“Putting Airliners into FLIGHT” – by Nicholas A. Veronico
Aviation writer Nicholas Veronico explains how Scroggins Aviation supplied two retired airliners for the blockbuster film FLIGHT starring Denzel Washington and Don Cheadle and the new movie OBLIVION starring Tom Cruise.
Click Here to View Article For a copy of this issue visit – Airliner World magazine
PPG Aerospace a provider for commercial aircraft windows contact Scroggins Aviation to supply them with a Boeing 767, N610TW training aid. Below is an image of an article Airliner World magazine published on the subject. The fabricated nose was completed with a Wonder Bread type paint scheme to be used during a training course put on by PPG.
Filming Hollywood’s Flights of Fantasy
by Christine Negroni
When the movie ‘Flight’, starring Denzel Washington, is over you might wonder, ‘Just how many airplanes did it take to make that picture-perfect airliner crash?’ The answer is three: McDonnell Douglas MD-80s salvaged from Delta Air Lines, American Airlines, and the former Continental Airlines. I know this because I have talked to the man who helped make it happen. Christine Negroni looks into how Scroggins Aviation supplied the mockups for FLIGHT, THE EVENT (shown on cover) and ABC’s television series Pan Am.
Click here to view article Magazine.
In the feature FLIGHT starring Denzel Washington. Scroggins Aviation was contracted by Paramount to supply two MD-80 series airliners for the film. MD-82, N442AA was choice for the crash scene. However, the cockpit from MD-88, N901DL had to be used to replace the damaged one from N442AA. MD-82, N16807 upper forward fuselage was chosen for all the key interior cockpit and cabin scenes.
In Airliner World magazine, aviation writer Nicholas Veronico explains how Scroggins Aviation supplied two retired airliners for the blockbuster film. Click here for story.
In Hollywood, Flights of Fancy
By CHRISTINE NEGRONI
Published: July 8, 2012
Enter Scroggins Aviation. Early in the season in the American television show “THE EVENT,” a Boeing 767 goes down in the desert. To achieve the aftereffect, which is featured in two episodes, Scroggins, based in Las Vegas, sawed an airliner into pieces and transported them 320 miles, or 515 kilometers, on 12 trucks before reassembling the plane at Pinnacles National Monument in the California desert.
For this project, the chief executive of the company, Doug Scroggins, called on his unusual experience as both a dismantler of airplanes for a salvage firm and as a film producer.
“Right now I’m devoting all my attention to the film industry,” Mr. Scroggins said in an interview.
That includes working on television shows and on the director Robert Zemeckis’s new movie “FLIGHT,” which is scheduled to be released in November — starring two McDonnell Douglas MD-80s and Denzel Washington.
Mr. Scroggins’s most challenging assignment to date was building the Boeing 707 flight deck featured in the short-lived television series “Pan Am,” a celebration of the glory days of air travel. The cockpit had to open like a clamshell to allow the filming of the pilots and the flight engineer at work. Every dial, gauge and breaker panel was checked for authenticity, Mr. Scroggins said, especially since the cockpit structure was really that of a Boeing 727.
“It was a major job,” said Mr. Scroggins. “It was a big, big job. We made sure that the thing was 99.9 percent accurate. That’s how confident I felt about the build. I tell a lot of guys it was a 727, and they can’t believe it.”
But building an authentic interior is often not enough: To create the effect of a plane crashing — as in “The Event” — or to add a static airplane to the scene of a busy airport tarmac — as needed for some sequences in Pan Am — takes sophisticated digital photographic techniques, said Sam Nicholson, chief executive of Stargate Studios, which specializes in visual effects and virtual environments.
A frequent flier himself, Mr. Nicholson said he enjoyed the challenge of trying to recreate the world of aviation circa 1960 with digital special effects.
“I like flying. I like traveling, and I’m glad every once in a while a movie comes along that wants to do it perfectly, historically real,” he said of the scenes in “Pan Am.” “They are a completely computer-generated environment based on historical photographs rendered by computer,” he said. “What we do looks like a plane and feels like a plane, but there’s nothing there.”
It is just the opposite approach at Air Hollywood. To accommodate the range of demands for movies, television shows, commercials, even promotions for airlines, everything must be physically on hand: airliners; first- and coach-class seats; and a warehouse of check-in counters, meal trolleys and metal detectors.
