Flying Carpet

Mayhem under our wings

"Look!" said my wife Jean with horror. "There's been a terrible crash!" Glancing downward, there was just enough time for me to glimpse an accident scene on the Red Mountain Freeway east of Phoenix. Below us, flames and blackened vehicles littered the roadway as we crossed low on final approach to Falcon Field. Stunned, I radioed a frantic report to the control tower. "Boy, am I glad we were flying today, not driving," said Jean after landing. "Surely there were fatalities." All the way home we'd fretted about it.

That incident was long forgotten when Jean and I recently lounged in front of a movie with her brother and sister-in-law, Dave and Barb. We were 20 minutes into The Kingdom when Dave yawned apologetically. "This film isn't nearly as exciting as the previews would lead you to believe," he said. "I thought I remembered seeing explosions on the advertisements, and cars flying through the air. That's why I selected it." Nodding heads around the room mirrored his lack of enthusiasm.

The Kingdom tells of U.S. investigators assisting Saudi authorities in probing a terrorist massacre, but so far the focus seemed to be more on bickering between Saudi and American team members than any actual progress in the plot. Dave floated several half-hearted queries about ending the movie, but without adequate conviction for anyone to actually push the Stop button. Besides, we had nothing better to watch that evening.

Together with the movie's characters we sank slowly into complacency until without warning the action picked up--while traveling a Saudi superhighway, the good guys' SUV was rammed from behind, rolled repeatedly, and skidded upside down while nearby cars crashed and burned. Then, from between gory pillars of flame and black smoke, terrorists opened fire. "This is more like it!" Dave said, clearly feeling vindicated. In the midst of the mayhem Jean noted the similarity of the Saudi desert to our own.

"Wonder where this was filmed?" I said in unthinking response.

"The highway signs are in Arabic," said Jean.

"Yeah, but those could be changed easily enough, either by covering them up or using a computer during editing," replied Dave. Between gunfire and explosions ensued a brief discussion about desert flora. While the Saudi desert as we understood it has little indigenous plant life, our own Sonoran desert is populated with plants found nowhere else in the world, most notably the giant Saguaro cactus commonly pictured in old Westerns. No distinguishing plants were visible in the crash scene, but I couldn't free myself from some subconscious familiarity with the site. Once raised, the notion tormented me through the rest of the movie.

Still intrigued afterwards, I lingered in the living room reviewing the DVD's "Filming the Crash Scene" bonus segment while everyone else convened in the kitchen for refreshments. Frankly, I found the explanatory segment with its modified cars and crash scene simulations more compelling than the movie itself. Could this be...? I wondered, but nowhere was the filming location revealed.

I was still obsessively panning and forwarding when the others returned to the room. "Watch this clip, Jean," I said. "Are those Saguaro cacti in the background? And the Mazatzal Mountains?"

"It's hard to tell," she replied. "Why do you ask?" Frustrated, I replayed the film credits through the usual endless and obsessively detailed minutia comprehensible only to moviemakers. I almost gave up upon reaching "drivers for the stars," but then my perseverance paid off. At the very end of the credits I discovered diminutive "thank-yous" to the Arizona Film Commission and several other local entities. Now I was certain.

"Remember, Jean, when we were landing at Falcon Field a year or two ago, and descended low across that new stretch of Highway 202 on final approach? You looked down and...."

"The accident! That terrible pileup we saw coming in to land! Do you think this was it, Greg? Now that you mention it, I do remember a blackened SUV overturned among the burning vehicles!"

With that, our memories flooded back. For days after seeing the crash site, Jean and I had scanned the newspapers fruitlessly for details on the horrific accident. Later the week of the accident, I had asked another Falcon Field pilot if he'd heard anything about it.

"Didn't you see the nightly news last weekend?" he said, laughing at my concern.

"No," I replied, distressed at his callous attitude. "We were out of town and didn't return until Sunday afternoon."

"Well, you're worrying about nothing, Greg. They closed that new stretch of the 202 for a couple weekends to film some terrorism thriller. Supposedly it takes place in the Middle East." I'd mentioned it to Jean upon returning home, and following a brief chuckle about how convincingly we'd been duped, the matter was forgotten--until tonight.

Now we know for sure that my pilot friend was right about the cinematic nature of the crash scene, and that it was indeed filmed on the final approach corridor to Falcon Field's Runway 22 Left. Rumor has it that sharp-eye viewers can even spot a legible Arizona highway sign in the clip, though I've yet to be motivated to look for it.

I guess there are shades of truth even from the air. How many pilot hearts skipped a beat on short final to Falcon Field that summer weekend, Jean and I will never know, but one thing is for sure--hopefully it's as close to highway catastrophe as we'll ever get. Later we learned that most of The Kingdom's shootouts and explosions were filmed just down the road at and around Phoenix-Mesa Gateway Airport. Those we're just as happy to have missed.

Greg Brown was the 2000 National Flight Instructor of the Year. His books include Flying Carpet, The Savvy Flight Instructor, The Turbine Pilot's Flight Manual, Job Hunting for Pilots, and You Can Fly! Visit his Web site.