Aviation History Movies

[Duke Dillio]

    Being an illustrator/animator, I'm thinking about putting together a publication about different "famous" pilots through the ages. Nothing to complicated...Maybe a full page about them, and on the opposite page, a portrait of them with the plane they flew in the background.

You would of course have to do a piece on Robin Olds.  He's one of those names that you don't hear very often but apparently he was the only American WWII ace who almost aced in Vietnam as well.  Just a thought.....

Oh, and you gotta include Close Encounters of the Third Kind.  Isn't that the one where they find Amelia Earhart?   

[ol'fido]

No, that's Star Trek: Voyager. Episode name: "The 37's".

[Rob Sherlin]

  Come to think of it, I don't recall any movies that show aircraft when they first got involved in warfare. When guns weren't calibrated to the propeller (they basically took to the air with shotguns and such). When bombs were carried in the cockpit and dropped by hand, etc...

[Duke Dillio]

Here's some good, non-Hollywood aviation films for sale.  They look pretty good to me:

http://www.ihffilm.com/aviation-history-ww2-allied-aviation-history.html

[♠SARKID♠]

Does the Death Star trench run count?  There were all sorts of X-Wings and Tie-Fighters in there

On the serious side, if you're looking for an educational aviation movie there's always One Six Right.  Its a documentary, not a feature flick but its outstanding none the less.

[Smithsonia]

1. Hells Angels. Howard Hughes WW1 Movie. Special Effects hold up. Great Movie considering how old it is. It's on Turner Classic Movies all the time. WATCH IT!
2. 12 O'Clock High. Gets better every year. The first movie I ever saw that had little melodrama and lots of realistic action with a bit of PTSD therapy for human interest.
3. The Great Waldo Pepper.
Everybody has there own - These are mine. Mine are best.

[Gunner C]

1. Hells Angels. Howard Hughes WW1 Movie. Special Effects hold up. Great Movie considering how old it is. It's on Turner Classic Movies all the time. WATCH IT!
2. 12 O'Clock High. Gets better every year. The first movie I ever saw that had little melodrama and lots of realistic action with a bit of PTSD therapy for human interest.
3. The Great Waldo Pepper.
Everybody has there own - These are mine. Mine are best.

These aren't movies, but they are historic:  History Channel did a series on Dogfights.  They used computer graphics to dissect what happened, had fighter jocks comment on each engagement, and had some of the actual participants talking about some of the dogfights (Gen Olds preferred "Engagement").  Like I said these are TV shows, but I Tivo'd them all and watch them from time-to-time when I need an excitement fix.  As aviation history lessons, they are absolutely priceless.  They go from WW1 to the (recent) present.

Gunner

[Smithsonia]

Dogfight is an excellent series. Excellent indeed. I toyed with the idea many yeas ago and was going to use Confederate Air Force Planes and some camera tricks to tell many of the same stories. I proposed it to the History Channel. I couldn't get it to work (in my demo) with the kind of vitality and drama that it needed to turn it into a series. So I scrapped the project before my pitch meeting with the network.

Meaning, the guys who finally did it... mostly in animation... had to solve many storytelling problems and resolve those visual elements to pull it off. I think they were very successful. These same folks also do the series Shoot Out.... which is a remarkable and admirable work too. Often times when one fails to tell a story -- but then sees another team pull it off -- it makes one envious. I don't feel that at all. I feel like these guys had a vision that perfected a concept and I admire them for doing it ever so well. Good for them.

That said, these are all TV series and not movies.

[CAP_truth]

Gathering of Eagles; Rock Hudson and Rod Taylor