[screaming] No. A helicopter cannot fly 90 degrees on its side like that. That's crazy. Hey, fly peeps. I am Vernice "FlyGirl"
Armour coming at you. And back in 2003, I became America's first
Black female combat pilot, serving two tours in Iraq. Today, I'll be looking at
helicopter scenes in movies and judging how real they are. Man: It's too much weight! All right, drop them! An attack helicopter, on average, can only handle so much weight. When I was going in combat, sometimes we couldn't even
carry the full amount of fuel because we were carrying
more rockets and missiles. So the weight of that semi well is beyond the 2,000 to 4,000 payload, let alone the other vehicles
that were attached to it. Totally unrealistic. I think they were trying to simulate the helicopter working so
hard against the vehicles to not be pulled, but that just wouldn't happen. When a helicopter is pulling
more weight than it can, the engine isn't going
to blow out like that. It's just going to slow
down the transmission, and the helicopter just
won't be able to lift. It's going to drag it down,
but it wouldn't explode. Man: Sir, the weapons are back online. Goodbye. A missile or rocket actually has to arm, and there was absolutely not enough time for a missile to be able to come off. Any shot where you're
going to shoot something within 50 feet, basically, 50 to 100 feet, unrealistic. And if they did get it off,
it's not going to explode. It's just going to be a chunk of metal, for the most part, that hits the ground. And if it did explode, the shrapnel is -- the
metal from the ordnance is going to come up and
impact the helicopter, which would probably take it down. I'd give it a 3. Different missiles arm
at different distances, but not within 50 feet. [alarm beeping] Alarm: Pull up. Pull up. So, the descending spiral happens when there's more torque on a certain part of the helicopter. That's why there's the tail rotor, 'cause if there was only
the rotor at the top, the helicopter would spin, so the rotor at the back
keeps it from spinning. So that meant something
was out of balance. Could he get it back in control? Mm, yes, absolutely. I didn't see any real reason on why the helicopter was nosediving. And as soon as you pull up and the rotor blades switch position, it should automatically pitch the nose of the aircraft up, whether the engine is running or not. That, just aerodynamically,
that's going to happen. Why he couldn't pull the
nose up, I'm not sure, unless he had a hydraulics malfunction in which the controls weren't responding. But that wasn't the case, because at a certain point
he pulled the stick up and he flew off, so. Unrealistic. Unless the guy's just a horrible shot, helicopters just don't maneuver superfast. There's no way to get
out of bullets like that. A helicopter doesn't react like a jet. There's a little bit of a lag. So if I were to do the
stick back and forth, my helicopter, it would
rotate on its axis, but it wouldn't have necessarily had time to move left
or time to move right. So you would see it dip and come back up, but it wouldn't have necessarily moved out of the line of fire that quickly. Just doesn't happen like with a jet. Immediately, it'll fly off
to the left or the right. [laughs] Yeah. No one would've survived that. That cabin, that helicopter, the frame would not even be intact by any stretch of the imagination. Totally destroyed as
soon as the blades hit. And that showed it rolling. It would have been an explosion. The gas is right inside of the helicopter. Yeah, no. That's the impossible, I guess. When your aircraft is going down, you're actually flying the aircraft down. There's this thing called an autorotation, which, when you have a fan,
and it's just in the window and a breeze blows through the window and the fan starts turning, that's the basics of a rotor. Well, when you're in the
aircraft and it's coming down, basically falling out of the sky, let's say you've lost power to the engine, it's just a big fan at the top. So a few feet above the ground, you pull up the collective while it's still flying a little forward, and that resistance can
cushion the landing. In this case, there was no cushion, there was no controlled descent. It was catastrophic. There
wouldn't have been anything left. I'd have to give it a 1. You can't fly through something like that. Unrealistic. Rotors would've already
fallen off the aircraft. As hard as rotor blades look, they're very sensitive and
finely tuned and balanced. And as soon as it impacts an object, you're not going to be able to
fly the aircraft after that. Hurry up! Because it's The Rock,
could've been realistic with him hanging on the side. It's like hanging on to a car, right? Because most of the downward push of the wind from a helicopter is on the last third of the blades. It's not in the very center. So, the wind shear wouldn't have pushed
him out of the middle. Totally unrealistic. It's just like the wheel of a car. It's never in one position,
it's constantly moving. Where'd he get the piece
of metal to even fix it? When they showed it in that
clip, it was just stable. He's actually able to
hold it, and the rod, and it's just not going
to be stable like that. [screaming] No. A helicopter cannot fly 90 degrees on its side like that. That's crazy. I would give it a 1. Guns at the front of
the attack helicopters, is that realistic? Absolutely. I had a 20-millimeter
Gatling gun, three barrel. It rolled around and
delivered lots of bullets very fast on target,
so, yes, 100% realistic. Only the pilots would fire that weapon. You see two rocket
launchers left to right, then two missile launchers left and right. There are 26 rockets in
each one of those pods, then there are four
missiles on the end board. That is actually a standard payload for an attack helicopter. The rockets are called 2.75-inch rockets. So they're about this big
around, right, 2.75 inches, and they're pretty long. The rockets are just like bullets. You aim, you shoot, you pull, they go wherever, wind shear impacts them. The Hellfire missiles
are laser-guided, right? So they're guided by laser
to a particular target. A rocket impacts a small area, let's say it's 20 feet, 30 feet. These rockets are
basically just, you know, as soon as they hit, they
explode, and it's a point target. The missile has a lot more explosive power to it. You could shoot a tank or a
building. It's going to explode. There are heat-seeking missiles and missiles that can fly to
catch a jet, per se, right? But those aren't the kind of missiles that, No. 1, were on this aircraft, and, No. 2, helicopters
don't normally carry them. And they don't follow humans. And I doubt his jet pack
had enough heat coming off, 'cause it probably would
have burned up his legs if that were the case. There would have been no
way they could just glide into going through the
vortices of the helicopter. I could easily see them being blown down 50 to 100 feet [snaps] just like that. The payload, that was actually realistic. The heat-seeking missiles, not so much. I'm going to give it a 7. Flying in formation in
helicopters is very common. We practice it a lot. We will land together,
we'll take off together. And in an environment like this, where you have that mission
where you're dropping off, say, a flight of soldiers in this case, yeah, that would absolutely
happen like that. Just everything about
that combat maneuver, the insertion, them dropping, that's why we don't do static things like that anymore in combat, because of the vulnerability. And the helicopter has pretty much no maneuverability when
you're in that close to be able to get out really quick. A helicopter just doesn't move quick. A helicopter has to build up momentum and get going, right? RPGs are a huge threat to helicopters, especially if we're flying
what we call low and slow. But I remember flying in
combat, and we just saw, and it was early on in combat, and I just saw these gray clouds of mist, and we were trying to figure out, like, what are those clouds of mist? And they were RPGs that
had been programmed to explode at 200 and 300 feet, and some of my buddies
were impacted by RPGs. Huge threat. So, the one, I would say,
unrealistic part of that clip, when that RPG hit the tail
rotor of that aircraft, I thought it would've been
spinning a lot faster, and it wasn't gliding down without power. And at the very end, if he tried to cushion
the landing a little bit, which we're taught to do
in that kind of situation, with a loss of tail rotor, we would've tried to circle around in the direction that it's spinning to have a little control. But it wouldn't have just landed flat like you saw in that video. So, the guys in the back,
hopefully they're tied in, or they would just
immediately be thrown out. Just like a car accident that twirls over and everybody gets ejected
out of the vehicle. The reason, I think, they show or film more helos getting hit in the tail rotor is just 'cause it's more dramatic. You get hit in the tail rotor, you're immediately going to start spinning and go out of control. If you get in the main rotor, you just explode and fall out the sky. Which one's more exciting? On a scale of 1 to 10, 9. My only thing would be right here. Why is the helicopter out of control? Nobody's touching the pilot. There're just two guys
fighting in the back. It wouldn't be hard to
fight and move around in the back of an aircraft. It would almost be like
an elevator without walls. Do not do a barrel roll. Oh, my God. [laughs] It's so -- no. An extended turn at a large degree, it would just have too much
weight lost off of the rotor. A helicopter is pulling
on this small little pole. There always needs to be
weight on the rotor system from the aircraft, right? So all of those little, the barrel roll he did at the end and the inversion flight, that's just completely
unrealistic for a helicopter. There is the Red Bull helicopter that is capable of doing things like that. But for the most part, 99% of helicopters out there can't do things like this. You would never want to
go past 50, 60 degrees. I'd have to give it a ... 3. Countries have different helicopters, and this was foreign. Like, definitely had a lot more stability, 'cause it had those kind
of semi-wings, right? It could carry a lot more armament. With attack helicopters here in America, we have the Apache in the Army and the Cobra in the
Marine Corps. Very similar. It's like comparing the
Mustang to the Camaro, right? There are going to be
a lot of similarities, but there are also going
to be some differences. What you'll see in attack helicopters is you'll have the tandem, which is pilot, copilot; front, back. Or you'll have side by side, as in the Black Hawks. And the Apache is actually tandem as well, just like the Cobra. [screams] When you're flying a helicopter that actually has what
we call door gunners, right, in the back, the pilots know how to
maneuver the aircraft to get the target in the right place for the door gunners to be
able to shoot at that target. It's Rambo. Not sure how much training he's gone through as a pilot, right, with door gunners. But you get it in position, and the door gunners
take care of business. The crew chief would say,
"Come left," or, "Come right." Or, you know, they would give them very specific instructions, especially if their
environment is changing and it's over on the right side but the left-seat pilot
can't see it, right? So they're in constant
communication the entire time. I'll give it a 6. Fire the missiles! Come on, come on. We go cold! [missiles boom] Yeah, there wasn't much
realistic about that clip at all, whatsoever. Let's say the heat-seeking
missile was coming after us. Just when you shut the engines off, the engines are still hot. So the heat-seeking missiles
would've still found them. There's no situation where
I would cut an engine off. The rotors aren't going
to stop turning like that, and just the fact that it
was flying through the air, the rotor would never be not turning, even if it didn't have power to it. Pilot: Restart. Restart. Woo-hoo! They were literally 1,000
feet above the ground. You're not going to get
the rotors turning again. And then fast enough to get
the aircraft back in control to be able to lift it up. That was completely, 100%, unrealistic. A helicopter is not like a plane. So you're not going to glide. Radio: General Tuco. You
are currently engaged in warfare on United
States military forces. Helicopter-to-helicopter combat is just not common at all, whatsoever, because when you think about helicopters, that's up close and
personal. Troops in contact. The only time you've seen
helicopter versus helicopter is in a movie like this, where the bad guys are chasing
the good guys, and that's it. If a helicopter is
caught up in a dogfight, something has gone drastically wrong, 'cause it just shouldn't happen. We do have training, but the training is actually focused on a jet chasing us, not another helicopter. If we were to get into
a situation like that, looks a lot like what
you see on the TV, right, where you're yanking it to the left, or pushing those over,
pulling up on the collective, coming up, flying around. The more you're moving around, you're a harder target to hit, versus a straight line,
where they can track you and then take you out of the sky. Just, helicopters are very vulnerable. We don't move that fast. So if you're caught in
that kind of a situation, the odds aren't exactly with you. But all the other "tricks"
and things they did, just unrealistic. This is just going to have to be a 2. And if you enjoyed this video, click the link above to watch another one.
