...see you back
at the lodge...
Bond is invited by Elektra King, to tour on skis the route of her late-father’s pipeline through the snow-covered Caucasus Mountains. A hit-squad of four powered parachute crafts, dubbed “Parahawks” attack. Bond skis off toward the cover to the trees to lead them away from Elektra. Dropping grenades and using hand-held machine guns, they stalk Bond. One Parahawk pilot pushes his luck, becomes tangled in a tree and explodes. Two others land, shedding parachutes, operating as snowmobiles. Bond leads them futher into the woods, where one, blinded by a compatriot’s hand grenade blast, crashes into a fireball. Bond lured the other chuteless Parahawk towad a cliff edge at speed. Unable to stop, Bond’s pursuer plunges to what seems like certain death, until a reserve chute unfurls. Bond devises a plan, making a risky jump off the cliff onto the canopy of the lower Parahawk, ripping it with his Rossignol Bandit X skis, before plunging to the slope below. The tears in the chute send the Parahawk spiraling out of control and into the path of the last Parahawk, with both exploding.
Under the sleek, dangerous-looking fiberglass shells, the flying Parahawks are actually Blue Heron XC-70 powered parachute aircraft, created by Heldeberg Designs out of Altamont, New York. A literal mom-and-pop operation run by Nick and Marie Viscio along with their son and a handful of part-time employees, Heldeberg made powered parachute crafts for twenty years before shutting down operations in 2015. Nick Viscio recalled in 2019 that the chase seen took a bit of filmmaking magic. “Those things only go 25 miles an hour—he could have outrun them going down the hill easily!”
What no one could outrun on Mont Blanc where the sequence was filmed, were avalanches. Original plans to make the scene a snowboarding chase came to a halt after two experienced snowboarders lost their lives on the slopes to an avalanche before filming. Massive, intermittent snowfalls proved a further danger after filming began on January 11, 1999, so much so that the film’s insurance policy wouldn’t allow stars Pierce Brosnan and Sophie Marceau on location. On February 7th, a massive storm brought more snowfall, and on the 9th, a deadly avalanche killed twelve in the nearby village of Montroc. The filmmakers loaned their camera helicopter and pilots to the rescue efforts.
Heldeberg Designs delivered 17 airframes to the filmmakers to be fitted with fiberglass bodies at Pinewood Studios, with some re-enforced for the snowmobile scenes. Ten Parahawks were destroyed during filming.
The IFF owns multiple versions, all acquired in 1999, together with a dummy pilot used in the production.
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