Avgeeks See Aircraft in Movies as Stars in Their Own Right
For Avgeeks, movies featuring airplanes are nearly always must-sees. Well, almost always. The airplanes are often the stars of the movie – whether the movie is good, bad, or horrible – to many, the aircraft get at least co-star credit. Witness Top Gun, Airport (all of them), 12 O’Clock High, Fire Birds, Air Force One, Battle of Britain, Tora Tora Tora, Pearl Harbor, Always, Forever Young, The Right Stuff, Catch-22, Flying Leathernecks, Flight of the Phoenix, Flight of the Intruder, The Bridges at Toko-Ri, Blue Thunder…the list is thousands long, but you get the idea. In these days of computer-generated imagery (CGI), there are more and more movies being made without any real aircraft on the screen.
Central Casting
Television shows featuring flight also draw the attention of those of us with our heads in the clouds. Airwolf, Baa Baa Black Sheep (or Black Sheep Squadron in syndication), Magnum P.I., and episodes of everything from Twilight Zone to Batman have all held our rapt attention and drawn our criticism or admiration. Many of the aircraft we’ve seen in a movie or on TV, sometimes going back decades, have starred in several productions. Such is the case with the North American B-25J-25-NC, Army Air Force serial number 44-30423. You’ve almost certainly seen this Mitchell before, but you may not realize how many times.
Born on Date
B-25J-25-NC serial number 44-30423 (NAA Mfg. Number: 108-33698) rolled out of the doors at North American Aviation’s Fairfax assembly plant in Kansas City, Kansas, on 13 January 1945 and was delivered to the US Army Air Forces on 16 January 1945. It’s indicative of the late-war production might of America that 44-30243, a spanking-new, current-model medium bomber, was accepted but declared surplus immediately after being delivered to the Army Air Force. The bomber was first flown to Brookley Army Airfield (AAF) in Mobile for storage and then, in May 1945, flown to Laurel AAF in Mississippi. 423 spent more than a year in storage at Laurel, during which time she was redesignated TB-25J.
One Flexible Bomber
On 31 January 1946, 423 was flown to Kelly AAF near San Antonio in Texas and briefly assigned to the 4121st Base Unit at Kelly. On 11 April 1946, the aircraft was flown to Dayton AAF in Ohio for conversion to the EB-25J configuration. Four years to the day later, EB-25J 44-30423 went to Griffis AFB in New York for duty with the 3171st Electronic Research and Development (ERD) Group.
423 was assigned to the 6520th Air Base Group at Hanscom AFB in Massachusetts on 24 June 1952. The aircraft departed Hanscom on 8 June 1953 for depot-level maintenance and returned to Hanscom on 14 September 1953, this time for service with the 6520th, which had been redesignated a Test Wing.
