When Kwuan is pushing the cargo out, he clearly has a safety line attached. As he and the cargo go over the edge, there is no line present. The safety line is back in the next cut.
Near the end of the movie while Nancy Travis (Corinne) is waiting to load the villagers she is wearing a white shirt with an OD over shirt unbuttoned. Once she is on the plane, only a minute later, she is wearing a tan colored shirt.
At one point during Gene's fall from the helicopter, a man with a black shirt is seen tumbling down the hill. Gene is wearing a gray shirt, Billy is wearing the black shirt.
When the C123 comes to a halt after the crash at the Tango 7 Airstrip, a brief shot shows the main fuselage segment with the wrecked remains of the smaller blue/white plane that is crashed into it much later in the film.
When the helicopter holds his licence when it says suspended he holds it on the top left corner but in the next scene he is holding the bottom right corner.
When Gene and Billy bail from the helicopter,
the sound of glass breaking can be heard. The UH-1 actually has a windshield made of plastic.
Billy is introduced at his 'glying eye' traffic reporter job, getting into an argument with a truck driver from his helicopter. In reality, this is impossible since up that close, the extreme noise of the helicopter makes it impossible to understand what anybody is saying without using an intercom or something.
When Billy and Babo go in for lack of fuel near the end, the sound of a spluttering piston engine is heard, but the Pilatus plane uses a turboprop engine.
When the right engine was hit by ground fire and was said to have lost oil pressure, it is doubtful that thrust could be maintained. With the extent of damage requiring fire extinguishers, it is most likely that it would have been feathered. This did not occur and during the landing sequence, it can clearly be seen that this engine is developing its usual thrust, the props both appearing to be turning as they would be when synchronized. Also if thrust were lost on that engine, a large amount of left rudder with about 3 degrees elevation of bank on the dead engine side would be required and none of this is seen in the film.
In opening scenes a C-123 is shown dropping cargo from it lowered gate in the tail end of the fuselage. In the next camera scene it is shown nearing the ground and going through the roof of a hut. It is shown going straight down. In the case of an air drop, all such cargo would be dropping at an angle, and not straight down.
Gene's necklace appears to be defying gravity at one point, but the helicopter is pointed straight down; the camera is also twisted, which makes the characters appear to be upside down instead of at a 90 degree angle.
When Billy is haranguing the truck driver on the freeway, the drive hears Billy over the radio. However, we clearly here the truck driver over the helicopter's radio. It would be nearly impossible to hear the truck driver over the helicopter noise, even standing next to him. Billy wouldn't be able to hear him at all in cockpit, much less have his microphone pick up the driver's cursing with almost no background noise.
When Billy is riding in the crashing plane at the abandoned runway, the two free-roaming cows on the side of the runway are clearly tethered to the ground with rope and a post.
When Gene flies over to pickup the passed-out Billy, he is clearly heard at 50-100 feet altitude over the blade noise, even though he isn't shouting.
After General Soong leaves the trio at the airstrip, Billy bangs on the aircraft door and inadvertently opens it a couple of centimeters when it's supposed to be locked.
Rober Downey Jr's character wear black levi 501's which didn't come into being until the 1980's whereas the film is set at the end of the Vietnam war.
At the KLCA studio, a Technics RS-1500 open-reel tape deck is seen in the background of the announcer's booth. This recorder was introduced in the late 1970s - years after the Vietnam War ended.
Set in 1969, a Laotian lounge duo sings "A Horse With No Name," which was not released until 1971.
The movie is set in 1969, yet in one scene in the nightclub the background music is "Long Cool Woman in a Black Dress" by the Hollies, which was not released until 1973.
The parachute packs used to bail out of the plane were modern day sports packs that weren't patented until the '80s.
The film is set in 1969, but a Ford Pinto (first sold in 1970) is seen in the car accident near the beginning.
When Gene and Billy are being held by the 'Hillbilly' type tribesmen the dialogue is obviously dubbed due to the mouth movements not always corresponding to the heard dialogue. This is because the heavy rainfall will have made the location sound recording unusable so the scene would have had to have been looped in post production.
During the tirade from Major Lemond to Senator Davenport in the helicopter towards the end of the film, the dubbed voice track is badly matched to the image.
When Gene and Billy bail from the helicopter, and fall to the jungle floor, parts of the green mat used to cushion their fall can be seen.
The Laotian hill tribesman who holds Gene at gunpoint speaks the language of the Phou Kan hill tribe, which lives in the area around Chiang Mai in northern Thailand, not far inside Laos.