Designer Times
Page 1 of 1

50. Universal Studios Hollywood King Kong - Crashing Helicopter

Sequoia Creative began design work on the 30 foot tall animated King Kong Figure in October 1985. Universal's own show design group had conceived a spectacular attraction that, in addition to the giant King Kong, featured a number of special EFX. Kong would be situated next to a moving bridge, background fires would erupt, a police helicopter would hover overhead, and a TV Helicopter would crash.

Universal had layed out a fabulous New York City set thru which the Universal Studios Tour (UST) guest tram would drive providing an up close encounter with King Kong. As the tram entered the NYC set, guests would see a breaking news story displayed on an building apartment TV set. This news was transmitted live from a helicopter circling over King Kong. an angry King Kong suddenly swatted the helicopter out of the sky, which then crashed.

Tram guests could follow the airborne camera shot on live TV as the helicopter spun out of control with the on-board lady TV news reporter screaming in terror as the craft hit power lines directly above the elevated train track over the tram road. The helicopter then bounced over the side of the train track, entangled in the power lines, and burst into flames just a few feet away from the guests.

Several EFX companies made proposals to UST, but our design provided the most realistic crash action. Conventional thought was to slide a helicopter down an overhead straight track and stop. This meant that the crash path was straight and that a reliable crash stop device would be needed. I came up with a simple deal that gave a curving crash look while avoiding any kind of stop system.

I found that if we used a boom connected to two opposite acting crank arms, the start and stop forces would be a natural smooth sine wave curved action consistent with a crash into sagging power lines.....no special stop damping system required. It also had the advantage of no track and wheeled carriage, just a few pivot bearings and a big air cylinder to power the action. In addition, the crank and boom geometry was such that when the helicopter was in the parked position, an air cylinder failure would result in the helicopter staying safely parked by gravity force.

Larry Lester, UST's project manager was a veteran Vietnam helicopter pilot who brought his chopper expertise to the project. He gave Sequoia a used Hughes 500 helicopter fuselage and rotor head, minus any power and internal equipment. This Hughes 500 had long been my favorite helicopter design and I was thrilled to get to play with one. First thing was to get the thing down to absolute minimum weight. I showed a shop technician where to burn out parts of the aluminum structure with a cutting torch while leaving the chopper body looking visually intact. We got it down to only 150 pounds.

Next, I designed an extension truss frame that connected the aft portion of the tail boom back up out of the sight lines to the crank and boom mechanism. This would make 90% of the crashed helicopter visible to the tram guests with no means of support other than the sagging power lines. We made up fiberglass fake smashed rotor blades and stuck them to a phony light weight rotor head. (I still have the real rotor head as I think it was such a clever design).

Since the helicopter was to crash in flames we came up with a real live fire effect working with the fire EXF gurus on the project. The show had lots of REALLY BIG FIRE. We also found that the fire duration had very little heating effect on the aluminum crashed helicopter fuselage. When some smoke and lighting EFX were added to the whole shebang, it really looked and felt like you had just survived an awfully close aircraft accident. That old Hughes 500 must have survived a half a million fiery crashes by now....the crashingest chopper in the world.

oOo

Next Month: Jurassic Park Movie T-Rex Animated Figure