On A Wing and A Prayer

As a Christian and an Air Force Veteran , this movie apparently had no Air Traffic Controller advisers . If a former pilot were instructing someone to land , they wouldnt need a garage mockup . Roma Downey failed on this one. The large scale Christian movies of the past were the hayday of movies 10 Commandments , Ben Hur , The Greatest Story ever told , The Passion of the Christ , cant seem to be topped. This movie has very low grade acting. The real story is amazing and deserved a bigger budget . The first encounter with the tower was very different than it would have been. The controller would have been more methodical and to the point. Much time was wasted in casual talk.

...but I couldn't. The first part of the movie was just tedious. I know it was about building up the family context, but it was tedious. There were several points where I almost gave up on the movie. The blonde daughter was very annoying. There was a point where she had to grab an epi pen out of a backpack in the cargo hold, and instead of her unfastening the webbing in the cargo hold, for what seemed like a long time we had to see her panicking as she tried to frantically reach through the webbing to feel for the backpack. All I could think was "how stupid of a daughter did this guy have?" Even my 10yo son would've tried to unhook the strapping. On the plus side, it's a family friendly movie and maybe a preteen or younger might find the movie entertaining. Most adults would probably not get past the mediocre acting and plot development.

Lovely movie based on true story. I work in the airline industry so noticed numerous flaws, even without my background some of the movie's flaws were pretty obvious - if plane took dive people would be banging around etc.

Poor acting by female lead in my opinion, otherwise all the other actors were solid and believable in their roles. I was unsure of the importance the kids had in monitoring the drama that was unfolding and I just found that part a bit distracting in the storyline.

The follow-up of the individuals after the show was very interesting.

I found it worth watching this family friendly movie.

Sometimes less can be more. They went way too over the top with this movie. They didn't need all the extra stuff, it was dramatic enough to begin with. They didn't need kids explaining everything. They didn't need to create any additional stressful situations on the plane itself when it was already stressful enough anyways. They could have simply told the story exactly as it happened and the movie would have been better for it. Sometimes I can understand movies really hyping things up, but this was never going to be an action movie and they tried to turn it into one, which didn't work out well, in my opinion.

If you want to actually watch this as it happened, there's a Youtube video about it on the channel FS Mania titled "PILOT DIES, Passenger Lands King Air". It recreates the entire incident in Microsoft Flight Simulator while using the actual transmissions from the incident. It's about 10x better than this movie is, while also only taking up about 40 minutes. Just watch that instead. Save yourself some time and watch a better video while you're doing it.

I have no actual knowledge of the real story that inspired this movie, but the end credits show photos and give explanations of the real people involved. It says of the King Air 200, the subject plane, "One of the most difficult to fly."

My wife and I watched this streaming on Amazon Prime. Both of us feel the same, the movie is done in a somewhat hokey and sentimental style, most of it in the air as they are trying to figure out how to land the plane safely while communicating with ATC. We both think the real story has a much better movie in there somewhere but this one was not particularly well made. Still, it was a fun watch, I laughed a number of times but probably where no humor was intended.

NB - I asked my son, a pilot who has flown a King Air a number of times, to watch the movie and see what he thinks. His opinion wasn't very favorable at all, like most of the rest of us he thinks the filmmakers botched the whole movie, especially the parts that involved flying the plane and landing.

We are glad we saw it for the knowledge that the real people are OK, but in truth it is not a very good movie. The part I actually enjoyed the most were the two younger kids in their home, not far from the Florida airport, following the plane on Flight Aware and speculating whether the plane would land safely. I don't know if that is factual or not but I found it entertaining.