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Thread: Searching for name of old flying movie.

  1. #11
    crusty old aviator's Avatar
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    In the compressibilty wave patterns of supersonic flight, the rules of aerodynamics tend to be reversed, so what you describe from the movie is not all science fictiion...even if they can't pronounce aluminum correctly.

    Aluminium??? (Where is that on the periodic table?)

  2. #12
    Mayhemxpc's Avatar
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    On the other hand, I have to emit that they have it right with "aeroplane." A Brit friend once challenged me on it so I looked up the Wright Brothers patent. Sure enough…aeroplane.

    Back on to the thread…I looked up "Above and Beyond" on Google and the only 1952 movie it comes up with is the story of Col. Paul Tibbets.

  3. #13
    Jonathan Harger
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    Quote Originally Posted by crusty old aviator View Post
    In the compressibilty wave patterns of supersonic flight, the rules of aerodynamics tend to be reversed, so what you describe from the movie is not all science fictiion...
    I first learned of the film from the awesome Tom Wolfe book The Right Stuff. The relevant excerpt from that book follows:

    "Breaking the Sound Barrier happened to be one of the most engrossing movies about flying ever made. It seemed superbly realistic, and people came away from it sure of two things: it was an Englishman who had broken the sound barrier, and he had done it by reversing the controls in the transonic zone.
    Well, after the showing they bring out Yeager to meet the press, and he doesn't know where in the hell to start. To him the whole goddamned picture is outrageous. He doesn't want to get mad, because this thing has been set up by Air Force P.R. But he is not happy. In as calm a way as he can word it on the spur of the moment, he informs one and all that the picture is an utter shuck from start to finish. The promoters respond, a bit huffily, that this picture is not, after all, a documentary. Yeager figures, well, anyway, that settles that. But as the weeks go by, he discovers an incredible thing happening. He keeps running into people who think he's the first American to break the sound barrier… and that he learned how to reverse the controls and zip through from the Englishman who did it first. The last straw comes when he gets a call from the Secretary of the Air Force.
    "Chuck," he says, "do you mind if I ask you something? Is it true that you broke the sound barrier by reversing the controls?"
    Yeager is stunned by this. The Secretary—the Secretary!—of the U.S. Air Force!
    "No, sir," he says, "that is… not correct. Anyone who reversed the controls going transonic would be dead."

  4. #14

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    I'm trying to find an old movie titled "High Frontier." Has anyone seen it or know if it's available? It supposedly contained good footage of the B-36 Peacemaker.

  5. #15
    rv8bldr's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by crusty old aviator View Post
    In the compressibilty wave patterns of supersonic flight, the rules of aerodynamics tend to be reversed, so what you describe from the movie is not all science fictiion...even if they can't pronounce aluminum correctly.

    Aluminium??? (Where is that on the periodic table?)
    Actually, Aluminium is historically correct, although AlumiNUM is more widely used these days.

    http://www.worldwidewords.org/articles/aluminium.htm
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  6. #16
    FlyingRon's Avatar
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    The reason you can't find that movie is that they never made it. RKO (what the -- is a radio picture?) was to planing it with Richard Widmark. I think that was during the the Howard Hughes era at RKO and a lot of things either didn't get made, finished, or released on any time schedule. Hughes's own Jet Pilot (mentioned earlier) took almost eight years to get released.

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