Or, to go to the ridiculous, the F9F Panther crashing
on the carrier flight deck in "Midway" - a movie which
had a disturbing tendancy to morph aircraft in mid-flight -
or mid-crash.

Are you sure about that?

Yep - Chuck Heston eats the round-down in an SBD/F9F. Other aircraft start out
as one type (TBD - To Be Ditched) and strike the water, turning into an F6F,
among other morph-jobs.

I could be wrong, but I seem to remember stock
footage an _F6F_ breaking in half on landing.

Chuck's kid, who cracks up after eating deck.

It doesn't seem likely that,
if they were using AT-6s as Zero, etc. lookalikes, they would make that
kind of mistake.

They were also using stock footage from Tora3, which seems a bit much - hey, if
the audience paid to see this footage last year, they are going to love it
again THIS year.

You may be thinking of _Hunt for Red October_, where an F-14 damaged in an
encounter with an ASW Bear tries unsuccessfully to get home, and morphs
into stock footage of a Panther on crashing on landing.

Same footage was used - Chuck's SBD and the Bear-crunch'd Turkey turned into
the same Panther over the stern.

v/r
Gordon
====(A+C====
USN SAR

Its always better to lose -an- engine, not -the- engine.