The BoB thread got me to thinking about aviation films & the people who can either make or break them. These are the aviation consultants whose job is to find the aircraft & the pilots who fly them. Most are unknown & stay in the background. They rarely get a mention in the credits & if they do it's so far down the list you probably wouldn't notice.  

During a long career in the aviation industry I met a lot of interesting people. Most of the old stagers were real characters. One such character was Captain John Crewdson who ran Crewdson Aviation Services at Gatwick for some years after WWII. He was aviation advisor for most British films at the time & being a talented fixed-wing & helicopter pilot he did much of the flying in the films.

While I never met the man himself, one of his employees was a regular visitor to my own company. His name was Les Hillman & he became a good friend. I first met Les soon after his return from Tuscon, Arizona on a mission to find & bring back 3 B-17s for the film The War Lover starring Steve McQueen. Their adventures are published in the book Everything But The Flak by Martin Caidin. I found this after a quick search.
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I've never read this book but Les told me a few things that might not be in there. For example, to choose the aircraft from the many stored in the boneyard they kicked the tyres. The ones with the most pressure still in them were the ones they picked. They fitted them with reserve tanks in the fuselage, filled them up with juice & set out for England. Les told me he spent most of the trip huddled in the fuselage pumping fuel from the reserve tank with a hand pump.

I found this composite photo of John Crewdson doing his legendary beat-up of the tower at RAF Bovingdon during filming. The photo is genuine & one of the only surviving records of this remarkable piece of flying. Unfortunately I never saw him do it.



Crewdson was aviation advisor for the film 633 Squadron. There is a scene in this film where a Mosquito hits a fuel bowser & explodes in a ball of fire. Les Hillman told me he was running behind it (with the engines on fast tickover) steering it with lengths of fishing line attached to the brakes. He only had one shot at it & had to get it right first time. I always thought this was a sad waste of a rare aircraft.

Les also modified several Tiger Moths to look like German fighters for the Blue Max. He did a remarkable job & I wouldn't have known what they started out as if he hadn't told me.

Sadly we lost touch & I heard my old mate Les Hillman died a few years ago. These guys were involved with many other films including several James Bond classics & others by Stanley Kubrick. John Crewdson flew the helicopter in The Spy Who Loved Me. Next time you watch an old British film look out for the name Crewdson in the credits & spare a thought for the guys behind the scenes. Some, like the unknown parachutist who was killed making The War Lover, who sacrifice their lives for our enjoyment.

Interesting stuff Hagar, oddly enough I know RAF Bovingdon well, as I used to practice driving my dads car there when I was preparing for my driving test.
They now hold a market there every Saturday (good for dodgy leather jackets that have appeared on Police 5), and on Sundays they've converted some of the taxi-ways into a race track for Demolition Derbys and Class 4 saloon car racing.
Alas nowadays most of the effects are computer generated. It somehow lacks the passion , although if you do get the chance to see a BBC film called Over Here (its not available on video ) then you do get to see the incredibly talented Ray Hanna, and also features a B-17 (I'm not sure which one though), but the aerial photography is simply awesome.

Ozzy

Ozzy

I think sadly in the days of those films it was a case of "there's plenty more fish in the sea" with those old aircraft. When those films were made there were far more WWII aircraft avaliable to film directors and so they thought they could afford to destroy them. In the making of Memphis Belle, a B17 was destoryed during filming, fair enough, it was an accident, but another one was dismantled after filming because the owner didn't want to pay for it to be taken back to the states.

Also if you think about it, those two B17's were sacrificed for the remaining one. If two wern't scavenged then the 3rd B17 might well have either crashed its self of been broken up after filming.

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This is quite true Woody. Thanks for pointing that out. Those B-17s would probably have been scrapped in Arizona anyway. As someone mentioned in the BoB thread, the aircraft used in the Battle of Britain film were the basis for the now healthy warbird restoration business in this country.

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This is a fascinating subject.  As fro wasting planes, my dad said when he was in the Air Force he would watch them line up old fighters and bombers then go down the line knocking the tails off with a bulldozer.  Makes me sick to think about it.