Comms, you put it much more eloquently than I could. Thank you. In fact, when SF goes through Robin Sage, it is ALL mental testing-they put you in impossible situations, situations where there ISNT a good outcome-but you HAVE to make a choice. Couple that with being tired, hungry, wet, hot/cold, etc, most people would give up. Thats the crowning achievement-Robin Sage. It puts everything you have been doing for months into one little exercise. they teach you the physical stuff, then see if you can handle the mental stuff, on your own.
All the training in the world doesnt matter if you are frozen in place, incapable of making a choice. Most times, ANY choice is better than none. Dealing with consequences later is just part of the game. Hindsight will ALWAYS be 20/20-but for most quick situations, its action vs inaction that decides whether you live or not.
We had a poster in my platoon room when I was active. It was a picure from WWI I believe. It showed a battlefield, somewhere in France, with a dead soldier who had fallen on a barbed wire fence. The caption read (I have to paraphrase, as I dont recall the exact quote)"And, when the time came do make a decision, he hesitated. And, in his hesitation, he died from indecision". that was almost 20 years ago, and that quote has stuck with me. My point is that ANYONE can LEARN to be decisive; but until its been proven they can act under fire, its just "training". I think I just changed my own mind on all this...lol. I think I would prefer a military person showing this...so long as its kept to civilian-related standards. Still, am going to watch it regardless.

I too am looking forward to watching the show, then on merits either continue or not.

Little disagreement on seeing a nuke, BTW was my military MOS, Pershing Missile (small nuke = 460Kt or 1/2 MT), depends on lots of factors including weather.
Actually thermal burns up close are the most unsurvivable, both overpressure shockwave and velocity of wind die off faster than you would think. A lot of the models on the web typically use very large sizes say 10 MT, when most of the so called strategic size weapons are now around 300 Kt, or 33 times less.
At the size most likely to happen (Nuke, not conventional) the thermal/radiation footprint (assuming air burst) of less than 2 miles, 5 PSI op shockwave of less than 5 miles. The calculations are simple (I will post if you like, but the web has lots and lots) cubic scaling formulas.
You easily could see something depending on terrain, weather for 10 to 50 miles.

Point of my comment, people often have fatalistic views of surviving a nuke, which are unwarranted. There were survivors of H and N, which were less than one mile from ground zero.

You are right in that if you had your druthers you would be as far as possible.

Last point:non state actor sized nukes are mostly psychological devices more than physical.

For Nation state size and quantity while terrible do not mean universal death.

Unfortunately, this may not be true. My father, RIP, was present during the A-bomb tests at Bikini Atoll. He was one of the guys you always see with the "welding goggles" on standing at the rail of the ship watching the ever expanding mushroom cloud form above the Pacific Ocean. He watched 2 of the bombs from as close as 20 miles away. Remember, the Army used soldiers as test subjects even before this took place.

Now I understand that those nukes are firecrackers compared to the nukes that are in use now. What if you are not in the primary blast area what then?

Very Much the opposite.
The ones tested in Bikini etc were larger than in use today.
Some as big as 20MT, nobody has anything in use (deliverable) bigger than 10 MT most today are much more accurate and therefore typically 1MT or SMALLER, Minuteman III is 300kt or .3MT.
Some U.S. submarine warheads are 1MT size, again most of our stuff in use (not in storage) is 1MT or less mostly less.
The Russians are usually a little less accurate and therefore a little bigger.

Nukes while terrifying are survival-able except for the inner most radius of action, typically the 99% dead zone is a couple of miles only.

While I hope none of us ever finds out, people would survive.
The oft retort of kissing your A** good by or everyone will perish is a myth.

Some soldiers were less than one mile from test in the desert and while many had health problems, none died directly as a result.

There is DOD footage of a unit of soldiers climbing out of foxholes and advancing, with the mushroom cloud rising in front of them. No special gear, just GI uniforms, rifles, steel pot helmet. Many of these are on the web.

A small percentage did suffer medical problems, but again not more than a couple of percent.

I sure don't want to minimize the downside which is awful, but if you are in a city somewhere and a strike happens, don't give up, you are not toast unless you panic.
As always in any survival situation, knowledge and will to live are the key ingredients.

If you want to look at the death toll from the bombing of Hiroshima you find more people died from the firestorms than from the radiation or blast effect.

Hiroshima (August 6, 1945)
http://www.cfo.doe.gov/me70/manhattan/hiroshima.htm


Nagasaki (August 9, 1945)
http://www.cfo.doe.gov/me70/manhattan/nagasaki.htm

Great stuff, Marsh; thanks! I highly appreciate SMEs.

Wow. I'm really surprised no one's commented on the show yet.

I watched it, and from a layman's point of view I thought it was pretty good. There wasn't anything that struck me as absolutely stupid, nor anything the common person couldn't do.

A hijacking is a desperate situation that calls for desperate action. It seemed to me that his suggestions were doable, and represented realistically.

So what did you learned, experienced people think?

DVR'd, watching later.

I am neither learned nor experienced when it comes to hijacking, but I though the show was very good. Practical, thought provoking and for the most part realistic. My middle daughter and I watched the show together and she focused in too much on the calm and obviously trained presenter. I think in real situation, it is going to be much more of a panic situation; you are unlikely to have someone on board with that degree of demeanor. The other minor criticism, was that little was presented in terms of alternative actions, if the first idea/plan did not work as presented.

I will definitely watch the show again and feel of the various shows that have been presented on survival, it ranks up there with the better productions (at least based upon the first show), time will tell.

Pete

They sure made it seem easy to land a commercial jet. Just turn on the auto pilot until you're about 80 feet off the ground. And they'll talk you through the rest...