Interesting , average and ridiculous.

First I just have to say, come on it's a movie.

If you watch movies of this period you will find that this one was very well done for it's time. The improvement in film quality between 1935 and 1948 is amazing, almost recognizable each year. In fact this movie plays like a '46 era film. And it was in color, (which was only 2 years old). This also is a history. It wasn't meant to be 1941. That's it's release date. The reasearch took years.

The RAF aircraft was a Curtis A-12 (1936). Despite less than 100 being built there were several on Hickam Field on 12-7-41. Fixed gear? The Japamese zero (naval version for sure) was fixed gear, and I believe I read, built and flown till the end of the war. And the British Swordfish, an open cockpit biplane, brought about the sinking of the Bismark.

The Spitfire and the ME-109 both cleared 300 mph, but barely. And both the Mustang and the Corsair, have claimed to be the first to clear 400 mph in level flight. The aircraft depicted here were markedly slower, probably below 200 mph.

As for the crash realism, If you want realism maybe you should volunter to be the pilot to crash the plane for real. The first crash had to have the survivor to set up the conflict between Flynn and McMurray. The final crash wasn't a straight in, and the seat harness would have held the pilot in place not smashed into the instrument panel as you suggest. Broken neck, ruptured internal organs yes, but not necessarily extravagant obvious insult. Also a plane dropping out of the sky doesn't fall straight down. Usually it enters a spin. Watch a leaf fall. It flutters back and forth, then drops a few feet then flutters back and forth again until the next drop. That's kind of a spin. A well balanced airplane will do this. It's designed to fly and will attempt to, acting like the leaf. Yes, planes have augered straight in, usually after the wings fail. I hope this helps you understand 'straight in' is not anywhere near a 100% thing.

Hope that helps make it a little more real for you.


"A lie can travel halfway around the world, before the truth can put it's shoes on." Mark Twain, I believe.

one more ridiculous aspect to the Fred MacMurray biplane crash scene that is probably lost on those not familiar with San Diego-

The observers who witness the crash are seen at the airfield at NAS North Island on Coronado and when they see the crash they scramble the crash trucks and are seen heading straight towards the crash site...when they arrive minutes later, the plane can be seen with the old Cabrillo lighthouse in the background, which is on the Point Loma peninsula...to have made the trip from North Island to Point Loma in 1941 would have required either a very slow ferry trip across San Diego Harbor, a very long trip down the Silver Strand almost to the Mexican border and back up highway 1 (a dirt road back then) to SD proper, a time machine set to 1969 when the Coronado Bridge was built, or an amphibious crash truck with the ability to drive across the bay and straight up the cliffs on the eastern side of Point Loma.

One other amusing feature of the film is that every time you see a plane landing or taxiing, you see formations of from three to dozens of aircraft making passes across the active runway areas at extremely low altitudes...obviously an attempt to impart a feeling of action, but had the ATC's at North Island allowed hordes of aircraft to fly willy-nilly across the fields when other planes were taking off and landing, we would have lost all of our naval aviators to mid-air collisions before they left SoCal.