Question: I don't see any motive for her to open the coffin, for which only she had the lock combo. Her motive was to find her daughter. Her daughter could not possibly have gotten into the coffin. This makes the plot too loose, in my opinion. It bothers me every time I try to re-watch the movie to find a reason why she would search the coffin. Or does the plot suggest here that she gave the combo to Julia, Julia somehow climbed down there, somehow found the coffin, opened it and climbed in? (00:59:10)
raywest
15th Nov 2024
Flightplan (2005)
17th Mar 2020
Flightplan (2005)
Question: Surely military people and special needs people would have gone first before her and her daughter? If that's the case there's no way no-one would have seen the daughter. Or are there different policies in Berlin?
Answer: It's unlikely it's different in Berlin, and it would be an airline policy, not a government one. The fact that no-one else was on the plane when Kyle boarded with her daughter or was not seen by one of the flight crew is simply an implausible plot device. This would never happen that way in real life.
15th Jul 2018
Flightplan (2005)
29th Jun 2018
Flightplan (2005)
27th Mar 2018
Flightplan (2005)
Question: How did Carson convince the captain Kyle was a hijacker without showing any evidence of Kyle being a hijacker?
Answer: Basically, Carson used his role as an air marshal to mislead everyone. In matters of security, the captain would assume the marshal was the expert and he would follow his recommendations.
Well a plot hole says just Carson is an Air Marshal does not mean the captain would trust him. The captain would know Air Marshals break the law too.
The captain had no reason to distrust him. He's busy flying the plane and Carson is acting exactly the way an air marshal would.
You would have to read the entire plot hole.
The captain has no reason at all to distrust an air marshal at that point. First of all, he was suspicious of her from the beginning and was angry for disrupting the flight which was the whole point of removing all evidence of the daughter, which was also the point have the morgue director sending a fake certificate that Julia died. They were going to use the "daughter's disappearance" as a credible excuse for "Kyle" to enter the hold and retrieve the explosives. The real plot hole is not that Carson has no evidence of as a hijacker, but why the airline accepts the "hijacker's" request to wire the money without talking to them or having a background identity.
26th Mar 2018
Flightplan (2005)
30th Jan 2018
Flightplan (2005)
Question: How come Julia wasn't listed on the flight manifest?
Answer: It is never explained. Stephanie, the flight attendant who was in on the conspiracy, claimed that only Kyle's name was on the manifest and the seat next to her was unoccupied. Whether she somehow manipulated the manifest or someone else in on the plot was able to remove Julia's name, is unknown.
There is probably no way she could have manipulated the flight manifest since you can't access it from on board a plane.
Wait a minute, I thought a passenger's name wasn't put on the flight manifest until he or she boards the plane.
It's possible someone off the plane hacked into the flight manifest sometime after Kyle, and Julia boarded.
13th Dec 2017
Flightplan (2005)
Question: What was the point of getting two FBI agents on the plane if Carson needed the plane cleared to kill Kyle and Julia? Or was that something he was lying about? If so, why did he proceed to get off the plane?
Answer: Carson would not have any authority to prevent the F.B.I. from boarding the plane, and it would be highly suspicious if he in anyway tried to interfere with their investigation. He needed to act as if he was following normal procedures, otherwise his part in the plot would have immediately been exposed.
13th Dec 2017
Flightplan (2005)
Question: Why would Carson have the morgue director send a fake certificate that claimed Julia has died if his goal was to get Kyle in the hold so she can unlock the casket? Wouldn't that interfere with doing so?
Answer: The goal was to make it look like Kyle was so unhinged that she was imagining that her daughter had not died. The fake certificate was to convince the captain that Kyle must be hallucinating. Carson knew that Kyle would not be fooled and would continue to search for her daughter on the plane, eventually looking inside the casket.
5th Dec 2017
Flightplan (2005)
30th Nov 2017
Flightplan (2005)
Question: How did Carson know Kyle had worked out he was a terrorist near the end of the movie?
Answer: At the end, when Kyle is speaking to the captain just before he disembarks the plane, she then realises that everyone believes she is the terrorist. She works out that Carson is the likely person behind the scheme and had been manipulating everything happening during the flight. When Kyle starts pretending to the captain that she is the terrorist in order to get what she wants (to find her daughter), Carson then realises that she likely now knows that he is in on the plot.
13th Nov 2017
Flightplan (2005)
6th Nov 2017
Flightplan (2005)
Question: How did the morgue director put the explosives in the casket? I thought only Kyle knew the combination.
Answer: He would have planted the explosives into the casket before the body was put in it and when Kyle was not present. Being that he was the mortician, he would have access to the body and the casket to prepare it for transport back to the USA.
18th Oct 2017
Flightplan (2005)
Question: Why would Kyle assume that her daughter was hidden inside the casket? Only she knew the code.
Answer: I don't think Kyle was looking for Julia in the casket. The crew and air marshal were convincing her that she was delusional. They had also told Kyle that Julia died with her husband. I believe she was looking in the casket to see if it was Julia's casket instead.
Answer: Because after searching the entire plane for her daughter without finding her, it was the last place left she hadn't looked in. It was a desperate, last-ditch attempt to try anything to find her. By now, Kyle may have been suspecting that her daughter's disappearance was something more than a missing child on a plane.
Actually the last place she hadn't looked before the casket was the avionics room in the nose of the plane, which is where Julia was hidden. And to be honest, I have no idea why Kyle didn't assume her daughter was hidden there, and search there before the casket instead of near the end of the film especially knowing it didn't have a lock, unlike the casket.
No kidding. I mean how in the world did she miss that? She's an avionics engineer. She designed the darn plane.
9th Oct 2017
Flightplan (2005)
Question: I realised a couple problems with Carson's plan. I understand that he murdered her husband by pushing him off the roof so he could hide the explosives in the casket, and that once Kyle and Julia boarded the plane and fell asleep, he could kidnap Julia, and Kyle would have a reason to open the casket. The first thing I don't understand is how did he get Kyle's husband to come onto the roof? What if a different person came onto the roof instead? Or what if multiple people came onto the roof? The second thing I don't understand is how did he know Kyle would decide to leave Germany and bury her husband's body in New York? What if she decided to store her husband's body somewhere and deal with it later? Or what if she decided to bury it in Germany instead?
Answer: Carson was a member of a conspiracy, not the sole person who planned and executed the entire plot. His cohorts, which included the funeral director, carried out the first phases by murdering Kyle's husband, then the mortician assisted Kyle in making the arrangement to transport the casket back to the USA. It is not important to the plot to show exactly how and by whom Kyle's husband was thrown off the roof. We only need to know that he was murdered as part of the plan. Kyle's specific travel arrangements would be relayed to Carson who could then get himself assigned as the air marshal on her flight so he could carry out the final stage of the plan.
I don't know that Kyle would have taken time to arrange for her husband to be transported back to USA especially since she would have been extremely busy helping design/build aircrafts. She's an avionics engineer after all.
Most people would take time off work to bury their loved ones or transport them for burial.
11th Sep 2017
Flightplan (2005)
Question: If Carson's plan indicated he was smarter than Kyle, given the way it was set up, then why did it fail? I know Kyle worked out he was a terrorist, what I don't get is what made her eventually become suspicious of him. Was Carson arrogant or something? Did he make mistakes in his plan, if so what? What mistakes did he make that made his plan fail?
Answer: This was a conspiracy involving a number of people, so it was not Carson's plan alone. Any plan, no matter how well plotted, will have flaws and unexpected variables. Kyle didn't suspect Carson until the very end when she was talking to the captain, who thought she was a terrorist extorting money. Not every detail of how she fully realised Carson's involvement is explained, but when Kyle saw she was being framed, and as Carson nervously attempted to leave the plane, knowing the plan was unraveling, Kyle cobbled together various clues and made an accurate assumption that Carson had been orchestrating the events during the flight.
How realistic would Carson's plan be anyway?
8th Sep 2017
Flightplan (2005)
8th Sep 2017
Flightplan (2005)
Question: What was the purpose of kidnapping her daughter? Was it to make Kyle look crazy? Or was it merely for the purpose of trying to make her open the casket? Because I find that very hard to believe.
Answer: The endgame was to get Kyle to open the casket during a search for her daughter. That is where the explosives and the detonator were hidden. They were counting on a frantic mother searching in every possible place on the plane for her daughter, including her husband's casket. If she hadn't done that on her own, no doubt Carson would have somehow compelled her into doing it.
How would Carson propel into opening the casket? By threatening to kill her?
7th Sep 2017
Flightplan (2005)
Question: How did the hijackers know who Kyle was in the first place? Kyle doesn't appear to have known them prior to meeting them on the plane so how did they know Kyle was an engineer and that David was her husband and that Julia was her daughter prior to killing her husband?
Answer: Carson was not the sole person who engineered the plot. There were others involved, and Carson would have been given the necessary information about Kyle in order to carry out his part of the plan.
Who would have given Carson the necessary information about Kyle? The only people involved in the plot besides Carson were Stephanie and the morgue director. Kyle doesn't appear to have known either Carson or Stephanie, and the only time she met the morgue director was at the beginning of the movie. So, where would Stephanie and the morgue director have gotten the information about Kyle?
Is it possible the hijackers tricked a coworker of Kyle's into giving them the information about Kyle and her family?
I thought he got the information about Kyle by hacking into files containing information about avionics engineers and their families.
Answer: There may be many unidentified others involved in the larger conspiracy - some individual or individuals killed Kyle's husband, possibly the coroner and/or police involved in the investigation into his death, airport security (why no cameras were referenced), and someone with access to the passenger manifest. There may be an insider who knew about Kyle's role as an engineer and pulled up info regarding her family, all to further the plot of framing her and unbalancing her. It's a massive plot hole.
3rd May 2017
Flightplan (2005)
Question: Why did Kyle want to sit in the courtyard with her husband at the beginning? She looked quite serious. What is the significance?
Chosen answer: He's not really there. On the plane, she tells the psychologist that she saw him, but that was her mind coping with his death. She imagines him helping her onto the train, walking home with her, sitting in the courtyard, but you can see there's only 1 set of footprints.
Answer: There's no explanation, but there seems to be some sort of tension or discord going on between them that may be putting some strain on their marriage. They may have wanted a more private place to discuss something where they knew their daughter could not overhear. They also acted this way when they're in the subway station, communicating that all is not right between them.
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Answer: By this time, Kyle believed Julia was not hiding but forcibly taken. She is investigating every possible place, however improbable, where her daughter might be, including the casket on the off chance someone obtained the lock code or there was an alternate default code. As it turned out, the funeral home was in on the scheme. Kyle suspected Julia could be drugged or dead and her body hidden. Kyle's an aerospace engineer who's methodical, determined, detail-oriented, and a problem solver. After systematically eliminating one possibility, she moves on to others.
raywest ★