The Flight of the Phoenix
Movie Quote Quiz

Lew Moran: I don't know what your practical navigation's like, but mine's not bad. I wouldn't march ten paces from here. In the daytime it's hitting a hundred and twenty in the shade, and out there, there is no shade.

'Ratbags' Crow: Don't forget to put it down in your diary, how very, very nice it was at the party here until the booze ran out.

Lew Moran: Time was you could take real pride, in just getting there, flying used to be fun Lou, it really was.
Frank Towns: He's crazy Lou, he builds toy airplanes.

Lew Moran: You told Towns he was behaving as if stupidity was a virtue. If he's making it into a virtue, YOU'RE making IT into A bloody science.

Frank Towns: I've lost five men, Lew. Gabriel in there, he's on the way, that'll be six. Are you asking me to try to kill the rest of them trying to get a deathtrap off the ground. I don't know... I don't know, Lew. It won't work... it just can't work.
Lew Moran: All right, then, it can't. Maybe it can't and we'll all be killed. But if there's just one chance in a thousand that he's got something, boy, I'd rather take it than just sit around here waiting to die.

Frank Towns: If you hadn't made a career out of being a drunk you might not have been a second-rate navigator in a firth-rate outfit. And if you'd not stayed in your bunk to kill that last bottle, maybe you might have checked that engineer's report on the radio and we might not be here now. All right.

Lew Moran: If you marched a hundred and six miles by the stars and your calculations were just one per cent out, you could pass the Eiffel Tower in daylight and never even see it.

Standish: Insurance companies move in mysterious ways. Much like God... only far less generous.

Factual error: Before the damaged plane is dismantled, in some shots the three propeller blades of the port side engine are a mixture of clockwise and anticlockwise type. (The twist along the length of the blade goes the opposite direction depending on the type).

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Trivia: The plane which is shown flying at the end of the movie was actually built and flown for the movie. The stunt pilot Paul Mantz was killed while flying it for the movie, which is why the plane is not shown landing in the movie's final scene.

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Question: Before I claim this as a continuity or factual mistake - a question: When the Arab raiding party shows up over the dune, they camp by a collection of scrub that was not all dead, some was green. There were also a number of plants in that low-lying area around the camp. Wouldn't the survivors had a better chance of surviving more days by digging for underground water in that area? Perhaps deep, but there. If they took 12 days to build the plane, it seems 2 days digging for water would have given them more time.

kaevanoff

Answer: In the desert, the only place you can find water as at an oasis or maybe digging in a dry river bed. Those bushes would be extremely salty, and any meaningful water would be far too deep under the sand.

stiiggy

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