Dunkirk (Movie) Aircraft Filming

Christopher Nolan is one of my favorite directors as he avoids CGI as much as possible. I wish more filmmakers would do the same.

The dogfights and audio of the Spitfires alone makes the Imax ticket price an absolute bargain.

 

The Spitfire scenes were awesome!

 

We make the mounts for the helicopter cameras used in this film, F1, MotoGP etc. Never a dull day around here.
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agreed. The Spitfire scene where Tom Hardy's plane runs out of gas and glides....I wonder

if thats possilbe for the length (given it was a movie) on a metal frame with fabric skin on

an empty tank??

 

It would be nice to know what the lift/drag ratio is on a Spitfire but I'll bet that it will glide better than most since it was the pinpoint optimum power to weight set up and not one of the follow on derivatives that were all engine and had the glide angle of a brick. The 707 had an L/D approaching 20 but you had to keep up a lot of speed and you could get it down . Then the problem was stopping it when you got there. Sully demonstrated that when he had total power failure and unlimited runway length.

 

Sully....that was a feat of just pure pilot experience. Hit the angle a few degrees to high and

the fuselage breaks..a few degrees to low and the nose dives in the water....just amazing.

 

Bob,

In the movie, when the Spit's closed in on the Heinkel's at their 6, does that gunner

on the top bubble of the Heinkel have a cannon? (In the movie it sure sounded and shot

like one given the period/era).

 

I don't recall any cannons being used on the HE-111. It was mostly the MG-42 machine gun. I'm not expert on all of that but I think that the ME-110 used 20 or 30mm cannons aimed upward out of the canopy in shooting down Lancasters at night. Later model ME-109's and the FW-190 used 30mm cannons to shoot down B-17's. Bad stuff. Okay, I was wrong about the machine-gun . It wasn't the MG-42 , it was the MG-131. And some HE-111 's did have a cannon in the nose but not topside.

 

thanks. yes I have heard the single cannon on the German (not Spanish) ME-109's but

the Focke-Wulf 190's had twin cannons and if those hit.....yes bad stuff.

 

The Spit was all metal, no fabric.

The time was compressed in the movie... the entire air portion took place in 1 hour, so the fuel out sequence was probably just a few minutes.

 

Stukas could carry cannons under the wings.

The energy management portion of the spitfire at the end was a little disappointing as was the thing holding the propeller on.

 

Just saw the movie last night, my ears still hurt. Gliding scene seemed unbelievable. I wonder if that was Steve Hinton Jr.? I was riding in a T-6 on his formation TRARON check-ride when he was about 19.

 

thanks...I stand corrected on the contruction of the Spit.

 

Great flying scenes, loved real planes and Stuka's ear bleeding scream, well worth seeing it just for that. But they could have added few SBC blocks into burning Spit, instead of stick holding the prop (and use CGI to make those container cranes disappear).

 

Actually, I think they originally had fabric on the control surfaces on the prototypes, but that didn't work at the speeds it could attain.

 

If I remember correctly, the early Corsair had fabric covering on the wing aft of the rear spar and all of the control surfaces were fabric covered. P-39 had fabric covered control surfaces, also the P-40.

 

I believe that fabric control surfaces were used to permit easier battle damage repair without adversely impacting balance.

 

I never thought of that. I always assumed that it was to save weight.

 

I agree with both of those points, which are among the only real flaws that I recall. On the whole the flying sequences were done very well, but I only saw Spitfires shooting down 109s; in reality I'm sure that the opposite also occurred at times.

The sinking ships were also done very well.

 

I'll have too dig for my Spitfire book. Most of the flyable Spits today, are latter manufactured variants. The early production pretty much destroyed long before wars end. We (Britain and Canada, etc..) declared war on Germany in 1938. So most of our war equipment was built as fast as possible to meet the challenge of war with Germany. So the construction on Spits and Hurricanes, etc... was mass produced as fast as possible. Not as fast as we built stuff for WWI, in that war some light vehicles like motorcycles got built so fast. You sometimes find a bike from that war with a soup can carb. From the factory. Rolls Royce... They converted many into armored vehicles and ambulances. It was get ready fast by any means necessary.

 

Would love to hear more about this. Very cool