It was more efficient to blow up a real 747 than to use miniatures or CGI
cinemablend.com
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"Un-mothballing" isn't cheap. I suppose maybe you could find one in a small, corrupt, country, but outside of that, it would be expensive.
Last time I spoke with a widebody broker a few months ago, an old 747 with no equipment was a smidge less than $100k. Though with COVID, airworthy 747 freighters are 30-50 million....
But if you're curious re:prices, you can call the dealer listed on Controller.com as selling a 777. He's actually got several for sale in that neighborhood (and is super friendly, too - Eric).
On the cash front, ferry flights to the US are the biggest expense by far. A 777 burns ~$10,000 in fuel per hour, so positioning from (say) Asia to a boneyard in California adds up quickly... with crew, ferry insurance, landing fees & sundries you end up at $200-$250k. Parking runs around $3-5k per month in the desert, too.
I figure if you're starting at, say, $150k to ferry it, might as well fill it with some junk.
Incidentally though, the FAA minimum liability coverage for a widebody is $750 million, and the policies I've seen do allow for cargo onboard (though not passengers).
Ferry permits can be issued to airplanes “not airworthy and operating outside their certified range” if I am not mistaken.
Also, is it possible to buy non-airworthy ones and fix them up and sell them as air worthy ones? Or is it too expensive?
Most of the places I can think of that I could get local government permission, and buy cheap land, to put a 747 house in place... Have a near 1:1 venn diagram overlap with places that might have a half mile dirt driveway with trees on both sides, where it would be difficult to get a truck and traditional dimension single-wide mobile home into, nevermind a 747.
This year they definitely had some issues getting it off of the playa, but your comment might imply to the unfamiliar that they didn't succeed in getting it on-playa.
There is a guy in Oregon who lives in a 727-200, but that's a lot less work to take down a road.
https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/airplane-home-in-the-woo...
I know, I tried to word my comment carefully to avoid implying that you were being intentionally misleading. I was just clarifying for the benefit of the unfamiliar
One of the people also talked about turning a second one into an AirBnb, so I think that's a great idea. It would be a very unique place to stay, so I think it would be fully booked if you're in a decent location.
Here's another person living in a 727: https://www.youtube.com/watch/?v=rKm5oF2p-II
This one has a much nicer interior: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bdwLlI9abgU
According to one of the comments on the first video, they spent 120k on the plane, and another 100k to move it to the forest. I would probably want to spend another ~300k for renovations and everything else (proper foundation, shower, kitchen, water and sewer lines, etc. etc.)
It's not cheap, but that's a lot cheaper than I was expecting. Especially compared to the average house in an expensive city. I think it might also be a lot more fun than living in a "tiny house".
I recently read this "Why We Don't Like Our Underground House" article that was posted on HN: https://dengarden.com/misc/The-Pitfalls-of-an-Underground-Ho... That was a reminder that doing something unconventional can be risky and cause lots of unexpected problems. So it would probably be a good idea to also spend a lot of money on architects and engineers to make sure that everything is done properly and there's no surprises.
Airliners are merely business tools - operators have no romance for any plane.
If a 777 is even 2% more efficient than a 747, the 747 is grounded and chopped up.
The related factors are that 4 engines is more maintenance than 2 engines, the classic 747 is no longer certified for passenger use in the USA (wiring and fuel-tank inerting ADs), and ETOPS allows twin-engine flight on almost all commercially-viable oceanic routes. (ETOPS makes me nervous af.)
Source: commercially-rated airplane pilot.
The only case I can think of where an ETOPS flight had both engines fail due to something other than fuel exhaustion was BA38, and it's hard to say a quad jet would have managed better there. I can understand the gut feeling that the safety factor has been reduced, but given several decades without horror stories is it really still something to be nervous about?
It's unlikely that an airliner can maintain altitude on one engine, so the risk is high that once a problem occurs, things can go bad fast. Ditching 300 passengers in the open ocean guarantees fatalities.
I understand that non-pilots think "it's handled", but that's not really the case.
That's why the old expression "it's a 4-engine ocean" came about.
"Small Planes Over Big Oceans (ETOPS Explained)"
It’s really weird to imply that losing one engine is a ditch situation. Modern airliners can take off on one engine. ETOPS 330 certifies them for operation on one engine for 5.5 hours continuously. They may have to descend a bit from max altitude but there’s a big difference between that and ditching.
More flights have experienced fatal crashes due to pilots flying a perfectly functional airplane into the terrain, than from both engines failing. On objective evidence, you should be more worried about the pilots than the engines.
“It’s a 4-engine ocean” is indeed an old expression.
I’m not a pilot but isn’t that a good thing? Diverting a flight as opposed to... crashing?
Well flying is like that kind of workplace but cranked to 11.
Again I’m not a pilot but it seems like diverted planes isn’t the problem, the problem is finding a safe place to set the plane down if a failure does happen. Yes the ocean makes that difficult, but so does a lot of land.
This is a super misleading technical truth. There usually is an engine out altitude where it’s most efficient to fly on a single engine. Just like there is an altitude where it’s most efficient with both engines operating. The two don’t need to be the same.
Planes don’t automatically become ETOPS certified, every plane gets tested.
The first step is to certify the type of aircraft itself, for which it is flown on a single engine for the required time of the ETOPS rating. So ETOPS-180 means 180 minutes of flying with a single engine. Not in a simulator, with a real aircraft.
The second step is that each operator also has to become ETOPS certified. You can’t just buy an ETOPS certified jet and fly it over the atlantic. There are additional requirements for crews and mechanical staff, including more regular checks of the aircrafts.
Lastly, this is all based on statistics. So operators have to publish statistics about their fleet. If say engine outs are increasing for a specific airframe and/or operator, it’s possible that their ETOPS rating goes down or is completely suspended.
There's nothing likely or unlikely about it - for an aircraft operating an ETOPS flight, the performance characteristics with one engine operative are well known, and taken into consideration when doing the mandatory diversion planning.
I got quite nervous as the plane appears to be resting on a pile of wood pellets.
Seems like quite a bit to live in a 747 in the middle of nowhere. Why not just buy an already-built $500K house in the middle of nowhere? It would be bigger and save you a whole lot of hassle.
$120k on the plane. $5k to move it into the forest. $95k fee for not having friends with heavy equipment. $200k for making somebody else do the renovating for you. $50k on materials. $50k on markup.
Neither the weight nor size of the plane are astronomical. The square footage to renovate isn't that high either. The reason it costs so much is that it's odd and every time you pay someone else there's a huge cost associated with a one-off and everything about the project is one-off.
> $95k fee for not having friends with heavy equipment.
Of course, it's next door to, and both started by the guy who ran the now defunct evergreen aviation.
Obviously, the fact that it has been done means that it is legally possible in some jurisdictions, but it's likely to be an uphill battle--or completely impossible--elsewhere.
Communities that require newly constructed buildings to match the character of the neighborhood likely would never grant permission for an airliner house. Jurisdictions that don't have this requirement would still require building code compliance, which could be extremely difficult to achieve as the technical standards used in aviation are not comparable to those used in conventional construction or mobile homes. At minimum, you'd have major issues with insulation requirements, fire resistance, and emergency egress.
After all of this, you'd still need to find a bank willing to issue a construction loan/mortgage, and an insurer willing to cover the finished product.
$300K might be a very low-end estimate of the costs involved to make everything physically and legally proper.
Apparently the airplane itself was free, but it cost $250k to transport it to the location of filming!
For the curious, heres the plane : https://www.google.com/maps/@12.7994926,80.2283484,166m/data...
I can’t imagine them fixing up a well scavenged airframe, I imagine they took a nice, but retired frame, blew it up, and sent it back to the yard.
Of course the internals would be scrapped ahead of time, but why not airworthy? Tons of these things sitting in the desert.
Makes me think of someone using an insured rental car to shoot the big scene of their breakout movie
There is a whole industry around salvaging old jet aircraft for parts, movie sets, furniture, etc.
An old 747 fuselage would be well under a million. Even less for 727s and 737-200s.
https://www.aircargonews.net/airlines/iata/iata-outlook-carg...
(but not millions high).
It's typically much cheaper to do anything like a plane crash in a computer (or models + computer). Even 20 years ago, when I was bidding visual effects, I bet it would have been cheaper. [Note, I haven't seen the movie, so maybe there are 50 angles of it exploding, in which case it might not be]
The cost of a mothballed plane is probably trivial compared to the daily cost of Tenet's movie set. You've got all of the actors (or maybe stunt people in this case) and crew members, so their salaries, food, hotels, costs of being on location and so on. The cost of renting the location itself. Constructing things you're going to destroy, cleaning up, etc.
My guess is that Nolan wanted to do it this way because it's more fun. Nolan knows it's cheaper to do it in CGI, but blowing stuff up in CGI is boring. He gets to sit in a desk chair and look at something blowing up on a screen instead of seeing it IRL. And he can call the shots because he's Nolan, he directed, wrote and produced the thing.
I would not underestimate this cost.
There are quite a few angles of it exploding, as well as it being a major set piece with people running around it before, during, and after the explosion.
The real question is if the movie could have been done with fewer angles and interior shots.
So much iteration time can go into attempting to get the right "shape" of the simulation, as well as "colours" (smoke, combustion, flame), whether via a black-body spectral shader or a more artist-driven one, and it's very difficult to get people to agree on what looks "real" or "right", especially compared to say hard-surface rendering.
Doing it practically (assuming the correct scale, and fuels were used) might (depending on directors and producers' opinions) make people "just" accept that the result is "realistic", and remove a lot of the uncertainty, at the very least just because they can't tweak things afterwards, and what was recorded is the result they get, as opposed to having a team of 10s of people iterating for months (including lots of compute time for simulations and rendering) trying to get something the people at the top are happy looks "real".
To be honest, the non-CG crash scene in the snippets that I've seen looked off too. Random fireballs starting in random locations.
Now when reality gets influenced by fiction, ISIS actually used bombs that make a lot of flames, more than necessary for warfare, just to make their propaganda videos similar to the Hollywood movies their recruiting targets have been watching all their life.
I am sure recruiting videos could just as well use CGI if they wanted to. Likely anyway does, skifull editing and manipulation are required for any propoganda content anyway.
All the graphics / VFX knowledge I now have is self-taught (other than learning off colleagues) as well as experience working in the industry.
I'd say learning how to program is a good starting point, if you are really interested in graphics it's probably a good idea move into low-level programming (C,C++,CUDA) that's used in the HPC realm, because often the code will need to be extremely optimised. However, you can still do cool things in a higher-level language.
Thanks a bunch for your output :)
My question is actually a logistical one: how on earth do you get a presumably inoperational 747 to wherever it is that you need to shoot it exploding?
Or do they just fly a crew and equipment out to god-knows-where, set up ginormous green screens behind it and detonate it in whatever airplane graveyard it sits in?
Given the massive transportation costs either way, I'm inclined to believe this headline is false, but good publicity. ;)
Here is a video of Jeremy Clarkson getting an English Electric Lightning installed in his front garden, much to his wife's dismay (as you might expect)
Husband: ...yeah.
Wife: So we could become a bombing target.
Husband: ...No?
Wife: You don’t think they’ll mistake us for an airbase?
Husband: We’ll be able to use this, in the summer, as a place to get out of the heat!
Or move the shoot to where the plane is, which might be easier.
I'm guessing that 'more efficient' means you buy a 747 and film it being blown it up and move on to the rest of the film. Where as CGI or miniatures take longer and add more risk if they don't look right on the first attempt.
I agree with you, the HN headline is click-bait.
I can’t see a 747 going for much more than scrap metal cost these days.
https://fortune.com/2017/11/22/boeing-747-jets-taobao-auctio...
Running it seems the going price is $16+ or so
But this was filmed in Victorville and they likely had an old stripped 747 laying around that could have been bought for very little
The airport itself received a $600k+ location fee:
https://www.vvdailypress.com/news/20191108/new-details-emerg...
I was going to say more, but let's not start a big coronavirus subthread in the middle of a neat CG thread. However, it's kind of interesting how normal it seemed to fly. Everyone is very cautious, things are sterilized, and there's not even any drink cart anymore -- it's individually-wrapped packs of food, to dampen contamination.
Not saying whether it's good or bad that things are going back to normal-ish, just that they seem to be trending that way.
The phase-out of the 747 was well on the way long before the pandemic was ever a twinkle in a pangolin's eye, or wherever it came from. Those airlines that still fly them are mostly not changing their plans to either phase them out or keep flying them due to the pandemic.
As at the end of 2019, there was not a single scheduled passenger operator of the 747 anywhere in the Americas, and only two in Europe (BA and Lufthansa). Prior to the pandemic, BA announced plans to retire all 747s in 2024. They brought forward the date due to the downturn, but they're the only airline to do so for their 747 fleet as far as I can tell. Lufthansa flies the new 747-8 and is very unlikely to retire them any time soon.
There are still plenty of 747 operators in Asia: among others, Air China, Air India, Thai, Rossiya, Korean, China Airlines. Thai and China Airlines both had existing plans before the pandemic to retire their aging 747s, and the rest have all indicated that they plan to keep flying them.
A 747-400 is about $15m, and can carry 412 metric tons. A 747-8 will cost you more, but you're heading up to 447 metric tons.
The only stuff that can lift more is: an A380 which will be _at least_ 10 times the price for an extra 130 tons MTOW, but you can only hand with ~50 tons more, so 80 tons of that is for range you might just not need in a cargo operation; a Strarolaunch which is a complete non-starter on many counts; or, finally an Antonov An-225 which comes at a high purchase price and a whole bag of operational problems you likely don't want as a cargo operator, including high running costs and a relative scarcity of spare parts.
There are plenty of businesses out there who can throw down money for a 747 in reasonable working condition and be confident they'll recoup that after other costs, and also know there are lots and lots of parts out there that will help them keep their fleet in the sky for a long time, and pilots and ground crew with plenty of experience on them too.
I know there has been noises around building at least a few more, but I’ll believe it when I see it.
Also looking at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_747-400#Retirement_and_... it disagrees with running costs you say
"The 747-400's leasing, resale and salvage value has dropped steeply because it is relatively expensive to operate. As most 747-400s are now more than 20 years old, airlines are beginning to replace them. Airlines using the 747-400 have been retiring the model, replacing it with more fuel efficient aircraft"
But then I was watching Captain America: The Winter Soldier, and I was not very engaged but following it. At some point I caught myself having a elevated heart-beat and at the edge of my seat. This was the highway bridge scene.
I asked myself what is going on, I don't really care that much about the characters or plot, why am I so engaged?
Then I saw this episode of Corridor Crew's Stuntmen React[1], where one of the stunt performers mentioned almost every stunt in that scene was a practical stunt. And with that it all made sense.
The same with the original Star Wars trilogy, they're all models lit by actual lights so there's a depth and "realness" to the lighting that makes it look so much more authentic than even modern CGI.
Sure, there are outfits that won't go to that amount of trouble but the end result is almost always junk.
Well, at least next attempts would be relatively cheap with CGI. Less so for the 747.
Especially with https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TheCoconutEffect in operation.
This is fun, I should go on.
So you always make three: the one you plan to blow up, the backup, and the one you hope will go into the archives to show people later.
What he actually said was "efficient" not "cost effective".
I’m assuming they have ways to plan how things are going to explode and maybe even ways to test it somehow before the shot.
Glad the article did a shout to Tom Cruise. The helicopter stunt scenes in the last MI were _absolutely phenomenal_.
And to be a movie prop it doesn't need to even have all the parts for airworthiness, it could practically be an empty hull with broken engines and you wouldn't see a difference.
Jokes aside, I wonder how much one of those decommissioned planes costs. Maybe disposing off a decommissioned plane is the hardest job and nobody cares about stripping out parts — in either case I’m very curious about the actual costs.
A practical advantage of CGI is that you can tweak it and redo till you get it right, whereas in the real scenario you have one take so you better make it count. But I don’t know if we should even seriously discuss a comparison; in all probability it’s more of a PR stunt. (Maybe one good enough to be worth spending a substantial fraction of the marketing budget!)
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.
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.
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.
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.
Oh well.
Of course someone else could tell the same story cheaper. Anyone with a smartphone can make a movie. The cheapest production cost generally isn't what people value in art and entertainment.
In this case, yes the plane was probably mothballed anyway, and yes actually blowing it up will give a more realistic result in a shorter time than CGI. But were the environmental impacts even considered when making the decision?
Because of the way it uses some older, off the shelf equipment for a key part of the device, I might actually be able to build a prototype for that price.
https://variety.com/2020/film/box-office/tenet-box-office-ch...
For example, NYC. Just what exactly are they waiting on? Has the curve not been profoundly flattened? How many cases per day until they feel safe reopening?
Nowhere can return to what used to be normal ('reopen') until enough people have been vaccinated--with a truly effective vaccine--to prevent new outbreaks from spreading. This will take years or decades.
NYC has had about the same number of daily cases for 3 months.
Given exponential growth, that’s a “stay the course” indicator, not “loosen up”.
We’ve gone from everything is closed to most things are partially open, and the rates are the same. Time to stop burning the local economy to the ground.
This makes it really hard to open up, unless the situation is really good, because there's a good chance of overwhelmimg system again before you have a chance to lockdown.
If it didn't happen elsewhere, it didn't happen because lockdowns, and other physical distancing measures, worked.
Arguing against taking defensive measures because they worked is like arguing that Y2K was a non-event without taking into consideration the hundreds of millions of dollars that were put into making sure it was a non-event.
The budget alone was $200 million, which doesn't factor in marketing...which will probably be higher than normal since they had to run a marketing campaign multiple times as it was pushed back throughout the months. Often times that alone can be as much as the movie budget.
The ticket price is split with the theater, so the movie only gets part. You need the box office receipts to be larger (usually 2x+) than the production + marketing costs.
From the article "Given its $200 million production budget, the movie needs to reach approximately $400 million worldwide to break even and closer to $450 million to get out of the red and into the black."
They clearly didn't release it thinking it might perform up to pre-covid standards. They knew they were sacrificing a big opening and they obviously figured they'd take a hit but make most of it up with a longer run, bluray, rerelease, etc.
I got to see it at a local theater capable of showing the 70mm version, and they had sectioned off two seats between any person or couples. So effectively they had less than half of the normal capacity.
On the bright side for them, it's been sold out 4+ weeks in advance for quite a while now.
This doesn’t pass the smell test.