Top Three All Time Aviation Scenes In Movies...

So last night I was thinking what my top three favorite aviation scenes in movies are, and I came up with the following list:


#3: Coffman Starter scene in The Flight Of The Phoenix (1965)


Quite possibly th best scene in the Flight of the Phoenix is when after the Phoenix is built, they try to start the cantankerous radial engine. Note: spoilers dead ahead. The engine uses a Coffman starter, which uses blank blackpowder cartridges to turnover the starter on the engine. The big disadvantage to this system is that for each starting attempt, you needed a cartridge. Run out of cartridges, and you cant start the engine. In the Flight of the Phoenix, the pilot Frank Towns (Jimmy Stewart), has seven cartridges with which to start the engine. If the engine does not start, they will all be stranded and face certain death in the desert. Towns quickly uses up four cartridges trying to start the engine, at which point the designer of the Phoenix, Heinrich Dorfmann (Hardy Kreuger), starts yelling at towns because he believes that he is wasting the cartridges. Towns then says that he is going to use a cartridge with the ignition off, to blow out the cylinders, to which Dorfmann starts yelling "I forbid you!!" over and over. Towns blows out the cylinders, and then uses the sixth cartridge with the ignition on, after which the engine finally starts.

If you haven't seen the movie, do yourself a favor and rent it. And don't rent the sucktastic 2004 remake with Dennis Quaid and Giovanni Ribisi. About the only thing better about the remake is that the Phoenix in the remake looks more like a plane cobbled together in the desert.


#2: Bridge scene in part one of Piece Of Cake (1994)

Piece Of Cake is a six part Masterpiece Theater mini-series based on Derek Robinsons book, Piece Of Cake. It's about a Spitfire Squadron at the beginning of WWII that gets sent to France. In the first part, a character Moggy Cattermole sees a small stone arch bridge over a river in the French countryside while on a patrol, and then claims he has boiling oil. The leader of his flight says he should head back to base, at which point...

That's not CG. That's an actual Supermarine Spitfire being flown by Ray Hanna under that bridge. Simply Awesome. Again, if you haven't seen it, I highly recommend the whole series.


#1: B-17 buzz job in The War Lover(1962)

The War Lover stars Steve McQueen and Robert Wagner, as pilot and copilot of a B-17 based in England. McQueen's characters Buzz Rickson loves war, and after a mission dropping leaflets, he is frustrated and decides to buzz the airfield:

Again, no CG, no models, no R/C planes, no blue screen, no nothing. That's an actual pilot (John Crewdson), in an actual B-17, beating the hell out of the field.

When this movie was made, there were no B-17's around to be used for film work. There is a very good book written by Martin Caidin called Everything But The Flak all about the adventures in finding three B-17's, repairing them, and ferrying them to to England to film the movie. There's a passage in t he book about the buzz job: "But most of all, John Crewdson remembers the buzz job he did of the airfield where the cameras were located to catch his low flying. This is an abuse of the expression, for John beat the field into scenes of men making frantic dives for cover-and they weren't made for the movie."

"In the scene he was coming in for a landing. But before the airplane touched down, John whipped the wheels and flaps up, firewalled the throttles to full bore, and went howling straight for the control tower."

"'For the next five minutes,' John told us just before we saw the rough film footage, 'I beat the hell out of everybody and everything on that field. The director said he wanted close-ups of the staff in the control tower reacting to the sight of the B-17 roaring straight at them-and then screaming by at a height below the tower, with the wing only inches away.'"

"'That's what the man wanted and what he got. I asked the old girl for everything she had, and she gave it to me. I pounded along inches away from the tower and nearly scraped the ball turret off on the runway. Pulling up was out of the question a few times, so I flew between the hangars, and I understand that several people fainted.'"

"'It was the most exhilarating flying I've ever done...'"

"If only we had a camera secretly aimed at John when he saw the first rushes of the film. The sight is absolutely terrifying, and John unknowingly came bolt upright in his seat. In his mind he was back in that cockpit, and his hands were again on those controls...because when the lights went on, John Crewdson was soaked with perspiration, and his hands were white where he had gripped the seat armrests in the theater."

Awesome.