rwdfresno wrote:
Warbird Kid wrote:
Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull:
When did Pan Am start operating AN-2s? Especially during the begnining of the Cold War?! And when Indy and the gang are flying on the Russian Transport it looks just a little too fake for my taste. Was that CGI plane even based off a real aircraft?
Oh come on it still looked cool

Actually, the funniest part was that when you were close up you could see where they added weathering to the paint job and where they have areas that are supposed to be chipped paint they have "rust" much like you would see on a ship. Apparently they think that aircraft are skinned with steel as opposed to fabric, aluminum or other lighter alloys.

I'm really digging the registration - "N48550" is and has been (forever!) Grumman G-21A Goose s/n 1061, ex-Alaska Coastal-Ellis Airlines, Antilles Air Boats, and Larry Teufel of Hillsboro OR; it's now owned by none other than Jimmy Buffett. If you were going to make up a registration for a Pan-Am AN-2, why would you pick that one out of all the other possible N-numbers?
Also, this weekend AMC had their air disasters movie marathon and I recorded a couple on our DVR. I saw
The Crowded Sky with Dana Andrews and Efrem Zimbalist Jr.
EZ was a Navy Commander who is flying east to Washington from North Island San Diego with Troy Donahue in the back seat of his T-33 (which had no markings other than some day-glo orange panels and a big black ID number - but the "North Island" ramp was full of F-86's w/4 20mm cannons - so they'd have been F-86H's or later - and there were also quite a few trees but no water in the background...)
DA was flying west from Washington to LA on the same airway V-16 in a DC-7 and due to the usual chain of unfortunate events (a busted radio, a sloppy pilot, some weather here or there etc) they collide, the T-33 explodes, but the heroic airline crew safely lands the DC-7 with a folded nosegear. Best part of the movie was Anne Francis - as hot as ever!
Robert Osborne of AMC pointed out before it even came to me that 15 years later, it was Dana Andrews flying the little airplane (a Baron) that collides with Efrem Zimbalist's big airplane (a 747) in Airport 75. Nothing is ever new or original in Hollywood!
The other movie that I caught was
Crash Landing with Garry Merrill and the future Nancy Reagan (still Davis in this movie - apparently her last feature.) Halfway across the Atlantic from Lisbon to NYC, two engines go rough or quit and the "heroic" crew (all four of them in the cockpit, pilot, co-pilot, flt eng and navigator) just sit there and look at the engines. Hmmm? Don't you think you should DO something guys? They end up ditching the plane near a Navy destroyer escort and except for a bumpy landing, everything else goes perfectly and they all get out and they don't even forget the kid's dog.
I especially like the part when they decided to set all of the parakeets that they were carrying free - at 13,000 feet and 145 knots, they opened a window and dumped them out of their cages. Nice!
I don't know why these movies qualified as "classics" - they were just more of the usual sappy soap opera drivel.