The airline pilots were right - there were so many things that were laughably wrong, especially virtually everything about the flight/crash scene and the NTSB hearing, that it was kind of hard to take the rest of the movie seriously, although Denzel Washington did a terrific job portraying an alcoholic in deep denial. That part of the movie was excellent.
But (this is stuff I learned from working at an airline in a technical capacity):
The captain doesn't normally perform the exterior preflight, especially when it's raining. That's the FO's job.
At most airlines everybody goes by their first names - none of this "sir" stuff.
The airplane itself was a weird and nonexistent mutant mishmash of MD-88/90 and CRJ 900 and God knows what else. Maybe that was to keep the manufacturers of real airplanes from suing them. The MD series doesn't have winglets, and the cockpit instruments kept changing.
The captain always picks up and reviews his/her flight plan at the gate before boarding. If this captain had really been that drunk the gate agent would have noticed and called their airline. All airlines now have random drug/alcohol testing, and this guy would have been busted ages ago at a real airline.
No pilot would have tried to fly through bad weather at high speed - in fact, you are supposed to slow to maneuvering speed in turbulence to avoid damaging the airplane.
Real first officers aren't subservient nebbishes like that one. They are fully qualified in the airplane and are expected to take command if it becomes necessary. A real FO would have refused to fly with that captain the minute he suspected he was drunk, and wouldn't have whined and panicked in an emergency.
The supposed malfunction was similar to the real one that took down an Alaska Airlines MD-80 about 12 years ago. But a damaged jackscrew wouldn't cause engine failures! In the movie. both engines actually caught fire for no apparent reason. Flying through heavy rain could cause an engine flameout, but not fires.
When the engines inexplicably caught fire, the captain told the FO to pull the fire handles and put them out, which he
did. A couple of big problems here: Pulling a fire handle shuts off fuel to the engine, so the engine stops running. In the movie the engines kept running and in fact the FO was directed at one point to increase power - after having pulled both fire handles, which would have shut down the engines. The engines kept running until just before the crash landing. Also, to put out a fire you have to pull the handle and then turn it to discharge the fire extinguisher, which they never did.
Another thing that happens when both fire handles are pulled is that the engine generators are taken off line. This means there is no electrical power to anything other than a few emergency instruments and lights. In the movie all of the flight instruments kept working, which would not have been possible.
If the airplane was pitching down uncontrollably because of a jammed horizontal stabilizer (the supposed scenario), rolling inverted wouldn't have solved the problem. First, they were very close to the ground, and you always lose altitude initially in a roll so they probably would have crashed. Even if they hadn't crashed, once they were inverted the jammed stabilizer would have caused them to climb, which they didn't. Then, when they rolled back upright they would have immediately pitched down again, and crashed.
And then there was the NTSB hearing, which was perfectly ridiculous, having been treated like a trial, which they are not.
Sorry for the extended nerdy rant, but it bugs the heck out of me when movie makers completely go off the rails and make up facts unnecessarily in order to dramatize their story line. This story could have been told just as well if they'd paid attention to their technical consultants and not left people who know something about aviation rolling their eyes and losing interest in the rest of the movie. If you saw this movie in a theatre and heard people laughing, chances are they were airline pilots.
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