Old buddies have surprise encounter at Ottawa airport

Normally, when an aircraft taxis up for fuel at Ottawa Municipal Airport, airport manager Chuck LeMaster moseys over to the pump without a thought.

This time as he was filling up the plane, a sleek, single-engine sportster, he looked up at the name inscribed on the side of the airplane — J.W. “Corkey” Fornof.

“Corkey? Is that you, Corkey?” LeMaster asked.

“It sure surprised me,” Fornof recalled.

Both LeMaster and Fornof have been good friends ever since they were on the air show circuit 40 years ago, but neither realized they would be meeting at the Ottawa airport last week.

Fornof had been touring in his LoPresti Fury, an aerial version of a sports car, across the country and stopped at Ottawa to get fuel to get back to his Texas home. Fornof delayed his trip for a couple of hours to chat.

Fornof is one of the top Hollywood aerial stunt flyers and coordinators and LeMaster enjoys rehashing his friend’s on-film flights.

Fornof has flown some of the most famous recent movie aerial stunts, including one that was featured in this month’s “Air and Space Museum” magazine. It involved a mini-jet that flew out of a horse trailer and evaded an anti-aircraft missile by flying through an aircraft hangar before running out of fuel and landing and rolling to a stop in front of a gas station in the James Bond movie “Octopussy” starring Roger Moore.

All of the incidents in the flight — except dodging the missile — had happened to Fornof before, including flying through the hangar, which he had done for a Japanese TV commercial, which was spotted by the 007 movie producers.

To keep him from bouncing into a rafter or wall because of the air pressure wave, all the doors and windows of the hangar were open as Fornof and his mini-jet blasted through at 180 miles an hour at a 90-degree bank.

The only way that worked was for me to fly knife-edged,” he said, describing the 90-degree bank.

The scene ends as 007 runs out of gas and the jet lands on a highway and coasts up to a pump at a gas station. That also happened to Fornof.

Fornof said he was flying to Washington when the engine oil pressure in his jet plane dropped and he was forced to land during a severe storm.

Because of the storm, Fornof was forced to land on the handiest spot, which was a North Carolina interstate highway.

Fornof rolled the jet down the interstate and down an exit ramp into a gas station, the hose bell ringing as his plane stopped in front of a fuel pump.

“The guy at the station walked out and stopped and looked at me without saying a word,” Fornof said. “He had a plug of chewing tobacco and he stood there around 20 or 30 seconds.

“Finally he walked up and asked ‘This is Candid Camera, right?’

“‘Nope,’ I told him.”

One of his other famous aerial scenes, in the John Travolta movie “Face Off,” required Fornof to roll a business jet through the doors of a hangar.

Normally, the doors would be cut and weakened to allow the plane to rip through, he said.

However, because of the high winds in the desert where the stunt was shot the doors couldn’t be weakened so Fornof had to barrel through actual hangar doors at 70 miles an hour, he said.

“That was a pretty tough one,” Fornof said.

He had to build a battering ram that was installed in the nose of the aircraft.

“The plane just punched right on through,” he said. “I felt a big bump but I was too busy turning on the cameras.”

The plane carried three specially-built movie cameras for the stunt and in all, 26 cameras recorded the smashup from different angles.

“We had just one take,” Fornof said.

Fornof is a friend to actor and pilot Harrison Ford, whom he met in Hawaii for “Six Days and Seven Nights.”

During lulls in filming, Ford, who was still a new pilot, and Fornof would be in the sky flying, building up Ford’s flight hours.

During their flights, Ford talked Fornof into letting Ford do some of his own flying for the movie. A key part of the romantic comedy-adventure movie is that Ford, playing a scruffy charter pilot, crashes his Canadian-built bush plane, a DHC-2 Beaver, onto a deserted island in the Pacific.

“He’s a very conscientious pilot,” Fornof said. “I wouldn’t have let him do it otherwise.”

Ford later added a Beaver to his collection of airplanes and helicopters and he calls it his favorite.

Fornof’s film work takes him all over the world. He recently received an offer to go to Thailand for a movie, he said.

Although he still gets scripts, Fornof is taking a break from movie-making as he flies the LoPresti Fury across the country on behalf of the manufacturer.

“It’s a wonderful airplane,” Fornof said. “My wife likes it, too.

“Since I’ve started flying it, I haven’t been doing any movies so I have to stay closer to home.”