At the crash site, Colby tells Helm that "all of the passenger bodies have been moved to the L.A. Coroner's Office," but later we see the shrouded bodies on the ground outside the command center tent.
Edgerton and Sinclair go to Wellner's storage locker. However, there is a large private jet in the background. Not too many storage facilities also store aircraft in the parking lot! This was probably shot at an airport and the supposed storage locker is actually an enclosed hanger for a small private aircraft.
According to the story, the villains are ultimately trying to get into the FAA's computer so that they can make the transponder readouts of certain planes, that appear on air traffic controllers' radar scopes, disappear. They are supposedly doing this so that they can have the codes of their drug smuggling aircraft disappear. In reality, if they want the transponder readouts of their aircraft to be off radar, the pilots of these planes need only turn off their transponders, and that is what drug dealers often do. While it is still possible to get a "skin paint" (where a blip on the scope, due to the reflection of the radar's beam off the surface of the plane) of each plane, with so many transponder readouts on the scopes, air traffic controllers would probably not notice a plane without a transponder. The very best the villains could do with their device is to make many legitimate planes' transponder readouts disappear from the scopes, thus causing confusion on the part of the air traffic controllers. In order to spot airplanes illegally entering the U. S. with their transponders off, tethered aerostats (balloons in the shape of small airships/blimps) carrying radar look downward. This equipment was responsible for giving Kuwait advance warning of the approaching Iraqi army at the start of the first Gulf War, thus allowing the Kuwaiti Royal Family, and others, time to get away.
Edgerton states that the suspect vehicle is a Ford F-250, based on the tire tread.
Tire tread is not correlated to any specific vehicle make or model. The best assumption Edgerton could have made was that the vehicle was a truck.
The cause of the plane crash is that someone tampered with the flight computer tricking the altimeter into thinking it was 4000 feet higher than it was. The altimeter does not work from a computer. The altimeter works in the same way a barometer works, it measures air pressure. The pilot sets the altimeter at the start of the flight to match the elevation of the airport then adjusts it in flight from the local barometric pressure which is given by ATC. Also checking to make sure the altimeter is set correctly is part of the before takeoff checklist. The only way to trick the altimeter is to set the calibration wrong in respect to the barometer setting, something that would be apparent to the pilot at the start of flight.
Detectives are questioning Mike Daley about why he was working on the plane's Flight Management Computer. He tells them that he had to upload the FAA's updates that come out every 6 months. The detectives say that there has been no recent FAA update. In reality, the FAA provides updates every 4 weeks.
When Charlie and Amita are reviewing the flight data, tricking the computer into thinking the crash hadn't happened the flight begins at 00000 feet. The flight should begin at 00125, the elevation of LAX. When the flight ends the altitude returns to zero. The altitude should continue to show its ending elevation.
How could one person remove a 1,000 lb. item from the crashed plane and load it on a pickup by himself.