Model Airplanes

Tom Cruise has always boasted that he does his own stunts.

Whether it’s driving a race car in “Days of Thunder,” battling enemies with a samurai sword in “The Last Samurai”… 

“The Last Samurai”

… Or climbing the tallest building in the world, the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, in “Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol,” the megastar has prided himself on giving audiences an authentic experience.

But with the release of the trailer for the new “Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation,” Cruise proved himself as one of the toughest guys in Hollywood.

In the much-hyped trailer, Cruise, reprising his role as IMF agent Ethan Hunt, ends up on a giant Airbus A400M plane and is hanging from the door as it takes off.

Paramount Pictures

In today’s era of Hollywood plugging in CGI for almost anything, when watching the scene teased one would likely assume it was done in a sound studio covered in green screen with a giant fan to project the star of the movie.

But that’s not Tom Cruise’s style.

“I knew I wanted to have an airplane sequence. I’ve been thinking about it for a long time,” Cruise told Yahoo Movies UK during an interview with director Christopher McQuarrie. “As a kid I remember flying on an airplane and thinking: ‘what would it be like out on the wing or on the side of

Article source: http://www.businessinsider.com/how-tom-cruise-did-plane-stunt-in-new-mission-impossible-rogue-nation-2015-3

SEYNE, France—An Airbus A320 carrying 150 people from Barcelona to Düsseldorf crashed into an alpine mountainside Tuesday after an unexplained 8-minute descent, leaving no apparent survivors and two countries in mourning.

Officials who flew over the crash site in the French Alps on Tuesday described an awful scene of desolation: a mountain face blanketed by small debris and body parts, suggesting the plane operated by Germanwings, the low-cost arm of Deutsche Lufthansa AG, disintegrated on impact.

“The violence of the crash leaves little hope for survivors,” French Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve said upon returning to Seyne, the remote village where emergency workers have established a base camp, after inspecting the site by helicopter as France rushed to mount a complex search-and-recovery operation.

ENLARGE

The crash of Flight 9525 stunned Germany and Spain, whose nationals made up most of the flight manifest. German Chancellor

If you’ve sat in an airplane’s window seat, you know what the world looks like from a mile up. It’s that point during takeoff and landing when you can pick out an individual car beetling along a highway; when, on a clear day, you can see the city bleed into its suburbs and trace the outline of a mountain range beyond but still find your favorite bocce court if you know where to look. Individual humans are barely detectable from this height, but humanity’s traces ooze to the horizon. In the not unimaginably distant future, this will be the view from someone’s breakfast nook. 

The mile-high skyscraper makes a little more sense to build now than it did when Frank Lloyd Wright designed one nearly 60 years ago. Wright imagined, on the fringes of Chicago, a habitable 528-story sundial called the Illinois. That idea wasn’t buildable then; its successor would still be risky, financially ruinous, slow to construct, and inefficient to operate. But that doesn’t mean a mile-high skyscraper won’t get done. “Going big has been a trend ever since the pyramids. It has little to do with practicalities,” says Jay Siegel, an executive and engineer with Allianz, the company that

Article source: http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2015/03/how-tall-can-tall-skyscrapers-be.html