another great movieI can watch over and over is Empire of the Sun…
I get goose bumps everytime those p-51 do their first flyfly
and the scene where Christian Bale is saluting the young Zero pilots gets me everytime too.
Greetings,
This is my first post, although I’m an active lurker. I lived in Hawaii while TTT was being filmed. I was quite fortunate to have watch a lot of the filming first hand. At the time all the aircraft were house down the hill from us a Barber’s Point NAS. We lived up in Makakilo 3 miles away and had a birds-eye view of the aircraft. I had a telescope (150x) at the time and watched aircraft, ships, and subs at Hickam and Pearl. I was big into WWII in the Pacific at the time. They did quite a bit of practice mock dog fighting above our back yard. If my memory serves me correctly therewas only one plane crash with a fatality. My dad took my sister and I down to Barber’s Point to see the aircraft thte day after the plane came in. I have several pictures of myself and sister on the airplanes and one of the pilots let my sister sit in the cockpit of the AT-6 Texans. For me, I was lucky enough to be able to climb through the B-17. The B-17 at the time was my favorite aircraft fron WWII and I was one stoked 13 year old. Unfortunatately the next day they roped off the aircraft and you could not get up close to them.
During this time my dad was stationed at Wheeler AFB. This is where the scene with the prop flying off was filmed. I use to go with my dad every Sat. to work on base. He would go to work I would wonder around. The movie has quite a few scenes filmed at Wheeler and I was lucky enough to watch them film quie a bit including the prop scene. All thte aircaft at Wheeler were either fiberglass mockups or were painted on a sheet of canvas. The fiberglass P-40’s had explosive charges planted in them to simulate the machine fire. There were also if I recall correctly 2 fiberglass B-17’s that were blown up. The cool is that when everything was claned up there was a faux aircrft graveyard of the unused aux strip near the base auto hobby shop. My dad took me down there a couple of times to check out the “wrecks”.
The big highlight was watching the bombing of Pearl again live and in person. What I would have given for a video camara then. For a Pacific war buff this was amazing.Seeing what’s on film and being there to see the overall “big picture” was really something. It gave me a really glimpse of what it might have been like diring that day. Thanks for rekindling some fond old memories.
Rick Bilak