How to Make an Airplane Crash Look Real on Film

Hollywood’s special-effects artists reveal their trade secrets.

Passengers shuffle up the aisle toward the exit of the Boeing 737, pulling sad-looking rolling luggage behind them. As a flight attendant in a spiffy uniform says her ritual buh-byes, she glances disdainfully at the parade of battered cases and clunky wheels. But when the last passenger breezes past with a pristine hard-shell gliding on slickly turning spinners, her face brightens, and you can almost see the thought bubble next to her perfectly coiffed hair: “Wow! That’s a classy piece of luggage.”

Then, a man standing next to a tripod-mounted camera says: “Okay, that was good. But let’s try it again, a little slower this time.”

The “passengers” are actors shooting a commercial for a new line of luggage. The action isn’t occurring in a flyable 737 but, rather, in a grounded 727—or, more specifically, a truncated section of the fuselage that’s been optimized for filming. The highly customizable set—along with every other accoutrement needed to create a facsimile of an airport, from gate signage to TSA full-body scanners—resides in the cavernous facility of a Los Angeles-area firm known fittingly as Air Hollywood.

A lifelong aviation enthusiast, Talaat Captan started the company in 2000 after his frustrating experiences as a movie producer taught him how hard it was to film scenes in genuine airplanes and actual airports. He began by buying surplus parts and stringing them together to create realistic mockups. Later, he started snapping up decommissioned airliners and going through the laborious process of disassembling them. 

“Airplanes are made to fly—they’re not made to film in,” he explains. “In a real plane, it takes about four hours to move one chair. You need a technician. You need an engineer. You need FAA approval. For us, it takes like two minutes. You want to put the camera here? Fine. You want over there? That’s fine, too. We can do almost anything. With the exception of the wood floor, everything is real. The seats, the windows, the overhead bins, everything works.”

Air Hollywood is one of a handful of companies that specialize in fashioning ersatz aviation and aerospace products for movies and television. Once you start looking for their work, you’ll see their wares everywhere: models of flyable World War II fighters, miniature jumbo jets primed for spectacular crashes, debris-blasted lunar landers, speculative spacecraft ready for warp drive, re-creations of authentic airports, the interior of a space station. These creations are assembled not from the soulless “ones and zeroes” of computer graphics imagery (CGI), but with wood, metal, fabric, glue, and a lot of human ingenuity. 

“We’re craftsmen—we’re not surrounded by banks of computers,” says Brick Price, the founder of WonderWorks, an old-school southern California vendor whose mills and lathes have shaped facsimiles of everything from the interior of a space shuttle to a Mercury space capsule. “I see stuff that’s either been altered or it’s totally fake, and it never looks right. Look at the credits at the end of a film. It’s thousands of CGI people, right? We can do the same thing with six guys going out to the desert with a model.”

Hollywood takes flight

Aviation and space travel have been favorite subjects of the film industry almost since  the invention of motion pictures. A Trip to the Moon—inspired by Jules Verne’s 1865 book, De la Terre à  la Lune (From the Earth to the Moon)—was produced way back in 1902. Wings, which staged mock World War I dogfights, was recognized at the first Academy Awards in 1929. The Howard Hughes-produced combat aviation extravaganza Hell’s Angels, whose climactic battle required 137 pilots, was released in 1930. And, of course, King Kong mesmerized audiences in 1933, when four Curtiss F8C-4 Helldivers were dispatched to shoot down a giant ape perched atop the Empire State Building.

In those days, war-surplus airplanes were available for pennies on the dollar, and the lives of the men who flew them weren’t valued much more highly. One pilot died during the filming of Wings, and four men were killed in flying accidents while Hell’s Angels was being made. That same year, 10 people died when two camera airplanes collided while shooting the otherwise forgettable feature film, Such Men Are Dangerous (1930).

As the 1930s passed, the supply of cheap airplanes dwindled. Ditto for the universe of pilots willing and able to perform the aerial gymnastics required by ever-more-enterprising screenplays. “Then, during World War II, moviemakers couldn’t get hold of the real thing because those airplanes were busy doing other stuff,” says airplane-spacecraft movie buff David Rutherford. “By that time, the studios had prop departments with model builders and in-house miniature-shooting specialists.”

An Australian who wrote his university thesis about the history of spacecraft designed for the movies, Rutherford briefly built models for the Japanese television science-fiction TV series Ultraman before seeing the writing on the wall and transitioning reluctantly to computer graphics. But he remains a huge fan of miniatures—not just airplanes and spacecraft but also trains and, especially, ships—and he maintains the remarkable “Model Aircraft in the Cinema” website, which contains a trove of information about the elaborate models and imaginative techniques used to film them in action.

The first models were suspended on thin but strong tungsten wires, and they were manipulated like puppets. Later, to simulate flight, they were attached to steel cables and moved forward and back, up and down, by pulleys. To showcase the miniatures they built for the action-packed Republic Pictures serials of the 1930s, ’40s, and ’50s, special effects mavens Howard and Theodore Lydecker routed an additional pair of wires through the wings of their models, which enabled the airplanes to perform barrel rolls. Although these accessories weren’t visible in the prints shown in movie theaters and, later, on television, Rutherford says they can now be spotted by informed viewers in high-resolution Blu-ray editions of old movies. 

A popular alternative to wires and cables is hard-mounting models to boom arms and other rigid structures that can be manipulated to make it appear as if the airplanes are pitching, rolling, diving, or climbing. This technique was used effectively in Memphis Belle in 1990. Rigid mounts are also used for motion-control photography: Foregrounds and backgrounds are shot separately, then married in post-production. Done badly, the technique can look hokey, which is why plans to use it in Top Gun in 1986 were scrapped. But by 1996, motion control had improved to the point that it was showcased seamlessly in Executive Decision, which incorporated a 1/12-scale Boeing 747 and a similarly sized Lockheed F-117 Nighthawk.

Of course, no matter how visually accurate a miniature may be, it’s going to look ridiculous in a real-world environment unless it’s finessed by some motion picture sleight of hand. The most common trick is known as forced perspective. By photographing a small model from a vantage point very close to a camera, you can create the illusion that it’s a full-size airplane that belongs in the real-life hangar in the background. 

“One of the questions that I get at the Museum is why we have an X-wing from Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker from 2019, but we didn’t get the similar screen-used vehicle from the original Star Wars film in 1977,” says Margaret Weitekamp, who oversees the National Air and Space Museum’s collection of space memorabilia. “The answer is they didn’t have one. You think you’ve seen that because they were so effective in using a combination of miniatures and forced perspectives, but they never had either the budget or the need to build out a full-scale vehicle.”

Alternatively, sets are sometimes built to the same scale as the model aircraft—think miniature buildings, miniature people, and even miniature fire hydrants. This approach was used recently in the whimsical Wes Anderson film The French Dispatch (2021), which featured a Douglas DC-3, a fancifully reimagined Boeing 314, and a bloated Douglas C-124 powered by 12 engines. Wildly impressive, but, as Rutherford points out: “There’s nothing new in large miniatures. They’ve been doing it forever.” He reserves his highest praise for Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo, the 1944 wartime favorite documenting the Doolittle Raid two years earlier. The film earned an award from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for the team led by special-effects icon Arnold Gillespie. Says Rutherford: “They built an astronomically huge model of the city, then strung wires across it and ran B-25 aircraft miniatures along them with massive pyrotechnics going off underneath. It’s a really amazing shot.” 

Still, no matter how artfully they’re deployed, cables, wires, and rigid structures can’t overcome a fundamental and inescapable drawback: Simulated flight isn’t the same thing as flying. Which is why it was only a matter of time before radio-controlled scale models got into the act. Larry Jolly, an industry stalwart who flew the radio-controlled F-18 Hornet that got shot down in Under Siege (1992), remembers talking to some “oorah!” U.S. Marine Corps Hornet pilots about the movie. “When I told them that there were no full-size F-18s used in the picture—just scale miniatures—they looked like I’d kicked them in the face,” he chuckles. “That’s what we do.”

The first blockbuster to embrace radio-control models in a big way was Battle of Britain (1969). There’s a certain irony there since the film’s producers were lauded in aviation circles for assembling a stunt fleet of about 100 vintage airplanes, supposedly making it the 35th-largest air force in the world. But the real fighters were augmented with a squadron of radio-controlled Junkers Ju 87s and Supermarine Spitfires, most of them ultimately consigned to crash duty.

Alas, crashing was what early radio-controlled movie aircraft did best. Their tiny gasoline-powered engines were unreliable, and pilots often lost contact with their models due to the electronic interference generated by film shoots. Connectivity was a problem as late as 1987 during the filming of Empire of the Sun, a sumptuous Steven Spielberg film that featured a radio-controlled North American P-51 Mustang, Boeing B-29, and Mitsubishi A6M Zero along with a handful of real airplanes. Unbeknownst to the pilot of the radio-control Mustang, the pyrotechnics crew had seeded the smoke generator with iron filings to generate sparks during a simulated strafing run. When the filings were released, they created enough electronic interference to cause the out-of-control model to then plow into the ground. 

Jolly was one of the first guys to pilot a radio-control model from the cockpit of a full-size helicopter that was filming the airplane he was flying remotely, which led to some sketchy, high-pressure situations. He was also a master at making his airplanes behave realistically instead of darting around like a TIE Fighter in a galaxy far, far away. “I toned my controls way down to make the models look like they were heavy—like airplanes rather than spaceships,” says Jolly. Cinematographers help by speeding up the frame rate four or five times faster than normal, which counterintuitively slows down the action when it appears on the screen. Jolly was part of the team that won a special-effects Emmy for Miracle Landing, the television movie based on Aloha Airlines Flight 243, which lost a substantial chunk of its fuselage during a flight on April 28, 1988.

If there were an Academy Award category for the most ambitious, sophisticated, and expensive flyable movie models ever built, the Oscar would go to Joe Bok for the airplanes he created for the Howard Hughes biopic, The Aviator, in 2004. Bok is an aerospace engineer whose company, Aero Telemetry, provides airborne electronic systems and telemetry equipment for satellites and unpiloted aerial vehicles (UAVs) operated by the U.S. military and commercial aerospace companies. In his spare time, he’s also a model builder and a radio-control pilot. As a passion project, he’d built a flyable one-fourth-scale model of the Hughes H-1, the noble, graceful one-off Howard Hughes had created to set speed and distance records in 1935 and 1937 (see “Slow-Building a Speedster” in the Fall 2025 issue).

When Martin Scorsese committed to making the The Aviator, he and his team had to decide whether to use miniatures or CGI, which had been gathering momentum ever since Jurassic Park demonstrated its potential in 1993. “They were interested in using [my model] for a static, motion-control, forced-perspective film test,” says Bok. “When they asked me how much I wanted for that, I told them to buy me a coffee and if they decided to go forward with building models to let me send them a quote for the airplanes.” The miniature photographed so well that Bok was hired to build large models of the Spruce Goose (the Hughes H-4 Hercules) and the XF-11, the reconnaissance prototype that Hughes crashed in Beverly Hills on his first flight. Scorsese later commissioned a brand-new half-scale version of the Hughes H-1 racer. “When the airplanes get as big as these, the lines really start to blur as to whether one calls them models or airplanes,” says Bok. “The XF-11 was as large as a Cessna and had similar flying characteristics. By all FAA standards, it was considered a medium-endurance tactical UAV.”

At one point, a crew of 35 worked 18-hour days for nearly three consecutive weeks. The most complex aspect of the build was something most moviegoers didn’t even notice—two sets of hydraulic retractable landing gear so fiendishly complicated and impeccably machined that they could qualify as fine art. The third model, the H-4 Hercules, didn’t need wheels because it was supposed to take off and land in the harbor off Long Beach, where Hughes had made his 28-second flight in the Spruce Goose in 1947. But with water came another array of problems.

For a variety of reasons, both technical and aesthetic, conventional gasoline engines were out, so Bok was forced to use electric motors powered by nickel metal hydride batteries with a mission-critical shortcoming: They typically caught fire when immersed in salt water. 

“What could go wrong?” jokes Bok. “We ended up with people on their backs trying to keep the hull from scraping the edge of the barge and handing the plane off to three divers. The weight of the plane pushed them under water with the entire nose section. It was nerve-racking to watch the whole spectacle. It’s a miracle no one fell off the barge or worse during the launching and recovery of the plane.”

Making space

Brick Price specializes in models that are even bigger than Bok’s. His company, WonderWorks, is a family-run business that still does miniature work, but its calling card is full-size mockups built not just for Hollywood productions but also for clients ranging from NASA and Disney to Scaled Composites and General Motors. Price and his crew created the lunar lander used in Apollo 13 (1995) and the Mercury-style capsule featured in The Astronaut Farmer (2006). Working out of a comprehensively equipped fabrication shop, WonderWorks has fashioned full-size space shuttle cockpits, International Space Station interiors, and a modular unit, SpaceHab. The company also rents spacesuits—some real, some made in-house, all designed to be comfortable enough for long film shoots or convention gigs.

Price is a child of the local aerospace and film industries. His father was a physicist at the California Institute of Technology and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory; his mother was an animator at Disney. Price worked at Hughes Aircraft, designing and photo-etching printed circuit boards for NASA’s Voyager probe while moonlighting as a model maker and writing for model magazines. A chance after-hours meeting with Howard Hughes and Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry was his entrée to the film business. His first taste of the big time was building a model of the starship Enterprise intended for Star Trek: The Motion Picture in 1979. (Three years later, the model appeared in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan.) But Price says his greatest triumph was his contribution to Space Cadets (2005), a British reality-TV show that perpetrated one of the most preposterous hoaxes in television history: convincing nine contestants that they’d been sent to Russia to train as cosmonauts and then flown into space in a WonderWorks space shuttle simulator made of wood. 

Although Price is a 70-year-old product of an analog age, he’s recently embraced newfangled technology such as artificial intelligence and 3D printing. “It’s not the tool that makes the artist,” he says. “It’s the artist’s vision and how he can make the tool work on his behalf.” Still, looking around his office, where virtually every surface is covered by lovingly created miniatures, it’s clear he still feels a deep connection to the handmade artifacts that are WonderWorks’ stock in trade. “We’re a dying breed,” he admits. “People come to us because we have the [old] technology.”

British visual effects superstar Steve Begg has not only worked through the transition from miniatures to CGI, he also helped speed it along. Like so many visual effects artists to come, he was initially inspired by the stop-action wizardry Ray Harryhausen showcased in movies such as Jason and the Argonauts (1963). Early in his career, Begg worked with industry titans Gerry Anderson and Derek Meddings, who’d collaborated on the beloved puppet-based TV series, Thunderbirds, filmed from 1964 to 1966. More recent credits include three James Bond flicks that feature breathtaking action set-pieces. Begg says that, for him, Casino Royale was the bridge between old and new. The film features a lovely 15-foot-long model of the Skyfleet S570—a fictitious alternative to the Airbus A380— along with an appropriately scaled hangar, airport vehicles, and human figures. “We pulled it out of the hangar on a computer-controlled winch, and it looked totally realistic to me,” says Begg. “And that’s the goal, really. I’m totally bolted into reality. My goal is to make it look real, not to just look cool. Believe it or not, there’s a difference.”

Casino Royale was released in 2006. Computing power has grown exponentially since then and so have the skills of the visual-effects geniuses. “I’ve been pushed into a corner quite often in the last 10 or 20 years by directors and producers asking, ‘Can we do this practical? Can we do this for real?’ ” he says. “I have a profound hatred for CGI explosions. They look fake no matter what. I’m a fan of miniatures, and I love using them whenever I can. But they have their limitations. CGI has limitations, but there are fewer of them.”

One industry player who is largely unaffected by the shift to virtual reality is Captan at Air Hollywood. “On every other script, there’s a welcome back, a goodbye, a when-are-you-coming?, and a when-are-you-leaving?” he says. “So there are almost always airport and airplane scenes.” 

Like everybody else in California, Captan has felt the pinch caused by film production companies moving their jobs out of state to cheaper locales. The exodus prompted the creation of his AutoPlane—a 53-foot-long section of a disassembled 777 built into the container of a tractor-trailer that can be trucked around the country. “It’s like a Transformer,” he says. “You can make it a wide body. You can make it a narrow body. You can have a lavatory. You can have a galley. You can put in a shower or a hot tub. They sometimes want a horse in there. We’re open to any of this stuff.”

There may come a day when computer graphics can render reality so plausibly that the film industry no longer needs genuine airplanes and airports, much less flesh-and-blood actors. But until then, there will be a niche for companies like WonderWorks and Air Hollywood, where movie magic continues to be made the old-fashioned way. 

A former daily newspaper reporter who often writes about automotive subjects, Preston Lerner is a frequent contributor to Air & Space Quarterly.

This article, originally titled "Lights, Camera, Aviation," is from the Spring 2026 issue of Air & Space Quarterly, the National Air and Space Museum's signature magazine that explores topics in aviation and space, from the earliest moments of flight to today. Explore the full issue.

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