As well he should, since "guns invisible to X-rays" have become a recurrent boogeyman of anti-gun rights groups based almost entirely off of the claims of a ceramic gun (Nowadays there is a federal law stating any commercially available gun must contain enough metal to set off an airport metal detector. As of 2013, they were considering revising that law to also state that the metal must be sufficiently distributed in the gun so that it can't be removed without rendering it nonfunctional). And people complain about the effect 24 has had on the torture debate...
  • Honestly, I think McClane was just screwing with the security guard when he threw that out there, to try and make him realize just how serious the situation really was.
• The airport SWAT team got trashed by a bunch of guys with pistols and submachine guns (not counting the cop who got a bullet to the head from O'Reilly's pistol). Either Stuart's men use full-metal-jacket rounds, or the SWAT guys didn't even have vests on.

  • The SWAT team most likely had vest on. However, people don't realize that vest only stop just a few rounds at most. Look up any company that sells bulletproof vest and read what the descriptions say. Most will state they will stop 9, 40, 45, 357, and 44 magnum. They never state those vest will stop a full magazine full of those bullets, let alone fully automatic weapons as well.

  • Then they were using FMJs. There's no way they didn't expect to have to take on a SWAT team.
    • Except FMJs are just standard ball ammunition, full metal jacket. The normal ammunition used in all weapons. Short of possibly high-pressure, specially-designed rounds that most guns can't safely fire, no pistol-caliber round will penetrate a vest. Ever.
    • ...If this were true then nobody in the military or police would ever die from a pistol shooting. Body armour fails all the time, and multiple impacts (from something like say, an automatic weapon) just increase the likelihood. Not to mention that shots to the leg or shoulder can easily be fatal depending on where the bullet goes after entering their body. Certain arteries could cause near instant death if they are pierced.
    • Essentially, don't take the name "bulletproof vests" so literally. Almost any product that claims to be anythingproof really means that it's just anythingresistant up to a certain point.
    • Given that they are entirely expecting to face enemies in body-armor, and that they're a US military spec-ops unit (even if they've gone rogue), they both have access to and are going to remember to bring armor-piercing ammunition.
  • The SWAT team were shot in areas not covered by armour.
    • Not really - most of the shots we see are center mass and look like they go right through the vests. Either these vests were really made by the lowest bidder or those were some magic bullets.
  • On that note, why weren't they wearing helmets?
    • They were amateur regular cops handed assault rifles and uniforms that looked tactical, not a real SWAT team trained to the bone.
    • Major Grant's Blue Light Special platoon don't wear helmets, either.
  • They weren't wearing ballistics vests. They were wearing vests for carrying equipment, not protection.
  • Imagine you put on a ballistic vest (with or without ceramic plates). I then say "Okay, I'm going to shoot you in the chest with a 9mm round." Would you be happy about this? Likely not, because while it won't penetrate, it will likely break a rib or at least wind you badly and leave a huge bruise. Now imagine I said "I'm going to empty a magazine of 30 9mm rounds into your chest." Would you expect to be in good condition after that, or even alive? Nope.
• Why was Esperanza's plane going to Dulles? That's a civilian airport, on one of the busiest travel days of the year. It would be absolutely packed with people, with no one outside the terminals proper being potentially armed. There's no way it could be secured, especially not on one day's notice like it was stated. It would have been more plausible if FM-1 was going to a nearby military airfield, like Andrews Air Force Base, and Esperanza diverted the plane to Dulles after taking over the plane, rather than having the plane going directly there.
  • Was it even originally going to land there? I think it was simply that it was going to pass close to Dulles, and Esperanza broke out and took over the plane to land it there.
    • It's entirely possible that the plane was set to land at Andrews AFB. Then again that doesn't explain why agents would have been waiting at Dulles, unless it was a worst-case scenario.
  • Most likely, Andrews AFB was shut down by the bad weather (a Hand Wave but whatever), so Dulles was chosen instead. Esperanza did not redirect the flight to Dulles- it was always going there (this is stated several times, and McClane immediately deduces this is why the mercenaries are in the airport even before they take it over); he merely killed the crew and took over to make his escape more simple.
  • Esperanza is a Dictator. Taking him in is a major coup for the U.S. Government. No doubt they were planning to perp walk him in public. But, that still doesn't explain why they didn't use Andrews, which would've been much more secure and gotten the same media coverage.
• Why does the plane explode? As evidenced with the Gimli Glider, a 747 is perfectly capable of landing without front landing gear, and in this case the worst case is damage to the landing gear and scratches on the belly, but otherwise, it would not break up and explode. So, why does this one break up immediately on impact and explode?
  • Chalk that one up to magic movie fuel tank physics. It's the same reason why movie cars sometimes explode in a giant fireball just from hitting a tree or driving into a ditch. The plane going up in flames also shows that there are no survivors without having to make McClane climb in and see all the bodies.
    • I think there might be another solution: me not being an expert on chemistry, but the pilot of Windsor Flight 114 says his plane is running on fumes. If I'm right, fumes are actually more flammable than regular liquid fuel. Plus, when the underbelly hits the ground, the plane is going much faster than it should be because Stuart has recalibrated the ground control system to change the altitude. So the underbelly hits the ground with enough speed to likely rupture the center wing fuel tank.
    • "Running on fumes" is an euphemism. It just means "we're low on fuel."
    • Except the tank won't rupture if the plane skids on its belly (again, as in the Gimli Glider, which couldn't lower its front landing gear, so the front crashed into the runway when it touched down) - it's just that heavily built, specifically to prevent the plane from breaking up. The Windsor 114 was still able to lower its landing gear, so its front wouldn't crash into the runway, which would have made the landing even smoother than the Gimli Glider.
    • Jet fuel has a high flashpoint for this exact reason - it's really hard to get it to ignite outside of a jet engine, and fuel vapor, while certainly flammable to a point, has to mix with oxygen in a certain ratio before it will produce a big flashy explosion. The only way it could feasibly blow up is Hollywood physics. Or the airline was smuggling nitroglycerin in the wing tanks.
  • To add to this, the bad guys adjust the ILS system to set ground level for 200' below actual ground level in order to cause the Windsor flight to crash. This is not possible because the ILS system uses antennas mounted on the ground around the runway which send out signals to the receiving plane. The system is based on how far and where the plane is relative to the antennas. The antennas would have to be physically moved in order to change where the ILS glide-slope would be. Even if they were put 200' below ground, the signals would not reach an airplane.
  • The Gimli Glider was actually a Boeing 767-200.
  • They wouldn't hit the ground anyway since every airliner has a radio altimeter. In fact the whole situation is one factual error after another: planes left without ATC support can contact the higher-level ATC for the flight region and be diverted elsewhere, the missing radio altimeter thing, the mentioned ILS transmitters thing, plane descending on glidepath(1000 fpm at most) getting a rough touch-down at worst... you get the idea.
  • There's also the fact that the plane was running low on fuel and had to land ASAP for this very reason, and yet there's still so much fuel that the crash causes an explosion this huge?
• I know that security was decidedly more lenient pre-9/11, but I'm still positive that they would not have let anybody bring an electric stun-gun on to a plane. In fact, from Die Hard, it would have been pretty hard for John to bring his gun on the plane, without having to check it, regardless of the fact that he is a cop (When a cop is off-duty, they're essentially a civilian).
  • Well, the taser belonged to an old lady, so security might have let it slide. After all it was indeed long before 9/11. Remember, they didn't even lock the cockpit door back then.
  • Stun guns of that sort were pretty new back then, and more seen as neat new self-defense gadgets than weapons.
• Are we really supposed to believe that Stuart is able to set all this up in the few days' time they'd have known the airport was going to A) be the site where the general was going to be delivered, and B) get hit by a snowstorm? Even if they knew where the guy was being brought into the U.S. weeks beforehand, weather reports simply aren't reliable enough to allow enough forewarning to build an elaborate scheme that depended on the planes' having no visual contact with the ground. Had the weather not cooperated with the bad guys, they wouldn't have been able to crash a planeload of hostages, because the whole city would be lit up for the holiday.
  • Well, then they would have to use the plan B, wouldn't they?
    • It was stated in the film that they've been planning everything for two months, which means they have been preparing for Esperanza's eventual extradition. It wouldn't be hard for people with backgrounds in military intelligence to figure out where he would be taken, if they didn't know beforehand where the most likely airport was. No doubt they greased some palms to be sure of it, but that's never stated. As for the storm, well, they just got a little lucky (Garber even says "God loves the Infantry" when Cochrane tells him about the storm system) and were able to make good on their threat by crashing a plane. I'm sure they had some other ideas in mind that didn't revolve around a blizzard.
• How do they reconcile the fact that Holly's plane had 90 minutes of fuel left and was circling around DC...and thus had over a dozen alternate airfields that it would have automatically diverted to if it have no communication with the tower?
  • Just came in here to mention that. Did they ever say why the planes had to land THERE and not divert to any number of other airports like they do all the time (even, notably, in the event of terrorist attacks such as 9/11, where Operation Yellow Ribbon had planes diverted to another country to land.)
    • Not clearly. I know fuel was a concern, but as this map shows, there were plenty of other options that were literally right next door, especially considering circling the runway pretty much meant they were flying directly overheard one of the other landing sites as they circled.
    • They said they'd lost all communication with the planes, so that means they couldn't direct them to head to other airports.
    • IIRC the planes were in communication with the fake tower run by Colonel Stuart, who gave them instructions to keep circling the runway.
    • That sounds familiar, but if so it's Just Plane Wrong to the extreme. Pilots in distress aren't slaves to ATC and they would divert if for no other reason than to avoid running out of fuel and crashing into D.C.
    • Possibly justified early on. A throwaway comment is made that Reagan National Airport has had to shut down and send their planes across to Dulles. It's not beyond the realms of possibility that Dulles was being kept open only as an emergency airport to land all the planes they could, it just also happened that the military jet with Esperanza on board was being sent there. Sure it's unlikely, but this page has already discussed about fiction and likely or unlikely things happening.
    • If only it wasn't for the fact that the planes are circling for at least two hours. A flight from T.F. Green in Rhode Island to Dulles takes about three. Most of the east coast is within two hours flight of Washington, DC. And in the event of an emergency that downed civilian airfields there are still military airfields in the area which could take the planes until the storm passed.
    • After a re-watch, fairly early on in the siege the tower manages to get through and alert the planes that Stuart has shut down the lights. The fact that they didn't immediately divert of their own accord is pure Plot Hole.
    • The fact that they lost communications with the planes in the first place is pure Plot Hole. There is a specific frequency band used solely for aviation emergencies. Every aviation radio in the world is designed to be able to use this channel, and every commercial aircraft is required to listen in on that frequency at all times while in flight. Our heroes could have broadcast in the clear to all the planes circling Dulles from any transmitter in radio range that could operate on guard frequency (such as, oh, the one at Andrews Air Force Base, which would entirely make this transmission on behalf of the police and be able to authenticate their bona fides besides), and all it takes to get aircraft diverting to nearby airfields is one simple transmission — "Dulles International Airport is closed due to a terrorist incident in-progress that has seized the air-traffic-control tower. Disregard all transmissions claiming to be from Dulles Approach and divert to other airfields immediately.".
  • Wouldn't the bad guys simply just have jammed that frequency? And any other frequency they might be using to contact the planes?
    • In addition, there is a Federal law that basically states that if an airport, any airport, military, civilian, or private, has a usable runway long enough to accept an aircraft in distress, it is required to do so if said airplane has an emergency (Like the original airport being taken over by terrorists and needing to make a controlled landing pronto or else they'll soon end up making an uncontrolled one) and requests emergency landing clearance. If the planes can circle for two hours, they can travel in a straight line for two hours, and any airport those planes passed that wasn't also shut down due to the storm (And there's no reason to believe the storm is two hours flight time wide) would immediately let them land as a matter of course.
    • New England resident can confirm "there's no reason to believe the storm is two hours 'flight time wide'". Sort of. It might be. It was specifically described as a nor'easter, which is a large tropical-like storm that approaches from the southwest (moving northeast). Point is, it doesn't zip up the coast at 500mph. If those planes took off from circling Dulles and headed northeast, they could all reach their destination and land hours before the storm got into CT/MA.
• John McClane pulls out a machine gun and starts to spray Lorenzo right in front of a bunch of other cops! And not one of them shoots him down! OK, they were blanks, but the other cops had no way of knowing that...
  • Shock, maybe? Remember, it also takes the police chief several seconds to realize that he's not getting shot.
  • Yeah, they're simply not expecting an attack at all (John is a fellow cop, after all, and they're safely back in the office at this time, not in a potential danger zone), and by the time their reflexes catch up with what's going on, the realization that John was firing blanks has also caught up with them.
• When Esperanza lands on the runway, John is trying to crawl out of the manhole that Esperanza's plane is about to run over. Me thinks even John McClane would decide that going back down and waiting for the plane to pass over you makes more sense!
  • Wasn't the grating pushing down on him making hard to get back down?
    • It would have been easier to squeeze out using leverage from your legs via the ladder than trying to go the other way with your hand pushing in the snow.
• The planes use the fire trail from Stuart's exploded jet to land. Why couldn't they use the fire from the earlier crash?
  • Probably because that fire was a point source, while the second fire was a long line going down a sizable fraction of the runway.
  • It still does leave the question of why they couldn't set a fire, but still.
  • Because the terrorists are still watching the airport and even if you could warn the planes about the bogus ATC and tell them about the signal fire they could have brought shoulder launched SAMs to take a few planes out.
  • Also, the airport fire trucks are seen rushing out to extinguish the blaze being caused by burning fuel and mount a futile search for survivors.
• Why was the sentry that John killed so quiet? The whole point of a sentry is to warn his comrades that there's a possible threat. If he really was an elite soldier, he should have known that his first priority would be to sound the alarm, then worry about killing the intruder.
  • If nothing else, his training would be to simply pull the trigger on his weapon. Even if he's not going to hit anything, the gunshots will alert the rest of his unit.
• O'Reilly is standing still in the middle of the room with no cover when he shoots the SWAT leader. The rest of the SWAT team immediately opens fire, but somehow none of them hit him!?
  • Shock and suprise. It's heavily implied the SWAT team are just regular airport cops handed assault rifles and don't have real advanced training or expierence.
• Grant getting sucked into the engine. Sure, this can easily happen, and sadly happens in real life, but shouldn't that have outright destroyed that engine? US Airways 1549's engines were outright destroyed when a few 10-lb geese were sucked into its engines. If 10-lb geese can destroy a jet engine, what would a 200+ lb human do to it?
  • It absolutely should have. Something the size of a paperclip or a pen can shred the inside of a jet engine. A human body would have completely wrecked it.
    • In the shooting script, the engine does blow up and Esperanza quickly shuts it off.
    • If you look closely during the wide shots of the plane after Grant is killed, the engine he was sucked into is rotating noticeably slower than the others, and there's part of his white jacket caught one of the blades.
• The Takeoff of the terrorists' escape jet. There's so many things wrong with this plot. Even if they had taken off, do they not think that any F16 could easily shoot the jet down once it got over the water? And even then, the movie has the plane rolling down the runway for several minutes, far longer than the usual takeoff. The v1 speed (decision speed for takeoff or stop) for that kind of jet is usually reached rather quickly, and is easily fast enough that anybody standing on the wing of the plane would have been blown right off the wing, especially in a cold icy night, yet there is supposedly a fight on the wing lasting nearly a minute, and Stuart has time to go and un-bind the aileron and re-enter the plane.
  • Well, to be fair, their plan hinged on the army unit sent to take them out actually being in on the plot, so ideally F-16s would not have been deployed until the ruse was discovered and they were long gone (similar to Grubers plan in the first movie- "by the time they figure out what went wrong we'll be sitting on a beach earning 20%"). In fact they have no idea that John has figured their plan out until he actually shows up on their wing, and might assume that it's just him acting alone or that any help he (may or may not have) called in for will arrive to late (which is entirely possible).
  • There is no way the plane would have made it out of the country without being spotted on radar, and airports everywhere would be on the lookout for its transponder signal. You can't just fly a plane in, across, or out of a developed country without air traffic control somewhere knowing about it.
• When the terrorists are throwing grenades into Esperanza's plane, why does it take so freaking long for them to detonate?
  • Rule of Drama.
• Is it possible to the Windsor airliner to crash in the circumstances depicted? Even with the ILS magically lowered 200 feet, the aircraft was descending on a glideslope (vertical speed probably around 800-900 fpm), full flaps and gear down, at around 130 knots (151 mph). Even without the flare (raising the nose at a last moment to reduce vertical speed and to allow a gentler touchdown), it's far more likely to be a hard landing, not a crash. (And the pilot might try to pull the nose up at the last second anyway.)
  • Not to mention that the plane was almost out of fuel. Even a fully fueled airliner will burn, not explode, on a bad crash landing. The Windsor jet shouldn't even have caught fire.
• Why did no one even try to see if the planes could be landed at any Air Force base near DC? Yes, they're supposed to be off limits to civilian aircraft, but this is a terrorist scenario that would have gotten the attention of some high-ranking people who could have ordered the bases to prepare to land the aircraft - or at least try to communicate with the pilots to let them know what was really going on.
• How could the same shit happen to the same guy twice?
• Why didn't the heroes just use emergency vehicles with their lights flashing to guide the planes in on the runways?
  • Likely because they didn't know how many men and guns Stuart had, and for all they knew the emergency vehicles would be blown to smithereens by RPG fire before they could land more than one or two planes.

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