“Flew in from Miami Beach BOAC … man I had a dreadful flight.” So sang the ‘Fab Four’ in 1968’s Back in the USSR – There’s certainly no arguing with the sentiment they express. Not only is there no airport in Miami Beach, but BOAC certainly never operated Florida to Moscow service.

It gets even better if you look at the 2018 video mix of the song. It opens with a prop aircraft in flight before switching to a Pan Am Boeing 707 parked at a gate. So much for BOAC which – having morphed into British Airways 47 years ago – was probably a bit of a mystery to these recent video’s producers.

Anything to do with aviation however seems to be an ongoing conundrum for moviemakers. If the film features policing, legal or medical themes they will hire technical advisors, or ‘subject matter experts’ as the buzzword has it. Not so it seems with any scenes involving airlines or air travel in general. “What the hell, an airplane is an airplane” appears to be the mantra.

I don’t have sufficient fingers and toes to count the number of times I’ve seen random B-roll footage of a widebody like a Boeing 747 being used to depict a short-haul domestic flight, or conversely a 737 showing up to represent the airplane used on a transatlantic trip. It’s just sloppy work on the producers’ part but presumably they figure 99.9% of their audience will be oblivious to such details so why bother.

Even when it starts out okay there are frequently quite laughable, continuity problems. Take the hit movie ‘Home Alone’ for instance, which shows an American Airlines McDonnell Douglas DC-10 taking off and a Boeing 757 landing. To be true to this metamorphosis cause, the sequel, ‘Home Alone 2, Lost in New York’ has a 747 interior in a 767 exterior. Nit picking perhaps, but would a scripted heart surgery scene show them removing an appendix, or would we see someone, “hanged by the neck until dead’ using an electric chair? I think not.

Then there’s the issue of historical correctness. The classic blooper has to be in Brad Pitt’s 2004 ‘Troy’ where, during a Trojan war scene, a jet can be fleetingly glanced flying overhead – clearly not an intentional embellishment. But one would expect something better of Quentin Tarantino.

His 2019 hit, ‘Once Upon a Time in Hollywood’ is set in 1969 and this time we see Brad Pitt arriving in LAX on a 747 – quite a feat as this was a full year before the airplane entered commercial service! Or there’s ‘Sully’, the story of the heroic 2009 USAir water landing. As the doomed A320 is taking off from LaGuardia (and about to get goosed) taxiing in the background is an American Airlines jet bearing the carrier’s new livery – that wasn’t introduced until four years later. Again, a little bit like using penicillin – introduced in the 1940’s – in a WW1 movie.

All very nitpicky cosmetic stuff I know, but there are other occasions where a lack of cinematic attention to operational correctness can only serve to stoke the viewer’s latent fear of flying. A classic example of this can be seen in the 2017 sci-fi thriller ‘2:22’. Thankfully for the flying public it was not a blockbuster. The movie’s central character (regrettably named Branson) is an air traffic controller at JFK who, following a mysterious blinding flash of light that paralyzes air traffic, is seen to narrowly save two airplanes from colliding in the air on takeoff and landing. “Great” you may say, except the script totally strays from the reality of how such things work in real life.

The fact is that a pilot is the ultimate authority and has the right to, “fly the plane” if they see any kind of impending peril. They are not, as the movie suggests, bound to blindly follow what one controller in ATC is telling them to do. In this case the pilot would have simply gone around way before getting into what the late great George Carlin maintained should be called a ‘near hit’ as opposed to a ‘near miss’ situation.

I once watched the movie ‘Titanic’ on a cruise ship: I just hope there were no airlines insensitive enough to play ‘2:22” in their IFE – especially if they were flying into JFK!

Talking of ‘Titanic’ how’s about that “I’m flying” scene? As the music swells, this famous scene has the doomed couple on the doomed ship, cavorting on the rail right at the ship’s bow – clearly an absolute no-no in a no-go area then and now. “Hey, it’s only a movie, who cares?” Well for starters, probably all the cruise-line crew members who have had to chase passengers out of there as they pursue their own Kate and Leonardo selfie.

Notwithstanding all of the above, my biggest bugaboo with movies and travel, is their consistent lack of attention to bags and baggage: The way that actors can pick up the biggest bags with one finger makes it obvious to all that there’s never anything inside the bloody things!

“Leave it ‘til tomorrow to unpack my case …” but we will save that rant for another day.