20 Things You Didn’t Know About For Your Eyes Only (1981)
2. “Goodbye, Mr Bond. I Trust You Had A Pleasant Fright?”
In For Your Eyes Only, Double-0 Seven's seemingly routine helicopter flight back to MI6 becomes a life-or-death situation when a strangely familiar bald, wheelchair-bound villain stroking a white Persian cat (played by John Hollis, but voiced by Robert Rietty) commandeers the aircraft by remote control.
For this entertaining sequence, the aerial stunts were performed by pilot, Marc Wolff whilst stuntman, Martin Grace stood in for Roger Moore as James Bond.
It was too dangerous to fly the helicopter inside a building, so visual effects supervisor Derek Meddings built a miniature of the structure next to an actual warehouse at Beckton Gasworks on East Ham Level to make it appear that Wolff was flying inside it. In truth, Wolff was actually flying behind the miniature and past the warehouse.
The aircraft later appears to be heading towards a fatal collision inside the warehouse, but a full-sized mock-up of the helicopter was manoeuvred along a rail inside the building rather than flying freely to remove the risk of an actual crash. Moore appeared in close-ups inside the helicopter, whilst Grace continued to double for him in the most dangerous scenes.
Meanwhile, even though the villain was to have alluded to last meeting Double-0 Seven ten years ago, the-then ongoing legal difficulties surrounding the ownership of SPECTRE and Ernst Stavro Blofeld led to that dialogue being trimmed from the final film.