Transportation

We Trained Like Tom Cruise for the Wild Mission: Impossible Helicopter Stunt

To see how Cruise pulled off the gut-twisting corkscrew dive, we went to Airbus' helicopter flight school for our own training time.

Flying a helicopter, to put it mildly, is hard. Just staying level requires an orchestral coordination of controls, which is why even a talented novice needs several months of full-time training to call themselves competent. The skill it takes to intentionally upset that balance—and make it right again before crashing—requires far more. Not enough, though, to deter Tom Cruise, who earned his helicopter license in record time so he could fly his own stunts in Mission: Impossible – Fallout, the latest installation in the action series that hits theaters this week.

The sixth installment in the franchise sees Ethan Hunt and his team in yet another race against time after yet another mission gone wrong. The plot is a complex one, but involves a pivotal scene in which Hunt pulls off a corkscrew dive in a matte black Airbus H125 helicopter, with mountains on all sides. And because Cruise is the sort of maniac who does his own stunts, he himself pulled it off.

As the name suggests, a corkscrew dive consists of a steep vertical drop with a twist, the sort of thing more suited to an Olympic diver than a helicopter. Here, Cruise faced the extra challenge of doing this all while avoiding the other helicopters in the production. To juice the odds of success, Paramount Pictures sent Cruise to Airbus' helicopter flight school in Grand Prairie, Texas, which mostly caters to the police departments and medevac providers who fly the H125 in less terrifying conditions. Cruise has been a certified airplane pilot since 1994, but was new to helicopters when he began the intensive process of mastering a trick that makes even the masters shudder.

To see what the actor went through, we made the trek to Texas. We pored over flight manuals, practiced in the simulator, and hopped in a whirly bird for our own flight. If Ethan Hunt's not your guy, and you can't wait for Cruise to return as Maverick in the Top Gun sequel, you can check out our own (significantly more possible) mission in the video above.

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