Flight (2012 film)

One morning, airline pilot William "Whip" Whitaker snorts cocaine to stay alert after a night of drinking in his Orlando hotel room with Katerina Marquez, who is scheduled to work his flight. He captains Flight 227 to Atlanta. Meanwhile, a drug addict named Nicole Maggen buys heroin and overdoses.

After takeoff, the first officer, Ken Evans, takes over while Whip mixes vodka in his orange juice and takes a nap. He is jolted awake when the plane enters a catastrophic dive. Whip manages to regain partial control by rolling the aircraft upside down and executing a crash-landing in an open field. The maneuver saves 96 of the 102 people on board, but several passengers and crew members are killed, including Katerina, who dies saving a child. Whip is injured and loses consciousness.

Whip awakens in an Atlanta hospital with moderate injuries and is greeted by Charlie Anderson, who represents the airline's pilots union. Charlie credits Whip with saving most of the passengers, and informs him that Evans is in a coma, but is expected to survive. Whip is also visited by his drug dealer, Harling Mays, who offers him alcohol, which he refuses. While smoking, Whip meets Nicole, who is also hospitalized after her overdose, and the two form a connection.

After his release, Mays drives Whip to his late father’s farm. Determined to change, Whip pours out his alcohol and resolves to get sober. Whip meets with Charlie and defense attorney Hugh Lang, who explain that the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) performed a blood test on Whip while he was unconscious, and the toxicology report shows that Whip was intoxicated during the flight. Hugh believes he can have the evidence dismissed on a technicality, but Whip is concerned that he may face prison time and soon relapses into heavy drinking.

Whip meets up with Nicole again and she moves in with him at the farm and the two begin a relationship. Whip's severe alcoholism clashes with Nicole's attempts to stay sober, and she repeatedly encourages him to stop drinking, but he resists. Whip visits Evans in the hospital after he comes out of his coma. Evans is severely disabled and will never fly again. When Whip tries to convince Evans to tell NTSB investigators that he was sober on the flight, Evans is upset, as he knows Whip was drunk. Despite this, he refuses to implicate Whip, believing that divine intervention placed Whip on the flight to save lives.

Nicole and Whip have a fight about his drinking, and she leaves. Feeling guilty, Whip drives to the home of his ex-wife and son, both of whom resent him. As media scrutiny intensifies before an NTSB hearing, Charlie and Hugh move Whip to a guarded hotel room with no alcohol so he can sober up. Whip finds the door to an adjacent room unlocked and with a full minibar. Although he initially attempts to resist, Whip succumbs to temptation and goes on a severe drinking binge.

The next morning, Charlie discovers Whip passed out and drunk. In a desperate attempt to help him function, Mays provides cocaine to sober him up before the hearing. At the hearing, lead NTSB investigator Ellen Block confirms that the crash was caused by mechanical failure, not pilot error, and that no other pilot in simulations could have replicated Whip’s successful landing. However, she also reveals that empty vodka bottles were found on the plane, and because Whip’s toxicology report is inadmissible, the only crew member officially recorded as intoxicated is Katerina. A tearful Whip, unable to blame Katerina for his actions, confesses the truth: he drank the vodka then and is currently drunk.

Thirteen months later, an imprisoned but content Whip is lecturing a support group of fellow inmates. Whip is serving a five-year sentence and will probably never fly again, which he believes is fair. However, he is proud of having done the right thing and staying sober. He is also working to rebuild his relationships with Nicole and his son, who visits to interview Whip for a college application essay. He begins by asking, "Who are you?" As a plane flies overhead, Whip replies, "That's a good question."

Robert Zemeckis entered negotiations to direct Flight in April 2011,^[3] and by early June had accepted, with Denzel Washington about to finalize his own deal.^[4] It was the first time that Zemeckis and Washington had worked together on a motion picture.

By mid-September 2011, Kelly Reilly was in negotiations to play the female lead,^[5] with Don Cheadle,^[6] Bruce Greenwood,^[6] and John Goodman^[7] joining later in the month, and Melissa Leo and James Badge Dale in final negotiations.^[8] Screenwriter John Gatins said in early October 2011 that production would begin mid-month.^[9] Flight was largely filmed on location near Atlanta, Georgia over 45 days in November 2011.^[10] The film was produced with a relatively small budget of $31 million, which Zemeckis calculated to be his smallest in inflation-adjusted dollars since 1980, made possible because of tax rebates from Georgia and because Zemeckis and Washington waived their customary fees.^[10]

Gatins explained in a 2012 interview with the Los Angeles Times that the dramatic fictional crash depicted in Flight was "loosely inspired" by the 2000 crash of Alaska Airlines Flight 261,^[10] which was caused by a broken jackscrew. In that incident, an ungreased jackscrew came loose and caused a catastrophic failure from which recovery was impossible, though pilot Ted Thompson and first officer Bill Tansky were able to fly the plane inverted in the last moments of the flight. Among the captain's last words on the CVR were:

Okay we are inverted... Now we got to get it... Are we flying? We're flying... We're flying... Tell them what we're doing. At least upside down we're flying."^[11]

The Alaska Airlines 261 crash had no survivors. The airplane in Flight, a two-engine T-tail jet airliner, appears to be from the same model family as was the plane involved in the Alaska Airlines 261 disaster, a variant of the MD-80. Many elements from the accident were used in the film, such as the cause of the accident, segments of the radio communication, and the inversion of the airplane.

Scroggins Aviation Mockup & Effects was hired to supply three decommissioned MD-80 series aircraft that represented the plane in the film, with additional MD-80-series aircraft used for scenes in the cabin and cockpit.^[12][13]

• The Pilot (1980 film)
• Alaska Airlines Flight 261, a McDonnell Douglas MD-83 that crashed under similar circumstances.