When Heath is talking to McVey at the side of the jet before taking off, Heath takes McVey's helmet from the edge of the cockpit and throws it in his lap. In the next shot, as Heath is getting into his seat, McVey takes his helmet from the edge of the cockpit again.
As the airliner is landing at the Air Force base, the sky is dark and the scenes of passengers exiting the plane down the chute show that it's nighttime. But the shot of one fire truck rushing to the plane has a twilight sky.
Right at the beginning, when McVey walks into Base Operations, he's wearing a Navy uniform and white sailor's hat. The hat is worn improperly. Here is a quote from navy.mil--The hat "...must be worn squarely on the head with the lower front edge approximately 1 ½ inch above the eyebrows and not crushed, bent or rolled". McVey is breaking 2 rules...it's sitting back on his head and the brim is "bent"/"rolled". Then a Chief speaks up about D Heath's previous collision. His hat is also worn against regulations--too far back and cocked to the side.
When Mike picks up the phone in Kitty's apartment to make a call, the phone has no cord.
The Flight attendant tells the passengers the plane will land tilted forward and they will need to climb upwards to the tail... but she was never told the nose gear wouldn't lower.
The air traffic controllers had both aircraft on radar flying on direct opposite course towards each other with unknown altitudes. They had one aircraft climb and the other descend thereby causing the crash. They should have had them maintain their current altitude and immediately had both planes turn right (or left) to gain horizontal separation by flying away from each other until each could get correct altimeter settings to verify their altitude. Then they could re-establish their required altitudes above ground (AGL).
The airliner is supposed to be a DC-7, but when it crash-lands, the #1 engine has a 3-bladed prop. The DC-7 had 4-bladed props. Therefore, the airliner has to be a DC-6.
At the 3 minute mark as the camera pulls away from Rhonda Fleming in bed a shadow from the camera rig moves to the left of her.
In El Paso, Dale tells McVey they will be flying non-stop to Washington, D.C. - a flying distance of about 1,720 miles. However, the Lockheed T-33 they are flying in has a range of only 1,275 miles.