Peter Jackson's Military Treasures • FULL DOCUMENTARY

[Music] a display of nine royal flying corps and raf first world war aircraft in formation a unique collection which can't be seen anywhere else in the world but thanks to one man's passion history is being brought to life these aircraft form part of the largest collection of world war one planes in existence and has been built up by a man with an obsessive interest in the details of the past but building and restoring historical aircraft is not why you've heard his name because of my day job making films i ended up with the resources of being able to afford to do this peter jackson is famous for directing writing and producing the lord of the rings and hobbit trilogies and blockbusters like king kong but more recently his project to bring old footage to life in they shall not grow old revealed his passion for the first world war i come in here and see these planes and from i momentarily kind of forget that they belong to me and i get excited i think oh my gosh look at that look at that oh wow peter jackson has an unrivalled collection of aircraft uniforms weapons and other memorabilia some of his planes can't be found anywhere else in the world others he's recreated from scratch using 100 year old engineering techniques to rebuild them piece by piece using the original plans his collection is phenomenal you name it he's got it what he doesn't know about world war one and while on the aircraft isn't isn't worth knowing so you strap yourself into into one of these planes and um and take off at that point nothing else in the world really matters it's like the world becomes a very simple thing until now all this has been kept behind closed doors but we've been given an exclusive look at a collection that reveals one man's love affair with the great war i don't know how good is it you know i keep my eye out and if there's something interesting i try to buy it peter not only wants to collect the artifacts he wants to know everything he possibly can some people might say it's about out of control i'd say it's evolved [Music] set amongst the leafy suburbs of new zealand's capital wellington in a secret location is peter jackson's creative world a factory where his beloved aircraft are made a warehouse containing his vast collection of first world war artifacts and just outside wellington an airfield where they take to the skies what i value about the planes aircraft and collecting other facts and things is i value the fact that that is a hobby that is something that i can do that gets me my head out of the film stuff because once you're in a movie uh you're in a you know 110 percent and it's sort of like it can consume you and sometimes at night time just going escaping from there then looking at some stuff or reading some books or something is a good escape but to find the source of peter's lifelong interest we need to start on the other side of the world his parents were both british his father william served in the british army and his mother joan worked in an aircraft factory during the second world war my mum worked in the hebland factory building the mosquitoes and my dad was um he was in um he was in the royal ordnance corps in on malta during the siege of malta for two years and when i went into italy after that but rather than telling his son about his own war experience peter's father preferred to regale him with tales of his father's adventures in many of the key battles of the first world war peter's grandfather william joined up in 1910 enlisting with the south wales borderers which is now the royal welsh william was serving in china when war broke out in 1914 he took part in joint operations with the japanese against the german territory of qingdao in 1915 william was posted to gallipoli one of the bloodiest battles of the war it was during this time he was mentioned in dispatches for conspicuous gallantry an article in the gazette describes how the 23 year old led his soldiers forward to reoccupy an advanced post for these actions he was later awarded the distinguished conduct medal his grandfather fought alongside new zealanders at gallipoli and developed a respect for them stories of that time influenced peter's dad to emigrate there years later but it was the first day of the somme in 1916 that had the biggest impact according to his war records william was injured by a german machine gunner and was brought home to recover in england which is where he met peter's grandmother william never got to meet his grandson as he died in 1940 but the impact he had on peter's life is felt by millions around the world today through his work [Music] i grew up surrounded by by veterans of two world wars so what i was the sort of the things that i was exposed to and listened to in the conversations i that happened in our house when dad would have friends over and everything else was all geared towards the war really um and and so you know and so i would just got an interest and then dad would also buy any first world war books that were you know coming on sale back then this is the 60s late 60s early 70s and it wasn't this sort of the flood of books that there are now on the first world war and like you know there's an onslaught of them now which is great but back then you know there would be the occasional book would come out on some historian had written something about the first world war and so dad would always grab those and bring them home so our bookshelf at home um which we didn't have a huge number of books but you know there was a certain number of first world war blocks there that dad had bought the young peter jackson enjoyed making model planes and these models became the focus of his very first foray into film my parents got a super 8 movie camera to make home movies with i would have been about eight years old maybe when they arrived in the house i kind of like the idea of making little sort of fictional films peter enjoyed recreating mid-air dogfights and his famous attention to detail meant setting some of his precious model planes on fire [Music] and this passion was cemented when he got the chance to see full-sized planes on a family holiday when i was 12 my parents took me to the uk sort of a family trip to meet all the cousins and uncles dance and things um so i went to it went to the hendon the hendanaria museum and that was the first time i saw you know real you know first world war planes in the flesh i was pretty obsessed by that stage [Music] forty years later his incredible success as a filmmaker has allowed him to realize those childhood dreams he has built up a vast horde of war memorabilia the collection's really mostly first world war it's a tiny bit of second world war and then there's a little bit of earlier prior you know 19th century conflicts but um so i have particular things i'm interested in so if something comes up for an auction that i think is is would be a great thing to add to the collection i i i i try to buy it but i don't really hunt things down all the time you know [Music] as you go down you'll just notice there's kind of a little theme in every little bay but it's kind of a little bit higgledy-piggledy which kind of adds to the excitement of the place because you keep finding things that you just weren't quite aware that were sitting there it's military historian peter connor's job to look after the entire collection oh we just got things like you know you get old mess tin which your typical british soldier would have to have his meal in cook his meal in um from the boring to the less slightly less boring potentially with the flamethrowers they kind of designed that as an offensive weapon so if you're trying to approach an enemy fortification or trench or something like that it's a good way of inducing terror on one level and a good way of killing people without having to directly hit them because the petroleum product that comes out of it would spill across trenches and ground and around corners i mean peter also also has a lot of new zealand hats there and then a lot of flying hats from the royal flying corps raf american flyers as well as a lot of very early or gas masks although the collection is private artifacts are lent out to exhibitions all these things are kind of at various times considered for various displays that people want to put on then peter has also quite frequently helped out people who want to put on a display he's very happy to loan loan things out to be able to hold the actual item is much much more of a satisfying experience than just kind of reading about them in a book [Music] peter's remarkable collection was invaluable when he was making they shall not grow old we weren't afraid of anyone a documentary giving an incredible insight into the experience of fighting in the trenches using original footage from the imperial war museum they said we want to do something new with it and we're not sure what and peter sort of scratched his head and he on his next visit to london he went in he had a look at the footage and he went away and had to think about it and came up with the idea and initially it wasn't a colorized film that he was intending to make that was something that came later uh he started with getting some footage over said send it over let's see what let's see what we can do if we put all the computer power that we've got and the amazing group of people we have down here in new zealand how amazing can we make this footage and we were blown away scenes were chosen from 100 hours of footage they were then stabilized retimed and restored before being colorized in painstaking detail [Music] one of the one of the techniques we used for color matching uniforms was to actually hold the the uniform up um against a white background on the screen and then just color grade by eye so in this case john's got a uniform or a jacket i would then go into that layer and just tweak the colours to balance them to look more similar or as close as possible to the jacket that is being held up everything down from the unit badges that you see on everybody we tried to be as accurate to recognizing you know what regiment they were in what uh time period exactly was because things obviously like uniforms et cetera changed a little bit over over times so we tried to be as absolutely accurate um as we could be even if we knew when an event took place we would even try and find out what the weather was like that day and sometimes we knew there'd been a big storm or things like that so the skies that we would make sure came through because often on the footage you couldn't really tell what the sky was it's usually just burned out and white on the old footage but we would try to make sure that we were super accurate to that because once again you know it's it's a historic record that you're trying to preserve and it is really important that we got it right if you survive survive anything for the soundtrack peter's team created a commentary using interviews with veterans from the 1960s and added brand new sound effects created especially for the film and in the five or six seconds you can pass through quite a number of psychological changes all of the footage was was silent uh and and his his brief to us was it's got to be real it's got to be like i was standing in that battlefield and i want to make sure that i that i feel the explosions and then debris and everything that falls off we just build it out of component after component after component and the ground shut what guns were put into the movie had to be really accurate so we had our sound design team who went and recorded and searched out the right type of of field gun of of rifle of pistol of of a bomb that would have been dropped a plane that would have been flying the stories he was told as a child about his grandfather's first world war service made they shall not grow old very personal for peter i'm sure that whatever happened to my grandfather and whatever you know he experienced wouldn't be too too dissimilar to look to what i was seeing and i'm hearing as i was going through the footage and i i was you know acutely aware that this was this was probably you know i i'm you know this is much how he felt and these are the sort of sites that he was seeing [Music] [Music] just a couple of miles from the film production house where peter jackson creates fantasy blockbusters like lord of the rings is a workshop where he can indulge his other passion building and renovating first world war aircraft if you're looking to hire people or find people that um have got experience building first world war planes you're you're like 100 years too late really they they don't exist and so what you do is you look for sort of the people who have got really good woodworking skills and and we have those people on our film crew so kind of so you know or their their engineers their metal workers who also came from films because that's really what happened in the first world war staff like nick larson who's been at the factory for 13 years before that he worked with peter on lord of the rings and king kong the big part about this business is that we really want to make first world war airplanes as authentic as possible so we use the word reproduction rather than replica so we actually are reproducing the aeroplanes exactly how they used to be from the first world war the 15th of august 1917 was when the these plans were issued many of the planes here are the only ones in existence they've been painstakingly recreated from the original blueprints you don't want to run into the trap of saying well we know more about flying now than they did back then you know our materials are better this and that so you don't want to sort of take their designs and just for no particular reason try and improve them you know so we're just going to we're going to add some more steel here or we're going to make this stronger or it should be thicker we'd never never ever do that because these plans were they they were tested they were put through extreme flight tests they were they were put through combat and they came out okay so there's no reason to actually improve them his standard is 100 authenticity so that sets the bar for us um there are a few occasions that we may need to step slightly away from that because in availability materials we may have to make minor substitutions but then we wouldn't do any of that really without consulting with peter and making sure he's happy often the engine is the component that drives the choice of which plane to restore next there's no point building a plane if you haven't got if you haven't got an engine for it and they all had different engines i know they had there's lots of different types of engines and so we look we see what sort of engines we we have either in our collection or ones that we can obtain or you know and then we look at what planes those engines belong to when we sort of just sort of figure figure out from there we've got parts of uh rolls-royce eagle we've got hispano sweezes we've got larones and speaking of larones and this box behind me so this is an original box with an original engine that never went into an airplane probably was test run once and then put into this case here so if you look inside here you'll see it just totally covered up in grease and that's just to preserve it so on delivery to it to the factory this is exactly how they would have received it in this box um so it's really unique it's sort of like having a star wars figure from the 70s in a preserved box on a bigger scale so to navigate your way through a lot of engines here a lot of very rare engines here's roger this is um roger postuma he's our engine shop manager what you're working on rog just putting together one of our new build mercedes 180s so this is this is an engine that we've reverse engineered from an original so we've taken the original engine we've pulled it all apart and then reverse engineered all of the parts and then re-manufactured this one we go to an extreme detail on these and that we don't change anything we take the original part and we make our new parts exactly the same same materials and exactly the same dimensions we don't change a thing and that again that's why any of these items in this engine would fit into an original engine if you had one so to create one of these engines could take between depending on what type of engine could take between two to four or five years because of um yeah there's the complexity of it this engine itself alone here has something like 1500 parts one of the oldest planes being rebuilt is a morris farmen the farm and brothers were huge names in aviation designing more than 200 planes between 1908 and 1936. this plane predates the first world war and was a factory demo which means only one was ever made morris farm and the engine's in here also yeah sure that's that's over here and that's undergoing a rebuild at the moment um and this engine was in so this is an original renault v12 engine it's 130 horsepower and it was in quite a bad state actually so we've had to re-manufacture quite a few parts for this one we've had to make new con rods uh we've had to make a new camshaft and all the gears in the front here you just have to go through the whole engine crack test every single part and then work from there and decide what we're going to replace and re-manufacture as well as engines there's an impressive collection of propellers the reason peter has collected all these propellers is a because he really likes them and b we can use them to use their profile we can we've got a machine that will actually follow the contours of the of the actual existing wing and copy it straight on to our blank so we end up with exactly the same prop irwin worked with peter on the set of king kong now he's a specialist in making aircraft wings in this case we're just fixing this one up in other cases we're fully building them like these marine ones so we make all the components we'll make every part and then i assemble them up here on this bench how do you find um having peter jackson as a boss well i really like him otherwise i wouldn't be here because yeah i want to make his dream come true as well that's partly why i'm here for myself because he made my dreams come true [Music] once the frame has been made it needs to be covered in another area of the factory fabric is stretched over the plane structure g'day mike hello nick how are you very well what are you up to ah just a bit of covering today so when the bag is um drawn onto the frame the uh we hand stitch it on or this in this case it's laced up there are certain um areas where they are hand stitched on and then the whole entire bag is wet with demineralized water the the water actually shrinks the fabric because it's a natural fiber so as soon as the water hits it all the fibers tighten up and then everything locks and it moves and round and locks onto the airframe really well and we let that dry and then we go to the doping process where we'll um brush dope onto the fabric and then let that dry and then we give repeated coats and then eventually go for spray coats multiple multiple layers of spray coats and we'll tell us a little bit about your background so um and from the covering side of things and working with leather sure my background is in saddlery i made uh used to make saddles for a living mike's father actually worked for the saturday department um for buckingham palace so i worked for the queen so his skill has all been handed down through generations so it was your granddad that wasn't it first was it granddad yeah he was yeah he started his business in 1911. and from what i understand you still have some of his original tools that you still use all my tools still granddad's tools here still have those all the stuff that would have been made of the day world war one i'm still using those same tools that granddad used the level of detail in these recreations is astonishing and it doesn't end with the main structure these are originals and we use them for reference and you can find out the spacing of drain holes we can work on the size of the roundels the color of the roundels any stitch detail we can look at the size of the tapes used over the ribs there's a multitude of information that can be gleaned from just a seemingly obviously neglected or unwanted artifact [Music] german aircraft there's no or very little actual plan so we work a lot from uh photographs crashed aircraft um the most just banal looking photograph can yield a huge amount of information so in the way of the lacing detail like i'm working on now patches where the uh any uh parts of the aircraft come out from the um the fuselage like in the tail skid area we can work out where the um the patches have to go work out all the signage so there's a lot to be learned from photographs luckily for the team peter has built up a huge collection of images all around the walls you'll see photographs and advertisements from the first world war what's super unique about these is that they are actually in a private collection this is the only place that you'll see them on the planet um there are a few particular interesting ones that i'd love to show you the sopwith aviation factory uh at the end of the war um in kingston it just shows you the scale of the production so there is hundreds of aeroplanes being built and they're all stopped with snipes there would only be a handful of supple snipes left on the planet now so there's a lot more in that photo than are currently around [Music] it's just really interesting this is um anthony focker so uh anthony focker offers his services um to the um to the english originally to the raf they turned him down he's actually a dutchman um and he said well i'll offer my services to the germans and they took them on and created fokker which is huge there's a lot of [ __ ] aeroplanes uh from you know in the first world war and then in the second world war um standing beside him was verna voss so he was an ace like the red baron and then this is the red barons crash fuselage here on the ground surrounded by um british troops and uh the australian there at the front claiming victory um as you can see it's all been cut up so they took them as souvenirs so often pilots won once they shot down an enemy to go down and cut off the the um these the sort of the number or the insignias from the side of the fuselage and what's really unique is that this particular fuselage from the red baron peter actually has the the iron cross insignia from the fuselage and that's safely uh way down in omaka down in blenheim peter jackson's collection of world war one planes is the biggest in the world this is partly because he restores and builds aircraft that no longer exist from their original blueprints but while his workshop in wellington is not open to the public there is a place where visitors can see some of his collection on show [Music] in the north of the south island just half an hour's flight from wellington is the amarka aviation heritage center in the late 1990s peter jackson became aware of a group of vintage plane enthusiasts and joined their number discussions began as to how to make the collection available to the public a group of us at the airfield here at omaka realized we shared a common passion for heritage aviation and and amongst that was quite a strong interest in first world war aviation so we tended to draw to us uh other people had that interest and one who came amongst us was was peter jackson peter had significantly more aircraft than the rest of us and he had a look through the the shell of the facility then and said look i know you had ideas of of covering a range of errors but i could fit the whole thing out with world war one would you like me to and we thought for about two seconds and said yes please [Music] for someone like peter to offer to us not just just his airplanes but also his his remarkable memorabilia collection and his own personal knowledge that goes with that that was really powerful peter brought in a group of experts that had worked with him on his film projects to help create tableaus using lifelike mannequins to bring scenes from the first world war to life peter appointed joe bleakley who had been a i believe an art director of his previously and joe came over and worked with us to design the way this would all be put together and he was a very creative guy great fun to work with and some of the the things he's put together just brilliant he never liked anybody to be able to see everything at once so he'd hide things and when you go through the memorabilia you've got to peek around corners and there'll be some remarkable things like a blue max medal but you can't see it unless you go looking for it [Music] peter always had a fascination with airplanes and trees and as you move through the display you see a few photographs on the walls of aircraft which have unfortunately ended up stuck in trees so it was one of those inevitable things that happened in early aviation with low powered airplanes and not very high from the ground and not many choices when the the engine stops as to where you're going to go so um peter was determined that he was going to build a set showing an airplane crashed in a tree jane in the meantime was very keen to have a snow scene so what ultimately occurred was a combination of the two and we've ended up with this delightful scene of basically a british pirate who's been shot down by a german pilot and he's crashed into the tree managed to get himself down out of the tree and the german pilot has landed alongside and is greeting him as a a fellow aviator not as an enemy but as a kindred spirit and it's a wonderful emotional setting which again talks to those human stories and it's one of our favorite scenes and we love showing people through it and explaining what it's all about one of the tableaus created at a marker tells the story of the death of the german flying ace known as the red baron he was shot in an aerial battle over the sun valley in 1918 and died after making an emergency landing australian soldiers who controlled that area looted his plane for souvenirs one can even be seen stealing his signature fur-lined boots if anybody knows of a person from the great war it would be the red baron manfred one richtofen and we've got an amazing selection of his own memorabilia things that he owned personally there's a lock of hair we don't actually know who it belongs to have to assume it was a girlfriend but it it sort of conjures up the real person behind behind him the family used to have hunting trophies and had mint little little cups like this little silver cups and during the war richthofen sent to the family jeweller to have more cups made whenever he shot down an aircraft now he had 80 victories but the jeweler we here ran out of silver at number 60 so never got that far but we've got two of them on display one is number 11 which was against llano hawker the top allied ace at that time british ace and the other is a number 10 which is a marker every tenth was a larger cup and it's amazing to see those things on display have them right here the knights of the sky exhibit open to the public in 2006. it's an amazing thing to be entrusted with with such treasures and it's not like money or jewelry this this is unique irreplaceable artifacts that are part of the history that we hold so dear [Music] attention to detail is peter jackson's hallmark if he's involved in a project it will have been meticulously researched and nowhere is this more apparent than back in the workshop in wellington as well as using original blueprints to build full-sized world war one planes they have also been used by wingnut wings a model aeroplane company based under the same roof manufacturing perfect replica planes on a miniature scale i was a kid who was frustrated because when you bought model kit sets they were only only a few first world war planes and there was a whole lot of visible planes there was no kit sets for and it was used to always frustrate me when i was a kid i always wanted this plane or that plane or i read a book and you know and there was no kit available so i started a company to make model kits and i'm able to make all the kits that i was frustrated i didn't have when i was a kid all the kits are really ones that the ones that i wanted badly that couldn't get my hands on the company's general manager richard alexander used to manage a hobby shop frequented by peter jackson he brought vital model making experience to a team that was strong on digital design but less aware of how to turn those designs into kits that were enjoyable to build we set ourselves incredibly high standards as far as research and accuracy and we sort of we owe that to history to get them as right as we possibly can so that you know people that make these things in 10 years or 20 years or maybe even 100 years can get a good feel for what these airplanes were really like [Music] the company started small with an early run of just four models in 2009 but they took the scale model market by storm building up to 100 different kits and from the artwork on the box to the instruction manuals and sheets of decals inside the quality is unrivalled [Music] if you scale them up they actually are good enough to go on a real airplane that's how detailed they are down here these are the instruments that are on inside the plane and if you zoom in on some of the other transfers you can read a word because we feel it's at some stage in the future these might be a surviving record of some sort or you know we want people to come along in 20 years time and they'll still build that model and it's still the best available we put a lot of effort into trying to make our plans one very detailed very very sort of you know you know so you can just build it straight from the box and it looks like really kind of like a professional model but also make that easy to build so we've really figured out how we can help people you know who might be a bit intimidated to us to make a first world role model kitset from time to time if we you know if i've got a weekend spare or or there's a holiday or something and um and and i i grab the latest one that we've done and and stick it sticker together yeah [Music] when he's not researching producing or directing the latest blockbuster film peter jackson returns to his other passion world war one planes his collection is remarkable 100 year old aircraft restored to their former glory or built from scratch using traditional methods and original blueprints some are the only examples to be found anywhere in the world but they're more than just museum pieces i guess we probably have the most awesome flying club in the world at hood aerodrome around 60 miles from wellington history comes to life as peter jackson's world war one aircraft collection of mainly british and german planes take part in displays and recreate aerial battles this collection here is all about the first world war so in terms of the specialization around that era there are sites here that can't be seen anywhere else in the world [Music] we don't just fly around a gentle circuit we actually demonstrate their capabilities and their abilities to and mock battles um we try and and be historically reasonably accurate pitting airplanes against airplanes that they would have fought against the pilots here need to have extensive experience of flying small planes we invite our pilots it's a collection so we can pick and choose pilots and we've now assembled a very fine collection of experienced pilots we have airline pilots ex-fighter pilots i'm one agricultural pilots and it's a great combination of skills but they're all modern pilots so we have had to take each of these pilots back to the beginning literally the beginnings of aviation [Music] a lot of pilots are very keen to join us and what generally happens is they'll express an interest and we'll have them along and and just get them working with the aircraft on the ground um for for a period of time really and and see how they they integrate with the team that way once we're happy that they've got the the prerequisites we'll start them off with a basic level and our tie them off and then just gradually step them through the varying aircraft in levels of complexity so some of our aircraft are more straightforward to fly than others so we'll start with the simple simple aircraft and i guess the ultimate challenge for our pilots is to fly some of the the late war rotary engine aircraft such as the camel and the snipe one of the most challenging and unusual planes is the fe-2b a farming experimental plane with the propeller behind the pilot a feature that hasn't stood the test of time it's one of the most exciting airplanes we have at the vendajavia collection it's a little bit larger than all the rest it's a little bit more interesting to fly than some of them which is to say it's not necessarily the easiest aeroplane to float come have a look it's designed with the engine and the propeller behind the pilots which gives the pilot and the gunner a field of view in front so he can shoot at other aircraft the unfortunate thing is it's very slow so most of the other airplanes ended up behind which didn't work out so well so they very quickly decided that maybe it'd be better off as a bomber at night time and it did very well right throughout the entire war anything ahead of the propeller if it's loose um or could come adrift more than likely had a propeller blade and it's not strong enough to take a hit from anything larger than a small nut perhaps so if that happens normally the propeller would break and then it's life's very interesting for a short period of time one of the bristol aircraft that can be seen at hood aerodrome was rescued from an undignified retirement the bristol fighter first flew in 1916 this was built a wee bit later on and then through the years it disappeared and was found again in the 80s was actually we call it a barn find some people found the fuselage being used in the loft of a barn as a chicken coop and it was rebuilt to an ear with the aircraft that we've got now the aircraft like all of the aircrafts of its era and even until later in the years are made of either fabric or in this case it's linen it's actually shrunk with water and that's what gives it a bit of a drum sound it's a two-seater and when it was initially introduced into world war one it wasn't all together a success because they flew it uh as they flew so many of their two-seaters relying on the gunner in the back seat to protect the aircraft the gun from the the front actually comes through uh the nose of the aircraft and that's timed so that the gun shoots through the propeller arc and it's called an interrupter gear i understand that the the germans were weary of engaging the bristol fighter if they're any less than three or four of them against the bristol it's a flying day and today nine pilots will be creating a unique aerial formation of century-old planes at the pre-flight briefing the schedule is decided based on last minute checks on the day's flying conditions [Music] starting with the weather hayley this morning we had a tempo from midnight last night to 7 of seven uk biz and moderate shows rank the aim is to to show off the royal flying corps and the royal air force in a combination formation as on the board nine aircraft getting all nine planes into the air requires careful planning each one needs to be hand started by swinging the propeller and some of them take a while to get going what's a good time aim for 8 30. i mean we've got a lot of starting to do and we don't have many starters obviously we get the the two seaters and the and the sc-5s going they take a bit of warming up going for 8 30 but we'll do a time check as we get a bit closer see how well you might be optimistic yes well should we say call it let's say quarter to nine and that gives us a bit more time this is separating it out and i'll start with the front and operate first and then continue to go um yeah although each plane is worth hundreds of thousands of pounds and some as much as a million they're not wrapped in cotton wool like this royal aircraft factory be2 they are fully functioning and airworthy we choose the days that we go out in these ones we don't want it too rough one too strong otherwise it becomes a bit of a handful these ones were built in about 1914 1915 they built about three and a half thousand of them and they're probably one of the best all-round bomber reconnaissance type aeroplanes mostly used for looking at over the trenches look down so they could spot for the artillery some of them had morse code keys where they used to drop messages and then they could range in and start putting their artillery on the germans [Applause] during the war they used to be up to around about ten thousand feet in this airplane it's quite heavy um it's very sedate it doesn't maneuver very quickly it doesn't do anything very quickly at all but it just seems to slowly accelerate down the runway and levitate off the ground and before you know it you're flying and there you go [Music] nowhere else could you have the opportunity to fly aeroplanes like this and and to the extent that we fly them um yeah it's very very special we feel very honoured to be allowed to do it [Music] these aircraft they're all cool really cool to fly and they have their unique quirks to handle but i guess the best aircraft to fly is the one you're flying these are the real deal so this is exactly what it was like to fly back in world war one these planes would never have flown together so this aerial display is a unique site but they represent almost the full span of the first world war [Music] the oldest the fe-2b first flew in 1915. [Music] from his years in the film industry peter jackson has built up a diverse team of experts many of whom now work with him on projects to build restore and fly first world war planes i want to do things that add a positive contribution to the world in one form or another whether people go to a movie i've made or they go to an air show and they watch some of these planes fly and it's just something that actually people get a little bit of education but it's actually a positive thing there's nothing sort of negative about it not many people get the chance to take their hobby to these lengths but peter hopes his work has helped keep a little of the great war magic alive hopefully whenever i fall off my perch i'll have left behind you know sort of a positive trail behind me [Music] you

Channel: Forces News

Views: 362,825

Rating: 4.9282126 out of 5

Keywords: Forces News, military, First world war, world war one, ww1, wwi, Peter Jackson, planes, aircraft, Royal Flying Corps, RAF, Royal Air Force, history, rare, New Zealand, exclusive, Nic Larsen, Helen Casey, The Great War, uniforms, Wellington, They Shall Not Grow Old, Clare Olssen, Matthew Wear, Wayne Stables, Michael Hedges, Roger Posthuma, Erwin Koedijk, Mike Grealish, Anthony Fokker, Aviation Heritage Centre, defence, Forces TV, Vintage Aviator, Omaka, John Lanham

Id: 7gmZ9X9Aplk

Length: 45min 48sec (2748 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 08 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/gamertagok]

Very interesting. I didn't know Jackson had such an extensive collection. Nice post!