Movie FUBAR's
 

I remember a thread a while back where we had a few commets about the movie industry getting in right ..and mostly wrong.

Anyhoo, I was watching James Bond's Goldeneye where James is trying to recover a stolen Eurocopter Tiger and had stopped the heavily armoured train by planting a T-55 main battle tank in its path.

After the dust clears and a bit of interaction with the bad guys, James finds himself stuck in the train as the bad guys escape.

The top of the train opens up and you hear a turbine cranking and out pop's
a russian marked R-22 ?????!!!!!!
What a odd escape aircraft for the russians to have, let alone a turbine one with the cooling scroll and everything.
Damn those ruskies, they have all the cool stuff.

It was going so well till that point.

Wouldnt it have been better for it to be piston & to see it try to crank but not start properly 2 or 3 times like reality LOL.

Ahh shame, yet they have a couple of Twinstar 355's and the Tiger.
Maybe the cash was getting low and the best they could do for the train scene was the R22. or was it infact a chinese or russian knock off ?

Ahh well.

HF

It's a matter of size. I take my R-22 on the train if the weather's dickie, in case it clears up at the destination. Fits nicely in an Intercity luggage rack. EC120 or bigger just won't fit the standard gauge!

Then there's the inevitable 206, Squirrel, Agusta etc that sounds just like a Bell 47.......:D

Oooh .. oooh ... oooh ... Was watching a film t'other week - "Planet Terror" ... "What sort of helicopters are those?" I was asked.

"Hmmmm." I replied, "They look like S61/S62's to me, but it's very strange, those tails just aren't right."

The question-poser wasn't really that interested in my sad knowledge, but later went on to watch the second DVD containing the "making of" details ... next morning I was told "you were right about the tails, they only had the front ends of the helicopters and had to computer generate the tails ..."

And no, I didn't get a prize.

Or in Tomorrow Never Dies when the AStar uses the main rotor to slowly chop up a marketplace in pursuit of Pierce Brosnan and Michelle Yeoh, in an attitude that would make for a Vne dive, rather than a sedate chop-across-the-square.

Or in Mission Impossible when Jean Reno flies an MD530 down a train tunnel and the train coming the other way doesn't kick up enough turbulence to knock him into next year.

In fact, the movies get it wrong so much that I almost applauded when in The Italian Job Alan Purwin got the tail rotor of his MD500 knocked off in an underground garage, and he calmly did a throttle chop and hover auto. Wow. Something done right in a movie. :ok:

I have posted this before and I will do so again.It is a pet peeve of mine. Why is it that in a movie/picture/flick(take your pick depending upon your current location)when a helicopter appears on the screen it is bound to crash within the next few frames-----spectacularly!!Case in point---Broken Arrow.I know, it is kind of dated, but ,go back and see it. Every helicopter that shows up is destroyed.
No wonder the unwashed masses think helicopters are death traps----.
Alt3

And there's always "Wings of the Apache" (or "Fire Birds" for our American colleagues)! :\

bondu

I always found the ON/OFF switch for "whispermode" in Blue Thunder interesting. I mean, when do you need to switch whispermode OFF?

As a young teenager i was under the impression that Airwolf was possible, having qualified as a "proffesional" pilot i find all my childhood dreams shattered......there is no boost button on a super puma,the trim release button doesn't fire rockets, we dont get to wear fancy helmets or use state of the art computer systems that make amazing humming noises that sound like flipper on speed.....and the north sea does not compare to the sunny climes of arizona.....DOH :ugh:...Blue thunder has just as much to answer for...im sure the residents of dyce would love us to have the whisper mode fitted!!!

In Die Another Day, Pierce Brosnan and Halle Berry gets out of something that looks like an IL-76 in an MD600N with the engine off. You can see them spinning towards the ground, the rotor is actually stopped and stays stopped all the way until he starts the engine and you can clearly hear a piston engine starting, like when you start a DC-3.

Helicopter movie cliches from rotaryaction.com :

That surely was Rambo 3, where he also kills gazelles with his crossbow ;)

One more ..
 

In the movie Blood Diamond, i thought I did see a wierd gunship - or is it really the one that is on hire for South African Mercs ?

Talking of producers destroying helicopters. In the James Bond movie, I'm sure it was " From Russia With Love " our hero destroys a yellow Hiller and it is seen falling burning to the ground. Heres the thing my brother was recently carrying out chainsaw training with some guys on an estate near Lochgilphead Argyll and they told him the wreckage lay on the hills there until quite recently. Never had a chance to check it out anyone heard of this ? .
R

When you find that one there is a Spitfire in a coal mine at a little place named Acland, not far from Oakey Queesnland. Oakey is now home to a few army rotary aviators and was used to store hundreds of war surplus fighters etc. (i have a photo somewhere) It is supposedly a brand new, in the crate, Mk 24.

and wait, there's also a couple of Kittyhaks in a cave somewhere near tipperary on the Daly River in the Northern Territory. That whole area is well adorned with crashed fighters from both sides of WW11 and a few heavies as well.

Acland I will never forget, as a young fella a mate of mine used to have a chick there, Debby Sherriff. We used to tell him when we were up to mischief, that we were gonna go over to Acland and shoot up the sherriff!:)

We've made progress...at least now everytime a helicopter lands...it is the soundtrack of a JetRanger winding down rather than a Bell 47. Funny thing the pilot always winds the throttle off as he descends from a hover and not after landing.:*

In the movie, it was South African Mi-24 Super Hind Mk III, but in the real events in Sierra Leone, South Africans were flying old unmodified Mi-24Vs.

Just about anything you see in the movies about guns is wrong. As a lowly SLF, it doesn't surprise me in the least that the same is true about movies and helicopters.

A couple of my favourites:

1. From the series '24'. The hero, Jack Bauer, seems to be an expert at everything. He has been seen getting into the left front seat of a Jetbanger in a couple of episodes - left hand on cyclic and right hand on the command seat collective. The boy sure has talent.

2. Good old Huey flying along after a dramatic rescue, doors all open, not a headset in sight, everyone in the back conversing normally. Love it.

3. And to echo one of Lt. Fubar's favourites: An old Charles Bronson movie but I can't remember the name of it. Bronson's character has to bust someone out of a Mexican gaol or something like that. Never had a flying lesson. Get's in a 47 and wobbles a bit at first, but has mastered it after about 15 minutes. Lands in the gaol, quite well controlled, escapee jumps in and off they fly. Not one bullet hits the machine. Amazing.

GP:O

On one movie - either Broken Arrow or Under Seige 2 - the bad guys have a 206 on a flatbed railway carriage for their "getaway". During the fight scene, one of the scrappers kicks the bottom tail rotor blade (low skids) which obligingly spins round a good 190 degrees to swat the other guy under the chin.

All very impressive, even more so when you realise that the blade tie-downs are still on...