The film Flight is the story of commuter airline pilot Whip Whitaker (played by Oscar-nominated Denzel Washington). Spoiler alert: I’m about to describe some of the plot and the ending.
Whip is an accomplished veteran pilot. He’s also an alcoholic and a cocaine freak. One morning, after a sleepless night of rowdy flight attendant sex, heavy drinking, smoking bud and snorting coke, Whip shows up for work to pilot SouthJet Flight 227* with 102 souls on board.
The plane encounters nasty turbulence, but Whip masterfully flies through the chop without so much as breaking a sweat. As he is speaking to the passengers over the intercom to calm them down, Whip secretly mixes vodka with orange juice and consumes two of those before going back to the pilot’s chair and taking a nap.
His nap is interrupted by the plane proceeding to engage in a steep, accelerating and uncontrollable dive, apparently due to loss of rudder control caused by the earlier turbulence. The only way to keep the plane from diving straight down into a fiery hellish explosion is to fly the plane upside down – a feat that only Whip could manage. Right before crashing, Whip adroitly flips the plane on its belly from its upside down position and manages to execute something of a landing. (The pilots in the real-life crash of Alaska Airlines flight 261 attempted the same maneuver, although they could not recover the aircraft and all aboard were killed.)
Whip takes complete control of the situation, with a masterful performance as a leader and pilot, calmly giving orders to his flight crew as he managed a crash landing in which only six out of 102 died. From the pilots' union representative to Whip as he lay in the hospital with minor injuries after the crash: "The FAA and the NTSB took 10 pilots, placed them in simulators, recreated the event ... Do you know how many of them were able to safely land the planes? Not one. You were the only one who could do it."
Whip is soon informed of a toxicology report revealing an extremely high blood alcohol level, and the presence of cocaine, in his system at the time of the crash. His defense lawyer (played by Don Cheadle) must defend Whip against manslaughter charges.
Assume that you are a criminal defense lawyer and Whip walks into your office. How would you defend him? What would be your theory of the case? And BTW, please assume the toxicology report is not excluded from evidence, as it is in the film. That was an unrealistic part of the movie in my opinion. Most defense lawyers don’t have it that easy.
If I am defending him, I would advance the argument that he is one of those rare individuals whose performance level and ability – only for certain tasks – improve with the presence of alcohol and cocaine, and that the boost of those intoxicants/stimulants counter-intuitively turbo-charged his performance and saved the lives of 96 people. I would call experts on laboratory studies regarding the effects of cocaine on human stimulus response, for example. This defense has the added virtue of providing explanatory value when the jury inevitably discovers that Whip piloted 90% of his flights for the last 10 years in similar states of inebriation. I would secure the testimony of the flight crew (that survived) to establish how godlike Captain Whitacre performed that day.
I realize that this is a weak (if not preposterous) defense, and the most to be hoped for would be a lesser-included prosecution verdict, but what else is there to work with? Any criminal defense lawyers out there, esp. those who have seen the movie, want to chime in?
In the film, Whip ends up serving a minimum of five years in prison for having openly admitted on the record that he was drunk on the plane.
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*The digits used in fictional flight 227 from the film add up to 11, as have other (real) planes that have crashed.
