A single-aisle jet takes a lightning strike over open ocean, loses its instruments, and glides to a beach landing on a lawless island, after which the film becomes a different genre entirely. The first fifteen minutes are the interesting ones. Everything after the beach is a hostage thriller wearing a flight suit.

This one is worth the same courtesy as the others: credit first, findings after.

The setup respects a real hazard. Airliners are struck by lightning more often than passengers assume — roughly once per aircraft per year across a fleet — and the film's storm-penetration sequence, weather returns lighting the cockpit red, captures the genuine unease of threading cells at night. The decision to divert rather than push through is the correct instinct, even before anything fails. That part of the film understands its subject.

Finding 1 — One lightning strike does not erase the airplane

The strike is staged as an event that takes out communications, navigation, and much of the cockpit instrumentation at once, leaving the crew essentially blind. Modern transport aircraft are built to take lightning strikes as a matter of course — the skin and structure are designed to conduct the charge around the occupied volume and off the airframe, and flight-critical systems carry redundancy specifically because single-point failures are not tolerated by certification standards. A strike damaging one system, even a serious one, is plausible. A strike erasing radios, navigation, and instruments in the same instant is not one failure. It is several, all conveniently arriving together.

Finding 2 — The dead-stick, no-instrument beach landing

The captain is shown flying a controlled approach and touchdown on an unlit beach with little to no instrumentation and degraded, absent hydraulics. Landing a transport-category jet without airspeed, altitude, and attitude references, at night, on an unprepared surface, is not a skill differential. It is a sensory problem: judging height and closure rate over featureless terrain in the dark defeats the human eye regardless of hours flown. The film wants this to read as extraordinary piloting. It is closer to extraordinary luck wearing a uniform.

Finding 3 — The window failure

A cockpit window is shown failing during the descent, with debris causing a fatal injury to one of the flight crew. Cockpit windows on transport aircraft are laminated, multi-ply, and rated for bird strike and pressure differential; failures happen, but they are rare enough to be individually studied events, not a routine consequence of a lightning-adjacent storm encounter. If the film ties the window failure directly to the lightning strike as cause and effect, that is one mechanism doing two jobs it was not built for.

Finding 4 — The warbird gets airborne on borrowed history

Late in the film, a piston-engine aircraft of WWII vintage, sourced locally, is fueled and flown out under pressure. Aircraft of that era generally require specific aviation gasoline formulations, not whatever is on hand at a remote strip, and an airframe that has not been maintained to a flying standard carries the same expired-parts problem as any other neglected aircraft — control cables, fuel bladders, and ignition components do not wait patiently for the plot to need them. Getting a seven-decade-old airplane into the air on short notice is not a fuel problem alone. It is a maintenance history problem, and the film skips the history.

Finding 5 — The passengers walk off a beach landing

The aircraft comes to rest largely intact, and the surviving passengers disembark under their own power with comparatively minor injuries. An uncontrolled or partially controlled landing on an unprepared surface, at speed, produces significant structural loading regardless of how gently the nose is held up — gear collapse, fuselage buckling, and cabin injury from unsecured items are the expected outcome, not an exception. A largely undamaged airplane and an ambulatory cabin is the film choosing survivability over consequence.

The instinct to divert rather than gamble on riding out the storm is exactly correct, and the film does not undercut it with a heroic-but-reckless alternative. The captain's checklist discipline in the opening sequence — briefing the storm, coordinating with the first officer, working the problem methodically before anything goes wrong — is genuine cockpit procedure, not dramatized guesswork. And the film resists the easy trick of making the emergency itself the villain; once on the ground, the threat is human, which is honest about where most aviation stories actually go wrong once the airplane stops moving.

The pattern holds here too. The sequences built on real cockpit discipline — the brief, the diversion call, the crew working as a crew — are the strongest ten minutes in the film. The sequences built on convenient failure — one strike taking everything, one pilot landing on nothing — are the ones that ask the audience to stop counting. Real airplanes fail one system at a time, for reasons an investigator can trace. That version is slower to write. It is also the one that would have kept a pilot in the seat instead of checking his watch.