Before shooting the film, the famous actor agreed to fly at night with the real commander Jim Lowell, then 67 years old. Trying to pilot the airplane and orienting itself only with the direction of the celestial bodies. Here’s how he went.
The American astronaut Jim Lowell, a former Usa Navy Pilot captain, died last August at the age of 97. A name that many will not say much if not connected to that of the Apollo 13 mission, of which he was commander veteran after participating in Apollo 8, Gemini 7 and Gemini 12. We therefore met him with the face of the actor Tom Hanks in the homonymous film Apollo 13 of 1995, taken from the book of Lowell himself “The Lost Moon”, in which the true Jim Lowell appeared in a cameo by the Commander ship that recovered the three astronauts who have returned from that “successful disaster”, as it was defined at NASA. That scene was strongly desired by Tom Hanks, who had to know the former astronaut and Marina officer to prepare for the film. HANKS’s interpretation was exceptional, the film became a cult of the nineties and brought back to the knowledge of the world both the phrase “Houston, we had a problem”, called by Lowell after the explosion of one of the on -board oxygen tanks, is the role of the famous launch director Gene Kranz, played in the film by another Holliwood giant, the actor and Harris, despite the fact that the Bankruptcy is not contemplated “both a cinematographic invention, while it is true, and famous, its” Tough and competent “speech with which NASA was raised from the disaster of Apollo 1 who killed the three astronauts on board (Virgil Grissom, Edward White and Roger Chaffee).
The motto of the mission and the episode with Tom Hanks
The motto of Jim Lowell’s mission, John Swigert and Fred Haise was “ex Luna, Scientia”, literally “from the moon, knowledge”, but what is less known is that during the deepening of everything related to that company, during the pre-production of the film Tom Hanks was led by Jim Lovell to make a nocturnal flight on his Bimatore Beechcraft 58 Baron from an airport. Located outside Austin, in Texas. Some time later Hanks told the Aviation Week head: “There was no one at the airport, then, after a plane control, we took off. Jim had assigned me an assignment: piloting his plane, but I am not pilot, I don’t have the license, even if I could try to pilot for a while reassured by his presence, which I did, but only after he had positioned a cardboard. Triangle -shaped hole on my side of the piloting cabin. And his crew would have lost themselves in the cosmos. College, four years after Jim’s return from space. Well, Nunki is a very weak point of light, a star that I had never heard of, never seen and never found before in the night sky, let alone while flying the Texas. But we had looked at the nautical cards, so after a little turns, maneuvers, research and elimination of other stale light dots I thought I could see it in my carved window. “Yes, it’s Nunki,” said Jim, “Hanks, you’re done to fly.” Said by him, the maximum praise that we can imagine, so we continued for another hour. I confessed that, despite the rhombus of the two engines, flying at night over the flashes of Austin guided by the stars of the cosmos created a sense of peace and without unparalleled place. “Yes,” said Jim. “Let’s keep it for us, otherwise we would all be up here, but now back on 1-7-2.” which was the route on the compass that would bring us back to the airport. I drive the plane throughout the way, going down to the right speed, with the right set -up, until we were only 150 meters above the grass. “I take him,” said Jim. He would have landed the plane safely, but before we had to fly over the track to frighten any deer that could have invaded it. “There were none, but that flight allowed the actor to fully understand the man to impersonate.
Adaptation of the NASA article (1995) taken from Aviation Week
