Denzel Washington received a Best Actor Oscar nomination for his performance in 2012’s Flight, and now the actor’s performance has received the stamp of approval from real-life pilot Rob Mark.

In a Vanity Fair video, former airline pilot Mark reviewed iconic scenes featuring emergency landings from the likes of Sully, Non-Stop, Snakes on a Plane, and more. One of those was Flight, which famously saw Washington’s pilot Whip Whitaker invert a pᴀssenger plane to save those on board from a devastating crash, which Mark recalls was based on an actual flight that happened years ago.

Mark said what impressed him most about Washington’s portrayal was how his character “kept his cool,” noting how that can be the difference between life and death in these situations. Watch the full video directly below:

According to Mark, the scene in Flight is reminiscent of the actual emergency that it is based on:

“In this particular emergency landing, they actually did flip the airplane over because the control on the back of the tail, the elevator that controls the pitch movement up and down on the nose, was jammed. And it was jammed in such a way that the nose wanted to go down. So what they did was they flipped it over and then the nose would come back up.”

Mark added that this kind of incident has only happened one time, noting that it is “extremely, extremely rare.”

Mark also commented on a number of things that make the scene authentic. One is how Washington and his co-pilot, played by Brian Geraghty, go through an emergency checklist as the plane begins to fail. “Absolutely there’s an emergency checklist,” Mark said. “It’s like a decision tree – if this happens, then try this and this and this in this order.” Mark added that the specific situation in Flight “is almost not even in the book,” because everything they were trying already wasn’t working.

The pilot also admitted that a few moments in the scene legitimately scared him. The first was when Geraghty’s co-pilot has the control wheel pulled out of his grasp, with Mark commenting if that happened in real life, a pilot would be very upset.

The other was a moment where a child falls out of his seat onto the ceiling as the plane flips. “The one thing that scares the bejeezus out of all of us are people that carry kids in their laps or don’t have them buckled in.” Mark said many accidents and injuries have happened because pᴀssengers weren’t properly buckled in.

Flight is currently streaming free on Tubi. In addition to Washington, the movie stars Kelly Reilly, Don Cheadle, John Goodman, Bruce Greenwood, and Melissa Leo.