I took the following pictures in 2007, during the Universal Studios tour in Hollywood, CA, USA. They depicts the outdoor airplane crash set built for War of the Worlds movie, directed by Steven Spielberg. The outdoor set, where Spielberg and his crew shooted for three days in January 2005, is mainly occupied by the chunks of a presumed wreckage of a B-747. Interestingly, a real Jumbo was used: the former All Nippon Airways JA8147, whose registration was N219BA. The aircraft was chipped into pieces and transported to the Studios. Actually, during the filming, the houses covered the asphalt road where the tour tram passes, but they were moved on the right of the tram off the road. Even if the production used a real plane the entire scene is quite different from an actual Jumbo crash site: the main aircraft parts are located in a relatively small area, while in a real crash site pieces would be spread in a larger area.
David Cenciotti is a journalist based in Rome, Italy. He is the Founder and Editor of “The Aviationist”, one of the world’s most famous and read military aviation blogs. Since 1996, he has written for major worldwide magazines, including Air Forces Monthly, Combat Aircraft, and many others, covering aviation, defense, war, industry, intelligence, crime and cyberwar. He has reported from the U.S., Europe, Australia and Syria, and flown several combat planes with different air forces. He is a former 2nd Lt. of the Italian Air Force, a private pilot and a graduate in Computer Engineering. He has written five books and contributed to many more ones.
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