Recently on Instagram I spotted a video of someone in a helicopter visiting Peyresourde-Balestas (LFIP) which is an altiport at a ski-resort in the French Pyrenees. An interesting location on its own, but it also has the claim to fame of being the location used for the introduction of the 1997 James Bond film Tomorrow Never Dies which I’m sure many of you have seen. For those of you who haven’t, here it is:
The opening scene shows Bond infiltrating a black market arms bazaar, blowing a load of stuff up and escaping in an L-39, with another L-39 pursuing him by accelerating the opposite way down the runway (hopefully I didn’t unlock any latent trauma for those of you experienced in flying from untowered airfields).
Now this immediately got me thinking in pilot mode, jet fighters (or jet trainers in this case) are not particularly known for their short field performance, and LFIP only has 470m of runway and is at an atltitude of 5193 AMSL. Assuming they based the jets there for real (which does look to be the case), how do you think they did it? Is it possible for an L-39 to do that takeoff with a light fuel load and favourable conditions? I found this behind the scenes video which is great but unfortunately is edited for mass-market audiences meaning it is scant on detail and a bit hard to follow. At 4:39 the aerial coordinator Mark Wolff is talking about the landing speed of the L-39 being 100-120 (mph?) and them being close to their tyre blowout speed but it isn’t clear without context what he is referring to.
I wonder if anyone else on this forum could offer further insight or speculation?
Neither of the links work….
I can’t imagine that an L-39 could operate from 470m, even with a bit of a slope which I believe LFIP has. I’ve flown one from a 6000 foot runway and that didn’t seem luxurious.
I did just visit La Grotte de Bedheilac in the Pyrenees, which is famous for having been used for a cave take-off and landing. The available “runway” is something like 150m. But that was done in a Rallye which is THE French altiport aircraft. The plane is still there.
Mooney_Driver wrote:
Neither of the links work….
Ah should be fixed now, I used the format in Posting Tips so not sure why they didn’t before.
johnh wrote:
I can’t imagine that an L-39 could operate from 470m, even with a bit of a slope which I believe LFIP has. I’ve flown one from a 6000 foot runway and that didn’t seem luxurious.
That was my intuition too, I wonder if they just did touch and goes there, that might explain why the coordinator was talking about maximum landing speeds. Then I suppose for the taxiing scenes they might have just delivered the jets by road, or used some other movie magic.
johnh wrote:
But that was done in a Rallye which is THE French altiport aircraft. The plane is still there.
Was that the landings that Georges Bonnet did in a cave? I saw that once years and years ago, quite interesting. Must have been in the 70ties.
I wonder if they just did touch and goes there,
It’s a one-way runway – 09 for landing, 27 for takeoff. It has a 15° average slope.
johnh wrote:
It’s a one-way runway – 09 for landing, 27 for takeoff. It has a 15° average slope.
Indeed. At 7:17 there is a shot of a jet appearing to accelerate along the upslope of 09, which doesn’t seem to be composited. Could just be a gear-down low pass though. A funny thing I noticed is that in the immediately following shot the same jet is very clearly taxiing on the ground towards the other jet. :)
No way a L39 could operate at LFIP.
Btw, some more info already covered here..
https://www.euroga.org/forums/trips-airports/13376-day-trip-mallorca-to-the-french-pyrenees?page=5
There was an article on LFIP in the French magazine Info-Pilote a few years ago, with one of the interviews being along the lines of, “they had to truck the planes in and out, which is a shame, but it was still fun while they were here.” I’ll try and find the article, but no guarantees.
I remember watching that scene for the first time and remarking to my wife I don’t know why he has taxied to the bottom of the runway to take off up hill, you never do that in the mountains you always take off downhill – I guess that it was the directors way of building tension.
