Page 11 - July 2023

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
JULY 2023
KING AIR MAGAZINE • 9