Flight (2012) on Netflix
Whip Whitaker is an airline pilot who drinks heavily and uses cocaine. After a mechanical failure sends his plane into a dive, he lands it in an open field, saving most aboard.
- Netflix3.8/5
- IMDb7.3/10401,100 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes77%
Trailer
Plot summary
Airline captain Whip Whitaker spends the night before a flight in an Orlando hotel room, drinking with Katerina Marquez, a flight attendant scheduled to work the trip, and takes cocaine to stay sharp. He flies SouthJet Air Flight 227 toward Atlanta, and once first officer Ken Evans has the controls, Whip spikes his orange juice with vodka and dozes off. A catastrophic dive wakes him, and he rolls the jet upside down, then sets it down in an open field, saving all but six of the 102 people aboard. He comes to in an Atlanta hospital, where Charlie Anderson, who speaks for the pilots union, credits him with the rescue and reports that Evans is in a coma. There Whip meets Nicole Maggen, recovering from a heroin overdose, and the two connect.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Flight (2012)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Screenwriter John Gatins said the crash in Flight was loosely inspired by the 2000 crash of Alaska Airlines Flight 261, in which a broken jackscrew caused a catastrophic failure; pilots Ted Thompson and Bill Tansky managed to fly the plane inverted in its last moments.
- Flight was made for a relatively small $31 million, which Robert Zemeckis calculated was his smallest budget in inflation-adjusted dollars since 1980; Georgia tax rebates and Zemeckis and Denzel Washington waiving their customary fees made it possible.
- Pilots questioned the film's realism, and the Air Line Pilots' Association dismissed Flight as an inaccurate portrayal of an air crew, saying an entertaining thriller should not be mistaken for the true story of airline safety and professionalism.
- Flight was the first time director Robert Zemeckis and star Denzel Washington worked together on a motion picture; Zemeckis accepted the job by early June 2011.
