Former combat-helicopter pilot Vernice "FlyGirl" Armour rates Tom Cruise’s flying skills in "Mission: Impossible — Fallout" (2018).
Armour was America's first Black female combat-helicopter pilot and served two tours of Iraq.
Armour was America's first Black female combat-helicopter pilot and served two tours of Iraq.
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00:00 Hey, fly peeps, I am Vernice Flygirl Armor coming at ya.
00:03 And back in 2003, I became America's first
00:06 black female combat pilot, serving two tours in Iraq.
00:10 [static crackling]
00:12 [helicopter whirring]
00:15 So the descending spiral happens when there's more torque
00:24 on a certain part of the helicopter.
00:26 That's why there's the tail rotor,
00:28 'cause if there was only the rotor at the top,
00:29 the helicopter would spin,
00:31 so the rotor at the back keeps it from spinning.
00:33 So that meant something was out of balance.
00:35 Could he get it back in control?
00:37 Yes, absolutely.
00:40 I didn't see any real reason
00:42 on why the helicopter was nosediving.
00:44 As soon as you pull up and the rotor blades switch position
00:48 and it should automatically pitch the nose
00:50 of the aircraft up, whether the engine is running or not,
00:54 that just aerodynamically, that's gonna happen.
00:56 Why he couldn't pull the nose up, I'm not sure.
00:59 Unless he had a hydraulics malfunction
01:02 in which the controls weren't responding,
01:04 but that wasn't the case because at a certain point,
01:06 he pulled the stick up and he flew off, so unrealistic.
01:11 [helicopter whirring]
01:15 Unless the guy's just a horrible shot,
01:18 helicopters just don't maneuver super fast.
01:21 There's no way to get out of bullets like that.
01:23 A helicopter doesn't react like a jet.
01:27 There's a little bit of a lag.
01:28 So if I were to do the stick back and forth,
01:30 my helicopter, it would rotate on its axis,
01:34 but it wouldn't have necessarily had time to move left
01:36 or time to move right.
01:38 So you would see it dip and come back up,
01:41 but it wouldn't have necessarily moved
01:44 out of the line of fire that quickly.
01:46 Just doesn't happen like with a jet.
01:47 Immediately, it'll fly off to the left or the right.
01:50 [helicopter whirring]
01:57 Yeah, no one would have survived that.
02:01 The cabin, the helicopter, the frame would not even be
02:05 intact by any stretch of the imagination.
02:08 Totally destroyed.
02:09 As soon as the blades hit and it showed it rolling,
02:13 it would have been an explosion.
02:15 The gas is right inside of the helicopter.
02:17 Yeah, no.
02:18 That's the impossible, I guess.
02:20 When your aircraft is going down,
02:22 you're actually flying the aircraft down.
02:25 There's this thing called an autorotation,
02:27 which when you have a fan and it's just in the window
02:30 and a breeze blows through the window
02:32 and the fan starts turning,
02:33 that's the basics of a rotor.
02:35 Well, when you're in the aircraft and it's coming down,
02:38 basically falling out of the sky,
02:39 let's say you've lost power to the engine,
02:41 it's just a big fan at the top.
02:43 So a few feet above the ground,
02:45 you pull up the collective
02:47 while it's still flying a little forward
02:49 and that resistance can cushion the landing.
02:51 In this case, there was no cushion,
02:53 there was no controlled descent.
02:56 It was catastrophic.
02:57 There wouldn't have been anything left.
02:59 I'd have to give it a one.
03:00 (silence)
03:03 [BLANK_AUDIO]