In the movie Broken Arrow, there’s a scene where the bad guys are pursued by FBI men in a helicopter. The guys in the chopper are wearing these weird fully-enclosed helmets with these very odd protrusions in the mouth area. They look like something out of Star Wars - more closely resembling space or pressure helmets than something a gunship crew would wear.
Do these kind of helmets actually exist in real life, or were they just invented by the props department for that movie? I was under the impression that helicopters did not fly at altitudes high enough to necessitate any kind of self-contained helmet like that.
I can tell you that there is a new helmet vaguely similar to that type that will be fielded in the next few years. Joint Service Aircrew Mask. It is to protect pilots from chemical weapons and stuff. I don’t know what the legacy equipment looks like, but I’m pretty sure they took some Hollywood liberties with that design in the movie. Military stuff usually looks more functional and less cool than movie producers think.
I don’t know, I reckon the standard military helmet looks a lot cooler than those dicky things. One thing that makes me suspect they are a Hollywood prop is that the visor seems a bit fogged up in some pictures, this’d be unlikely to happen with functional equipement.
Prop-wise, the Airwolf people had a similar prop. The best rationale for such a helmet would be as part of a full suit that would give protection against contamination in an N(uclear)B(iological)C(hemical) threat environment, though a suit would at best handle the non-nuclear stuff. The enhanced helmet might also support enhanced information display and targeting systems.
That article makes NEST look like the most inefficient and worthless response force in the world. It’s almost like it was written by a disgruntled employee or something.
I thought the best rationale would be that with the mouth covered, they can just shoot all the footage they need of the pilots randomly futzing around in the cockpit, then dub in whatever dialog they want later.
Actually, a surprising number of actors are real pilots. (John Travolta, Harrison Ford, Jimmy Stewart, Michael Dorn, Christopher Reeve, and a bunch o’ others - those are just the first few that come to mind. Don’t know if Katherine Hepburn ever bothered to get a license, but when she and Howard Hughes used to go flying she’d take the controls sometimes). Don’t know if those two in the screencaptures are, and I suspect even if actors are “real pilots” they frequently aren’t permitted to do real flying in their movies.
You may now return to the debate about the helmets already in progress.
