I know I've talked about it to death elsewhere on the boards, but I am not kidding when I say you have to check out
Air Crash Investigation, which also goes by
Mayday or
Air Disasters in some regions, airing on the Smithsonian Channel.
It's not exactly heavy on the action (though it has its moments), but for drama and suspense, I dare say the reenactments of actual events on the show are far more interesting and compelling than any fictional stuff. The best ones are edited and paced to deliver maximum emotional impact. Just watch the moment of collision in the
Deadly Crossroads episode on the Uberlingen disaster, and you'll see what I mean. The immediate aftermath of the Aeromexico airliner crash in Cerritos in the
Out of Sight episode is another amazing (and appalling) example. It also helps that the reenactment scenes are surprisingly realistic, and the CGI effects are pretty good too. Whichever outfit produces these things is actually putting some money into the budget.
Fortunately, not every episode features death and widespread destruction. My favorite shows include the legendary "Gimli Glider" incident, and
Nowhere to Land, where an airliner without engine power, piloted by a man
with one eye, landed safely on a levee outside New Orleans.
Please note, however, that the first one-third to two-thirds of the show deals with the accident itself, while the rest of the show goes into figuring out why it all went down. Which is probably not your jam if you're into analytical stuff.
BTW I think it's fun to see how the actors depicting the pilots and passengers in the reenactments compare to their real-life counterparts in the interview segments. I also wonder if any of the people have met the folks who played them?
The first three seasons are available to download off of Amazon for $1.99 an eppie.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/...ie=UTF8&redirect=trueOr, if you're a super-cheapass like me, you can also catch 'em on YouTube.
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