7 ms·
Surely you can buy one approaching end of life? They don't fly the engines or airframe forever.
by reitzensteinm 6y ago
Surely you can buy one approaching end of life? They don't fly the engines or airframe forever.
- anm89 6y agoThere are good ways to recycle multiple tons of high quality metal.
- oconnor663 6y agoJust as a hypothetical, filming a movie that hundreds of millions of people will enjoy, and saving thousands of hours of expensive professional labor, might be one good way to recycle it :) More seriously, is the metal on an old airframe of high quality? I'd wonder whether the accumulated decades of wear and weathering might make it hard to recycle for anything like another airplane. But this isn't my field, so I'm just guessing.
- danellis 6y agoDoes wear and weathering matter if you're just going to shred it and melt it down anyway?
- leereeves 6y agoI imagine they did pick up the pieces and recycle what they could, just like after blowing up (down?) a building.
- gdulli 6y agoNolan also sold the corn that was planted for the Interstellar corn fields. Supposedly made a profit.
- pilsetnieks 6y agoThe article is a puff piece, it doesn't have any detail so I'd take it with a grain of salt with regards as to what actually happened and how much it cost. Also, this sentence a couple of paragraphs down: > Though buying a 747 plane and blowing it up may have been more efficient, Christopher Nolan later seems to insinuate that it may not have been the cheaper option seems to muddle the waters somewhat.
- jacobr1 6y agoI can imagine the time to deliver the plan and rig the explosives might be only roughly a week. And the shot where it blows up is only going to take that one day or night. Then there is cleanup time. So the whole thing only takes a few weeks. On the otherhand a good CGI shot is going to take months. So even if the plane isn't cheaper overall, weeks vs months still might makes sense in the overall production timeline if the premium isn't that much higher.
- reitzensteinm 6y agoYeah, it's not free, but great CGI for a blockbuster movie is not cheap. I could easily see them spending more on that than the scrap value of the plane. But presumably the stunt coordination itself is also expensive.
- robjan 6y agoThe metal doesn't get vaporised in the explosion. There's still at least $50k of scrap aluminium there for someone to salvage
- anm89 6y agoI would be interested to know the reality of how this plays out. In one sense I would expect stuff to be degraded and scattered, on the other hand, of course the raw materials don't dissappear.
- icebraining 6y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24526292 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24526292 Movie "explosions" don't usually actually explode things, that would be dangerous to the crew. They just make pretty flames, and use air cannons to send stuff flying in controlled ways.
- FlyMoreRockets 6y agoDC-3 airframes are still flying and often refitted with turboprops. The original radial engines are getting expensive to maintain, parts are getting tough to source.
- bleepblorp 6y agoThe DC-3 is unpressurized. Pressurized aircraft have a much shorter lifespan due to metal fatigue.