Final Countdown

[Scott Rose]

I'm sitting here watching the Final Countdown and I'm noticing something really weird. All the Navy aircraft are CLEAN and shiny. Navy must have put extra effort in making the Nimitz and its air group extra shiny.

[dj51d]

Now that you mention it, all of the aircraft were remakably shiny. The other thing that struck me was I hadn't realised the Crusaders were still in service as late as 1980.

[airnutz]

I visited the Coral Sea in early 1977 in Alameda...they still had an
RF-8 photoship in use. Up close it appeared to be a lot smaller bird
than I had remembered. Probably because my first contact with the
F-8 had been at NAS Dallas/Hensley in the early to late 60's when I
was a little feller'.

...although off-topic, this memory also triggers images
seeing flights of XC-142, Corky Fornofs Bearcat, Bob Hoovers antics
in the '51, the Cutlass gateguard, "brand-new" A-7's and the fledgling
CAF at nearby "reserve field" in their white red/blue trim livery. Good days!

As for shiny F-14's..didn't see 'um. They had the 2 tone low-viz gray
when I visited. Got photos somewhere.....

[Jack Cook]

Back in my Navy Days in did a IO/Persian Gulf deployments on the Nimitz
in 90/91. Any way our great TV station on the boat had four channels. #1 was the PLAT camera, #2 was training,
#3 was old news while #4 was continious showing of the Final Countdown.
Can you imagine watching that movie 24/7 for 6 months. Let us never speak of it again!

Last edited by Jack Cook on Fri Dec 13, 2019 1:44 pm, edited 1 time in total.

[Stoney]

Six months of listening to Marty Robbins sing "El Peso" in the Med did it to me, every day, every day

[TimAPNY]

I'm sitting here watching the Final Countdown and I'm noticing something really weird. All the Navy aircraft are CLEAN and shiny. Navy must have put extra effort in making the Nimitz and its air group extra shiny.

To the pain and suffering of the Ground crew the Navy will make their a/c look really nice for stupid reasons like movies. But every other day they look like crap.

[Jeffrey]

now here's a cute bit of trivia for you.

during WW2 my father flew in vultee vengeances in new guinea. he always used to tell us about how they'd scrub down the planes with aviation fuel every so often. apparently it smoothed off the paint or something and they got another 15 to 20 MPH out of them.

no idea how accurate but he kept saying it the same way so who knows?

[mrhenniger]

I remember reading about B-24 squadrons operating in the Pacific that would polish their Liberators with wax for the extra long range missions. Apparently it gave them something like another 12 mph and made the difference.

Mike

[Jeffrey]

I remember reading about B-24 squadrons operating in the Pacific that would polish their Liberators with wax for the extra long range missions. Apparently it gave them something like another 12 mph and made the difference.

Mike

Ummm, Dad's sqadron, number 12 RAAF, became a B24 squadron. I wonder if the idea was a carry over from the vengeances?

[Scott Rose]

Just watched the fight scene on YouTube... Again.... I can't help it. Every time that clip shows up I HAVE to watch it. I've scene it a million times but I love it. The rest of the movie.... eh... but the Tomcat vs. Zero scenes give me goose bumps every time, especially when the Tomcat comes out of the clouds behind the Zero. I still think this sequence has some of the best cinematography of any Aviation film out there complimented amazingly well by the soundtrack.

[p51]

Reportedly taken on the deck of that carrier during the filming, of one of the F-14s used in that famous sequence:

Does anyone know if either of those Tomcats exist anywhere today?

[Scott Rose]

Thats funny, because when I was rewatching the scene I was wondering about kill markings for the Tomcats.

[maxum96]

I bought a DVD of the movie just because I love that dogfight scene so much. I love the thought of what would have been on the mind of a Zero pilot if suddenly a futuristic F-14 suddenly showed up and started dogfighting him.

[Lon Moer]

The real question is;............How old is the dog from 1941 at the end of the movie??

[p51]

Thats funny, because when I was rewatching the scene I was wondering about kill markings for the Tomcats.

there's a discussion about that on that YouTube link. Some suggest, and I agree, that there'd be no kill markings allowed as the DoD would say, "Nope, never happened," and wouldn't allow the kills in any official way. That said, how the heck would they explain this to the crew of the chopper that the Senator blew up by accident (never mind that the Navy would have found the remains of that afterward and started wondering what the heck it was from)? Or the people the Zero pilot shot in the carrier?
I've always loved to think, "What happened next?" after the credits rolled and this movie always made me wonder (especially once I served in the military and realized all the nuts and bolts issues behind what happened in the film).
I mean really, the entire crew knew what had happened, so it's not like the navy was going silence thousand of sailors for life. They couldn't tell them it was just a DoD exercise, because, well, the sailors knew what was going on (remember the recon pilots who flew over Ford Island, oddly taking photos of the attack as it was happening?)
Then there's the issue over what had happened in the first place. they missed all kinds of opportunities to link similar 'storms' with disappearances of other ships in the past. But anyway, how would the DoD react to the knowledge that storms like that existed at all? Imagine today's risk-averse military, they'd never let ships leave their ports! There'd be no way to know it couldn't happen again...
...which leads to the possibility of a sequel:
Imagine a different version of this where, say, the USS Gerald Ford attacks the Japanese task force and succeeds, with F-35s, and then comes back through the storm again to find a totally different world where WW2 didn't happen at all like we now know it. With the entire task force at the bottom of the Pacific, the US battleships and carriers launch into the Pacific full-throttle and the entire pacific war is over by the summer of 1942? They then turn toward Europe without a Pacific war to fight, with the full Allied effort, and the entire war is over by 1943?
Makes me wish I worked in Hollywood so I could pitch this idea!