Ah, being shot through the air, thousands of feet above the Earth in a giant tin can which, if anything goes wrong - mechanical failure, pilot error, cabin de-pressurisation etc - will result in your untimely (though hopefully expedient) demise; don't we all love hopping on a plane for our holidays and business trips? Even the most confident, calm flier would be advised not to check out any of the films on this list, which features the most alarming, ridiculous, brutal, and in some cases unsettlingly realistic plane crashes in cinema history. They're all designed to scare the living crap out of us, and damnit, they've succeeded - if Robert Zemeckis (who directed the stellar Flight, in cinemas this Friday) includes another plane crash in any one of his films, then he is certifiably a plane crash fetishist (think David Cronenberg's Crash, but with planes). Ok, enough tasteless gags about plane crashes. The landscape of cinema changed considerably after 9/11, so directors can't be as flippant about mid-air collisions and violent crashes anymore, hence why the overwhelming majority of these crashes are pre-2000. Here are the 10 most terrifying movie plane crashes ever put to film...
10. Die Hard 2
I'm not a particularly big fan of Die Hard 2 at all; for my money (and this will be an unpopular opinion for sure), it is definitely the weakest of John McClane's (Bruce Willis) outings to date (though that could easily change in 2 weeks time, with the release of A Good Day to Die Hard). However, I have to give director Renny Harlin credit for trying to top John McTiernan's action classic pretty much right out of the gate, as a team of heavily armed mercenaries, led by the fearsome Colonel Stuart (William Sadler), take control of an airport which, of course, McClane is going to have to save. When Stuart realises that an effort to stop him is being mounted, he sends the authorities - and McClane - a message, by masquerading as an air traffic controller, and duping a pilot into landing prematurely (due to the hazardous weather conditions making the runaway near-invisible), causing the plane to explode into a fireball as it impacts with the runway. Though it doesn't have the terrifying intricacy and intimacy of the "better" crashes on this list, it's a reminder of just how brazenly we places our lives in the hands of air traffic controllers, and those who try to impersonate them.