Top 5 aviation movies

Velocity173

Touchdown! Greaser!
PoA Supporter
Joined
Jul 3, 2012
Messages
15,249
Display Name

Display name:
Velocity173
We all have our favorites. What are your top five?
Mine:

1. The Right Stuff
2. Top Gun
3. The Memphis Belle
4. The Battle of Britain
5. The Final Countdown
 
Last edited:
1. Top Gun
2. Top Gun
3. Top Gun
4. Top Gun
5. Top Gun
 
Always
Flight of the Phoenix
Top Gun
Memphis Belle
Any movie with aircraft in it
 
The Spirit of St Louis
The Great Waldo Pepper
Strategic Air Command
Always
Island in the Sky
 
The Spirit of St Louis
The Great Waldo Pepper
Strategic Air Command
Always
Island in the Sky

Great selection. I have Stategic Air Command on VHS. I like Always as well but for some reason never bought it.
 
Battle of Britain
The Blue Max
Strategic Air Command
The Great Waldo Pepper
The "Piece of Cake" miniseries.

Ron Wanttaja
 
Battle of Britain
The Blue Max
Strategic Air Command
The Great Waldo Pepper
The "Piece of Cake" miniseries.

Ron Wanttaja

Just saw the Blue Max for the first time a couple weeks ago. Awesome air to air footage. Never seen the Great Waldo Pepper yet. Seems like a popular recommendation though.
 
1. The High and the Mighty
2. 30 Seconds Over Tokyo
3. Island in the Sky
4. Twelve O'Clock High
5. The Bridges at Toko Ri
 
Airplane!
Island in the sky
One Six Right
Strategic Air Command
Dark Blue World

Sent from my Nexus 7 using Tapatalk 2
 
Last edited:
1. The High and the Mighty
2. 30 Seconds Over Tokyo
3. Island in the Sky
4. Twelve O'Clock High
5. The Bridges at Toko Ri

Ah Bridges at Toko Ri. Another favorite of mine. Love the Panther scenes!
 
Just saw the Blue Max for the first time a couple weeks ago. Awesome air to air footage. Never seen the Great Waldo Pepper yet. Seems like a popular recommendation though.
Blue Max was the first aviation movie I can remember seeing as a kid, and my favorite. When I saw it again as an adult I realized that I had missed the whole other part of the plot.
 
1. Top Gun
2. Top Gun
3. Top Gun
4. Top Gun
5. Top Gun

doo doooo doooo do do do do dooo dooo doo do dooooo do do dooooo do do doooo doooo dooooo. doo doooo doooo do do do do dooo dooo do do dooo do do doooo do do doooooooooo
 
Top Gun
Twelve O'Clock High
Memphis Belle
Battle of Britain
Piece of Cake Series on BBC


And of course Airplane! In a category of its own

Cheers
 
doo doooo doooo do do do do dooo dooo doo do dooooo do do dooooo do do doooo doooo dooooo. doo doooo doooo do do do do dooo dooo do do dooo do do doooo do do doooooooooo

Man, I never knew the words before - thanks!
 
Top Gun
Twelve O'Clock High
Memphis Belle
Battle of Britain
Piece of Cake Series on BBC


And of course Airplane! In a category of its own

Cheers
"Piece of Cake" twice now? Never heard of it.
 
Airplane
StarWars
ShawShank Redemption
Fast Times at Ridgemont High (mostly just the swimming pool scene)
CaddyShack
 
Airplane
StarWars
ShawShank Redemption
Fast Times at Ridgemont High (mostly just the swimming pool scene)
CaddyShack
????

Okay, I'll let Star Wars slide, but how on earth do you classify the last 3 as 'aviation' movies?
 
We all have our favorites. What are your top five?
Mine:

1. The Right Stuff
2. Top Gun
3. The Memphis Belle
4. The Battle of Britain
5. The Final Countdown

"Strategic Air Command", "Twelve O'Clock High", "The Great Waldo Pepper", "Captains of the Clouds", "Airplane!", not necessarily in that order.
 
Airplane
StarWars
ShawShank Redemption
Fast Times at Ridgemont High (mostly just the swimming pool scene)
CaddyShack

OK, Shawshank has Morgan Freeman and he's a pilot. That's about the only relation to aviation the last three have.
 
OK, Shawshank has Morgan Freeman and he's a pilot. That's about the only relation to aviation the last three have.

Ah, come on. He was probably flying pretty high when he saw Caddyshack and Fast Times. We are talking late 70's here.
 
Ah, come on. He was probably flying pretty high when he saw Caddyshack and Fast Times. We are talking late 70's here.
Hey now, let's get our decades right....them are both 80's movies! (Caddyshack '80 and Fast Times '82).
 
Memphis Belle
Battle of Britain
Top Gun
Flight of the Intruder
The Rocketeer (yea I know its cheesy but I dont care)

ties for fifth are the great waldo pepper, Red baron, and Tuskegee Airman (NOT REDTAILS!!!!)
 
There are just too many! I'm a movie collector, and have most all of them. VHS, Laser Disc, DVD, and BlueRay. My favorite aviation scene is still the B-36 takeoff in Strategic Air Command.

By the way, another one that I haven't seen listed is "Mother Lode". Excellent flying scenes, including an unplanned float plane crash into a mountain lake, which was re-written into the story. After sitting in a vault for many years due to legal reasons, it was released on DVD last year.

L.Adamson
 
"Fast Times at Ridgemont High" was an aviation movie for Captain, because every time he watches the pool scene with Phoebe Cates, he gets ... Ummm... Elevated.

:D
 
lets not forget Air America
 

I discovered an interesting unexpected (to me) connection between "Always" (1989) and the movie it is a remake of, "A Guy Named Joe" (1943):

The song "Smoke gets in your eyes" that the characters Pete and Dorinda consider "theirs" in the 1989 remake was sung by Irene Dunne (who played Dorinda in the 1943 move) in the 1935 film "Roberta".

Irene Dunne's 1935 version:

Oh, and somebody uploaded the "girl clothes!" scene from "A Guy Named Joe" with Spencer Tracy and Irene Dunne:
 
There are just too many! I'm a movie collector, and have most all of them. VHS, Laser Disc, DVD, and BlueRay. My favorite aviation scene is still the B-36 takeoff in Strategic Air Command

We gotta play by the rules, the thread says Top 5.

My main criteria for aviation movies is actual aireal footage. The Spirit of St Louis is an exception because of the story and Hells Angels probably ought to be in there but we only get five. The Great Waldo Pepper is one of the best because it's most likely the last actual Curtiss JN-4 air to air we're ever going to get. Frank Tallman was responsible for most of that stuff and if he hadn't been killed in the filming of Flight of the Phoenix we'd probably have been blessed with much more of that kind of stuff. Strategic Air Command is one of a few 50's era films that use lots of spectacular USAF footage.

The key is real footage, films like Red Tails and Pearl Harbor that are 100% CGI just cannot compare to an older fim such as Tora Tora Tora. The images don't convey the sense of flight properly, they can't adequately portray the extreme spatial separation and three dimensional oddities that real flight involves.

You really have to be there to get it.
 
Last edited:
The key is real footage, films like Red Tails and Pearl Harbor that are 100% CGI just cannot compare to an older fim such as Tora Tora Tora. The images don't convey the sense of flight properly, they can't adequately portray the extreme spatial separation and three dimensional oddities that real flight involves.

You really have to be there to get it.

Really disliked Redtails, some of pearl harbor was okay...except the story and the actors and th.....but I digress. I really hate CGI in aviation movies, Im not even sure it saves money compared to actual flight but its painful to look at.
 
I'm just going to add a couple oddballs.... Not really top five... I'll watch anything with an airplane in it, but I do draw the line at horrible RC models and bad acting ... Which would be...

"Iron Eagle II... Return to my private hell"

The list...

Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines
Pushing Tin
MST3K: The Starfighters (Karen can't stop laughing at the jokes cracked during the hudeously long air refueling scenes.)
Dr. Strangelove
The entire Airport series...
Whatever that one Airplane is a copy of... Kinda fun to see it copied scene by scene.

And just because its the season, and it's a crazy strange movie...

MST3K: Santa Claus - damn strangest and funniest Christmas movie ever. Santa vs Satan. Haha.
 
Back
Top