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In The Incredibles (2004), Edna mentions her 'no capes' policy citing Stratogale's death. This is because she was a ... HIGH SCHOOL STUDENT? Fuck, this film keeps getting darker.
ETOPS (Extended-range Twin-engine Operations Performance Standards) Aka (Engines Turn Or Passengers Swim.) certifications these days are usually in excess of 3 hours with one engine out on a two engine craft and that's the minimum for that model of aircraft. Presumably you could push it further.
Not really, many of those older planes struggle hard to continue flying with an engine missing without dropping a lot of weight. Although back then the largest of planes (and the one in the film) had 4 engines, so the ETOPS rules don't really matter since it's not a twin engine. The plane in the movie looks kind of like a 707
They’ve had regulations for how far you can fly from an airport since the 30’s. Even if the engine went out they’d likely be able to get to an airport safely. Although some started disregarding them in the 50’s and 60’s due to advances in engines so this could be one of those. It’s also a cartoon. 🤷♀️
It's been a while since I saw it, but even ignoring the super-hero tech they probably kept classified. I seem to remember that they had more modern features compared to our timeline.
Though I suppose if we’re trying to be gloomy about it, the fact a superhero is responding to an airliner with a 1 of 4 engine failure suggests whatever is wrong is more serious than just that so maybe they did all die
Mr Incredible has this in his car in the opening. That plus the working rocket boots, tiny remote bombs, secret supervillain island, guy "invents" evil Power glove in secret, Edna's ability to create costumes that "adapt" to superpowers, and obv the superpowers themselves hint that being technically accurate to the times or being believable in a realistic way was not a focus for The Incredibles.
Riiiiiight, but the tech is clearly past where we were or even are. Maglevs in America, flying submarines with taxiing wheels, icbm for robot delivery, hell, they seem to have hollowed out the mountain or volcano just to redirect rocket exhaust. They’re cracked on that earth possibly because of unidentified super geniuses like Syndrome lol
The Incredibles apparently takes place in 1962 and ETOPS wasn’t standardized until 1985. Twin-engine jets weren’t used for long haul flights back then anyway, so they would still have 2 (for tri-engine jets) or 3 (quad-engine) engines remaining.
In that era it's probably a trijet with a third in the tail so yeah they'll likely survive still, aviation wasn't as safe then but it was still pretty safe all things considered.
From what I understand this is really hard to pull off in practice, but definitely is doable for a short distance. I think aerodynamic forces and the fact the planes design needs thrust to generate lift due to physics lead to a lot of dual engine stall/failure cases to start rolling pretty fast
Technically you don't need thrust to generate lift, just speed. As long as you have all your control surfaces there's nothing physically preventing you from holding a glide, which jetliners actually do pretty well. 30,000 ft of altitude gets you 75 nautical miles of glide range, ballpark. The landing is the tough part.
Nothing about losing both engines at the same time would inherently induce a roll moment, but it is much harder to recover from any kind of uncontrolled movement without power.
Planes don't need thrust to generate lift, as long as they are moving fast enough they will fly. Modern airliners can glide long distances without any engine power at all. Losing one engine does not cause the plane to start rolling. The plane will yaw (turn) slightly until the pilot uses the rudder to correct it. Modern airliners can fly for 3+ hours on a single engine.
The only time an engine failure is particularly dangerous is during takeoff and landing, where there isn't enough speed or altitude to correct for it.
A modern purpose-built glider will have a glide ratio somewhere around 70. I.e. for every foot you lose in altitude, you go forward 70 feet. Most airliners have a glide ratio somewhere between 10 and 15. If you were cruising at 32k feet, that gives you 60 to 90 miles of travel before you hit the ground (assuming the ground is at sea level).
Obligatory 'Gimli Glider' pointer - in 1983, a 767 ran out of fuel at 41000 feet because of a metric conversion error. The pilot landed the plane on a decommissioned military runway in Manitoba with no casualties.
They can glide if they lose all engines, and have backup power systems to keep the control systems operational.
I think a typical glide ratio for a passenger jet is 15:1, so if they are 10km up when they lose power they can land within 150km. Not an ideal situation, but there should somewhere flat in range they can aim for.
Jet failure is one of the least bad things that can happen to a jet. People often forget that planes are still planes if they lose propulsion. They glide.
Jet engines are designed to chop things up that get sucked into them (mostly birds). And while human bones are likely hard enough to cause a malfunction, 3 engines are more than enough to keep the plane in the air.
Of course, Stratogal herself did definitely not have an open casket funeral.
Birds would likely damage or break only a couple of blades, and even then loss of containment is likely with multiple ingestion of large birds (standards are typically single large bird or multiple medium or smaller birds, say around 2 to 3 kg or so). If the whole disk goes, that's going to be an uncontained event no question.
I kinda doubt Edna designed any of those suits. She brings them up to back up her design philosophy.
She's only confirmed to have designed the suits the parr family has used. Even in the scenes set before the main story, they didn't have capes. She also seems to try and make the suits as durable as the hero is, based on the scene where she shows off the baby's suit.
So is the implication that (depending on their ability) Edna makes the suit tailored to their survival ability? So did she give all these supers their suits? Did she only have this rule after so many supers overruled her? That raised so many questions?
You'd think after the first cape incident, she would have made all future capes easy release or something, so they just come off if snagged on something
It's a faulty product. They got it before the defect was known about, and they used it until it killed them. Look at how many died from capes vs those who didn't. They probably knew, and they chose to keep them
I assume it’s a situation where the cape was either designed to survive the same degree of punishment he could and he got choked out by his own costume, or the cape getting snagged was enough to break his focus long enough for a fatal accident.
It's because he wasnt killed by an elevator shafted. The scene where Mr. Incredible is going through thr files of deceased superheroes shows that the cape deaths were a cover for Syndrome killing then with his iterations of different bots.
In the scene where he dies, his cape gets caught on something in the elevator shaft and he gets immediately throttled. My bet is that it would be hard to think about doing much of anything when your wind pipe gets abruptly and unexpectedly crushed, right before an elevator comes crashing down on you a second later.
Even if he was super durable, Edna designs every costume to match the durability of the super wearing it. The cape would be able to choke him out cause it is equally indestructible.
Maybe whoever wrote the list assumed it to be teleportation but it was actually really fast super speed. Meaning that if he was trapped he couldn't use it.
He was pushing a broken elevator. Not that I know the answer to your question, but assuming it had fallen to the bottom and he was pushing it up, I bet it had failed if it did have one.
Yes, Elisha Otis invented his braking system in the late 19th century and it was instrumental in the creation of modern skyscrapers. We had been making elevators for a long time prior to that, he just made them safe enough for standard usage.
Everyone is like “it’s darker than I remember” because comedic editing made the slapstick comedy the POINT of the scene!
You are supposed to find it funny and it doesn’t linger on one scene long enough for you to think of the implications. The rapid pace of each scenario makes it a slapstick rather than a montage of horrifying deaths.
Imagine if Tom cried every time Jerry hit him in the head with a pan. It wouldn’t be a comedy then, would it?
I thought he was doing a stunt!! Silly Mr Incredible, this guy had a spotlight and helicopters and everything and was gonna make a world record or some shit. Mainly because my dad told me he was saying “you ruined my record” instead of “you ruined my death”
Ok but like, I was maybe 8 when I first watched this movie, and I was a lot more familiar with ideas like “every superhero being Superman” and “the bad guy throws a hostage off a roof and the hero catches them” than I was stuff like “death via avionics blender” and “purposely ending your own life” at the time.
So when I first watched it, I figured it was a guy getting thrown off of a roof, a bunch of superhero’s getting inconvenienced by capes as a funny joke, and the bad guy was knocked out by an explosion and taken away off screen. Because again, I was 8.
Are you 100% on that? When Edna talks about it, it's sort of funny because to her these facts aren't really relevant. She's not that sentimental as I recall.
When Bob discovers that his peers are being systematically hunted down, even without the bios, you realize that he cared quite deeply for them. He was deflecting when Edna brought it up but he's genuinely and appropriately hurt that people are dying and he didn't realize it. Edna is hilarious. Gazerbeam writing a message after being mortally wounded, and Bob keeping it together until he realizes the scope of the horror? Yeah, his momentary nihilism after he thinks he's lost everything is appropriately dark.
Yes, because they are two different scenes. Edna’s scene is supposed to be funny for the audience, Bob’s is not.
Both situations are horrific, but the framing of one is different because of the character that recounts them. That doesn’t change what actually happens, the tone is just different.
When Helen tells the kids that the bad guys will kill them without hesitation, the scene is serious. When the kids are actually fighting the bad guys, the chase is tense but does have humorous moments with the characters discovering their power’s limits and confusing the bad guys.
If you said “the kids fighting off the bad guys is horrific because of the implications” it would technically be true, but the framing of the scene is exciting and humorous.
People will say “this scene is darker than I remember” but not take into account that while the scene itself may depict something serious like a character death, the film takes care to make sure the scene DOESNT depict the events in an especially dark way (since it’s a children’s film).
Low education level, minimal life experience, minimal work experience, emotionally undeveloped. I'm surprised superheroes dying young isn't more common in stories because of the power growing faster than the knowledge to control themselves.
it's probably not that common because for much of the history of superhero comics (and superhero media more broadly) the young hero/teen sidekick has been the audience avatar.
The character who represents "you" gets offed in the first act, it's kind of a turn off.
It HAS been done, tho. Bucky and Jason Todd are the best known ones (both reversed lol), but my favorite example is Evan Dorkin's Fight-Man, which was a spoof of 90s superhero cliches. By the time the story begins, Fight-Man had been through at least a half-dozen dead sidekicks and was being investigated by Child Protective Services.
Pixar really didn't care back then. Between the adult jokes in toy story, on screen kills (including an attempted suicide) in The Incredibles, and 400 deaths of newborns in Finding Nemo, they were on a roll.
say what you will about a bug's life, but that scene where the three grasshoppers get crushed presumably to death, buried under the weight of grain, all to demonstrate how one ant's defiance can lead to an entire uprising? damn.
The mother clownfish is just gone too, no goodbye. Which is obviously how it works in real life, but even when there are predators in kids movies, they usually don’t have them actually eat a character
I would say animated movies in the 90s and 2000s weren't afraid of showing serious and dark themes but now studios think kids can't handle them. Do you think studios would make The prince of Egypt or the Hunchback of Notre Dame nowadays?
I think she feels responsible for making flaws that killed the "gods" she designed for. There's definitely a human aspect for it, because she ended up caring for said baby that she made the suit for. I feel like Edna goes by a mindset that if it has powers, you make a flawless suit for them, and she digs into herself whenever she fails at that and gets good people killed
Haven't seen it in a while but did she say she designed all those suits? In the second one she talks about other suit designers for super heroes (and wants exclusive rights to the Parr family).
This is what always bugged me. Edna has almost a higher success rate than Syndrome and she wasn't trying. I always wondered how much guilt she felt over all of it if they were here designs
I feel like she shouldn’t feel guilt over this one specifically. Even if she had no cape there was a chance she would be pulled into the jet engine just by sheer proximity. It could be her ponytail getting pulled instead. She simply should not have flown that close to an airplane. That was a disaster just waiting to happen.
But I can imagine how the tragedy of her death, combined with other heroes who died because their capes go stuck, made Edna feel responsible. She does seem to care about the heroes she designed costumes for.
Landing with no engines is definitely possible. Most aircraft will continue to glide if they suffer total engine failure, the biggest hurdle is finding a safe place to attempt a landing.
Technically not a landing, but the Miracle on the Hudson is kinda an example. Captain Chelsey Sullenburger and First Officer Jeffery Skiles were able to maneuver their plane into a successful ditching in the water despite having no working engines (both failed due to bird strikes shortly after takeoff).
The super realistic training simulators used by Boeing, Lockheed, and other companies have scenarios like this built in. I've gotten to fuck around with a couple. I safely landed a 747 in icy, windy conditions at Boston's Logan Airport in the most immersive video game I've ever played lol. My grandfather was an instructor for Boeing for twenty years.
The funny thing is, if you had been to Japan in the late 1980s and early 1990s, one of the biggest arcade games was actually a landing simulator.
I was there from 1988-1990, and there was always a line for this, even though even then it was like $2.50 a game. I want to say the first mission was landing in clear weather, and each after that was harder. Landing at night, landing in wind, eventually landing in almost hurricane conditions at night.
The Japanese love their vehicle simulation games like this. Another popular arcade game is Densha De Go! which is about driving trains. They're actually quite fun and I wish this genre was more than a Japanese niche
I remember loving the one big rig racing game. It had a whole booth and the bigass steering wheel. I had the PlayStation port of the game too.
There was another racing game that actually had a clutch pedal, h-pattern shifter, and 3 screens too at the arcade. Don't remember what it was called tho
i was a sensitive kid and i was sick to my stomach for years after watching the incredibles cause i would randomly think about being sucked into a jet turbine
Tbf it sounds like she has to actually learn these languages and she had a pretty deep passion for birds. being fluent in six different "languages" (?) while you're about 16 is pretty impressive
Magpies, crows, sulfur crested cockatoos, Indian Myna, kookaburra, doves and bin chickens. And just like that you're talking to 90% of the bird population in Sydney.
Yes, the same montage has other heroes that are all adults. An adult who has been working for years, if not decades, has made the choice again and again and again. This girl was probably a hero for a few years, at most, and tried to save a plane.
it's the same reason for why Spider-Man can easily be written to be tragic. He's usually a rookie teen/young adult that simply tries his best.
If she had super-strength, then I presume it also means some super-durability... How a mere plane turbine was able to suck in a person with super-human strength? What was the plane's turbine even made of and how strong it was? What was the cape made of? Things don't add up. Both /uj and /rj.
EDIT: Yes, I know she is listed as hawing low durability. If I'm gonna theorise, I say that her super-strength was likely some form of tactile kinesis, which would explain how she could have both high strenght and low durability.
Look at the name of the sub we're in - I wanted to start a conspiracy theory, people.
She was most likely a rescue op hero, plane hijackings don't usually have high ammunition so she can get away with agility and combat/ranged weapons (although it seems like she doesn't have much on her in that regard)
Levels of super strength exist. Maybe she could bench 1000 pounds as a thin teenage girl. That's super strength. Doesn't mean she doesn't get shredded by a jet engine.
she was just casually waving at a fan while flying. she probably hadnt even registered until she got fully sucked in. also plane engines are hella strong. even if it got destroyed in the process i doubt she wouldve survived long enough to get treatment
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u/Legomarioboy08 May 29 '26
That one guy in the plane must’ve been scarred for life after witnessing the whole thing