Meet the guys who helped prepare the King Air for a starring role in “On a Wing and a Prayer”
Photos provided by Doug Scroggins unless specified otherwise
The first thing you the reader of King Air magazine should know about the film “On a Wing and a Prayer” is that it was written and edited for the general public – an audience that movie studios believe values the dramatic over the technically accurate.
The second thing you should know is that fellow aviation enthusiasts were working behind the scenes – and in front of the camera in some cases – to accurately represent the Beechcraft King Air, which gets an incredible amount of screen time in the 2023 film starring Dennis Quaid, Heather Graham and Jesse Metcalfe.
For those who haven’t yet watched the movie, which was originally scheduled for a theatrical release but instead debuted April 7 on the streaming service Amazon Prime, here is the studio synopsis:
In this extraordinary true story of faith and survival, “On a Wing and a Prayer” follows passenger Doug White’s (Dennis Quaid) harrowing journey to safely land a plane and save his entire family from insurmountable danger, after their pilot dies unexpectedly mid-flight.
It’s a faith-based film that is based on the true story of the White family’s flight in 2009 from Marco Island, Florida, returning home to Louisiana. According to a 2009 Associated Press account of the ordeal, Doug White had earned his pilot’s license when he was 18 years but at 56 years old he had only recently started to fly again. He had fewer than 150 hours in a single-engine Cessna 172 and no experience flying the King Air 200. While he owned the King Air, he had never flown the airplane and was leasing it to an air charter firm.
In real life, White landed the King Air at Southwest Florida International Airport in Fort Myers about 30 minutes after takeoff and about 20 minutes after the pilot suffered a sudden cardiac death. He told AOPA at the time that he landed smoothly on his first attempt: “It was a greaser, to be honest. It didn’t jump or skip. It just set down and stopped in 3,500 feet or less.”
Brian Egeston wrote the screenplay and the film was directed by Sean McNamara, known for the films “Soul Surfer” and “The Miracle Season.” Filmmakers injected more drama by adding a storm to the situation as well as an aborted first landing attempt. There were other dramatic additions, from the family moving the deceased pilot from his seat so Terri, played by Heather Graham, could sit in the cockpit with her husband to an allergic reaction in the cabin by one of the daughters.
The King Air appears on screen for a majority of the 102-minute film, either with Quaid and Graham in the cockpit, the family in the cabin or exterior shots of the airplane flying and taxiing.
Two airplanes were used for those scenes: a prop created from an actual King Air 100 by Scroggins Aviation Mockup & Effects and a 1979 King Air 200 (N143DE) owned and operated by Atlanta Air Charter. Still, some of the sequences were computer-generated. Here’s how it all came together.
Interior
Doug Scroggins grew up around the film industry, eventually picking up contractor work on the technical side such as pulling cable, lighting and camera operation. He also grew with a connection to the aviation industry with his father taking him to local airfields and knowing his grandfather was a World War II pilot flying Boeing B-17 aircraft and then flew Boeing Stratocruisers for Pan Am.
Scroggins’ interests led him to get into researching old aircraft accidents, and his work in aviation archaeology led him to direct and produce a few documentaries. By 2001, he was working full time in crash recovery, commercial aircraft dismantling and recycling of decommissioned airplanes. In 2010, he disassembled a retired Boeing 767 he had in Victorville, California, and reassembled it in the California desert as a crash landed airliner for the television series “The Event.” A turning point for the trajectory of his business was winning a contract to supply two full airliners and the cockpit of a third for the 2012 Academy Award-nominated film “Flight” starring Denzel Washington. He also provided technical advice on recreating a crash scene to director Robert Zemeckis.
By 2015, he had formed Scroggins Aviation Mockup & Effects to focus on supplying real aviation set pieces to the motion picture and television industry.
“I’ve worked as a manager overseeing aircraft parts sales, dismantling and recovery, and I’ve worked as a director of photography – it’s a great combination because it allows me to understand what the director of photography needs and what can be done from an aircraft standpoint.”
The company is based in Las Vegas and creates aerospace mockups, miniatures and effects that you see in movies and TV shows. They provide cockpit sections, passenger cabin sections, wreckage, seats, galleys and lavatories as well as complete aircraft, varying from helicopters to commuter planes, cargo planes and light aircraft. They have more than 30 helicopters, dating back to 1946 and as large as a Boeing CH-47 Chinook. In addition to the King Air 200, they have a Cessna C-208B Caravan, a Beechcraft B2000 Starship and MiG-15 fighter jet, as well as many airliners.
Scroggins said what sets apart his business is that he operates, with eight employees, a full service fabrication and effects shop to offer custom builds. That is what he was asked to do for “On a Wing and a Prayer.”
He procured a King Air 100 specifically for the project and then dismantled it to make it useful for filming. They call it “wild” when a piece of the set or scenery is designed to be easily removed for crew or camera access.
The cockpit detaches, the left and right wall panels are removable as are the front wind-screen structure and panel.
“For filming purposes, the King Air is a very, very small aircraft,” he said. “So we had to literally butcher the fuselage, reinforce it with a steel frame structure on the underside so that they can roll it around and it can be picked up with a forklift. It also can be placed onto a platform where they shake it around and create turbulence. You have to factor all that in and figure out a way to keep it safe when there’s $100 million worth of actors inside it.”
This was the smallest airplane he’d modified for use in filming, and it took a great deal of preplanning to maintain the integrity of the structure while having the ability to connect and separate the segments quickly. With filming costs easily reaching $600 a minute, time is money on set, he said.
“The most important thing was to make sure we could open up the airplane in the front where the camera can get in there,” Scroggins said. “The intent was to be able to have the actors still have their hands on the yoke and you can see that on film, or for the camera to capture their hands on the throttle. That meant the instrument panel had to be wild, so we could remove it and plug it right back in.”
The exterior of the King Air was finished in a white matte paint to reduce glare on camera. Scroggins said he purchased the retired King Air in October 2020 and had about nine months to prepare it for use in the film. He then hauled it to Georgia in a 53-foot van trailer for filming starting in September 2021.
Exterior
Chuck Maire has known Scroggins for several decades and worked as a technical consultant to him during the filming of the 2016 movie “Sully” that chronicled Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger and Jeffrey Skiles landing an Airbus A320 on the Hudson River.
Scroggins again got Maire involved with “On a Wing and a Prayer.” He is a U.S. Air Force veteran and a retired airline pilot, now working as chief pilot for Atlanta Air Charter, Inc. The company operates three King Air aircraft from Cobb County International Airport (KRYY) in Kennesaw, Georgia, just north of Atlanta: a 1994 King Air B200 (N700NA), a 1980 King Air 200 (N383JP) and the 1979 King Air 200 (N143DE) used in the film.
The choice to use N143DE was as simple as it would require the least amount of work to look like the actual airplane from the 2009 event, and the film did not have a large budget according to both Scroggins and Maire.
“We didn’t want to paint the airplane so we used shrink wrap,” Maire explained. “One of our pilots has a company that does that, though this was the first time he ever had tried it with a King Air. We put N143DE down in the shop at the airport where we did all the filming, Fulton County Airport, because once we applied the shrink wrap we would have an FAA waiver in place that limited us to flying within 30 miles. The shrink wrap worked out really nice. When you look at the photos you have no idea that’s just plastic stuck on the airplane. We didn’t lose any of it in the filming, and when they were all done it just peeled right off.”
That King Air has since had two new engines installed and next will get an avionics upgrade, Maire said. “The plane is about as basic as they get but it is a solid airplane and our most reliable King Air,” he said. “We all love flying it, it’s a really nice airplane.”
For the movie crew to film various shots, they asked Atlanta Air Charter to have the aircraft on set for five days, during which Maire said he flew about 90 minutes including takeoffs, taxiing and three to four approaches.
To stay true to the event, they had Maire in the right seat dressed to look like Dennis Quaid and one of his fellow pilots from Atlanta Air Charter in the left seat dressed to look like Heather Graham, in case a glimpse of their head or body made it into the film (you’ll see Maire’s shoulder in several scenes when the aircraft in taxiing.)
“I had watched the actual footage of the real event, and I knew that the guy did a pretty decent job,” Maire said. “I was trying to be accurate. I wasn’t trying to be dramatic. But the stunt coordinator wanted me to bring it down right in front of the camera, land on one wheel and make it look like an amateur was bringing the airplane in. They kept telling me to make it look rougher, so I was rocking and rolling and pitching up and down. That’s how I got the stunt pilot credit for the movie. In the end, they didn’t use my landings because of the CGI (computer-generated imagery) cost. They were going to have to block out all the stuff in the background with CGI, which is extremely expensive, so they went with the special effects guys, who I thought made it look very cartoony.”
You do see footage of Maire roll out from an actual landing and taxi in. “It was really interesting to watch the process and to just see how it ended up coming together,” Maire said. “I mean, this is my first rodeo with regard to filming scenes. To me one of the most incredible things to realize is that all of those interior shots including all the cockpit scenes were done in the mock-up that Doug created, none of them are from the real airplane. He did a fantastic job on creating that for the movie.”
While Maire and Scroggins both consulted filmmakers on realistic aircraft operations while on the set, much of the editing work on the film and final decisions were done in a studio during post-production without consultation.
They said Quaid was open to the feedback and told them that because he was a pilot himself, he wanted the script to be as accurate as possible. They suggested some changes to words and movements Quaid’s role as pilot of the King Air was scripted to perform, and one way he thanked them was by giving Scroggins a speaking role in the film. Near the end of the film, just after the plane lands, you see Scroggins as the airport operations manager telling the pilot to cut the engines of the King Air.
“I was there when Dennis wrote the part into the script, but it wasn’t until the next day the director told me that Dennis wanted me to play the part as a thank you for helping out,” Scroggins said. “That was kinda cool of him, I thought.”
While Scroggins Aviation Mockup & Effects built this King Air mock-up specifically for the film “On a Wing and a Prayer,” the airplane will continue to work in the film and television industry.
Recent screen appearances by Scroggins Aviation Mockup & Effects:
Book Club: The Next Chapter film – EC-135 helicopter
65 film – escape vessel, a set of airlock doors, crew seats and control panels
True Lies TV series – EC-135 helicopter
Dear Edward TV series – Airbus A320 full fuselage with cockpit and wreckage, plus other props
PLANE film – Airbus A320 forward cockpit with cabin and other props
Echo 3 series – Sikorsky UH-60 Black Hawk helicopter
Black Panther: Wakanda Forever film – EC-135 helicopter & Eurocopter AStar AS350 helicopter
Black Adam film – Eurocopter AS365 Dauphin helicopter
The Terminal List series – Sikorsky UH-60 Black Hawk helicopter
Upcoming films to watch for:
Blue Beetle (DC Comics film)
Captain America: Brave New World (Marvel Studios)
Bad Boys: Ride or Die (Sony Pictures)
Movies, TV and video games that have prominently featured King Airs
Movies
A Few Good Men (UC-12F Huron)
American Made
Blackhat
Chinese Zodiac
Devil’s Gate
Jurassic Park II
Point Break
Sister Act
The Bodyguard
The Forgotten
The Lost City
TV
El Capo
MMG Engineers
Psych
The A-Team
Top Gear
Whiskey Cavalier
Video Game
LEGO Jurassic World (yes, built
with Legos!)
Microsoft Flight Simulator
Microsoft Flight Simulator X