Content area
Full Text
PBS Broadcast Followed By Museum Archival
On Veteran's Day, November 11, an hour-long documentary called Flight Line: The Army Helicopter Pilots of Vietnam will air on PBS stations around the country. Featuring the on-screen presence and narration of actor Harrison Ford, Flight Line was shot in the 480 progressive format with Panasonic's AJPD900WA DVCPRO50 Progressive camcorder.
Funded by Bell Helicopter (a division of Textron), Allied Technologies (which makes Sikorsky helicopters), and Boeing, Flight Line is an oral history of the recollections of 70 pilots who served in Vietnam between 1961 and 1975. An estimated 20,000 pilots flew in Vietnam, one of five of whom was killed.
"I wanted to do a documentary that would capture the pilots' stories," director Chris Fetner, who co-produced the film with Jeremy Wood, told TELEVISION BROADCAST. "Then it got bigger and we decided to make something that would be on permanent record."
The 100 hours of oral histories that Fetner and videographer Mark Kregel recorded will be housed at the National Vietnam War Museum, which is being built in Mineral Wells, TX, near Fort Wolters, where helicopter pilots who flew in Vietnam were trained.
The genesis of the project came when Fetner, who was inspired by the tales of his uncle, a Vietnam helicopter pilot, read the 1980s bestselling Vietnam memoir Chicken Hawk by Robert Mason. After contacting Mason and determining they shared the desire to produce a documentary, Fetner, Wood, and Mason formed Flight Line Partners to produce the film. Harrison Ford, himself a helicopter...