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koristan
Reviews
Ground Control (1998)
Ouch. "Inaccurate" is as kind as I can get about this film.
I'm a retired air traffic controller and simply put, I was amazed that this garbage was released. Another IMDB commenter said that, "[t]he performers did their homework when it came to radio protocol and terminology." Well, they may well have done their homework, but none of the well-studied proper phraseology came out of their mouths. ("...maintain flight level six zero zero zero?" Oh please...) What's more, the instructions given to the aircraft either made no sense or were so vague as to be dangerous. And other parts (telling the pilot to spin twice: "gimme $4,000 worth"--a VERY old ATC joke) were nothing more than apocryphal.
In the past 20 minutes I've written and deleted a dozen examples illustrating why this is such a bad movie, and THAT exercise appears to have been cathartic enough that I now feel that I can just go to bed. But allow me this one indulgence: having spent 25 years in this field (no, not as a "sim" controller... the airplanes I worked had real mass), this movie actually angered me. What in the world is the point of replacing believable control instructions with the trash that appeared in this film? This is a movie built around air traffic control, for heaven's sake. Why give such short shrift to the lifeblood--the very structure of that undertaking? Millions of folks who would be interested in this subject matter will LISTEN to what's being said and reject it as absurd. Somebody hired an ATC consultant for this film. Why would they disregard his advice? Bottom line: there is no excuse for the intellectually lazy approach this film took to ATC. It wouldn't have cost any more to do it right, and the dialog would have been at least as poignant. What's more, they wouldn't have alienated those of us who love this stuff. From my standpoint, NONE of this movie was "right on."
P.S. I had a hard time sitting still for this film, so I'm sure I must have missed it, but could somebody explain why it is called "Ground Control?" Ground Control is the position in a tower that works airplanes on the surface of the airport. There is nothing in a Center that has anything to do with Ground Control. While I did see tower scenes in this movie, I don't recall Ground Control having a big part to play. Somebody PLEASE tell me that this wasn't called "Ground Control" because the writers thought that that was the proper name for air traffic control in general. Because if THAT was why they did it, then NOBODY did their homework...