Just Plane Wrong / Live-Action TV

• The large plane that serves as the mobile base for the team in Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. sports a pair of engines on the tail fin, sucking in all that hot exhaust air from the wing engines.
  • Also, considering how much a C-5 flares (rotates its nose up) for takeoff and landing, a pair of engines hanging that low, that far aft, would make a takeoff or landing run really interesting, for the pilots and everyone else aboard.
  • As it turns out, the extra engines are necessary when the plane hovers in "The Hub". But making her a VTOL just brings up more technical problems, like insufficient thrust and structural support for the engines. Applied Phlebotinum plus Rule of Cool is the only possible way to overcome these problems.
  • In "0-8-4", the Bus makes a landing on a dirt landing strip in the jungle, kicking up much dirt and debris directly into the engine intake. FOD (Foreign Object Damage) appears not to be a consideration.
• Airwolf:
  • All aircraft from Soviet-influenced countries are depicted as having Soviet color schemes, complete with red star.^note The Warsaw Pact countries (as well as Cuba) had their own roundels, which could - but did not have to - incorporate red stars. For example Poland and Czechoslovakia used their pre-WWII roundels, East Germany used the black-red-yellow lozenge, and other Warsaw Pact countries used red stars, but with some variation in design - typically a miniature roundel of their national colours inside the star. (For example Romania used such star from 1950 to 1984, before reverting to the pre-WWII roundel in Romanian national colours.)
  • The first part of the pilot has an aircraft described as a French Mirage and shown as such on the chopper's target ID screen with accurate side-drawing, but the Stock Footage is of a completely different aircraft — quite possibly the British Hawker Hunter. To give you an idea of the size of the error, the Hunter is two generations of fighter aircraft older, i.e. late first-generation (mid 1950s) and subsonic. The Mirage is a third-gen, late 1960s aircraft, capable of exceeding Mach 2. The Mirage also has a large, triangular "delta" wing, and looks nothing like the Hunter.
  • Another episode features F-4s in service with the government of Suriana, a country in Latin Land. The F-4 was not exported to any state there and considering the instability of that country, it would not be high on the export list.
  • In one episode, Stock Footage of F-4s play F-16s. Rather different aircraft.
  • "Fallen Angel" has MiG-17s (one tail) playing MiG-25s (much younger two-tailed aircraft). While footage of the "Foxbat" may have been hard to acquire in 1985, that's not even trying. The aircraft is described as carrying "Arid" missiles, which appears to be a misspelling of "Acrid", the reporting name for the R-40/AA-6 missiles, which the aircraft could carry.
  • "Echoes of the Past" has, for some reason, an F-100 Super Sabre pop up in a shot that's meant to be of two MiG-19s. The two are similar in appearance and function (both were their country's first supersonic fighters).
  • "To Snare an Airwolf" has a US satellite launch done with footage of a Saturn V launch—and the actual satellite using a clip of Skylab, which had re-entered the atmosphere in 1979, five years before the episode was made.
  • "Proof Through the Night" has Airwolf approach a USAF refuelling tanker, which is fine, and has the copilot asking why they're using a refuelling setup for aircraft with a refuelling probe. Several errors are made: the pilot and copilot believe the choices are a Harrier or SR-71 Blackbird, forgetting that all USN carrier aircraft use refuelling probes (the probes on the Tomcat and Hornet fold away when not in use). Secondly, they're using a "male" boom refuler, instead of the hose-and-drogue setup. The male boom plugs into the aircraft, and can't fit a refueling probe. Third, the crew is shocked to be refueling a helicopter... Except that at that time, the Air Force was deploying MH-53J Pave Low III and HH-60G Pave Hawk search and rescue choppers, which DID have refuelling probes, and were regularly refueled by USAF tankers.
• Alex Rider (2020): Damien Cray's secret weapon, used to chase after Alex, Kyra and Tom when escaping from the Amsterdam facility, is a minigun-armed drone. Problem is, the drone appears to be little different from a commercial heavy-lift model, and as such, it probably just wouldn't work. Even assuming that the vehicle is able to lift the heavy weapon and its ammo in the first place, the recoil would presumably send the thing careening around the sky and render the gun totally useless.
• Parodied (like everything else) in Angie Tribeca. A Boeing 767 seen at an airport terminal suddenly turns into a badly animated two-seater biplane when in the air. Interior shots show a wide-body jet, but cockpit scenes include the loud buzzing of an old prop engine. And it's so long that it takes Angie several minutes to run the length of the plane...
• The landing sequence in The A-Team from the episode The Beast from the Belly of the Boeing was largely accurate for a TV show, though it did make some notable mistakes. Murdock tells Hannibal to put the plane in a shallow dive to descend, which is not what airliners generally do. A "dive" means to lower the nose of the plane without reducing engine power; the resulting maneuver sheds altitude in exchange for higher airspeed. Airliners rarely dive when descending, and certainly won't be losing airspeed while in a shallow dive. Airliners generally just cut back on the engines to descend, and the reduced airspeed reduces lift and lets the plane drop (and often with spoilers partly deployed). The team also forget to deploy spoilers after touchdown, and despite being completely out of fuel Murdock tells them to reverse the thrusters, which is absolutely useless if they engine isn't producing any thrust. Also, although a Boeing 747-100/200 was used as the main plane, a few of the stock footage taxi scenes show engine nacelles from a 707.
• Black Sheep Squadron used slightly-modified North American AT-6 trainer aircraft (different cockpit canopies) as Mitsubishi A6M "Zeros"/"Zekes". The AT-6 is a noticeably larger and somewhat differently-shaped aircraft than a Zero, but the masquerade was necessary because at the time, there was not a single flyable Zero fighter anywhere in the world.
  • The T-6s were ones originally rebuilt to "impersonate" A6M2 "Zekes" for the 1970 movie Tora! Tora! Tora!. Those "Zekes" got around; they later showed up in the 1980 time-travel movie The Final Countdown, which had the nuclear carrier USS Nimitz time-warped back to the late afternoon of December 6, 1941, just west of Hawaii...
• There's a rocket example in an episode of Blake's 7. Establishing model shots of the rocket are clearly based on the Russian Soyuz design, but the actual launch footage is of an American rocket. Presumably the producers were planning to use stock Soviet launch footage but either couldn't get it or thought it was of insufficient quality.
• In The Comic Strip Presents episode "Four Men in a Plane", our heroes take off for the middle east in a four-engined airliner, but when they land it's only got two engines. It's not the plane of the title, by the way — that is a single-engined light aircraft.
• Dark Skies used a Redstone-Mercury to represent a Gemini launch despite Gemini stock footage being widely available.
• Doctor Who:
  • In The '60s, the show seemed to use rocket stock footage in every other serial. This dropped off in later years, but didn't die off completely until nearly the end of the original run. There's also the Vogan "Skystriker" missile from "Revenge of the Cybermen", which is obviously a US Saturn V. And by "obviously" we mean it has "USA" painted on the side in big, easily legible letters.
  • "Victory of the Daleks" is set during the London Blitz in 1941, but has Spitfire Mk IXs, which were introduced in 1942. They should have been Mk II or IIIs, which flew in the Battle of Britain.
  • In "The Big Bang", there is a scene showing a small video reel showing the journey of the Pandorica from Stonehenge to London. The video ends with the Blitz in 1941. The "German" bombers shown in the clip are actually American B-17 Flying Fortresses — in fact, the closest bomber has the American, 1943-45 vintage USAAF roundel on the wing.
• Father Ted, "Flight into Terror":
  • External shots show a BAe 146, but interior shots are of a wide-body aircraft.
  • The priests find two parachutes and hold a 'Why Should I Win A Parachute' contest. Real passenger planes don't carry parachutes.
  • There appears to be only one pilot onboard.
  • When they're in the cockpit, the engine gauges are mentioned. The plane is a two-engined jet, but the pilot mentions 'engine three'.
  • In the climax, Jack manages to open the cabin door in mid-air and jump out with the drink cart. Ted later climbs out the cabin door onto the fuselage. Both scenes are impossible due to the design of cabin doors. A more likely scenario is Jack struggling to open the door and being found by the priests.
• In the second season of The Greatest American Hero, an episode called, The Hand-Painted Thai had scenes from the Vietnam War that were supposed to be taking place in 1970. In one of the scenes, you see an F-16 dropping bombs. The problem is that the F-16 never saw service in Vietnam. In fact, the F-16's first flight wasn't until a few years after this scene was supposed to take place.
• The military-legal show JAG has many examples of this trope in practically every episode dealing with aircraft. There was a scene where some attack chopper was supposed to be firing machine guns. The noise was right, but the heli was really firing rockets from a pod. They were probably used in place of the guns because machine guns firing look quite boring in real life, as opposed to foot-long flaming "bullets". Oh, and here's a suggestion: if playing a JAG Drinking Game, drinking whenever a plane changes model in flight will get you drunk quick smart.
  • At least one episode used stock footage from Top Gun of the "Mi G-28" claiming it to be a North Korean fighter.
• Particularly jarring in Jericho (2006), where the main character reports seeing a Tupolev "Bear" and some escorts, when the plane in question is clearly is a C-130 Hercules, the single longest-produced American military aircraft of all time.
• In the intro sequence of the Kamen Rider Double movie A-to-Z The Gaia Memories of Destiny, we see Katsumi Daido (soon-to-be Kamen Rider Eternal) hijacking a Foundation X helicopter in mid-air to steal their T2 Gaia Memories. The problem is, while the interior shots are of a normal civilian helicopter, which makes sense, the CGI exterior shots of the heli are of a freaking AH-64 Apache, which has no business being a transport vehicle for civilians. It's likely they just reused a 3D model they had lying around, since a similar CG Apache appears in the Origin Story scene where Shotaro and Philip transform into Double for the first time.
• Leverage falls into this fairly frequently. The most obvious case is in "The Mile High Job" which centers around a plane flight. The establishing shot of LAX uses some Stock Footage which prominently displays a TWA airliner (TWA was bought out by American in 2001). On the flight, they have Parker giving the safety spiel (on just about any plane with an entertainment system, this is given by a video), and the plane itself seems to be a 777 with the wings of an A330.
• The Machine Gunners:
  • Bizarrely, The BBC's TV adaptation changes the downed bomber from which the machine gun is stolen from a Heinkel He 111 to a Junkers Ju 52. Guess which one of these German aircraft wasn't in service as a bomber during 1941.
  • The source novel explains that the tail section of the He 111 broke off and crashed into the woods after the rest of the aircraft crashed into the laundry. Since the dorsal gun on a He 111 is located relatively far forward on the aircraft there is no way the tail section of this aircraft could break off and still contain the gun position. While the Ju 52 used in the TV series was clearly incorrect for the time period, at least it had the gun position in the 'correct' spot for the plot to actually work.
• A Magnum, P.I. two-parter had a "prototype attack helicopter" be hijacked by a Manchurian Agentified T.C. and his Soviet handler. The chopper is blatantly a McDonnell Douglas MD 500 with rockets bolted on, i.e. the same model of chopper that T.C. flies in his day job. Not quite as bad as it could be, though, given the MD 500 is a civilian variant of the OH-6 Cayuse, which saw combat in Vietnam.
• Manifest has the main characters flying aboard a Boeing 737 Next Generation before vanishing from the face of the Earth for more than five years. When it lands, not only have five years inexplicably passed, the plane has also inexplicably become a much older 737 Classic.
• Mayday has a tendency to fall into this.
  • One example is in the episode "Bomb on Board", which recycles the same clip for taking off and landing with the thrust reversers deployed.
  • Another episode about the Tenerife disaster, which involved a collision between two 747s, Pan Am and KLM, introduces the KLM plane with a shot of it in flight... with winglets, identifying it as a 747-400, which would not be in production until 11 years after the 1977 disaster, in 1989.
  • In another episode, it is made clear that the people making the show believe that any twinjet in an American Airlines livery must be an A300.
  • The above is averted in the episode about American Airlines Flight 587, which actually did involve an A300, but instead it goofs in showing the plane pitching downward when it loses its vertical stabilizer; in real life, losing the vertical stabilizer (i.e. the part of the tail that points straight upwards) causes uncontrollable movements in the yaw axis, as in the plane wants to drift from side-to-side like how a car turns. It's both baffling, in that the episode about the Uberlingen disaster correctly showed the effects of losing the vertical stabilizer, but also darkly amusing, in that this trope (specifically, training pilots to dangerously overreact to the wake turbulence that caused the vertical stabilizer to separate) contributed to the real AA 587 crash.
• In the NCIS episode "Agent Afloat", an F/A-18 on USS Seahawk switches to an F-14 between shots. The F-14 had retired from USN service before the episode was made.
  • The first season episode "High Seas" features a US Navy SH-60 Seahawk quite clearly crewed by Australians.
• Jetstream, a documentary series on the training of Canadian fighter pilots, constantly has the announcer refer to the aircraft as the "F-18 Hornet". That was the original designation, but only Finland appears to use it. The US calls it the F/A-18 and the Canadian single-seater version is officially the CF-188A, but more usually called the CF-18A.
  • This is technically an error, but a forgivable one, as almost no one (even its pilots) bothers calling it the F/A-18 in colloquial speech. This is common with other aircraft that have complex or unpopular official tri-service designations. Generally, when referring to these aircraft, people will use the shorter (but technically incorrect) designation, or its common service name. For example, almost no one calls the A-10 the "Thunderbolt II". It is universally known as either the A-10, or the "hawg" or "warthog". The "F/A-18 Hornet" is more commonly known as "the bug" or "the plastic bug", etc.
• Averted when Donald P. Bellisario actually did do the research for the pilot episode of Quantum Leap. He went scouting for a Bell X-2, only to presumably be told that both the X-2s were destroyed in crashes so he'd have to make a replica. The full-scale fiberglass replica he had built is on display at Chino airport's Planes of Fame air museum, unfortunately quite worse for the weather since it's been stored outside for years, sans wings.
• The USS Pike in Salvation has a motley collection of aircraft, all of which do not belong on an American carrier. The only American craft are a US Coast Guard chopper and US Air Force F-22s and A-10s, the latter two of which can't land on carriers. Neither can the Eurofighter or non-navalized Russian MiG-29s. Also present is a French Army Caracal helicopter.
• In SEAL Team season 2's penultimate episode, Bravo Team is evacuated out of Pakistan by an Indian Air Force UH-60 Blackhawk helicopter. Except the Indian Air Force doesn't use Blackhawks; their helicopters are almost all Russian or indigenous designs. American helicopters only began to enter the IAF's inventory in late 2019, and the first models to be delivered to India were the AH-64 Apache and CH-47 Chinook.
• In the TV-movie The Six Million Dollar Man, Steve Austin goes up in an HL-10 lifting body, but crashes in an M2-F2. ^note This is because the crash is real: pilot Bruce Peterson was very badly injured but survived, though he did not receive any bionic upgrades.
  • In a later episode of the TV series, he pilots what's supposed to be the same aircraft yet again. This time, they show a Bell X-2 rocket plane. In the script, Steve Austin calls the plane the "X-PJ-1" (perhaps the script writer was wearing pajamas at the time).
  • In another episode of the TV series, he's shown taking off in an F-4 Phantom II, flying around in a Northrop F-5, and landing in an F-104 Star Fighter. This scene was supposedly showing a single flight.
  • In yet another episode, Steve identifies a fighter (an F-94) by the engine note alone (supposedly realistic, too).
• Smallville once featured a character taking a trip by private jet. When shown on the ground it was a Bae 125. The shot of it en route showed it had suddenly acquired a third engine and looked like a Falcon 50. It then got into trouble and plummeted Earthwards and turned into a Cessna before coming to rest as wreckage that looked like a Lear.
• The final episode of Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip has off-screen F-14s scrambling out of Bagram in Afghanistan. The F-14 had been retired before the episode was made; even if they'd still been active, they would have been far more likely to have been scrambled from a nearby aircraft carrier than flying from a land base. It's doubtful any F-14s ever operated out of Bagram.
• In addition to lifting scenes from Destination Moon, the second episode of The Time Tunnel used an Atlas rocket to represent the launch of a mission to Mars.
• Entirely averted on Top Gear, due in large part to 1. presenter James May holding a private pilot's license in his own right and being a total aviation nerd (witness his excitement at finding the Albanian MiG boneyard — "It's a two seater version from the Korean war... I believe that will have been built in China") and 2. the coolness of certain stunts being based on the performance of a car vs. the legitimate capabilities of [insert name of Cool Plane or Cool Helicopter here].
• Averted in the Twilight Zone episode "The Odyssey of Flight 33". Rod Serling used his brother Robert, who was an aviation writer, and an airline-pilot friend as sources for the cockpit dialogue.
• White Rabbit Project: In the "Crazy World War II Weapons" episode, Tory says the proposed bat bombs were to be dropped by B-52s, which were only conceived after the war's end, and wouldn't see service until 1955. The plan actually called for B-24s.

---