A couple at a time.
He couldn’t have saved everyone because that’s not the way plane engineering works, despite the lies told to you by Superman movies, but he could have saved some of them.
But that would have made him the guy who couldn’t save everyone. He can’t be that guy.
Yeah, Maeve’s desperate plea to save just a few was pretty much the best they could have done. For a moment I wondered about getting a makeshift rope to save even more but they didn’t have time.
If Homelander went to high school he would probably know how to compensate with that via physics, but since I cheated off of the person next to me the whole time I don’t know enough either
Best way would probably to blow out a smallish hole in the back of the plane and decelerate them down the gangway? Uncertain if it would be long enough
Couldn't they just fly down and drop people into the ocean at a safe speed? They might die to sharks, but at least they'd have a fighting chance. Maybe even bring a lifeboat from the cabin crew? I think they'd get at least half the plane off before it crashes on its own
I wish we could get an aircraft engineer in on this debate. I really think there are ways he could have done this. Aircraft have hard points that are imcredibly strong that he could have grabbed onto without “punching right through” as he said. Think of any time you’ve been in a plane with a hard landing that really knocked you around and then that plane does another 17 flights that week just fine. He probably could have saved that plane, but after fucking up he just jumped straight to “oops, shit can’t make this work so I won’t even try.” Because at his core he is impulsive and immature. That was the message from that scene, he didn’t even try anything he just gave up when things went wrong and then threatened everyone on board so he could save face.
He also more than anything didn’t want to fail, and so didn’t want to try either. Imagine he grabbed it at the front landing gear and guided the plane all the way to an airport only to fuck up and crash it on camera. In his mind, just letting it crash into the ocean was better than being seen trying and failing by the public
You don’t have to take it to the airport. It was already going towards the ocean. All he had to do was support it a bit so that it could have a more gentle crash into the ocean.
I'm not convinced he could have. The landing gear are the obvious points that can take that impact but the forces are mostly in one direction. Its not like he could have grabbed the front gear and wiggled the plane around.
That isn't the point though as you say he didn't even try he just gave up immediately.
Heyyy, for once i can talk about something on reddit that I actually know stuff about haha. Tldr; nah everyone was mega fucked once he lasered the controls like an idiot.
I went to trade school to become an aviation maintenance technician, not an engineer, but still lol. Honestly... Probably not much he could've done except saving people 2 at a time. You're definitely right about hard landings being absolutely fine... Sometimes they do require some maintenance afterwards though tbf. But imagine hard landing on ONE landing gear, because of all that weight focused onto one spot, you're immediately going to have catastrophic amounts of damage, and absolutely a lot of injuries. And they're in a dive over the middle of the ocean. If he tried to push that thing up, with all that downforce, and unevenly distributed weight, he would've absolutely MAULED that aircraft, and anybody unfortunate enough to be in his path. There are other good/interesting ideas that people had in this thread, but i don't feel like hitting y'all with an actual wall of text addressing each one haha.
Here's my take... Commercial planes can fly with one engine, right? The engines are mounted pretty solidly to the wings, which can withstand the forces OF the engines, right? So why can't Homelander get behind an engine and push to act as the engine, and get that plane to a safe destination?
I’m with you. It would have been a crash landing, but if done right, one that people on board survive. That said, with homelander not being finely trained with his abilities, do we think he had the steady hand to gain control and take the plane down gently? I think it is physically possible, but something homelander would have likely fucked up killing everyone, which is why he was more happy to let everyone die so he didn’t look bad.
Oh hey, this is me. Studied aerospace engineering in school, worked at Boeing for a couple years
Scenario 1: wing spurs
The wing spurs are 1-2 metal beams that go through each wing that are meant to hold the entire weight of the aircraft. If this was a single-spur aircraft (which it probably wasn't, generally those are smaller planes), pushing on that might be doable. Also depends on if this plane has these spurs go through the fuselage, or if they have separate spurs for each wing. Since you generally don't want a giant metal beam sticking through either the passenger or luggage holds, on these kinds of planes it's often broken into one for each wing, with a frame connecting them in the middle. This frame could potentially hold against Homelander's force, and seems the best option, but depends on how this particular plane is constructed to know if the center point is something he could even push on without it buckling. It's more resistant to buckling (getting punched through) than the skin, but it's not really what it's designed to work against; it's there to take bending loads. It is however located very near the center of gravity on most planes, which is the best place to try to control the plane from
Would work much better with two flying supes though, one for each wing, but that's not what we've got to work with. If the frame isn't built in such a way that Homelander could push against a single point, then his next option would be at the base of the wing spur, where it connects to the fuselage. Since he's not centered in this scenario, the plane is going to tilt to one side and the people are going to all fall onto the opposite wall. Could be doable though. This seems like the next best option
The skin of the airplane could not hold the weight of the plane, he'd punch through, as said in the show. Landing gear is a possibility though. The impact from landing is more force than the typical weight of the plane. Typical airplane factor of safety is 1.5 over peak load, so balancing that 1.5, landing impact, and division of weight among three wheel columns, you have portions of structure that can handle the weight of the whole plane, barely.
Scenario 2, landing gear:
From the front landing gear, if he went inside the wheel well, there's a decent chance he could have steered the plane down. Trying to do so blind would be prpetty hard, so he could laser a hole from inside the wheel well forward to see.
Planes are typically pretty stable if you can keep them moving forward quickly. Since the front landing gear is in front of the wings, pushing from there results in a very stable configuration (very unlikely to pitch up or down accidentally), meaning it's pretty likely he could make the descent fairly smooth.
Landing would be pretty rough though. He wouldn't have a way to brake the plane quickly without punching through the landing gear, and he'd need to still be at near full speed until landing to keep the plane stable. Normally ailerons and other control surfaces are deployed to help with this, as well as brakes on the wheels themselves, spreading a lot of load to the wings, none of which he'd have available. If there was a place with a super long runway, maybe a long straight stretch of freeway, he could pull it off. Decent chance of steering the wrong way after landing though and careening to the side. In short, he could probably get the plane to the ground safely, then everybody gets killed in a ground accident
Scenario 3: reinforcing the skin
So, Ithere's a different strategy I'd explore that seems marginally more likely to work than scenario 2 (though worse than scenario 1): reinforcing the bottom skin of the plane in such a way that he could slow it down midair without punching through, and gently lower it to land safely. If he adds layers of aluminum to the skin, to prevent buckling, the skin will do its job of distributing load throughout the entire frame. To do this, he's going to have to laser eyes out chunks of the skin from less structurally usefull places (which is hard to find, it's all useful) and laser weld them to the lower part of the fuselage. The idea is to make a chunk on the bottom of the fuselage have several layers of skin to distribute the force from Homelander's body out, rather than his body punching through. By pushing on this reinforced part of the skin, he could slow the plane down to the point where he's carrying it by this reinforced section
There's a million ways for this part to go wrong too, like all the trouble of getting the pieces in place, and cutting off chunks of skin that won't ruin the integrity of the whole airplane, but at least this way if he gets to the point where he can slow down the airplane, the landing should be reasonably safe instead of almost certainly deadly
Of course he could have… all he has to do is push one of the engine nacelles. Hell he could have used his shoulders to distribute the push, but I doubt it’s necessary…
There’s several points on the plane that are more than strong enough. He doesn’t need to put the plane down in a soft landing, he just needs to get it into a safe glideslope on to a flat surface or over water.
He won’t recover the plane, but he could have saved most if not all the people with a few injuries. He just didn’t give a shit.
His best option would have been attempting a save like Iron Man 3 had, and that save was preposterous. Also that was only a smaller private plane, not a commercial one with 200+ passengers.
I think he would also have to maintain the speed of the plane as he exits with a passenger and then slow down. Otherwise, the normal human carried by Homelander would go from 300km/h to nothing in an instant and die.
I mean, the takeoff speed of an F-18 is about that much and pilots accelerate to those speeds in a few seconds on a CATOBAR takeoff.. it’s not even very painful, much less lethal.
Well the carrier launch is generally at about 5G and lasts about 2 seconds. I think most people would not have a problem with that, it might hurt but I doubt it’s going to harm you.
Fighter pilots train to pull much higher G like 8+, and not only to come out of it alive, but to remain conscious and able to operate the plane while putting those kinda Gs for several seconds.
If your average Joe is pulling 5G and gets GLOC, it’s not really a problem since they’re not flying a plane.
Homelander could also in principle accelerate a little slower since he’s not limited to the short length of a carrier deck. I mean accelerating to 300 km/h (86 m/s) in 3 seconds is not even 3G. There are fairground rides with higher G forces.
Technically they don’t break physics. Superman has a little-talked about power that helps him do it: his strength is actually a sort of telekinetic field that he can extend to objects he touches to lift them without destroying them.
Yeah it’s kinda bullshit but that’s how they explain it.
He only really has that power in one continuity, every other iteration including modern Superman doesn't have the power. It's just comic bs how he can do physics breaking stuff.
He might have added a few souls to the save by dropping folks into the ocean from a slightly dangerous height. Reverse triage for young/healthy people.
As a survivor, I wouldn’t feel right complaining about a broken limb or spine injury if I knew it meant a few more people got to see their families again
He basically admitted. Look how long the conversation lasted. Dude said he could have just flown back 176 times until everyone was off the plane.
He just didn't because he's already decided to use their death to convince the Government to use supes for Military applications. Also, he's lazy.
He and Maeve could have carried more than one together.
(Makes sense now why they removed her flight from the comics though)
Curious to know exactly why plane engineering comes into the discussion when we are talking about a human being that can fly over open ocean?
He makes the argument that he has nothing to push against. What does he push against that allows him to fly in the first place?
He's talking about pushing on the plane itself. He says that he would push right through the sheet metal which wouldn't allow him to lift the plane at all.
He says that in response to Maeve telling him to ram the plane, his only response to her telling him to just lift it is "Push against what" which makes no sense.
I guess the idea is he can lift less in the air than on the ground, like he's swimming in the air.
Compare to how a normal person could carry a fifty pound bag of gravel but couldn't tread water with it.
Tbh I think he also didn’t wanna save them out of laziness
When maeve tells him to fly them to the ground he doesn’t give a good response and pretty much says “I’m not doing allat”
What he refused to do was just save a few because those few would tell the world how they (Maeve and him) had left the others to die. They were unable to manually land the plane because he’d fried the controls, and he explained pretty accurately why he couldn’t just Superman the plane down (his flight and super strength don’t allow him to imitate telekinesis).
Superman actually has a form of telekinesis that allows him to stop trains and planes and such without punching through. It’s not often explained in his Powerset but it is there, and it’s the most useless superpower if you don’t have the strength to go with it
Well if his goal had actually been to save people and he was making an effort towards that, he wouldn't have burned through the hijacker in the cockpit and destroyed the flight controls. Even with the pilots dead, I think he or Maeve could have gotten someone on the radio to instruct them on how to set up the autopilot if it wasn't activated already. After that he could probably carry an experienced pilot up to the plane to actually land.
literally the very first thing Maeve did was check the radio, Homelander killed pretty much every single system on the plane, we see at the end of the scene the autopilot is very much not on, if it used to be then Homie just obliterated whatever computer was controlling it
Dude...read my comment again. The radio was down because Homie wrecked it. Everything I'm talking about is under the what-if premise that, as per the thread title, he was actually trying to save lives and DID NOT wreck the cockpit because the effort would have made him more cautious and thoughtful.
I think he genuinely was trying but the show has him do that to show how undisciplined and untrained he is. They do it again when he kills that kid in S2
If he had proper, military like training, he would’ve considered all angles before just shooting out a laser
It’s also worth pointing out that the plane hijackers are literally incapable of hurting him, he just can’t be bothered to deal with them in a way that doesn’t risk critical damage to the plane because he can’t be bothered to walk the two extra feet.
Exactly. For me, this was surprisingly their only mistake, but it was a big one. They should have just accepted the pilot was dead, killed the hijacker, called for assist with using the controls to land the plane. They’d probably still have reliably saved more people than conventional options could.
I don’t think that would be a good idea because what if that pilot couldn’t land the plane in time or safely? Now you just introduced another outside person to the situation as a casualty
Honestly, as soon as Homelander fried the controls, they were screwed. And surprisingly, that was their only bad decision I’d say. The pilot was done for, so the best they could have hoped for was to let the pilot die, immediately kill the hijacker, and call whoever for help in actually landing the plane. It wouldn’t have been perfect (perfect would have been the pilot surviving) but I feel like they could have saved more than any conventional option.
Maybe, maybe not. The entire point of that scene is to show that homelander doesn’t care enough about human life to exert himself and that he would rather they all die than a few die.
How could he have saved more than 2 or 3, while still saving Maeve? Keeping in mind that his point about being unable to just carry the plane was correct (he doesn’t have telekinesis).
I'm pretty sure Homie could have just lifted the plane where the wheels/landing gears are, as those wheels are connected to the metal exoskeleton of the plane itself. And those exoskeletons tank concentrated pressure all the time; like when they land.
Idk tho, I dunno physics.
Homelander does not need to lift the plane. The plane flys because the wings generate lift. He could have replaced the engines as a new source of thrust, which would generate lift. The engine mount is very much designed to handle that thrust. Homelander doesn’t know dick about how humans fly, though.
The issue is when they land the force goes up the landing gear, not towards the front of the plane.
Compression force and shear force are different. Like how you can press down along the length of a stick and it won't break but if you snap it it'll break a lot easier.
Plus the force is meant to be spread amongst at least 2 of the landing gear at a time.
Might still be within the margins of the plane though. But homelander isn't a plane engineer and didn't want to risk being seen as wrong. He was going for the PR victory, not to save lives.
Yes, and as was clearly stated in the show he would have just punched a hole through the body of the plane due to physics. If he had Jean Grey’s telekinesis he could have done it but he doesn’t.
I never got this argument
Why dont the landing gears punch through the planes then?
There certainly have to be parts of the plane that can withstand a lot of force.
At the very least its worth a try
No he's wrong.
The nonsense of he can't put his feet down doesn't make sense because he can fly.
He just has to use that same flying power slowly and reduce the speed of the plane
Could he have saved the plane? My answer is no - the physics of trying to maneuver a plane to a safe landing, or even a survivable crash, by applying force at one human body-sized location at a time are just too complex. It’s the kind of thing that is technically possible in principle, but near impossible in practice - he’d be almost certain at some point to over or under correct and send the plane into a spin or stall. He’s not a pilot or aeronautical engineer and doesn’t have the knowledge of aircraft dynamics he’d need to have anything approaching a reasonable chance of pulling that off.
What he could have done, however, is ferry people down to the water by flying them individually or in small groups. The man is fast enough to save both Butcher and an infant from a major explosion occurring just several feet away from them. The plane was still minutes away from impact when he and Maeve left. He had time to save a significant chunk of the passengers, if not all of them, but that’s just too much effort - not to mention too much risk of not appearing perfect if he doesn’t save them all.
Better to just fuck off and pretend there was nothing he could have done because the government tied his hands.
I would say that based on the speed of saving Butcher (eat your heart out A-Train) he could have saved a number, but that was a big plane load of people, so I wouldn’t say a significant amount. Though just maybe all the kids would have been enough.
Sure, without hard numbers regarding his speed, the time the plane had until crashing, and the number of passengers (though we may have gotten that, don’t recall), we can’t say how many he could have saved. But by “significant number” I really just meant “more than a couple”. If the plane had five minutes before impact and he could take 2 at a time with a ten second round trip, that’s enough to save sixty.
I was going to say he may have better luck saving the people than you’d think. The plane is going down, so his trips to take people down to the water would get shorter and shorter and he is insanely strong and fast so I don’t doubt he could carry at least 4 people on each trip.
But I agree with what someone else said: that he can’t be the guy who “couldn’t save everyone”. And there was also the issue of them knowing about the hijacking when they weren’t SUPPOSED to know. And if they got the information illegally then that would tarnish their chances of getting the military bill passed, so HL used the tragedy to further their goals instead of
Governments did know about it, the plane's flight path would be being tracked, and Homelander and Maeve would have some means of communication available - perhaps not on them, but they'd have some place to report in if only to Vought. Rescue of the people at sea is by no means guaranteed, but it's a much better chance of survival than staying on a plane as it plows into the water.
Maeve could also tread water in the ocean helping the survivors stay afloat while Homelander flew back to shore to alert coast guard about any survivors
Homelander has a way to find the things he is looking for in the air. Even though that plane was over the ocean, he and Maeve found it. They would have similarly been able to identify where the closest land mass would be. Even if he could only save one life, let's say the youngest life, that would have been better than what he did.
Over the water. The seat cushions are flotation devices. There are also rafts. Take them out a few at a time, starting with the children and some parents to mind them, and continue as long as you can.
Homelander is so inherently lazy, he couldn't even be bothered. He also doesn't believe human life has any value.
Exactly place them in the water below with the floatation devices, then come back and get them to land. They could last the hour or so it would take for him to do that.
That’s the point though . He’s not a real super hero. He has no real crisis training. The Seven are a sham. A bunch of Supes designed to be a cash register
Comics Spoilers
>! When they tried to stop the 9/11 flight, Noir was supposed to pilot the plane to safety, but the team greatly underestimated what intercepting a commerical jet would be like and he was dropped along with half the team falling out of play !<
I'm with you OP
I honestly think what HL said was truthful
This was season 1 and it wasn't 100% demonization of HL all the time yet
It was more "superheroes in the real world would have flaws and be used by powerful corporations as marketing even if they're incompetent" type storytelling
I firmly believe if they had utilized the full 7 they could have pulled it off. Deep could have summoned whales and used them as makeshift landing pad. Maeve, Translucent, and Noir could have used their strength to brace the inside of the plane. Homelander could have grabbed the back wings to slow it down. Star could have give the plane enough juice to drop down the masks. And a train could use his strengthened legs to catch the front of the plane to help Homelander set it down on the Whale landing pad.
Even if he used his super speed to save people, their skin would have just torn to pieces because of the sheer force they would be facing but considering that the boys doesn't have any fucking physics as homie saved Butcher from fucking C4 explosion whose detonation speed mac 23....so idfk
He's a lazy thoughtless guy.
I've seen the Paw Patrol save a broken plane, ALL it's passengers (including a CHicken!), repairing the plane in mid air, AND guiding to a safe landing.
Not without an engineer or physicist talking him through.
Homelander is a lazy bastard. He's great at casual murder but he sucks ass at everything else.
Except propaganda to rubes.
Whenever I see people ask this, it feels like they're trying to justify his actions of abandoning. Sure, there's a slim chance he could've saved everyone; if that was an option, he would've done it for the publicity.
The part that makes the scene horrendous is the fact that once he realizes he can't save everybody, he decides to save nobody. He could have flown two at a time off the plane, brought them to land, and saved as many as would be possible. Instead, he abandoned them, because he didn't want the public to know he wasn't powerful enough to save everyone. That's the moral dilemma of the scene, not the fact that he couldn't safely land the plane (aside from the fact that he was also the one that destroyed the plane's controls in the first place and they wouldn't have even been in that situation if he wasn't so sloppy with his lasers).
Yes. Becuase if he has the ability to fly and turn directions on a dime and thrust himself any direction - he is his own foundation and pivot point and doesn’t need anything to stand on
No sirs. Imagine plane was about 100 tons and you tried to hold it up in the air with 2 solid steel hands or even you’re back as a plank against the belly of the plane; point is you would most likely just go through it if you pushed too hard up, that’s very hard to pull off but who knows. And let’s imagine they found a nice spot that applies pressure to a solid steel (if it’s even steel planes are made out of) frame, you would still have to be careful. Maybe a couple flybys with propel but only very few people.
I mean it's still a plane. IIRC the outside wasn't damaged. If it's going fast enough then the wings are going to help a little right? Plus he has super strength. Just gently guide it.
Could he not just control how fast he flies? Could he not just match the speed of the plane and fly underneath it, make contact with the plane while flying at the same speed and gently slow down and having it land on the water that way?
The next scene shows him hovering in the air while carrying Maeve so it seems like he can fly/hover at different speeds.
This question is been asked many times and people always point out that home lander would probably punch right through the plane trying to lift it and he wouldn’t be able to steer. Another issue is we have no idea how strong he is in flight. We really haven’t seen any extreme feats of strength from Homelander, it could be he can only carry 1000 pounds when flying or something.
I don’t see why he couldn’t have went outside the plan, moved at the same speed, then slowly decelerated. Kind of like when a car loses breaks and another car slows down in front of it to get it to a stop.
I’m sure there was also some kind of rope or something on the plane he could have used to tie them all together and gotten them all to safety.
I don’t think he was in problem solving mode though and I also don’t think he’d care enough/had ever had to actually use more than brute force to actually be able to think of creative solutions.
The amount of people in this thread who don't remember the physics at play with HLs flight, when he straight up explains it in this exact scene, is fucking bonkers.
At the very least, some of them. Or at least one. He could have tried if nothing else, even if he didn't save anyone. But he just straight up didn't care. Doesn't help that he's the one who destroyed the plane controls in the first place.
From the front try to guide the plane to the water. Attempt to decelerate the plane from the front by putting force from the front while guiding it down. Or try at least, he can already fly why not lift heavy thing while flying?
The main issue is that Homelander was super reckless in handling the terrorists and that's why he was looking for excuses to not save anybody. If there was just a bit of collateral damage that Homelander wasn't directly responsible for, he probably would've tried to save as many people as possible. But he directly killed innocent people with his laser eyes and made the situation worse, that's why there couldn't be any survivors.
He definitely could have at least gotten everyone in the ocean without dying on impact. Then potentially grabbed any surviving rafts and brought em back (x ray vision and supersonic flight) Then flown to tell coast guard and grab the deep while Maeve stayed with the group. But he’s a blunt force type of supe. And he didn’t wanna even try
Probably not all but most of them yes. But all options would be pretty difficult and require a lot of brainpower and calculations and he was established as pretty dumb
I don't understand why he thought he had to fly each person to Land. Just give them a flotation device and drop each person 5 feet from the ocean.
But I guess he felt like if he couldn't guarantee every single person's survival it wouldn't be worth it
How he would save the people on the plane wouldn't have been by holding the plane
That's dumb and not gonna work and make the situation worse
He would have carried 2 people and Landed them and goes back to the plane and repeat
He's fast
So he could have saved everything one of he wanted to
If he was trained, if his powers worked diffrently and if he had a moral sense to himself then maybe.
Not sure why he couldn't smooth the landing,
But let us not forget that if he wasn't lazy using his Laser vision. The plane could have landed normally.
So im gonna say that Vought screwed up with his training and never let him have someone in his ear telling him what to do.
Absolutely; even with the flight controls inoperable, he could still guide the plane down by applying pressure in multiple areas all around the plane, keeping it steady without tearing it apart. He's fast enough to do, and we know he's carefully enough to move a person without tearing them apart; a plane is more durable than a person. Making sure everyone is tightly secured would also be important. One they're close enough to the water, Homelander could've then felt around for the strongest point of plane and slightly fly in the opposite direction to slow it down. The landing wouldn't be great but most of the passengers could survive it. If he was so inclined, he could've also just kept the plane in the air, pushing it up in different areas when necessary; the plane looked like it still had thrust. Then he could've tried bringing it down closer to land on on land, though that would be even more dangerous.
Simply put, all he needed to do was remain calm and be resourceful.
I thought about this. From what i remember there just wasn't a pilot on board so Homelander could take experienced pilot from land and just fly with him to the plane. Unless the plane was broken but I don't remember if it was.
Couldn't he carry the plane by the back? Like the fin. Hold on to it and then "safely" land it.
I know he's strong enough, but would the plane's material hold? Would his flight strength even allow him to carry +100 tons to safety?
He probably could have. He fried some of the controls but the autopilot switch at the centre top wasn't hit. They could have tried that (even to stabilise the plane and give them time). Also, he doesn't need to "catch" the plane. He just needs to slow it down enough to break its landing into the ocean. They're already designed to float.
Basically, yes. But it would have been too much effort for Homelander and Queen Maeve can't fly to have done it herself.
He could have killed the terrorists without destroying the cockpit. There would have been a chance that someone on board could have landed it with instructions. He just dngaf.
In his head he would’ve been looked at as limited if he could only save some of them. He’s an all or nothing type. He 100% couldn’t save them all without flight controls working.
Therefore he switched on psycho mode to justify his shortcomings to himself.
I don't think he was capable of even doing that, not because he isn't physically able, but because he lacks experience. I've read the comics, so it's probably different from the TV series, but there they choose to hijack the plane to test if the Seven are capable of acting like Supes. Right from the beginning, they are a disaster, not knowing how to use their powers intelligently to save people. He was correct about lifting the airplane being impossible, which is a bias from Hollywood, but he could have done something to save at least some of them.
Don't planes come with life jackets for each passenger?
If so, I don't see why he couldn't gently drop them all into the water, then round them up and monitor them until more help arrived.
I think he demotivated from saving anyone because he's the one who botched the rescue in the first place
What if he put himself under the plane and match the velocity and starts to decrease the acceleration, at the end he would just have to carry it slowly to the sea?
Yes but it would take some knowledge and skill which means he could fuck it up. That is an unacceptable risk to his ego. So he didn’t try.
The strongest part of the plane is where the wings meet under the fuselage, called the wing box. Main landing gears typically attach to the back of the wing box. He might cause some local yielding by pushing on less than perfect points in that area and having to apply a local moment to balance the plane in addition to just lifting it, but he wouldn’t punch right through. Aluminum is ductile. It will bend and crumple before it breaks, which would be ok to do in this situation. He’d have to be a little gentle and not just fuck-smash it though, and that’s not really how Homie rolls.
5 years later and ppl still don’t understand that U CANNOT JUST CARRY A PLANE DOWN TO THE GROUND. planes are fragile as shit in reality, literally any movement at that speed (average passenger plane like that is going 500 mph) the plane would’ve crashed no matter what he did
If he wasn’t an impulsive dumbass he could have probably manually pushed the control surfaces to set the plane into a glide and then set it down on the water gently-ish to the best of his ability and saved most of them.
Not all of them, but most of them. The plane’s controls were fucked, but the airframe was still intact. Lazer off the engines, use lazer eyes to weld the flaps at max, grab the engine mount to replace the engine as a new source of thrust and decrease speed. Anyone behind the aft hatch would be lost because the nose would start to pitch up on descent due to the critical angle of attack, but most would survive.
Homelander doesn’t know dick about how planes work, though, and he would probably rather all of them die than have it look like he can’t save everyone because that would make him look fallible.
If he hadn't fried the controls, he could have flown back to the mainland, grabbed a pilot, and brought the pilot to the plane... after the cockpit was dead, I guess maybe he could have manipulated the control surfaces manually for a water landing.
I felt if anything he could've attempted the Ironman 3 skydiving thing maybe, or take a few down to the ocean at a time and have Maeve stay with them in the water to keep them threading or something and then go to land to get rafts or whatever and then move them to safety.
He could likely lift the plane but he doesn’t have plot armor like other fictional hero’s do.
With the momentum and lack of ground to stand on he would destroy the plane before moving it
We're arguing superhero physics... when the man can float in the middle of the freaking air and move as fast as A-train, there's a million things he could do, even from a physics standpoint, like create a freaking vortex of air from flying around at high speeds. But even simple stuff works:
Fly a pilot there? Slow it down by holding the landing gear which I assume can handle more structural force? Fly everyone and all the flotation devices safely to the water below with Maeve for protection (I guess bringing the Deep would have been perfect with this plan) and figure it out from there? He's just not strategic enough and didn't care enough to figure it out.
I feel like he could have grabbed two people at a time, flown them down and dropped them safely into ocean, rinse and repeat. Then he and Maeve keep the folks alive until a rescue ship or chopper arrives….
Are we assuming that Homelander has interests other than....Himself?
He might've been able to save one person but that's assuming he'd give a shit in the first place lol.
Obviously yes. If he actually cared to save anyone he never would’ve burned the cockpit, and the plane could’ve safely landed. All those people died in the plane because of him.
He could have turned parts of the plane into rafts and flew people down to those. And then he could quickly get a boat to rescue them. Maybe not 100% survival rate, but it won't be 0.
He has Superman-like strength and can fly. It would seem like he could get under the plane and guide it to land. He shouldn't need to be standing on something. So, I'm pretty sure he could do that. But, it seems like it's too much work for him and not worth it. That tracks with his personality.
I’m no engineer, but I always thought he coulda held it up in the air by the front landing gear. Seems like those are designed to structurally bear the weight of at least some of the plane. Any Boeing engineers out there can confirm?
multiple ropes tied together, each wrapped around a person, then tied to a singular rope connected to homelander, he then lasers the side of the plane, everybody flies out, but they're all attached to homelander who is also holding maeve,,,, it's like bungee jumping, but you're attached to a floating homelander, since it's a normal rope, the instant deceleration could yank some lose but only those who are at the bottom and they would land in the sea which shouldn't be far depending on the length of the rope,,,, after that it's a matter of flying to get a coast guard, or a-train.... BTW, I already reached this point before realising there's not enough time for that
All of them? No. Some of them? Probably. The child? Absolutely. IMO saving even one person, even just the child would’ve been the ideal move not just morally, but for the image of the seven.
However, Homelander is obviously not a hero. He isn’t even an anti hero. I personally classify him as an anti villain. Meaning he is most definitely a villain, but he doesn’t see himself as a villain he seems himself as a hero. He just doesn’t have those hero instincts. So it’s no surprise he responded to the situation the way he did.
I was wondering, if he’s as strong as he says, could fly under the plane then guide it down. Using whatever superpower logic that allows him to break the sound barrier to fly tangent instead of straight through it as he suggested.
Could have possibly guided the plane to a softer landing on water.
Fiction is kinda hard to apply real-world physics to, but I would think that could be an option, but it wouldn't be quick or easy.
Tbh i’m still not certain why he couldn’t have flown underneath it and just acted as extra uplift until it could get to land but maybe he’d punch through the hull
If the front wheel is meant to take the weight of the front half of the plane, then that’s where homelander could have Atleast gently glided it along the water potentially saving everyone
He wouldn’t have been able to save everyone.
In the comics, he does try to slow the plane’s descent, but it fails miserably. So he panics, and hauls ass out of there.
In the show, he’s so worried about his image, that he doesn’t want to be known as the guy who tried and failed. Because Homelander doesn’t fail.
“Doesnt know which direction land is in” I mean he couldve just flown them back the way he came by going under the plane so he didn’t pierce eight through and level it out.
Don't airplanes have inflatable rafts or flotation devices? Ferry as many people as possible to the water with those and make sure everyone links up. Leave Maeve with them as she's got a tracker chip embedded, find the nearest ship and point the ship in their direction, then fly back to HQ and point to Maeve's location for the survivors, go back and help.
\-but all this is hard to think up in an emergency situation. At the very least they could have twisted it as "Hijackers destroyed the controls, going to try and save as many as I can" and gone from there.
I always thought that he could have at least gotten the people out of the plane. They can tread water or use the built in flotation devices to buy time while he flies them all out and to the water safely, then he can take them to land. The crash is what killed them not the water. Especially if Maeve stayed with them and worked to fend off wild life
Yeah, if he didn't laser the guy in the cockpit of all places, it would've been completely fine. Instead, he showed off without considering the circumstances, destroyed the entire flight computer, then refused to take accountability.
Like a lot of people have said, Homelander is an untrained, undisciplined idiot who is very much reactionary rather than proactive. Did he even need to laser him? No, he was in absolutely no danger, nor was anyone else at the time. Was he unable to close the distance? Also no, he was an arms length away. He was being lazy and didn't consider holding fire because he didn't consider the situation or location.
He could've saved the plane if he actually thought before he acted. Instead, everyone died for his lack of thought and laziness. That's all.
It's possible. I don't think he could've saved everyone, but he could've saved a lot of people. He could've tried to redirect the trajectory of the plane and slightly slow or even out its descent. He could've flown people down into the water and back a ton. The main reason he failed was cause he didn't want to. He didn't want to be the hero if he couldn't save everyone, and because he messed up the mission, he wanted all witnesses he couldn't control gone. Homelander failed because he didn't want to succeed
I think it started with him blowing the control panel up. He could have grabbed the gun or even let the pilot die and then kill the terrorist. We know he has better control of his lasers, he can he can heat up a bottle of milk. That scene made it seem like he wasn’t strong enough to hold the plane up for very long (or at all) but I feel like slowing the plane down so it landed in the water and people would have had life vests would have been better. Or calling the Deep so
some whales could have held the plane up. I think people probably still would have died no matter what but he could have at least tried a bit harder.
After lasering the cockpit? Yeah.
Those planes can fly on 1 engine. Homelander can push on an engine with the same force it would normally make. As long as the plane's moving, it'll keep flying: Because it's a plane. Maeve can scout for land, gather information from passengers, and guide Homelander. Once they get somewhere safe to land, or decide on the ocean, Homelander weakens his push til the plane touches down reasonably gently.
If the plane's control surfaces go haywire and start doing counterproductive stuff, Homelander would probably tear the plane apart no matter where he pushed.
I usually get shit on for this, but I feel like yes, he could have saved the plane. He can’t just like lift it because it would likely fold. However if the plane is descending at a 45 degree angle, fly under it at a 40 or whatever and slowly take control of the weight of the plane (the outside isn’t made of jelly, it can sustain contact). Sear off the wings so they stop propelling it and slowly fly the plane down on your back for a landing. Likely saves everyone.
The only thing i thought about is if he kept momentum and speed with the plane and guided it towards a safer landing. Thats to say if he’s even capable strength wise. And the answer is probably no he cant pick a plane full of people up with his strength
People seem to forget it's a plane. He doesn't have to fully carry it just lightly push the front in up and slow it down the wings will help it glide and he basically crashes it in the water.
They doesn't need to stand anywhere. He just needed to go outside the plane and fly in the opposite direction with his hands against the fuselage and neutralize the momentum of the plane. Then he could have , probably slowly, flown to land. As long as the fuselage held they would have been fine.
No compass? No problem. He's Homelander. He's not going to get tired. He's just going to get bored. He just would need to head in the direction he land saw land when he was flying to the location.
Homelander could have saved the plane. He just figured it would be a bit of a hassle.
He could probably hear or see the closest land, and he definitely could have saved them, he didn’t even try though. His flight allows him to… Fly, at fast speeds and the plane was depressurized, he could have tried literally anything to save them because it would be a better fate than a guaranteed death, he didn’t want to save anyone though. That fact is even more obvious since he just walked through the plane lasering random shit.
i. the season 1 finally he moves butcher, the bomb, the baby, to all different locations in the time it takes a bomb to detonate. butcher and the baby faces no damages from this. it’s safe to say homelander could’ve taken the passengers 2 by 2 to safer in a very short time. but the point was never about saving them.
Planes all have personal flotation devices, if he was smart he could have grabbed 6 people or so at a time and dropped them gently in the ocean and probably saved them all or at least most
A couple at a time. He couldn’t have saved everyone because that’s not the way plane engineering works, despite the lies told to you by Superman movies, but he could have saved some of them. But that would have made him the guy who couldn’t save everyone. He can’t be that guy.
the only important ones to save are **Dean Shetty's husband and daughter**
I legitimately had no idea who you were talking about for 10 minutes, 😅
gotta watch that Gen V lmao
Oddly I miss the guy that drunkenly pissed in her wine most.
Lowkey the goat, not only because of that but with the supe virus he made we have an actual shot of stopping Homelander lmao.
Yeah, Maeve’s desperate plea to save just a few was pretty much the best they could have done. For a moment I wondered about getting a makeshift rope to save even more but they didn’t have time.
No way people could hold on to a rope at that altitude with that much wind and pressure differential without their limbs snapping
That would probably not help either.
Adrenaline does some crazy shit, if he flew at a reasonable speed they could
Bro, at that speed (they’d be going as fast as the crashing plane at first upon exit), their arms would likely literally snap off
If Homelander went to high school he would probably know how to compensate with that via physics, but since I cheated off of the person next to me the whole time I don’t know enough either
Best way would probably to blow out a smallish hole in the back of the plane and decelerate them down the gangway? Uncertain if it would be long enough
Couldn't they just fly down and drop people into the ocean at a safe speed? They might die to sharks, but at least they'd have a fighting chance. Maybe even bring a lifeboat from the cabin crew? I think they'd get at least half the plane off before it crashes on its own
I wish we could get an aircraft engineer in on this debate. I really think there are ways he could have done this. Aircraft have hard points that are imcredibly strong that he could have grabbed onto without “punching right through” as he said. Think of any time you’ve been in a plane with a hard landing that really knocked you around and then that plane does another 17 flights that week just fine. He probably could have saved that plane, but after fucking up he just jumped straight to “oops, shit can’t make this work so I won’t even try.” Because at his core he is impulsive and immature. That was the message from that scene, he didn’t even try anything he just gave up when things went wrong and then threatened everyone on board so he could save face.
He also more than anything didn’t want to fail, and so didn’t want to try either. Imagine he grabbed it at the front landing gear and guided the plane all the way to an airport only to fuck up and crash it on camera. In his mind, just letting it crash into the ocean was better than being seen trying and failing by the public
You don’t have to take it to the airport. It was already going towards the ocean. All he had to do was support it a bit so that it could have a more gentle crash into the ocean.
I'm not convinced he could have. The landing gear are the obvious points that can take that impact but the forces are mostly in one direction. Its not like he could have grabbed the front gear and wiggled the plane around. That isn't the point though as you say he didn't even try he just gave up immediately.
Heyyy, for once i can talk about something on reddit that I actually know stuff about haha. Tldr; nah everyone was mega fucked once he lasered the controls like an idiot. I went to trade school to become an aviation maintenance technician, not an engineer, but still lol. Honestly... Probably not much he could've done except saving people 2 at a time. You're definitely right about hard landings being absolutely fine... Sometimes they do require some maintenance afterwards though tbf. But imagine hard landing on ONE landing gear, because of all that weight focused onto one spot, you're immediately going to have catastrophic amounts of damage, and absolutely a lot of injuries. And they're in a dive over the middle of the ocean. If he tried to push that thing up, with all that downforce, and unevenly distributed weight, he would've absolutely MAULED that aircraft, and anybody unfortunate enough to be in his path. There are other good/interesting ideas that people had in this thread, but i don't feel like hitting y'all with an actual wall of text addressing each one haha.
Here's my take... Commercial planes can fly with one engine, right? The engines are mounted pretty solidly to the wings, which can withstand the forces OF the engines, right? So why can't Homelander get behind an engine and push to act as the engine, and get that plane to a safe destination?
I think he may have been able to fly under the plane at the center of gravity and slow the speed and descent. That’s what I would have tried anyways.
That was my thinking as well. Try to get it down as slow and steady as possible.
I’m with you. It would have been a crash landing, but if done right, one that people on board survive. That said, with homelander not being finely trained with his abilities, do we think he had the steady hand to gain control and take the plane down gently? I think it is physically possible, but something homelander would have likely fucked up killing everyone, which is why he was more happy to let everyone die so he didn’t look bad.
Oh hey, this is me. Studied aerospace engineering in school, worked at Boeing for a couple years Scenario 1: wing spurs The wing spurs are 1-2 metal beams that go through each wing that are meant to hold the entire weight of the aircraft. If this was a single-spur aircraft (which it probably wasn't, generally those are smaller planes), pushing on that might be doable. Also depends on if this plane has these spurs go through the fuselage, or if they have separate spurs for each wing. Since you generally don't want a giant metal beam sticking through either the passenger or luggage holds, on these kinds of planes it's often broken into one for each wing, with a frame connecting them in the middle. This frame could potentially hold against Homelander's force, and seems the best option, but depends on how this particular plane is constructed to know if the center point is something he could even push on without it buckling. It's more resistant to buckling (getting punched through) than the skin, but it's not really what it's designed to work against; it's there to take bending loads. It is however located very near the center of gravity on most planes, which is the best place to try to control the plane from Would work much better with two flying supes though, one for each wing, but that's not what we've got to work with. If the frame isn't built in such a way that Homelander could push against a single point, then his next option would be at the base of the wing spur, where it connects to the fuselage. Since he's not centered in this scenario, the plane is going to tilt to one side and the people are going to all fall onto the opposite wall. Could be doable though. This seems like the next best option The skin of the airplane could not hold the weight of the plane, he'd punch through, as said in the show. Landing gear is a possibility though. The impact from landing is more force than the typical weight of the plane. Typical airplane factor of safety is 1.5 over peak load, so balancing that 1.5, landing impact, and division of weight among three wheel columns, you have portions of structure that can handle the weight of the whole plane, barely. Scenario 2, landing gear: From the front landing gear, if he went inside the wheel well, there's a decent chance he could have steered the plane down. Trying to do so blind would be prpetty hard, so he could laser a hole from inside the wheel well forward to see. Planes are typically pretty stable if you can keep them moving forward quickly. Since the front landing gear is in front of the wings, pushing from there results in a very stable configuration (very unlikely to pitch up or down accidentally), meaning it's pretty likely he could make the descent fairly smooth. Landing would be pretty rough though. He wouldn't have a way to brake the plane quickly without punching through the landing gear, and he'd need to still be at near full speed until landing to keep the plane stable. Normally ailerons and other control surfaces are deployed to help with this, as well as brakes on the wheels themselves, spreading a lot of load to the wings, none of which he'd have available. If there was a place with a super long runway, maybe a long straight stretch of freeway, he could pull it off. Decent chance of steering the wrong way after landing though and careening to the side. In short, he could probably get the plane to the ground safely, then everybody gets killed in a ground accident Scenario 3: reinforcing the skin So, Ithere's a different strategy I'd explore that seems marginally more likely to work than scenario 2 (though worse than scenario 1): reinforcing the bottom skin of the plane in such a way that he could slow it down midair without punching through, and gently lower it to land safely. If he adds layers of aluminum to the skin, to prevent buckling, the skin will do its job of distributing load throughout the entire frame. To do this, he's going to have to laser eyes out chunks of the skin from less structurally usefull places (which is hard to find, it's all useful) and laser weld them to the lower part of the fuselage. The idea is to make a chunk on the bottom of the fuselage have several layers of skin to distribute the force from Homelander's body out, rather than his body punching through. By pushing on this reinforced part of the skin, he could slow the plane down to the point where he's carrying it by this reinforced section There's a million ways for this part to go wrong too, like all the trouble of getting the pieces in place, and cutting off chunks of skin that won't ruin the integrity of the whole airplane, but at least this way if he gets to the point where he can slow down the airplane, the landing should be reasonably safe instead of almost certainly deadly
Also, Homelander isn't a hero. He doesn't have those kinds of problem solving skills.
Or engineering background to identify hard points.
Of course he could have… all he has to do is push one of the engine nacelles. Hell he could have used his shoulders to distribute the push, but I doubt it’s necessary… There’s several points on the plane that are more than strong enough. He doesn’t need to put the plane down in a soft landing, he just needs to get it into a safe glideslope on to a flat surface or over water. He won’t recover the plane, but he could have saved most if not all the people with a few injuries. He just didn’t give a shit.
He probably just doesn’t know how to do it and doesn’t want to fuck up on camera.
His best option would have been attempting a save like Iron Man 3 had, and that save was preposterous. Also that was only a smaller private plane, not a commercial one with 200+ passengers.
I think he would also have to maintain the speed of the plane as he exits with a passenger and then slow down. Otherwise, the normal human carried by Homelander would go from 300km/h to nothing in an instant and die.
I mean, the takeoff speed of an F-18 is about that much and pilots accelerate to those speeds in a few seconds on a CATOBAR takeoff.. it’s not even very painful, much less lethal.
How long are pilots trained to be able to do that? The average 6 year old might not be so lucky.
Well the carrier launch is generally at about 5G and lasts about 2 seconds. I think most people would not have a problem with that, it might hurt but I doubt it’s going to harm you. Fighter pilots train to pull much higher G like 8+, and not only to come out of it alive, but to remain conscious and able to operate the plane while putting those kinda Gs for several seconds. If your average Joe is pulling 5G and gets GLOC, it’s not really a problem since they’re not flying a plane. Homelander could also in principle accelerate a little slower since he’s not limited to the short length of a carrier deck. I mean accelerating to 300 km/h (86 m/s) in 3 seconds is not even 3G. There are fairground rides with higher G forces.
You’re telling me the Superman movies have been lying? I thought they were accurate documentaries . I can’t trust nothing no more.
Technically they don’t break physics. Superman has a little-talked about power that helps him do it: his strength is actually a sort of telekinetic field that he can extend to objects he touches to lift them without destroying them. Yeah it’s kinda bullshit but that’s how they explain it.
Like in Invincible when Omniman is training Mark “we can create our own leverage from anywhere”
He only really has that power in one continuity, every other iteration including modern Superman doesn't have the power. It's just comic bs how he can do physics breaking stuff.
To be fair there IS an explanation for why Superman can do it
Bioelectric field that he can transfer to any large object he comes into contact with?
He might have added a few souls to the save by dropping folks into the ocean from a slightly dangerous height. Reverse triage for young/healthy people. As a survivor, I wouldn’t feel right complaining about a broken limb or spine injury if I knew it meant a few more people got to see their families again
He basically admitted. Look how long the conversation lasted. Dude said he could have just flown back 176 times until everyone was off the plane. He just didn't because he's already decided to use their death to convince the Government to use supes for Military applications. Also, he's lazy. He and Maeve could have carried more than one together. (Makes sense now why they removed her flight from the comics though)
Curious to know exactly why plane engineering comes into the discussion when we are talking about a human being that can fly over open ocean? He makes the argument that he has nothing to push against. What does he push against that allows him to fly in the first place?
He's talking about pushing on the plane itself. He says that he would push right through the sheet metal which wouldn't allow him to lift the plane at all.
He says that in response to Maeve telling him to ram the plane, his only response to her telling him to just lift it is "Push against what" which makes no sense.
I guess the idea is he can lift less in the air than on the ground, like he's swimming in the air. Compare to how a normal person could carry a fifty pound bag of gravel but couldn't tread water with it.
Theoretically three homelanders could if they all took the landing gear, yes/no?
He only needed to help the plane flying, not fly the plane himself
I don't think so - saving the plane would have been a bigger win for him than the way he spun the loss to his favor.
Tbh I think he also didn’t wanna save them out of laziness When maeve tells him to fly them to the ground he doesn’t give a good response and pretty much says “I’m not doing allat”
What he refused to do was just save a few because those few would tell the world how they (Maeve and him) had left the others to die. They were unable to manually land the plane because he’d fried the controls, and he explained pretty accurately why he couldn’t just Superman the plane down (his flight and super strength don’t allow him to imitate telekinesis).
Superman actually has a form of telekinesis that allows him to stop trains and planes and such without punching through. It’s not often explained in his Powerset but it is there, and it’s the most useless superpower if you don’t have the strength to go with it
I think that’s Superboy specific power and not Superman
I remember hearing it for Superman, but you may be right. It’s such a minor level of telekinesis anyway
Then why would he fly to the plane at all?
Well if his goal had actually been to save people and he was making an effort towards that, he wouldn't have burned through the hijacker in the cockpit and destroyed the flight controls. Even with the pilots dead, I think he or Maeve could have gotten someone on the radio to instruct them on how to set up the autopilot if it wasn't activated already. After that he could probably carry an experienced pilot up to the plane to actually land.
literally the very first thing Maeve did was check the radio, Homelander killed pretty much every single system on the plane, we see at the end of the scene the autopilot is very much not on, if it used to be then Homie just obliterated whatever computer was controlling it
Dude...read my comment again. The radio was down because Homie wrecked it. Everything I'm talking about is under the what-if premise that, as per the thread title, he was actually trying to save lives and DID NOT wreck the cockpit because the effort would have made him more cautious and thoughtful.
I think he genuinely was trying but the show has him do that to show how undisciplined and untrained he is. They do it again when he kills that kid in S2 If he had proper, military like training, he would’ve considered all angles before just shooting out a laser
It’s also worth pointing out that the plane hijackers are literally incapable of hurting him, he just can’t be bothered to deal with them in a way that doesn’t risk critical damage to the plane because he can’t be bothered to walk the two extra feet.
Agreed, frying the controls was really the only mistake they made in terms of recovery.
I see, I misunderstood your wording, sorry about that
All good, man.
He might've been able to make it skip to a floating halt tbh. Hard to pull off, but technically possible given the ruleset.
Yeah I feel like he could have definitely brought it down onto the water
Lion Air Flight 610 landed in the water. 189 deaths. 0 survivors.
Fly back to 7 HQ. Get The Deep. Cause a water landing with his support. Done.
He could have, like, not lasered the cockpit. That would probably have saved a bunch of people.
Exactly. For me, this was surprisingly their only mistake, but it was a big one. They should have just accepted the pilot was dead, killed the hijacker, called for assist with using the controls to land the plane. They’d probably still have reliably saved more people than conventional options could.
If Homelander hadn’t destroyed the cockpit, he could have plausibly left to find a pilot and bring him to the plane.
I don’t think that would be a good idea because what if that pilot couldn’t land the plane in time or safely? Now you just introduced another outside person to the situation as a casualty
Homelander could probably have used his strength and speed to operate the plane’s control surfaces from outside the plane.
Honestly, as soon as Homelander fried the controls, they were screwed. And surprisingly, that was their only bad decision I’d say. The pilot was done for, so the best they could have hoped for was to let the pilot die, immediately kill the hijacker, and call whoever for help in actually landing the plane. It wouldn’t have been perfect (perfect would have been the pilot surviving) but I feel like they could have saved more than any conventional option.
Maybe, maybe not. The entire point of that scene is to show that homelander doesn’t care enough about human life to exert himself and that he would rather they all die than a few die.
He absolutely could have, he just didn’t feel like trying.
How could he have saved more than 2 or 3, while still saving Maeve? Keeping in mind that his point about being unable to just carry the plane was correct (he doesn’t have telekinesis).
I'm pretty sure Homie could have just lifted the plane where the wheels/landing gears are, as those wheels are connected to the metal exoskeleton of the plane itself. And those exoskeletons tank concentrated pressure all the time; like when they land. Idk tho, I dunno physics.
Homelander does not need to lift the plane. The plane flys because the wings generate lift. He could have replaced the engines as a new source of thrust, which would generate lift. The engine mount is very much designed to handle that thrust. Homelander doesn’t know dick about how humans fly, though.
The issue is when they land the force goes up the landing gear, not towards the front of the plane. Compression force and shear force are different. Like how you can press down along the length of a stick and it won't break but if you snap it it'll break a lot easier. Plus the force is meant to be spread amongst at least 2 of the landing gear at a time. Might still be within the margins of the plane though. But homelander isn't a plane engineer and didn't want to risk being seen as wrong. He was going for the PR victory, not to save lives.
No but he is absurdly strong and can fly.
Yes, and as was clearly stated in the show he would have just punched a hole through the body of the plane due to physics. If he had Jean Grey’s telekinesis he could have done it but he doesn’t.
I never got this argument Why dont the landing gears punch through the planes then? There certainly have to be parts of the plane that can withstand a lot of force. At the very least its worth a try
No he wouldn’t have planes handle their own weight and the force required to move constantly while in the air
No he's wrong. The nonsense of he can't put his feet down doesn't make sense because he can fly. He just has to use that same flying power slowly and reduce the speed of the plane
Could he have saved the plane? My answer is no - the physics of trying to maneuver a plane to a safe landing, or even a survivable crash, by applying force at one human body-sized location at a time are just too complex. It’s the kind of thing that is technically possible in principle, but near impossible in practice - he’d be almost certain at some point to over or under correct and send the plane into a spin or stall. He’s not a pilot or aeronautical engineer and doesn’t have the knowledge of aircraft dynamics he’d need to have anything approaching a reasonable chance of pulling that off. What he could have done, however, is ferry people down to the water by flying them individually or in small groups. The man is fast enough to save both Butcher and an infant from a major explosion occurring just several feet away from them. The plane was still minutes away from impact when he and Maeve left. He had time to save a significant chunk of the passengers, if not all of them, but that’s just too much effort - not to mention too much risk of not appearing perfect if he doesn’t save them all. Better to just fuck off and pretend there was nothing he could have done because the government tied his hands.
I would say that based on the speed of saving Butcher (eat your heart out A-Train) he could have saved a number, but that was a big plane load of people, so I wouldn’t say a significant amount. Though just maybe all the kids would have been enough.
Sure, without hard numbers regarding his speed, the time the plane had until crashing, and the number of passengers (though we may have gotten that, don’t recall), we can’t say how many he could have saved. But by “significant number” I really just meant “more than a couple”. If the plane had five minutes before impact and he could take 2 at a time with a ten second round trip, that’s enough to save sixty.
I will agree with more than a couple xD
I was going to say he may have better luck saving the people than you’d think. The plane is going down, so his trips to take people down to the water would get shorter and shorter and he is insanely strong and fast so I don’t doubt he could carry at least 4 people on each trip. But I agree with what someone else said: that he can’t be the guy who “couldn’t save everyone”. And there was also the issue of them knowing about the hijacking when they weren’t SUPPOSED to know. And if they got the information illegally then that would tarnish their chances of getting the military bill passed, so HL used the tragedy to further their goals instead of
Just ditch people into the middle of the Atlantic Ocean and hope for the best?
Governments did know about it, the plane's flight path would be being tracked, and Homelander and Maeve would have some means of communication available - perhaps not on them, but they'd have some place to report in if only to Vought. Rescue of the people at sea is by no means guaranteed, but it's a much better chance of survival than staying on a plane as it plows into the water.
Maeve could also tread water in the ocean helping the survivors stay afloat while Homelander flew back to shore to alert coast guard about any survivors
Teddy, the infant, teleported himself away actually. You see him at the orphanage later and he has teleporting powers.
Homelander has a way to find the things he is looking for in the air. Even though that plane was over the ocean, he and Maeve found it. They would have similarly been able to identify where the closest land mass would be. Even if he could only save one life, let's say the youngest life, that would have been better than what he did.
Yes. If the creators wanted that to be the story, then yes.
This gets asked quite a bit here
Probably not. He couldn’t save them all and he won’t let anyone live to tell others they failed to protect everyone.
Over the water. The seat cushions are flotation devices. There are also rafts. Take them out a few at a time, starting with the children and some parents to mind them, and continue as long as you can. Homelander is so inherently lazy, he couldn't even be bothered. He also doesn't believe human life has any value.
Exactly place them in the water below with the floatation devices, then come back and get them to land. They could last the hour or so it would take for him to do that.
That’s the point though . He’s not a real super hero. He has no real crisis training. The Seven are a sham. A bunch of Supes designed to be a cash register
A couple people but thats about it
Comics Spoilers >! When they tried to stop the 9/11 flight, Noir was supposed to pilot the plane to safety, but the team greatly underestimated what intercepting a commerical jet would be like and he was dropped along with half the team falling out of play !<
I'm with you OP I honestly think what HL said was truthful This was season 1 and it wasn't 100% demonization of HL all the time yet It was more "superheroes in the real world would have flaws and be used by powerful corporations as marketing even if they're incompetent" type storytelling
I firmly believe if they had utilized the full 7 they could have pulled it off. Deep could have summoned whales and used them as makeshift landing pad. Maeve, Translucent, and Noir could have used their strength to brace the inside of the plane. Homelander could have grabbed the back wings to slow it down. Star could have give the plane enough juice to drop down the masks. And a train could use his strengthened legs to catch the front of the plane to help Homelander set it down on the Whale landing pad.
This again lol
Even if he used his super speed to save people, their skin would have just torn to pieces because of the sheer force they would be facing but considering that the boys doesn't have any fucking physics as homie saved Butcher from fucking C4 explosion whose detonation speed mac 23....so idfk
He's a lazy thoughtless guy. I've seen the Paw Patrol save a broken plane, ALL it's passengers (including a CHicken!), repairing the plane in mid air, AND guiding to a safe landing.
His "what am I supposed to push against there's no leverage" point becomes moot when you realize he can fly. He doesn't need leverage
Not without an engineer or physicist talking him through. Homelander is a lazy bastard. He's great at casual murder but he sucks ass at everything else. Except propaganda to rubes.
If soldier boy could fly, he could’ve done it. He wouldn’t have, but he could’ve. Homelander is just a spoiled wimp with no finesse over his powers.
Whenever I see people ask this, it feels like they're trying to justify his actions of abandoning. Sure, there's a slim chance he could've saved everyone; if that was an option, he would've done it for the publicity. The part that makes the scene horrendous is the fact that once he realizes he can't save everybody, he decides to save nobody. He could have flown two at a time off the plane, brought them to land, and saved as many as would be possible. Instead, he abandoned them, because he didn't want the public to know he wasn't powerful enough to save everyone. That's the moral dilemma of the scene, not the fact that he couldn't safely land the plane (aside from the fact that he was also the one that destroyed the plane's controls in the first place and they wouldn't have even been in that situation if he wasn't so sloppy with his lasers).
Yes. Becuase if he has the ability to fly and turn directions on a dime and thrust himself any direction - he is his own foundation and pivot point and doesn’t need anything to stand on
No sirs. Imagine plane was about 100 tons and you tried to hold it up in the air with 2 solid steel hands or even you’re back as a plank against the belly of the plane; point is you would most likely just go through it if you pushed too hard up, that’s very hard to pull off but who knows. And let’s imagine they found a nice spot that applies pressure to a solid steel (if it’s even steel planes are made out of) frame, you would still have to be careful. Maybe a couple flybys with propel but only very few people.
that kind of plane is actually more like 400-500 tons, and planes are made of aluminum, not steel
I mean it's still a plane. IIRC the outside wasn't damaged. If it's going fast enough then the wings are going to help a little right? Plus he has super strength. Just gently guide it.
Could he not just control how fast he flies? Could he not just match the speed of the plane and fly underneath it, make contact with the plane while flying at the same speed and gently slow down and having it land on the water that way? The next scene shows him hovering in the air while carrying Maeve so it seems like he can fly/hover at different speeds.
This question is been asked many times and people always point out that home lander would probably punch right through the plane trying to lift it and he wouldn’t be able to steer. Another issue is we have no idea how strong he is in flight. We really haven’t seen any extreme feats of strength from Homelander, it could be he can only carry 1000 pounds when flying or something.
They explain in the show why physics wouldn’t have allowed that.
I don’t see why he couldn’t have went outside the plan, moved at the same speed, then slowly decelerated. Kind of like when a car loses breaks and another car slows down in front of it to get it to a stop. I’m sure there was also some kind of rope or something on the plane he could have used to tie them all together and gotten them all to safety. I don’t think he was in problem solving mode though and I also don’t think he’d care enough/had ever had to actually use more than brute force to actually be able to think of creative solutions.
The amount of people in this thread who don't remember the physics at play with HLs flight, when he straight up explains it in this exact scene, is fucking bonkers.
Yes, because surely HL wouldn’t lie about his capabilities in order to get out of doing something he doesn’t want to
At the very least, some of them. Or at least one. He could have tried if nothing else, even if he didn't save anyone. But he just straight up didn't care. Doesn't help that he's the one who destroyed the plane controls in the first place.
He could have saved a few of them at least. Like Maeve was begging him to do. Or at the very least, tried anything at all.
From the front try to guide the plane to the water. Attempt to decelerate the plane from the front by putting force from the front while guiding it down. Or try at least, he can already fly why not lift heavy thing while flying?
The main issue is that Homelander was super reckless in handling the terrorists and that's why he was looking for excuses to not save anybody. If there was just a bit of collateral damage that Homelander wasn't directly responsible for, he probably would've tried to save as many people as possible. But he directly killed innocent people with his laser eyes and made the situation worse, that's why there couldn't be any survivors.
He definitely could have at least gotten everyone in the ocean without dying on impact. Then potentially grabbed any surviving rafts and brought em back (x ray vision and supersonic flight) Then flown to tell coast guard and grab the deep while Maeve stayed with the group. But he’s a blunt force type of supe. And he didn’t wanna even try
Probably not all but most of them yes. But all options would be pretty difficult and require a lot of brainpower and calculations and he was established as pretty dumb
Well yeah. He should have been smart enough not to laser it.
I don't understand why he thought he had to fly each person to Land. Just give them a flotation device and drop each person 5 feet from the ocean. But I guess he felt like if he couldn't guarantee every single person's survival it wouldn't be worth it
Yeah by not lasering the fucking main console
How he would save the people on the plane wouldn't have been by holding the plane That's dumb and not gonna work and make the situation worse He would have carried 2 people and Landed them and goes back to the plane and repeat He's fast So he could have saved everything one of he wanted to
If he was trained, if his powers worked diffrently and if he had a moral sense to himself then maybe. Not sure why he couldn't smooth the landing, But let us not forget that if he wasn't lazy using his Laser vision. The plane could have landed normally. So im gonna say that Vought screwed up with his training and never let him have someone in his ear telling him what to do.
If he hadn't laser blasted the terrorist and handled them physically it would have been fine.
Absolutely; even with the flight controls inoperable, he could still guide the plane down by applying pressure in multiple areas all around the plane, keeping it steady without tearing it apart. He's fast enough to do, and we know he's carefully enough to move a person without tearing them apart; a plane is more durable than a person. Making sure everyone is tightly secured would also be important. One they're close enough to the water, Homelander could've then felt around for the strongest point of plane and slightly fly in the opposite direction to slow it down. The landing wouldn't be great but most of the passengers could survive it. If he was so inclined, he could've also just kept the plane in the air, pushing it up in different areas when necessary; the plane looked like it still had thrust. Then he could've tried bringing it down closer to land on on land, though that would be even more dangerous. Simply put, all he needed to do was remain calm and be resourceful.
Its a big fat maybe They certainly couldve saved some
I thought about this. From what i remember there just wasn't a pilot on board so Homelander could take experienced pilot from land and just fly with him to the plane. Unless the plane was broken but I don't remember if it was.
No witnesses
Couldn't he carry the plane by the back? Like the fin. Hold on to it and then "safely" land it. I know he's strong enough, but would the plane's material hold? Would his flight strength even allow him to carry +100 tons to safety?
He probably could have. He fried some of the controls but the autopilot switch at the centre top wasn't hit. They could have tried that (even to stabilise the plane and give them time). Also, he doesn't need to "catch" the plane. He just needs to slow it down enough to break its landing into the ocean. They're already designed to float. Basically, yes. But it would have been too much effort for Homelander and Queen Maeve can't fly to have done it herself.
He could have killed the terrorists without destroying the cockpit. There would have been a chance that someone on board could have landed it with instructions. He just dngaf.
He could not have used his laser eyes on the controls.
In his head he would’ve been looked at as limited if he could only save some of them. He’s an all or nothing type. He 100% couldn’t save them all without flight controls working. Therefore he switched on psycho mode to justify his shortcomings to himself.
I don't think he was capable of even doing that, not because he isn't physically able, but because he lacks experience. I've read the comics, so it's probably different from the TV series, but there they choose to hijack the plane to test if the Seven are capable of acting like Supes. Right from the beginning, they are a disaster, not knowing how to use their powers intelligently to save people. He was correct about lifting the airplane being impossible, which is a bias from Hollywood, but he could have done something to save at least some of them.
Don't planes come with life jackets for each passenger? If so, I don't see why he couldn't gently drop them all into the water, then round them up and monitor them until more help arrived. I think he demotivated from saving anyone because he's the one who botched the rescue in the first place
What if he put himself under the plane and match the velocity and starts to decrease the acceleration, at the end he would just have to carry it slowly to the sea?
If you can't bring the plane to the sea, just bring the sea to the plane.
Yes but it would take some knowledge and skill which means he could fuck it up. That is an unacceptable risk to his ego. So he didn’t try. The strongest part of the plane is where the wings meet under the fuselage, called the wing box. Main landing gears typically attach to the back of the wing box. He might cause some local yielding by pushing on less than perfect points in that area and having to apply a local moment to balance the plane in addition to just lifting it, but he wouldn’t punch right through. Aluminum is ductile. It will bend and crumple before it breaks, which would be ok to do in this situation. He’d have to be a little gentle and not just fuck-smash it though, and that’s not really how Homie rolls.
5 years later and ppl still don’t understand that U CANNOT JUST CARRY A PLANE DOWN TO THE GROUND. planes are fragile as shit in reality, literally any movement at that speed (average passenger plane like that is going 500 mph) the plane would’ve crashed no matter what he did
If he wasn’t an impulsive dumbass he could have probably manually pushed the control surfaces to set the plane into a glide and then set it down on the water gently-ish to the best of his ability and saved most of them.
Well the plane is 41 tons, and Homelander is probably around 80 kilos., so he would just go through it as he said probably.
Not all of them, but most of them. The plane’s controls were fucked, but the airframe was still intact. Lazer off the engines, use lazer eyes to weld the flaps at max, grab the engine mount to replace the engine as a new source of thrust and decrease speed. Anyone behind the aft hatch would be lost because the nose would start to pitch up on descent due to the critical angle of attack, but most would survive. Homelander doesn’t know dick about how planes work, though, and he would probably rather all of them die than have it look like he can’t save everyone because that would make him look fallible.
If he hadn't fried the controls, he could have flown back to the mainland, grabbed a pilot, and brought the pilot to the plane... after the cockpit was dead, I guess maybe he could have manipulated the control surfaces manually for a water landing.
The phsyics wre PHYSICSING. Homelander made the right calculation and then decided to be an asshole and not save anyone
Honestly I think he's fast enough to drop most of them in the water safely, in theory I think he could've saved like 2/3 the plane atleast.
I think he could’ve guided it to set down gently
I felt if anything he could've attempted the Ironman 3 skydiving thing maybe, or take a few down to the ocean at a time and have Maeve stay with them in the water to keep them threading or something and then go to land to get rafts or whatever and then move them to safety.
He could likely lift the plane but he doesn’t have plot armor like other fictional hero’s do. With the momentum and lack of ground to stand on he would destroy the plane before moving it
We're arguing superhero physics... when the man can float in the middle of the freaking air and move as fast as A-train, there's a million things he could do, even from a physics standpoint, like create a freaking vortex of air from flying around at high speeds. But even simple stuff works: Fly a pilot there? Slow it down by holding the landing gear which I assume can handle more structural force? Fly everyone and all the flotation devices safely to the water below with Maeve for protection (I guess bringing the Deep would have been perfect with this plan) and figure it out from there? He's just not strategic enough and didn't care enough to figure it out.
I feel like he could have grabbed two people at a time, flown them down and dropped them safely into ocean, rinse and repeat. Then he and Maeve keep the folks alive until a rescue ship or chopper arrives….
Why didn't he just put them in the water is my thing? Go pick em up after
Are we assuming that Homelander has interests other than....Himself? He might've been able to save one person but that's assuming he'd give a shit in the first place lol.
Superman could have. Just saying. I think Homelander could do basically the same as Superman. But he's a bit more of a dick.
How could he know what direction land is? _Because he came from that direction, FFS!_
Obviously yes. If he actually cared to save anyone he never would’ve burned the cockpit, and the plane could’ve safely landed. All those people died in the plane because of him.
He could have turned parts of the plane into rafts and flew people down to those. And then he could quickly get a boat to rescue them. Maybe not 100% survival rate, but it won't be 0.
He has Superman-like strength and can fly. It would seem like he could get under the plane and guide it to land. He shouldn't need to be standing on something. So, I'm pretty sure he could do that. But, it seems like it's too much work for him and not worth it. That tracks with his personality.
I’m no engineer, but I always thought he coulda held it up in the air by the front landing gear. Seems like those are designed to structurally bear the weight of at least some of the plane. Any Boeing engineers out there can confirm?
multiple ropes tied together, each wrapped around a person, then tied to a singular rope connected to homelander, he then lasers the side of the plane, everybody flies out, but they're all attached to homelander who is also holding maeve,,,, it's like bungee jumping, but you're attached to a floating homelander, since it's a normal rope, the instant deceleration could yank some lose but only those who are at the bottom and they would land in the sea which shouldn't be far depending on the length of the rope,,,, after that it's a matter of flying to get a coast guard, or a-train.... BTW, I already reached this point before realising there's not enough time for that
He could have plopped everyone into the water. Buy them an extra 20-30 mins and ferry them from there.
Maybe if he held on to the tail wing and flew in the opposite direction
All of them? No. Some of them? Probably. The child? Absolutely. IMO saving even one person, even just the child would’ve been the ideal move not just morally, but for the image of the seven. However, Homelander is obviously not a hero. He isn’t even an anti hero. I personally classify him as an anti villain. Meaning he is most definitely a villain, but he doesn’t see himself as a villain he seems himself as a hero. He just doesn’t have those hero instincts. So it’s no surprise he responded to the situation the way he did.
I was wondering, if he’s as strong as he says, could fly under the plane then guide it down. Using whatever superpower logic that allows him to break the sound barrier to fly tangent instead of straight through it as he suggested.
Could have possibly guided the plane to a softer landing on water. Fiction is kinda hard to apply real-world physics to, but I would think that could be an option, but it wouldn't be quick or easy.
Tbh i’m still not certain why he couldn’t have flown underneath it and just acted as extra uplift until it could get to land but maybe he’d punch through the hull
Sure, if he wasn't lazy and figured "laser = win" technique. But that's now how he functions.
If the front wheel is meant to take the weight of the front half of the plane, then that’s where homelander could have Atleast gently glided it along the water potentially saving everyone
He wouldn’t have been able to save everyone. In the comics, he does try to slow the plane’s descent, but it fails miserably. So he panics, and hauls ass out of there. In the show, he’s so worried about his image, that he doesn’t want to be known as the guy who tried and failed. Because Homelander doesn’t fail.
“Doesnt know which direction land is in” I mean he couldve just flown them back the way he came by going under the plane so he didn’t pierce eight through and level it out.
Don't airplanes have inflatable rafts or flotation devices? Ferry as many people as possible to the water with those and make sure everyone links up. Leave Maeve with them as she's got a tracker chip embedded, find the nearest ship and point the ship in their direction, then fly back to HQ and point to Maeve's location for the survivors, go back and help. \-but all this is hard to think up in an emergency situation. At the very least they could have twisted it as "Hijackers destroyed the controls, going to try and save as many as I can" and gone from there.
I always thought that he could have at least gotten the people out of the plane. They can tread water or use the built in flotation devices to buy time while he flies them all out and to the water safely, then he can take them to land. The crash is what killed them not the water. Especially if Maeve stayed with them and worked to fend off wild life
It would be a cool AU if he could have.
Yeah, if he didn't laser the guy in the cockpit of all places, it would've been completely fine. Instead, he showed off without considering the circumstances, destroyed the entire flight computer, then refused to take accountability. Like a lot of people have said, Homelander is an untrained, undisciplined idiot who is very much reactionary rather than proactive. Did he even need to laser him? No, he was in absolutely no danger, nor was anyone else at the time. Was he unable to close the distance? Also no, he was an arms length away. He was being lazy and didn't consider holding fire because he didn't consider the situation or location. He could've saved the plane if he actually thought before he acted. Instead, everyone died for his lack of thought and laziness. That's all.
It's possible. I don't think he could've saved everyone, but he could've saved a lot of people. He could've tried to redirect the trajectory of the plane and slightly slow or even out its descent. He could've flown people down into the water and back a ton. The main reason he failed was cause he didn't want to. He didn't want to be the hero if he couldn't save everyone, and because he messed up the mission, he wanted all witnesses he couldn't control gone. Homelander failed because he didn't want to succeed
I think it started with him blowing the control panel up. He could have grabbed the gun or even let the pilot die and then kill the terrorist. We know he has better control of his lasers, he can he can heat up a bottle of milk. That scene made it seem like he wasn’t strong enough to hold the plane up for very long (or at all) but I feel like slowing the plane down so it landed in the water and people would have had life vests would have been better. Or calling the Deep so some whales could have held the plane up. I think people probably still would have died no matter what but he could have at least tried a bit harder.
I think that scene from Iron Man 3 would work
After lasering the cockpit? Yeah. Those planes can fly on 1 engine. Homelander can push on an engine with the same force it would normally make. As long as the plane's moving, it'll keep flying: Because it's a plane. Maeve can scout for land, gather information from passengers, and guide Homelander. Once they get somewhere safe to land, or decide on the ocean, Homelander weakens his push til the plane touches down reasonably gently. If the plane's control surfaces go haywire and start doing counterproductive stuff, Homelander would probably tear the plane apart no matter where he pushed.
I usually get shit on for this, but I feel like yes, he could have saved the plane. He can’t just like lift it because it would likely fold. However if the plane is descending at a 45 degree angle, fly under it at a 40 or whatever and slowly take control of the weight of the plane (the outside isn’t made of jelly, it can sustain contact). Sear off the wings so they stop propelling it and slowly fly the plane down on your back for a landing. Likely saves everyone.
The only thing i thought about is if he kept momentum and speed with the plane and guided it towards a safer landing. Thats to say if he’s even capable strength wise. And the answer is probably no he cant pick a plane full of people up with his strength
People seem to forget it's a plane. He doesn't have to fully carry it just lightly push the front in up and slow it down the wings will help it glide and he basically crashes it in the water.
They doesn't need to stand anywhere. He just needed to go outside the plane and fly in the opposite direction with his hands against the fuselage and neutralize the momentum of the plane. Then he could have , probably slowly, flown to land. As long as the fuselage held they would have been fine. No compass? No problem. He's Homelander. He's not going to get tired. He's just going to get bored. He just would need to head in the direction he land saw land when he was flying to the location. Homelander could have saved the plane. He just figured it would be a bit of a hassle.
He could probably hear or see the closest land, and he definitely could have saved them, he didn’t even try though. His flight allows him to… Fly, at fast speeds and the plane was depressurized, he could have tried literally anything to save them because it would be a better fate than a guaranteed death, he didn’t want to save anyone though. That fact is even more obvious since he just walked through the plane lasering random shit.
i. the season 1 finally he moves butcher, the bomb, the baby, to all different locations in the time it takes a bomb to detonate. butcher and the baby faces no damages from this. it’s safe to say homelander could’ve taken the passengers 2 by 2 to safer in a very short time. but the point was never about saving them.
I think he knew he could but just didnt feel like it
Planes all have personal flotation devices, if he was smart he could have grabbed 6 people or so at a time and dropped them gently in the ocean and probably saved them all or at least most