MovieChat Forums > Flight of the Intruder (1991) Discussion > Outstanding air scenes in an excellent m...

Outstanding air scenes in an excellent movie


First a couple of admissions to paint the scene for you...I am a marine veteran of Vietnam having served with the 1st marine air wing as medevac support on choppers. I have a deep seated admiration for all fixed wing pilots who covered our asses numerous times out over the LZs. F-4 phantoms, A-6 Intruders, A-1 Skyraiders---I love them all.

So with that in mind, let me say that this movie was outstanding. Great air scenes, wonderful shots of A-6 Intruders, and my personal favorite the scene with Camporelli and Grafton on the ground and suddenly two A-1s come flying by at about 50 feet off the ground. Great direction and great camera work.

On top of my thumbs up for the plane scenes, I think this movie is highly underrated. The writing is tight, non manipulative and very realistic. (except for the very obvious hollywood insertion of a bar fight to get the male bonding over with quickly). All scenes on the carrier are real, life is slow and boring and then you are up in the air and life and death is inches away.

Of course I didn't miss the hollywood point of view that the war was wrong headed and we never should have been there, but overlooking the political statement was easy since I have come to expect that and it wasn't all that bad in this movie.

And I think Johnson did a decent job.

"We're going to need a bigger boat..."

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SPeaking as a Sailor who served aboard a carrier on deployment (Kitty Hawk) I have to say this movie does represent life aboard carriers at sea. You are correct.

The Flight and combat scenes are by far some of the best (And realistic) scenes in just about any war movie ever.

Another point to be made is that this film is proof that better effects does not make a better movie, or even a better scene within a movie. A Director can take a great film and have the best special effects available and turn it into a joke.

Compare the SAM scenes in this film with 1991 special effects and compare it to a more modern film with far better (and CGI) effects with a SAM scene like "Behind Enemy Lines".

The scenes in "Flight of the Intruder" depicted a very realistic flight profile of a Missile in flight attempting to track and hit an aircraft.

"Behind Enemy Lines" on the other hand was created by a director that watched a few too many Roadrunner vs Coyote cartoons with Wile E. Coyote (super genious) and his ACME brand guided missiles. Completely moronic.


I joined the Navy to see the world, only to discover the world is 2/3 water!

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[deleted]

No. I have seen the empty chair however.

The Empty Chair:
http://www.neptunuslex.com/2006/09/15/the-empty-chair-2/






I joined the Navy to see the world, only to discover the world is 2/3 water!

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Heh - I'm glad I wasn't the only one who thought of RoadRunner cartoons while watching that sequence!

I was always curious about the way Behind Enemy Lines depicted the SAM (an SA-6 I think?) destroying the (Super)Hornet. I know that a lot of anti-aircraft missiles, whether air to air or surface to air, use expanding rod warheads where metal rods are packed around the explosive and then attached to each other alternately at the top and bottom. When the missile figures out it's close enough, it detonates and the packed metal rods expand outward into a big hoop shape, hopefully tearing right through the target it was shot at.
Was this what we saw in BEL? To my eyes it looked as though the SAM discarded the shell covering its nose, and then shot a load of smaller projectiles at the plane like it was some sort of giant flying shotgun.
Is this what it looks like when an expanding rod warhead goes off, or does that movie show some other type of SAM warhead? Or is the actual shoot down of the jet just as bogus and silly as the chase?
Flight Of The Intruder, with much more basic SFX just shows the SAMs exploding into big puffs of fire with an accompanying shock wave whenever one got close enough to be felt - pretty much what seems to happen in most of the movies I've seen involving jets and missiles being shot at them.

For all of the showy effects, did BEL get it completely wrong, or is a real shoot-down somewhere in between what we see there and in Flight Of The Intruder?

--Myk

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It has been awhile since I last watched BEL. But yeah... the jettissoning of the nosecone and a delay then the shotgun blast of pellets is another ACME moment.
Behind the nosecone would be the antenna for the guidance system.

In a proximity detonated warhead (which is what they were trying to show) when the missile is close enough to the aircraft the missile will detonate. The warhead will send out a shower of fragments in an expanding cone ahead of the missile (due to the momentum of the missile).

Another reason why this fraked up scene is stupid is because the missile IS proximity detonated so why the hell did the missile actually scrap past the plane without exploding when they were (for lack of a better word) Dueling with it?

In FotI, you see the missiles arcing up towards the plane, guiding on the plane by the ground radar bouncing a signal off the plane and the missile closing on the echo(Semi Active Radar Homing or SARH). The missile will continuously guide towards the echo (the plane's location). If it misses and overshoots the missile will lose lock and just go stupid (ballistic) and often self destruct. They DO NOT turn back around and keep hunting after the plane like in the moronic BEL.

Also as you were asking about, FotI shows the missile detonations as big puffs of fire. That is more realistic. The fragmentation warheads are too fast for the eye to see. All you see is the detonation of the missile, and the results if it hits.

Here is an excellent video showing the SA-2 (the missiles from Flight of the Intruder)
Each missile is about the size of a telephone pole.
Note how the main booster moter burns out in a couple of seconds but the sustainer motor keeps burning with less smoke.
Also note how the missiles (they fire two) keep altering their course to track in on the maneuvering target. But they never loop back around or re-attack, it is just alterations to the flight as they continue to arc towards the target intercept.
Also not the detonation on target and parts of the target spiraling away towards the ground after intercept followed by the second missile detonating at the very end.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KHfOF8hF8mA


Another part of what you were asking about the SA-2's shown in Flight... HOw they only seemed to buffet the plane with the shockwave.

Ideally, the missile will home in on and detonate in a position so that the plane is in the cone of the blast fragmentation pattern. Remember though that Grafton was maneuvering and pulling hard G's to force the missile to overshoot.

If the missile is close enough but just out of the cone, and the missile is going to overshoot the guidance logic on the missile will detonate anyway in a last ditch effort to kill the plane. This means the missile is close enough for the blast to buffet the plane but because of the missiles momentum, the fragments travel past and behind the plane.

If the missile is just sitting still and detonates, the fragments will go every which way in a sphere, but because a missile is moving at near mach 2 or higher, those fragments also have that same mach 2 or higher momentum on detonating. so as they explode outwards, they are also still travelling in the same direction as the missile just prior to exploding. Thats why the fragments form a conical pattern.

Here is my ship firing her SAMs. The SM-2ER.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DGjvN3Uf4-c
4.9 Mach and a skin to skin kill at over 100 miles.
Skin to skin meaning direct impact...though the missile is fused for proximity.
The electronic hornets nest buzzing you hear and the frequent horizontal static you see is a result of an unshielded camera being screwed with by our powerful radars.


I joined the Navy to see the world, only to discover the world is 2/3 water!

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