NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
From: Frank Reed
Date: 2019 Feb 18, 14:00 -0800
Paul Hirose, you wrote:
Both positions are seen in the 1955 Paramount production "Strategic Air Command," in the part where Jimmy Stewart gets an introductory B-36 flight after being recalled to active duty. He talks with the actor playing the navigator. Aerials for that flight were shot between Texas and Florida. Famed movie pilot Paul Mantz flew the B-25 camera ship for some of the photography, but the view looking down on a B-36 streaming contrails at sunset was photographed from another B-36. It was challenging since the light was perfect for only about a minute.
That's odd enough to make me think Google is watching us. About two hours before you posted this message, while searching for something quite unrelated on youtube, the search algorithms offered me that very scene as something I might like to watch. And I do love the B-36, and because of that I actually own a copy of "Strategic Air Command". Nonetheless, I watched the scene. The copy of the scene on youtube appears to be higher res, so perhaps there's a new digitization of it available. Here it is:
Six Turning Four Burning - B-36 "Peacemaker".
Maybe you watched the video earlier in the day, and the Google algorithms saw that we both had NavList in recent activity...
A more pure coincidence which could not have involved Googorithms: This weekend during my celestial navigation class in Boston, I was talking briefly about flying movies and bubble sextants, and someone mentioned "that one where they re-built the plane in the desert". And I recognized that as a reference to "Flight of the Phoenix" which, like "Strategic Air Command", starred Jimmy Stewart, and also some of the flying sequences were flown by the same Paul Mantz. Mantz was killed when the "re-built plane" broke apart on landing during the filming.
Frank Reed