TOM STARTED TRAINING to ly helicopters
years ago. In several of the ilms I’ve worked with
him on, he’d always be going to location and ly-
ing as much as he could. For this movie, though, we
needed to give him speciic light training. I taught
him close-formation lying, and then we had Air-
bus’s chief helicopter instructor work with him. To
practice lying through the narrow canyon, where
his blades would be 15 to 20 feet from the canyon
walls, he lew around a racetrack. He could weave
and play around, and if he got it wrong, he’d just
stray of track. We gave him distractions—emer-
gencies and mechanical problems—so he could
build up the responses he’d need in a live situation.
When we lew in formation, we would purposefully
put him in turbulence so that he could feel what it
was like to lose control of the aircraft.
When you do a big dive like this in a helicop-
ter, the risk is that the rotor speed goes too high.
A governor automatically keeps the blade speed
within 30 to 40 rpm of the 390-rpm average.
In a dive, it gets confused. It feels the airspeed
increase, and instructs the blades to move more
quickly, even though they don’t need to. That
could damage the blades and the devices that con-trol them, or throw a blade. The other danger is
an engine stall, when the blades spin on their
own until they lose momentum. It’s called free-
wheeling. We had Tom practice landing with
freewheeling blades. Then we had him practice
the dive in free airspace with an instructor pilot.
Once we all agreed that the margins were safe, the
instructor got out and Tom went for it.
During ilming, there were three helicopters in
the canyon, including Tom’s. The command and
control helicopters—with the director and other
crew—were above that, and another was even
higher. Protocol requires each helicopter to be one
rotor disc apart, or about 40 feet. The rotor disc is
the saucer shape the blades make when they spin.
One disc’s distance gives you leeway if you get too
close or the lead aircraft changes its speed unex-
pectedly or you get into some turbulence.
That was what we were dealing with. Tom,
however, also had to act. And direct: Most of the
cameras for the scene are ixed to his helicop-
ter in diferent positions. He has to imagine the
background those cameras are seeing. So he’s
lying, communicating with the crew, acting,
and operating the camera.Ethan Hunt has to save
the world. This time
it’s from the threat of
nuclear terrorism.The bad guy (Henry
Cavill) chases the
good guy (Tom
Cruise) in helicopters
through a narrow
canyon. To escape,
Cruise dives his chop-
per over the edge of
a clif in a tight, nearly
vertical, spiral.THE SCENETHE PLOT
BY
MARC WOLFF,
aerial coordinatorMISSION: IMPOSSIBLE—FALLOUT
THE MOVIEIn some scenes,
Cruise had less than
20 feet between his
helicopter blades
and canyon walls.
68 JULY/AUGUST _ 201 POPULARMECHANICS.COM