Hollywood Stunt Pilots

Old Dominion Flyer

Old Dominion Flyer

Well-Known Member
The other day, one of my students informed me that his inspiration to fly was the movie "Iron Eagle". He thought yanking and banking a Cessna 152 around a canyon would be badass. Does anyone know who was the pilot for that movie? I wonder if there are pilots who performed for Hollywood that might still be on the airshow circuit. Does anyone know of performers from Hollywood that are still active today?
 
Old Dominion Flyer said:
The other day, one of my students informed me that his inspiration to fly was the movie "Iron Eagle". He thought yanking and banking a Cessna 152 around a canyon would be badass. Does anyone know who was the pilot for that movie? I wonder if there are pilots who performed for Hollywood that might still be on the airshow circuit. Does anyone know of performers from Hollywood that are still active today?
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Like stuntmen....stunt pilots have gone the way of CGI and other special effects.

Cheaper and easier to produce.

IMO, the days of Frank Tallman flying through the billboard in It's a mad, mad, mad, mad World, Paul Mantz flying a bastardized aircraft called the "Phoenix" for Flight of the Phoenix, mass formations of B-25s complied and brought together for Catch 22.....have sadly come to an end.
 
Corkey Fornof (Octopussy, Licence to Kill, Six Days Seven Nights, Mission Impossible II) still performs in airshows, demonstrating the LoPresti Fury.
 
bdhill1979 said:
IMDB is listing Art Scholl on the aerial stunts

Who apparently died filming for Top Gun
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Very interesting!

From the article...

When Art Scholl climbed into his Pitts S-2 camera-plane on the set of Top Gun – as he had so many times before - he had no idea of the dark fate that awaited him.

Embarking on one of the dynamic flat spins that made the flight sequences so memorable, Scholl lost control of his plane and he fell into the Pacific Ocean.

His last words were “I have a problem, I have a real problem.” Neither the plane nor Scholl’s body were ever recovered.
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A guy named Craig Hoskyns is a movie pilot. He used to do the airshow circuit in a Pitts that had landing gear mounted on the top wing and tail. He would land upside down and take a little break, then his crew would ratchet him back in and he would takeoff upside down. Fun to watch.
 
poser765 said:
Pretty sure it was Doug Masters at the stick.

It wasn't that, it was the fact that he put in his tape and through inspired music he was able to guide his way through the canyons and over A typical Middle Eastern country. Does anyone find it odd that A typical Middle eastern country couldn't take down 2 planes with a whole Air Force?














Ok really I have no idea.
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t-cart said:
A guy named Craig Hoskyns is a movie pilot. He used to do the airshow circuit in a Pitts that had landing gear mounted on the top wing and tail. He would land upside down and take a little break, then his crew would ratchet him back in and he would takeoff upside down. Fun to watch.
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Craig Hosking.
 
Johnny Carson once did a flight with Art and said " I wanted to throw up, but I had no idea where up was.." Thems were the days....
 
Since nobody's mentioning it, realize that there is a whole other level of qualification you need if you want to fly for the movies -- a SAG card!

I recall reading in "Air Classics" back in the early 90s about the pilots who flew the replica 1930s air racers in the movie "The Rocketeer". These three or four pilots (I know they included Steve Hinton, John Maloney, Kevin Eldridge, and Rick Brickert, but there were others I just don't remember off hand) were some of the only guys qualified to fly these replica racers, but apparently they couldn't fly in the movie without being a member of the actors' union.

The problem is, you can't just up and join SAG -- it's sort of a Catch 22, where you have to fulfill one of a long list of criteria in order just to apply to the union, and anyone who has not been a struggling actor hasn't done any of these things (a.k.a. none of these pilots qualified).

IIRC (it's been 15+ years since I read the article, so I don't remember exactly) there was a way that you could get some kind of "voucher" to join SAG every time you participated as an extra in a movie. If you collected 3 or 4 of these vouchers, that was a ticket to join the union. I think these pilots somehow worked as extras enough to collect enough vouchers to join SAG...and thus fly in the movie.

I wish I could find that article...a quick Google turned up nothing...but I remember it being a very interesting story at the time.
 
t-cart said:
A guy named Craig Hoskyns is a movie pilot. He used to do the airshow circuit in a Pitts that had landing gear mounted on the top wing and tail. He would land upside down and take a little break, then his crew would ratchet him back in and he would takeoff upside down. Fun to watch.
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Saw a video of this guy. Always amazed me that he could keep such a squirrely little airplane straight on landing. I have seen many people do spectacularly destructive groundloops in Pitts machines for most of my life and they were having a problem keeping it going straight when right side up...can't imagine upside down and the controls are backwards. I wonder if somehow the gear geometry was changed that allowed for straighter tracking in someway on the "inverted" gear.
 
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