Rotorcraft
IMAX flick shows helos in a good light
Helicopters have traditionally gotten short shrift in the movies.

Helicopters have traditionally gotten short shrift in the movies. Either they are blowing up and then burning (or blowing up and burning simultaneously) or serving the interests of the bad guys. In a press conference accompanying the release of the 1983 John Badham film Blue Thunder, a brain-candy melodrama about an ultra-high-tech police helicopter being put to no good purpose over the steaming neon hell of Los Angeles, star Roy Scheider crowed, “This movie is going to do for the helicopter what ‘Jaws’ did for the shark.”

Scheider wasn’t far off (he should know–after all, he starred in both pictures). Not many months later, during an especially acrimonious heliport zoning meeting in Houston, one bewildered helicopter proponent was asked by a concerned citizen if he was going to operate his rotorcraft “using whisper mode.”

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