Hollywood is showing a lot of love for Denzel Washington in "Flight", nominating him for both an Oscar and a Golden Globe. In the movie, Washington's character, pilot Whip Whitaker, is forced to roll the plane on its back and fly upside-down to avoid disaster. However is it really possible to fly a plane like that? Not for very long, according to experts interviewed by CNN.

The film "enjoyed a bit of artistic license," says Larry Goodrich, a pilot with 32 years of experience who was used as a consultant on the movie. Goodrich, who has trained pilots to fly MD-88s, a model similar to the plane in the film, told director Robert Zemeckis "...you can turn an airplane like this over, but it's not going to fly like this very long. It's gonna go down."

Boeing, which owns the MD-80 series of airliners, weighed in on the subject as well. "The MD-80 cannot sustain inverted flight," the company told the network. "The MD-80, as with all commercial airliners, was designed to fly upright. Commercial airliners are only tested and certified for upright flight."

In a situation that seems to have in part inspired "Flight", pilots of Alaskan Airlines flight 261 actually did fly upside-down in an attempt to regain control of their plane, which was having a problem with its horizontal stabilizer. Unfortunately, unlike the fictional SouthJet flight 227, this attempt was unsuccessful and the 88 people on board did not survive.

For some pilots, the least realistic part of the movie isn't its aerobatics, but its portrayals. Apparently Whip Whitaker would have never gotten that plane off of the ground to begin with.

The FAA has a blood-alcohol limit of .04 (in many states, half that constitutes a DUI), it does not allow pilots to drink within 8 hours of flying, and it does conduct drug and alcohol tests to enforce this. Also, other pilots take intoxication very seriously, and Washington's character would have been reported by his own flight crew before he got into the cockpit.

While turning a plane upside-down to prevent a crash may not be realistic, there have been heroic pilots in recent history that averted tragedy and saved lives.