Post your favorite aircraft documentary/movie

Hey guys,

I don't really watch tv anymore and mainly stick to watching documentaries, so I thought I might be able to add a few more things to list to watch.

So maybe we could just post our favorite aviation documentary/movie and then maybe a brief description.

Mine are;

Movie: Top Gun. Don't really see this needing a description on an aviation board

Documentary: Fire Power: Desert Storm Air Assault.

That's a documentary outlining the start of Desert Storm, has a lot of focus on the role of the F-117. Pretty cool showing when the first bombs went off they just went into a frenzy shooting into the sky at nothing.

Oh dr Strangelove is my number one

The Avro-Arrow !

reply to post by boomer135


Mine too. I don't see it as being a big social commentary that so many do, but it's just a hell of a lot of fun.

By Dawn's Early Light is one of mine. Remarkably accurate.

reply to post by Zaphod58


By dawns early light is a great one

Oh come on guys remember this?



I loved this as a kid....still do

Movies :

1) Top Gun

2) Iron Eagle (the first one)

3) Air America

Documentary:

I used to LOVE watching the series 'Wings' when it was on the Discovery Channel and then the Military Channel

Originally posted by olliemc84

2) Iron Eagle (the first one)

The first two, for the sheer stupidity level.

The best documentary in my opinion is the story of The Supermarine Spitfire. The greatest fighter aircraft ever produced.



As for films it would be:-

The Battle Of Britain
Aces High
The Dambusters

Great thread OP.

My favourite documentary is this-



As for favourite films

Dambusters
Firefox
Top Gun - the F14 became my favourite plane because of this film. I was very obsessed with it as a child. I even made a model from empty toilets rolls and cardboard once

King

'Airplane!' A classic in movie in history. Especially that scene where 'June Cleaver' is speaking ebonics to the passengers,..

www.youtube.com... always liked this one flying/landign a plane with one wing has to be one of the more impressive feats pulled off by a pilot anywhere and this was the first thing i thought of when i saw the thread title

The Final Countdown. Has some of the best Navy aircraft scenes ever. I saw it in 1981 and didn't know that two years later that I'd be on a carrier.

Wings was a good series. I'm in the one they did on the C-5B.

The movie about the Arrow with Dan Akroyd was excellent.

Reach For the Sky
Twelve o"Clock High
633 Squadron
Strategic Air Command
Dive Bomber
Medusa's Child
Pandora's Clock
Airport
The High and The Mighty
Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo (I love the B-25 ever since I rode in one)
Tuskegee Airmen
Fail Safe (even though there were no aircraft in the movie)
Catch 22 (the B-25 again)
Memphis Belle

After reading the comments about Top Gun and it inspiring some F14 lovin' I figured this would be a good thread to post this clip.



For those too young to remember, the press in the UK slated the MOD for sending 'outdated' Buccaneers into active service in GW1. That small vid is what got me interested in the Buck, it's capabilities considering the era it was designed in are astounding and some of the stories from pilots that have flown it and those that went up against it have taken on almost mythical proportions. For me it's simply a beautiful aircraft and a wonderful piece of British engineering when we were at our peak in aircraft design.

reply to post by Stealthbomber


PBS had a doc on nova about 20 years ago called "frozen in time" it was about a crew of men trying to restore and fly out a b29 that crashed in Greenland in the 40s or 50s. It's an incredibly good movie but extremely tragic and sad.

www.pbs.org...

Dramatized, but maybe still passing as docu's..

Forget "Tora!Tora!Tora!".except for the best of both worlds, a Tomahawk with a Merlin.
Gotta love the dogfighting valley shots in Hawaiian soup condensing off the wingtips...
Too bad it was as historically accurate as the Wizard of Oz.
A tossup with Dambusters, just because hitting the beef edge of that damn
thing with a surface-skipping giant iron beach ball is bonkers, I say!

No contest here, 50-50 between "Test Pilot". Come on, Gable and Tracy
at maybe their best ever.
The other half, and probably just as good "Spirit of St.Louis".
That's Colonel Jimmy Stuart to me.
"McConnell", Alan Ladd? My old boss, and a VP Engineering later on, flew that F86
in Korea for a long time after they fixed it... yeah, both sides of the Zone. Shhhhh

Porco Rosso - one of the best with seaplanes even!

After watching some of the films listed here umpteen times (nothing wrong wi' that!) I tried to search out other, older films with aircraft in them, here are a few I found;

Sound Barrier - with the Comet, Swift etc credited as stars in their own right! A proper plane buffs film about the development of early jets starring Ralph Richardson as a thinly disguised Geoffrey De Havilland

The Man In the Sky - Jack Hawkins as a test pilot who must not land as the aircraft company employees watch nervously.

No Highway - Jimmy Stewart is a Farnborough Boffin with a bee in his bonnet in a movie foreshadowing the Comet disasters in eerie fashion)

Cone of Silence - featuring the Avro Ashton as an airliner with a problem - echoes of the Comet again! An experienced pilot is blamed by the airline for the crash that kills him to avoid having to make the expensive admission that its new airliner is defective, but his daughter fights to clear his name. (point of interest, Boeing flat refused to have the 707 feature in this movie for some strange reason )


Dawn Patrol - Flynn, Niven and Rathbone in a solid gold first world war classic you MUST watch this movie "Top Gun 1915", lol.

Appointment In London - Dirk Bogarde in a surprisingly realistic depiction of life in Bomber Command made just after the war - another must see.

There are more but these are enough for now. Treat Yourselves

Snakes on a plane, classic.

nice thread OP