What movie plot-hole is impossible to ignore?

This isn't a movie, but I was just thinking about this one yesterday.

There is a short story at on an with planet on the distant future. There is a giant planetary earthquake that happens every X thousand years caused by tidal forces when the planets line up. It will destroy everything, and since we've known it's coming for hundreds of years, everyone has left the planet, except for this one old man who is putting it off. He's visiting all these places that he lived over the years, feeling tormented by not wanting to leave his home. At one point he decides to send the last spaceships at the spaceport away on autopilot, trapping himself on the planet and dooming himself. It ends with him waiting for the ground to start to shake.

It was a pretty good story, well written, but then something hit me... the catastrophe is essentially an hours long, planet wide earthquake worse than any on Earth, it's not only going to level every structure, there will be extinctions as some biomes are wiped out by tidal waves. It really hammers in that they're is no way to survive... Except the story describes how he spends hours flying all over the place in his flying car. No earthquake should endanger a man flying a few miles above the ground.

/r/AskReddit Thread