A DC-3 made an appearance on the show Grimm. Unfortunately, "grim" also describes the writers' and the CGI artists' treatment of the DC-3.
The CGIers had the airplane cruising in flight with its cowl flaps open. That would impart a lot of drag to the airplane, as well as being completely unnecessary for proper cooling.
But that's small beer. The writers had one character that the airplane was observed leaving the coastline of France and then, seven hours later, being spotted over Newfoundland.
Riiiight. The great circle distance from Brest, France to Gander Airport in Newfoundland is 2,252 miles. Which would require that DC-3 to cruise at 325 MPH, which would be quite a feat. Even Basler's turboprop conversions would be about 80MPH slower than that. And then they flew from Switzerland to Portland, OR? The great-circle track for that flight takes them not over the French coast, but the Dutch coast, then over Scotland, Greenland and then coming across Baffin Island and the Northwest Territories.
Not to mention that the flight would have taken 30 hours. DC-3s had a fuel capacity of 822 gallons, they'd only have to cram another 2,200 gallons of gas into one to fly that far, which would have been far above the useful load capabilities of a DC-3.
Yes, I know at the core of Grimm, it's all fantasy. And it was nice to see a DC-3 on a wintery strip, snow falling and all. But on the non-Wesen crap, is it too much to expect that they hew a little closer to reality?
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
4 comments:
It looked well maintained.
Sometimes you just have to ignore some realities because they won't fit in the plot. For example, one of my characters in the latest novel traded in her old two-seater Jeep CJ for one of the newer four-door Jeeps. She was out of state, in Wyoming (she was from Colorado). I looked up all the DMV hijinks that would be required and she'd be spending ours visiting offices and filling out forms, Wyoming is apparently one of those states that requires you to appear in person to handle a lot of stuff, the dealership can't handle it for you like in most states. I finally said f**k it and just pretended it was a matter of signing a couple of papers at the used car dealer and driving off, because I was writing a murder mystery, not a guide for dealing with the Wyoming DMV, and all those details would have just slowed the pacing down.
Sigh... You're right, helluva way to treat a Gooney...
Reminds me of writing some navigation software when I was a lad. I fed it a bunch of airports for testing. It kept telling me that you fly north-west to get from Paris to Miami.
Took me a looong time to find the flaw!
Post a Comment