I tend to watch a lot of old, obscure aviation movies just to see what kind of airplanes might be parked in the background.

Watched an interesting one today... "Top of the World." The plot itself was pretty stale, but it showed some WWII/postwar planes operational that I don't think I'd seen anywhere else.

It has an LC-126 (military version of the Cessna 195) on skis, landing in an open field and taking off again. It has four SAR B-17s in arctic colors. It has neat footage of a F-82 Twin Mustang, including takeoffs, air-to-air, and landing. It has a passel of C-47s, including one landing on wheel/skis. The movie ends with a flypast of early-production B-36s...no jet engines.

What was the most surprising to ME was a set of scenes showing operational use of a Waco CG-4A glider in the Arctic. I hadn't known the US used them after WWII, though I later found it mentioned in Wikipedia. The glider was used to pick up a crew abandoned on the ice cap, including an aerial pickup (which they didn't show very much of, so I suspect never actually happened).

But the movie has a lot of scenes with the glider, including one great shot of it landing at an intermediate airport...the shot is down the runway with a telephoto lens, with the glider turning back and forth in the distance to lose altitude, and rolling up to the camera at the end. The neat thing is, the F-82 is sitting in the foreground for the entire shot...interesting juxtaposition of little-known airplanes from US history. There's even an air-to-air scene with the F-82 passing the C-47 pulling the glider.

Some interesting footage....

Ron Wanttaja