Flightplan(2005)

Plot Summary

• Kyle Pratt (Jodie Foster) is a propulsion engineer based in Berlin, Germany. Her husband David (John Benjamin Hickey) died from falling off the roof of an avionic manufacturing building, and now Kyle and her 6-year-old daughter Julia (Marlene Lawston) are going back to NY. They fly aboard an Elgin 474 plane, which Kyle helped design (loosely based on the Airbus A380 with the aircraft's classification number being similar to the Boeing 747) operated by Aalto Airlines. After falling asleep for a few hours, Kyle wakes to find that Julia is missing. After trying to remain calm at first, she begins to panic, and Captain Marcus Rich (Sean Bean) is forced to conduct a search, while sky marshal Gene Carson (Peter Sarsgaard) monitors her. Julia's boarding pass is missing, her seat is registered empty, Flight attendant Stephanie (Kate Beahan) tells Kyle that the boarding gate has no record of her boarding, & none of the passengers remember seeing Julia. Kyle accuses two Arab passengers of stalking her daughter the night before, resulting in a fight breaking out and Kyle being handcuffed.Marcus refuses cargo to be searched due to risk of injury. He suspects Kylie of insanity due to loss of her husband. One flight attendant Stephanie is exceptionally unsympathetic. Because of her increasingly erratic, panicked behavior, air marshal Gene Carson is ordered by Marcus to guard and handcuff her.Captain Rich receives a message from a Berlin hospital that Julia died with her father, and is convinced that Kyle, unhinged by her husband's and daughter's deaths, imagined bringing Julia on board. The increasingly erratic Kyle is confined to her seat, where a therapist, Lisa (Greta Scacchi), consoles her. Kyle doubts her own sanity until she notices the heart Julia drew in the condensation on the window next to her seat.Kyle asks to use the bathroom, where she climbs into the overhead crawl space and sabotages the aircraft's electronics. In the ensuing chaos, she rides a dumbwaiter to the lower freight deck and unlocks David's casket, suspecting Julia to be inside, but finds only her husband's body. Carson escorts her to her seat in handcuffs, and explains that the flight is making an emergency stopover at Goose Bay Airport, in the Canadian province of Newfoundland and Labrador, where she will be taken into custody.Kyle makes a final plea to Carson that she needs to search the plane upon landing. Carson considers for a moment, then "goes to speak to the captain," against flight attendant Stephanie's command (they are landing), leaving the audience to momentarily believe he is sympathetic. Instead, he sneaks back into the freight deck to remove two small explosives and a detonator concealed in David's casket. He then climbs down to a part of the avionics section, revealing Julia is sleeping (presumably drugged) with her coat and backpack that no one could find. He attaches the explosives to the side of the platform and arms them.At this point, it is revealed that Carson, Stephanie, and the coroner in Berlin (Christian Berkel) are the antagonists and part of a conspiracy. Carson tells the captain that Kyle is a hijacker and is threatening to blow up the aircraft with explosives hidden in the not X-Rayed casket unless the airline transfers $50,000,000 into a bank account. It is revealed that the conspirators killed Kyle's husband and abducted Julia in order to frame Kyle. They abducted Julia to cause Kyle to unlock the casket Carson tells an unnerved Stephanie that he intends to blow up the aircraft's avionics section, killing the unconscious Julia, and leave Kyle dead with the detonator in her hand.After making an emergency landing at Goose Bay Airport in Goose Bay, Labrador, the passengers exit the aircraft as the tarmac is surrounded by U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) agents. As the captain is leaving, Kyle runs to speak to him with Carson in tow. The captain demands she give up her charade, revealing Carson's deception. Quickly playing the role of hijacker, Kyle demands that Carson stay on board and the crew disembark.As soon as the plane's door closes, Kyle knocks Carson unconscious with a fire extinguisher, handcuffs him to a rail, and takes the detonator from his pocket. Stephanie comes out of hiding and Kyle screams "she's in avionics, isn't she?" Carson quickly regains consciousness and fires at Kyle with a concealed gun, sending her running. He chases after Kyle shooting, until she locks herself in the cockpit. He reveals his conspiracy to talk her out. She opens a hatch door to the upper level and throws out a binder to fool him. Carson hears the upstairs thud and leaves. Kyle exits and encounters a guilt-ridden Stephanie slapping her palm with a large flashlight. Kyle talks her down and punches her out. Stephanie panics and flees the plane, abandoning Carson who looks on.Kyle during this time searches avionics and finally finds the unconscious Julia. Kyle finds the unconscious Julia but Carson arrives, revealing that he murdered David in order to smuggle the explosives inside his casket and gagged and dumped Julia into the food bin, believing that neither the passengers nor the crew would care enough to notice. Kyle escapes with Julia into the aircraft's non-combustible hold as Carson shoots at her. She detonates the explosives, killing Carson and damaging the aircraft's landing gear, but she and Julia emerge unscathed as the crew realize she had been telling the truth all along.The next morning, in the passenger waiting section of the airport, Captain Rich apologizes to a seated Kyle holding Julia in her arms as Stephanie is led away by FBI agents for her crimes, while another agent informs them that the Berlin mortuary director has also been arrested, adding that they are tracking down another accomplice who erased Julia's record from the flight manifest. Kyle silently redeems herself by carrying Julia through the crowd of passengers who realize the truth. As one of the Arab passengers assists Kyle in loading her luggage onto a waiting van, Julia awakens and sleepily asks "Are we there yet?" as they drive away.

Storyline

• The husband of aviation engineer Kyle Pratt has just died in Berlin, and now she is flying back to New York with his coffin and their six-year-old daughter Julia. Three hours into the flight Kyle awakens to find that Julia is gone. It's a big double-decker plane, so the very concerned mother has a lot of territory to cover in order to find her daughter. She takes matters into her own hands as she fights to discern the truth. — Anthony Pereyra {hypersonic91@yahoo.com} Berlin-based David Pratt has just died from a fall off his apartment building's roof; it's unclear whether his death was accidental or a suicide. His wife, aircraft-propulsion engineer Kyle Pratt, and their 6-year-old daughter Julia Pratt are in emotional turmoil as they fly his body back from Berlin to New York for the burial. Aboard the Alto Airlines jumbo-jet flight, Julia goes missing while Kyle naps. Julia has a tendency to wander off so at first Kyle thinks this is just another instance and she'll be found easily, but she is proven wrong, and nobody remember ever seeing young Julia Pratt on board, including the flight attendants. As they look for her, the entire flight crew and Kyle learn that there is no record of her ever having been on board - no boarding pass, no name on the official manifest, and no extra person on the official head count conducted by the flight attendant prior to the supposed disappearance. Further information from Berlin comes to light: that Julia could never have been on board. Kyle is certain that someone on board has taken her and that someone with the airline who could alter official flight records is also involved in her disappearance. Kyle's increasing rantings put her at direct odds with the inconvenienced passengers, the flight attendants (who previously admitted that they have their favorite and not-so-favorite passengers, and now Kyle is in the latter category), and, most specifically, Captain Rich and Sky Marshal Carson, whose foremost goal is the safety of all passengers. With a detailed knowledge of aircraft design, Kyle believes she has an upper hand in finding Julia if only someone would believe her and let her search. Or is the trauma from David's death playing games with her mind so that she's searching for someone who no longer exists....or ever did? — Huggo A grieving mother (Kyle) and daughter (Julia) are flying in a plane she helped create, from Berlin to New York with the daughter's very recently-deceased father in a casket below deck. Kyle awakens from a nap and Julia has vanished. The passengers and flight crew don't recall her boarding the plane. Will Kyle find her daughter or will she start to accept the truth? — pinkustink12 Kyle has just gone through the trauma of losing her husband who jumped off the roof of their apartment building in Berlin. Now she and her 6-year-old daughter Julia are flying his casket back to the United States on a plane she helped design. About 3 hours into the flight, Kyle wakes up from a nap to find Julia missing, and no one remembers ever seeing her. The flight crew begin to search the plane until the Captain comes back with information that when her husband jumped, he took Julia with him. As Kyle fights to discern the truth, she takes matters into her own hands. — The M Continuum