| “ | You must have read about the kid who had a dream about a plane blowing up, so he got all his buddies off the plane and then the thing blew up just like in his dream? But did you hear what happened after? So a month goes by, right? Everything seems cool. But then all the survivors start to die one-by-one. | ” |
–Eugene Dix telling the story of Flight 180. | ||
Volée Airlines Flight 180, better and commonly known as Flight 180, was an international flight on a Boeing 747-230B destined for Paris, France, that exploded shortly after takeoff from John F. Kennedy Airport on May 13, 1999, killing all 287 passengers and crew onboard and at least one person on the ground. The disaster was seemingly caused by a catastrophic engine failure, but it was more likely that the wiring caught fire, and the fire spread across the wires to two places. One to the engine, the other to the fuel tank.
Theatrically, Flight 180 is the first major disaster of the series, as seen in Final Destination, and the fourth major disaster chronologically[1], given the events of Final Destination 5.
Description
Flight 180 operated out of Terminal 1 at John F. Kennedy International Airport. While it has four cabins, only two classes were shown: economy and premium economy, neither of which has video entertainment. The seating capacity is a total of 330, and the colors of the airliner are red, white, and blue, representing the French flag. The aircraft appears to be under-maintained.
Disaster
Final Destination
Alex Browning and his French class, led by their teacher Larry Murnau and his colleague Valerie Lewton, board the plane for their trip to Paris. Christa Marsh and Blake Dreyer ask Tod Waggner, Alex's best friend, if he can move to Alex's row so they can sit together, but Tod lies and says that he has a urinary tract infection. The girls then decide to ask Alex if they can switch seats with him.
Premonition
Flight 180 leaving the jetway before the disaster.
After Alex takes his seat, Blake and Christa ask him to move to Tod's row. Despite Tod's silent protests, Alex gets up and moves to his row. As he sits down, the tray table in front of Alex unfolds. Alex props the tray table back up and attempts to lock it, but accidentally pulls out the pin, allowing the tray table to unfold again.
Alex in panic.
Moments after taking off, the plane shakes slightly due to turbulence, alarming some of the passengers. A flight attendant assures some of the passengers that everything is okay when the cabin begins to shake violently (presumably from Engine #1 exploding off-screen as seen in the ending of Final Destination 5), which causes things to topple onto a woman sitting next to Ms. Lewton, killing her. The oxygen masks drop down, and the passengers struggle to put them on as the pilots attempt to redirect the plane back to the landing strip. A large explosion occurs in rows 17 and 18 on the left side of the cabin, showering passengers with sparks and fire, and killing all three passengers in row 17 and blowing a passenger’s leg off. The fuselage of row 18 rips away, initially sucking out Dustin and another boy. Ms. Lewton attempts to save Christa by reaching out and trying to grab her hand, but is unable to as Christa is sucked out of the cabin. A ball of fire erupts next to the exposed hole in the fuselage, incinerating Christa as Ms. Lewton screams in horror.
Ms. Lewton screaming.
The plane begins to nosedive, throwing a passenger from his seat and down the aisle, and a stereo boombox falls and bounces off the back of Tod's head, killing him. The fuel pump at the front left of the plane explodes, breaking it apart, and a wall of fire roars throughout the cabin, incinerating Alex and the other passengers. The burning plane finally explodes and sends a fiery piece of the landing gear toward the city.
Reality
Alex suddenly snaps awake on the plane in his original seat and realizes what he just experienced was a premonition. Blake and Christa are asking him to switch seats when he panics, running to the seat next to Tod and sees that the tray table is broken. He shouts that the plane is going to explode, prompting Carter Horton to get angry and attempt to assault Alex. This results in Alex and Carter getting kicked off the plane, and Terry Chaney immediately follows her boyfriend, Carter. Billy Hitchcock, who was just entering the plane, is caught in the fight accidentally, and he is escorted outside as Mr. Murnau and Ms. Lewton go to check their students. Tod later removes himself from the plane when his brother, George Waggner, suggests that he should keep an eye on Alex. Clear Rivers removes herself shortly after Tod.
After they are evacuated to the terminal, the Co-pilot tells Ms. Lewton that only one faculty member can get back to the plane. Mr. Murnau offers to stay, but Ms. Lewton convinces him to return to the plane while she stays behind. Before the plane departs, Carter lectures Alex, saying that they "blow a half a day in Paris all because [Alex] Browning had some bad fucking dream". Carter then begins to ridicule Alex and prompts him to tackle Carter. The two attempt to fight as police officers restrain them.
The plane then explodes mid-air, and the shockwave from the explosion is so powerful that the terminal’s glass windows shatter. As the officers call for help, the other survivors look at Alex in horror and watch as the burning wreckage falls from the sky.
Final Destination 5
Alex and Carter being escorted from the plane from Sam's viewpoint.
Meanwhile, after Alex notices his vision, Sam Lawton and Molly Harper arrive on the plane to leave for Paris before they witness him and the other survivors being removed from the plane. Sam and Molly, unaware of his warning, take their seats before the plane departs.
While at cruising altitude, the fasten seat belt sign above them flickers before the plane shakes. Sam begins suffering the recurring omens from his premonition, and soon overhears a flight attendant talking to a passenger about Alex and his vision.
Sam and Molly on Flight 180.
As he realizes that he and Molly were too late to get off, engine #1, a Rolls-Royce RB211, erupts into flames. Sam and Molly hold on to each other as they stare at the burning engine in disbelief. Engine #1 explodes, sending out shrapnel that tears holes throughout the fuselage.
Inside the cabin, the oxygen masks drop due to a partial loss of cabin pressure, and the plane tilts downward to the right. As Sam and Molly attempt to grab hold of their oxygen masks, the fuselage in rows 22 through 24 rips away, sucking two passengers out of the plane. Molly is sucked out, but is temporarily saved when Sam holds on to her. Unfortunately, Sam loses his grip and watches Molly get bisected by the horizontal stabilizer. The fuel pump at the front left of the plane explodes, separating the cockpit from the rest of the plane. A wall of fire roars into the plane's interior, incinerating Sam and everyone else. The burning plane finally explodes and sends a fiery piece of the landing gear toward the city, where it ultimately crashes through the ceiling of a bar and crushes Nathan Sears.
Signs/Clues
Final Destination
Flight 180 blows up.
- A skeleton figurine hanging in a noose is among the toys scattered about Alex's room.
- The book Death of a Salesman is shown on Alex's bookshelf.
- A fan running in Alex's room blows open a book about French history, which has pages covered in illustrations of executions and the supernatural.
- The last page shown in the history book depicts Jim Morrison's grave, with red graffiti on it reading "This Is The End" in red.
- Alex tells his mother not to rip off the tag from a previous flight because it's good luck. She rips it off anyway.
- Alex's father tells him, "Live it up, Alex. You got your whole life ahead of you."
- While Alex is asleep, a strong gust of wind blows through his room.
- Alex is briefly woken up by a voice whispering his name.
- Alex's alarm clock read 1:00, but briefly flickers and reads 1:80.
- In the airport, a Hare Krishna approaches Alex and tells him, "Death is not the end," foreshadowing Death's never-ending list.
- The flight board malfunctions briefly, causing one of the boards in the column listing departing times to stay blank.
- The ticket a flight attendant attaches to Alex's bag has "Final Destination" printed on it.
- When Alex's air ticket is torn at the checking desk before he boards Flight 180, there is a piece of text saying "Your Final Flight" if you look closely.
- The departure time was the same as Alex's birthday - 9:25. Additionally, Alex's original seat is J25, the 9th seat in row 25.
- One of the signs within the flight schedule has a broken wire over the word "Terminal."
- When Clear drops her book in the lobby, Alex picks it up and returns it to her. When Clear looks at the page, it is on an article about Princess Diana's accident.
- In the terminal, "Rocky Mountain High" is playing by John Denver, who died in a plane crash.
- The lyric "I've seen it raining fire in the sky" is audible, alluding to the blazing debris of a crashing plane.
- Flight 180 leaves from JFK Airport in New York. John F. Kennedy's son, John F. Kennedy Jr., died with his wife and sister-in-law in a plane crash.
- When Alex looks at the plane through a window in the terminal, the window has a large crack in it that aligns over the plane, foreshadowing the plane's destruction.
- Alex's class board the plane through Gate 46. Half of 46 is 23, hinting at the Route 23 pile-up in Final Destination 2. Additionally, the airport is JFK Airport, and John F. Kennedy was assassinated when he was 46.
- Before Alex gets on the plane, he sees a van. Its number is 666, which is symbolically associated with Satan or the antichrist.
- Noticing a crying baby onboard, George says, "It'd be a fucked-up God to take down this plane." And when he sees a man with cerebral palsy, traveling with his caretaker, he says, "A really fucked-up God." God in many religions is portrayed as punishing people who violate its will, like Death.
- The flight attendants don't show how to use safety equipment in an emergency, although this may be off-screen.
- When Carter calls out Alex for getting him and everyone else booted off the plane, he says they would blow half a day in Paris, all because of him.
Final Destination 5
- Alex is shown freaking out, and he and his friends are kicked off the plane. When a passenger asks about what had happened, the flight attendant stated that the kid claimed he had a "vision" that the plane was going to explode.
- Sam and Molly were assigned to sit in Row 23, hinting at the Route 23 pile-up from Final Destination 2.
- An advertisement for the Lasik Center, where Olivia Castle dies, is shown in Molly's magazine.
- As he is listening to the music, Sam hears "Dust in the Wind" playing, just as he did on the bus on the bridge.
- Sam noticed the flickering sign reading "Fasten seat belt" and "No smoking".
- Sam cuts his thumb on the seat, just as he does on the bus on the North Bay Bridge.
Unintended Survivors
- Clear Rivers (deceased)
- Alex Browning (deceased)
- Carter Horton (deceased)
- Billy Hitchcock (deceased)
- Valerie Lewton (deceased)
- Terry Chaney (deceased)
- Tod Waggner (deceased)
Casualties
On-board
Crew
Passengers
Mt. Abraham High School
- Dave Anderson
- John Joseph Alvarez
- Fraser Boyle
- Rich Brown
- William Burns
- Jody Chow
- Christa
- Vance Conway
- Blake Dreyer
- Dustin
- Laurie Edmundson
- Karen Ann Eisenstadt
- Todd A. Emde
- Kevin Fish
- Ivan Fish
- Kasandra Griebel
- Kate Elise Heslup
- Wm. Carle Heslup
- Lisa Rose Hudson
- Sally Hudson
- Stephen Jackson
- Lee M. Jenkinson
- Joey Jow
- Marko Lytviak
- Terry Mackay
- Christa Marsh
- Johanna Ingrid Masur
- Brooke Karen McGill
- Derick McLeod
- Pamela McLeod
- William McMahon
- Larry Murnau
- Bryan Pederson
- Julie Anne Slater
- Terry Sonderhoff
- Mary Lou Storey
- Anneke Van Oort
- Kirstie Van Oort
- George Waggner
- Geoffrey Wallace
- Carie Lynn Wallis
- John B. Willett
Others
- Molly Harper
- Sam Lawton
- Girl with Red Sweater
- An unnamed man suffering from Lou Gehrig's disease
- The Lou Gehrig sufferer's unnamed companion
- An unnamed female passenger
- Infant Flight 180 passenger
- At least 236 unnamed passengers and crew
Ground
Trivia
- Volée Airlines Flight 180 Aircraft is a former Lufthansa Boeing 747-230B with four wing-mounted GE CF6-50E2 engines, first registered as D-ABZD before it was sold to Volée Airlines prior to the accident. Additionally, Flight 180 was confirmed to be related to, inspired by, and loosely based on the real-life crash of TWA Flight 800 that occurred on July 17, 1996, near East Moriches, which also involved a Boeing 747.
- According to a newscast in Final Destination, it is believed that the deterioration of silicon insulation on an electrical connector to the scavenger pump may have leaked combustible fluids, and that a spark in the fuel switch in the fuselage may have ignited the fuel line and proceeded to the fuel pump, which would have set off the explosion on Flight 180.
- Flight 180 was the original working title of the first film and the franchise, as it was originally written as an X-Files episode before being adapted into a film.
- The Flight 180 crash occurred on May 13, the same date as the Route 23, Devil's Flight, and Coral Clipper disasters.
- "Volée" is a French term for "flight" or "stolen", which may reference the fact that Flight 180 is literally a flight or that the survivors are living on stolen time after escaping from the doomed flight.
- Flight 180 is referenced in the opening credits of Final Destination 5 by having a plane explode during the opening credits.
- The Flight 180 crash serves as the beginning and plot of the Final Destination and the ending to Final Destination 5, effectively bringing the movies full circle.
- The Flight 180 crash is also referenced in Iris' book, which is part of the main plot in Final Destination Bloodlines.
- In Final Destination 2, the presenter speaking on Kimberly Corman’s TV at the start of the movie states that Mt. Abraham High School lost 40 students and 4 teachers in the Flight 180 explosion. However, 40 students and 4 teachers were the total who boarded the plane and only 6 students and 1 teacher were removed, meaning that actually 34 students and 3 teachers died on the plane. This is therefore considered a continuity error in the film.
- In The Final Destination, when Nick O’Bannon and Lori Milligan show Janet Cunningham and Hunt Wynorski a printed article about the Flight 180 explosion, the first photo in the article shows the plane wreckage on land, even though it is directly mentioned in a news report watched by Alex that the wreckage of Flight 180 fell into the Atlantic Ocean shortly after it exploded. This is therefore considered a continuity error in the film.
- There are several notable discrepancies with the Flight 180 crash as shown in Final Destination and Final Destination 5.
- In Final Destination, the Flight 180 crash was explicitly shown to have taken place in 1999. However, the year is changed to 2000 in later sequels. It is unclear why this occurred, though it is still a continuity error on the writers’ part nonetheless.
- In Final Destination 5, Sam's ticket shows that the boarding gate is H6, which is different from the earlier film, where the gate number was 46.
- In Final Destination, the seats occupied by Sam and Molly are shown to be occupied by a brunette man and woman instead, and most of the other passengers in the seats around them differ in Final Destination 5 as well.
- The seating layouts from the two movies differ in several instances. For example, the cabin seems to be a row shorter in Final Destination 5, with the last row number being 24 instead of 25, among other things.
- This is the only disaster in which the order of the survivors ' deaths wasn't properly shown, though Tod is shown to have been killed first by a falling radio. It's also the only disaster where the death order was based on the disaster pathway provided by the news reporters instead of the premonition. This is why, for example, Alex deduced that Clear would be next since he never changed seats with Blake and Christa in real life, compared to the premonition where he did.
- Over a month elapsed between the Flight 180 crash and Tod's death, making this the disaster in the film series where Death waited the longest to start claiming survivors, though it may be surpassed by the Coral Clipper disaster from Final Destination: Looks Could Kill.
- With a total of 288 casualties, considering both the onboard passengers and crew as well as Nathan Sears on the ground, the Flight 180 explosion has the highest death toll in the entire film series and the second highest in the whole Final Destination franchise, being surpassed only by the Hotel Grand Tzolk'in explosion in Final Destination: Spring Break.
- The crash of Flight 180 ranked #9 on WatchMojo's "Top Ten Airplane Crashes in Movies".
- While largely based on TWA Flight 800, some noted some similarities to The Twilight Zone episode "Twenty-two", in which a fatigued dancer is having recurring lucid dreams involving death and the number twenty-two, ending with her witnessing the plane, "Flight 22", that she refused to board, explode after take off.
- In Iris Campbell’s notebook, a sketch of an airplane is shown, which could be a reference to Flight 180.
- Flight 180 is referenced in Final Destination Bloodlines as Paul Campbell's car license plate, which reads "FL8•18E".
- Flight 180 was built on October 11, 1970. It then entered service on March 17, 1971.
References
- ↑ William Bludworth mentions in Final Destination 5 that he's "seen this before", probably referring to The Sky View's disaster, making it third in line behind that disaster and the North Bay Bridge collapse.