9 Worst Accidents That Keep Happening On The Sets Of Hollywood Movies

6. Stay Out Of The Skies

In the early years of filmmaking, producers and directors were desperate to use the ultimate spectacle of the time in their cinematic offerings: the aeroplane. So many crew members, actors and stuntmen have been killed filming stunt scenes with real planes over the last ninety-odd years that it would genuinely bore you to hear about them all. Some of the more ridiculous examples include stunt pilot Dick Grace being required to actually crash his Fokker D-VII during the filming of Wings in 1927: the landing gear didn€™t crumple upon impact as it was designed to, creating a nastier impact with the unforgiving ground, and causing Grace€™s straps to break, smashing his head into the instruments in front of him, breaking his neck and crushing four vertebrae. Astonishingly, Grace was back at work in less than a year, a feat of toughness that only a professional stuntman (or a professional wrestler) would be capable of. Then there€™s Hell€™s Angels in 1930, produced by crazy-rich, actually-crazy entrepreneur and daredevil pilot Howard Hughes, the real life Tony Stark. During the final scene, the aircraft would be required to pull out of a steep dive after a strafing mission. Given that the troubled production had seen the deaths of three pilots already, stunt boss Paul Mantz put his foot down, telling Hughes that the set piece was too risky and that none of his boys could pull it off safely: at which point Hughes decided to do it himself, and proved Mantz 100% correct, failing to pull out of the dive, crashing the plane and hospitalising himself. Mantz himself survived for a further four decades, until crashing a plane while making a low pass filming a scene for 1965€™s The Flight Of The Phoenix. Hughes himself would survive to be responsible for another two aircraft crashes, and the subsequent medical conditions that shortened and finally ended his life. There€™s so many more€ second unit director John Jordan being sucked out of his B-25 bomber because he refused to strap himself down while filming Catch-22 in 1970€ two planes actually colliding with one another and killing ten crewmembers, including the director Kenneth Hawks, brother of the more famous Howard Hawks€ but these days, planes are old hat. No, helicopters have been the new planes for a few decades now. From 1980 to 1990 there were 37 deaths relating to accidents during the filming of stunts, 24 of which involved the use of helicopters. And not just while flying in them. During the filming of TV movie World War III in 1982, director Boris Sagal (father of Katey) was pretty much decapitated when he accidentally walked into the spinning tail rotor of a nearby helicopter, and no one€™s likely to forget the horrifying deaths of actor Vic Morrow and two young child stars when a helicopter crashed on top of them during filming of Twilight Zone: The Movie in 1982.