Aviation-theme movies on Netflix & Amazon Prime

NoHeat

NoHeat

Final Approach
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This thread is for sharing tips on films now available to view online, using common services like Netflix and Amazon Prime.

I'll start:
John Wayne in "Island in the Sky" is now available on Amazon Prime. It's about a civilian transport crew, after WWII, that crashes in bitterly cold Labrador, the survival, and the search and rescue effort made by his peer pilots. I enjoyed it. There was good drama, reasonably realistic cockpit scenes, and of course the usual John Wayne, who was the captain of the Corsair that crashed. It was 1953, so it is black and white.

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That's a great film. It's based on a true event that took place during WW2, described in Fate Is The Hunter -- author Ernie Gann was one of the pilots searching for a downed colleague.
 
Not Netflix or Amazon Prime, but there is a hidden gem on YouTube.

In the late 1980s, the BBC produced an outstanding 12-hour documentary on the history of aviation, called "Reaching for The Skies". It is accurate, intelligent, well-researched, beautifully photographed, and chock full of interviews with aviation legends who were still with us then. General aviation gets good coverage, with visits to Oshkosh and Reno (1984-style), a formation ballet with a Long-Eze and a Defiant, and Richard Bach taking off from a mountain lake in his Lake Amphibian.

As far as I know, the series was released on VHS many years ago, but never on DVD. Fortunately, all 12 episodes are on YouTube here:
http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLNQ-K755_QX9ZnqVV8Vj1Pr44-hg19DsG

The only downside, of course, is that video quality is not up to 21st Century standards, but it's still must-see TV.

The BBC series was narrated by Anthony Quayle. An Americanized version of the series was later produced by CBS, and broadcast on TNT, with Robert Vaughn reading the same narration script. But the link above is the original BBC version.
 
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I try to stay away from aviation themed movies/TV. With the possible exception of "Sully", they're usually so bad they **** me off and make me want to throw things at the screen.
 
Art VanDelay said:
I try to stay away from aviation themed movies/TV. With the possible exception of "Sully", they're usually so bad they **** me off and make me want to throw things at the screen.
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Twelve O'Clock High -- great story, outstanding performances, technically accurate ... and on Netflix.
 
I think it is Netflix that has "breaking the sound barrier" on right now, I believe it is from the British side of things, haven't had an opportunity to watch it yet but will get to it one of these days.
There is a couple of the new age CGI crappers like "the red barron" and the red tails on one of them as well, you couldn't pay me enough to watch either one.
 
I always loved "The Great Waldo Pepper" and have to have my fix of it at least once a year.

Like "Twelve O'clock", and "Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, more commonly known as Dr. Strangelove", other favorites.

Trailer for Waldo:


Name escapes me right now but stunt pilot from Calif did the flying, Tallman?
 
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Snakes on a plane?

Sharknado?

Airplane?
Airplane 2?
Airplane 3?
Airplane 4?

Top Gun?

Oh, what was the one with Chappy?
 
I wish Blaze of Noon would come out on video. Pretty good movie about airmail pilots. It stayed pretty true to the original book.

Every now and then it gets aired on TV. Need to get that recorded somehow.
 
mulligan said:
Snakes on a plane?

Sharknado?

Airplane?
Airplane 2?
Airplane 3?
Airplane 4?

Top Gun?

Oh, what was the one with Chappy?
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Wow didn't know there were 4 Airplane movies, but the original is the only one I like. The terminology and how it's used in the movie make it obvious they had good aviation advisors. I was a controller and PPC when I first saw it and thought it was hysterical.
 
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Zero Hour!

Very, very bad. But you will laugh all the way through it as you find whole scenes that Airplane! lifted from it, sometimes verbatim.

Ted Stryker really is a terrible pilot... just watch the gauges!
 
Mercy Mission. Rescue of Flight 771 :)
 
Flight of the Phoenix. The one with Jimmy Stewart.
Did you know they really build a plane and flew it. It crashed while filming. Killed the pilot.
 
Acrodustertoo said:
If this doesn't get your heart pumping then I don't know what will. This is pure gold right here so get your tissues ready and be prepared to shed some tears!

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At least they used real planes and not CGI. While he had to keep the flaps out to stay with the motorcycle it was some pretty nice flying.
 
Not sure if it's online but Strategic Air Command came out on Bluray last month. Watched it tonight and it looks amazing!
 
Netflix now has:

TV:
Ice Pilots, Air Disasters

Movies:
The Red Baron (2008), Top Gun

Documentaries:
Little Dieter Needs to Fly (Vietnam War aviator shot down / captive), Battle of Britain The Real Story, Kamikazes, Above and Beyond (early Israel Air Force)
 
Amazon Prime now has:

TV:
Legends of Air Power, Plane Facts, First Flights with Neil Armstrong, The Complete History of Air Combat, Flying through Time,


Movies & documentaries:
Combat Aircrafts, How to Build Jet Aircraft, Angle of Attack - How Naval Aviation Changed the Face of War, Grounded, Your Flight in Their Hands, A Century of Flight, Faster than a Speeding Bullet ( air speed records), Memories of a WWII Hero: Captain Brown's Story, Wings for Naggie Ray (WWII WASP), Celebrating 60 Years of Farnborough Air Show, German Jets and Destroyers
 
mscard88 said:
I always loved "The Great Waldo Pepper" and have to have my fix of it at least once a year.

Like "Twelve O'clock", and "Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, more commonly known as Dr. Strangelove", other favorites.

Trailer for Waldo:


Name escapes me right now but stunt pilot from Calif did the flying, Tallman?
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I finished watching this today. Not sure I dug the story so much. I guess that was like the end of point break where he paddles out and he's not coming back, haha. Seems a bit out there though that he's going down vs. facing the 'faa' or caa or whatever it was called. He should've just landed a town over and stuck to his story, "wasn't me, nope". moved to canada and fly there.
 
jsstevens said:
At least they used real planes and not CGI. While he had to keep the flaps out to stay with the motorcycle it was some pretty nice flying.
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I actually had to evaluate/analyze shots in that movie (and other aviation movies) for a film class. More than half of the footage in that awful thing are RC models.

At least I got to watch aviation movies for an easy "A". Even if it was on a machine I could track forward and back on VHS with a shuttle jog so I could find telltales for things like model use (bad angles, screwed up shadows, trying to make the scale look right) and editing/continuity errors (the famous Top Gun "banking left!" and the next shot is a Tomcat breaking right).
 
Tora! Tora! Tora!

and not just because the first plane I ever sat in was a Zero, deemed to have been in the Pearl Harbor raid. But that helps
 
Skyrys62 said:
Tora! Tora! Tora!

and not just because the first plane I ever sat in was a Zero, deemed to have been in the Pearl Harbor raid. But that helps
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A lot of the filming was done over the Catalina Channel off the coast of Southern California. I remember seeing formations of those "Aichi D3A dive bombers" (modified BT-13s) flying overhead when I was an undergrad student at U.C. Irvine.
 
I'm pretty sure "Spirit of St Louis" is on both. I own it on DVD but just looked at saw it was on Netflix. However, I did not know Air Disasters was on Netflix, I will be catching up on that for sure.

Also, did not know there were for "Airplane!" movies but nothing is every as good as the original so I'll just keep it at that.
 
Anyone know if "The Great Waldo Pepper" is on Netflix?
 
Someone mentioned to me the other day that the new Amazon Fire stick and Fire with the voice remote thingy...

You tell it what Services you subscribe to... (Amazon, HBO, Netflix, whatever...) and then when you ask it to find a show, it goes through all the services you have and tells you which one has that show available to watch.

Anyone have one, and can confirm? That’s sort of worth the price of admission by itself.

I know my stupid old AppleTVs will never do that.
 
denverpilot said:
Someone mentioned to me the other day that the new Amazon Fire stick and Fire with the voice remote thingy...

You tell it what Services you subscribe to... (Amazon, HBO, Netflix, whatever...) and then when you ask it to find a show, it goes through all the services you have and tells you which one has that show available to watch.

Anyone have one, and can confirm? That’s sort of worth the price of admission by itself.

I know my stupid old AppleTVs will never do that.
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Roku has voice search as well. I believe it also puts the viewing options that have no additional cost at the top of the search results. I'm not sure Amazon Fire will do that, instead favoring their own Prime Video service.
 
Amazon Prime does have a few interesting foreign aviation films. "Star of Africa" (Sturn von Afrika) is a classic 1957 German film about Hans-Joachim Marseille, one of their top aces in Africa during WWII. Has a number of live action flying scenes of ME-109s (actually Spanish Buchons) and a Fiesler Storch.

"Only Old Men are Going to Battle" is a 1974 Soviet film based on the memoirs of a WWII pilot in the Red Air Force. It's not quite as good in the flying effects department...using Zilns or something as Yaks, and few scenes of real airplanes flying.

Neither of these two is really any great shakes as a movie...the traditional cocky fighter pilot and "we can't keep sending these kids out to die" sorts of things. At least the political content is fairly low...kind of a surprise for the Soviet film.

2015's "The Battle of Sevastapol" is about a female sniper in the Red Army. It's mostly ground-based, but the subject has a boyfriend who's a fighter pilot and the movie has some pretty good low-level combat scenes (CGI) around a naval convoy. There's are snippets of these scenes in the trailer:

Ron Wanttaja
 
wanttaja said:
"Star of Africa" (Sturn von Afrika) is a classic 1957 German film about Hans-Joachim Marseille, one of their top aces in Africa during WWII. Has a number of live action flying scenes of ME-109s (actually Spanish Buchons) and a Fiesler Storch.
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I need to see that. I'd not heard of Marseille before I read The German Aces Speak (available on iBooks), essentially a series of interviews of the top Luftwaffe aces. From what they say, Marseille was a fascinating character. He was a very talented fighter pilot, but very much a nonconformist, sort of the Hawkeye Pierce of the Luftwaffe. His best friend was his black South African assistant, Mathias; he played his smuggled American jazz records "loud enough for the British to hear it in Egypt," and on the subject of politics said, "If there's a party worth joining I might consider it, but there would have to be some attractive ladies present." He was shot down and killed at the age of 23.
 
Also, The Tuskegee Airmen (1995) is on Amazon Prime. And it actually is included, so free to watch with your monthly membership fee, unlike majority of movies that need to be paid for (I love the scam that Amazon invented).
Good suggestions, keep the thread going, guys!
 
jsstevens said:
At least they used real planes and not CGI. While he had to keep the flaps out to stay with the motorcycle it was some pretty nice flying.
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Meh, that's the only good thing about that short. Everything else blows, from the green screen, through absolute horsesh*t physics, to downright f***ed up flying. Whoever shot this did so for drama and clueless idiots (aka the general populace), not for smart people.
But hey, I agree, at least it wasn't CGI! :D
 
The BBC had a series about the early days of the Royal Flying Corps in WWI called "Wings" with a lower-class laborer becoming a pilot. Some taxiable aircraft, some large RC models. Pretty good show, actually. Kind of "Upstairs Downstairs meet the Fokkers." It's fully available on Youtube.

First episode:
The ironic thing is Tim Woodward plays the young new pilot. About 15 years later, he played Squadron Leader Rex in "Piece of Cake."

Ron Wanttaja
 
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