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Flight Plan: Chuck Tamburro has made a living out of performing daring helicopter stunts— with Jamie Lee Curtis, left, on the set of True Lies; and low-altitude barnstorming for End of Days.
58 TOWN / towncarolina.com
Perhaps his hairiest stunt was a Terminator scene. “It’s one where, if I made a mistake, I would be killed,” he says, with the casual understatement of someone ordering lunch.
SCREEN SAVER TAMBURRO’S STUNT FLYING APPEARS IN THESE SELECT MOVIES AND TV SHOWS
• 24 • Banshee • Blade Runner • The Closer • Demolition Man • Die Hard • Lost • Memoirs of a Geisha • NCIS: Los Angeles • Scarface • Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby • Terminator 2: Judgment Day • True Lies
Photographs courtesy of Chuck Tamburro
“He’s probably the best all over,” Picerni says of Chuck. “He was trained in Vietnam, so he’s very cautious with what he does. He sets things out, he knows what he’s doing, and he has a lot of confidence in what he’s doing. . . . He can take a helicopter and put it on the hood of a car going 70 miles an hour. I can’t say enough about him. I’ve worked with a lot of pilots—and, yeah, you could say I say that because he’s my nephew—but he’s the best.” Among his 7,000 flight-hours, perhaps his hairiest stunt was that Terminator scene in Long Beach, California. “It’s one where, if I made a mistake, I would be killed,” he says, with the casual understatement of someone ordering lunch. Yet here’s how James R. Chiles describes the daredevil stunt in his book The God Machine: “During a nighttime chase scene, a Bell JetRanger dips down—bringing its skids nearly to the pavement—to fly under an overpass. It was director James Cameron’s idea. Veteran pilot Chuck Tamburro put his helicopter on wheels and rolled it under the bridge to measure the clearance (five feet above and four feet on each side). He flew the stunt twice at a speed of sixty knots [69 mph]. No special effects were used.” Chuck says he was paid $10,000 for those harrowing minutes that could have cost him everything.
Wasn’t Joree freaked out? “I was there,” she says. “I thought it was really cool.” But she does admit she got unnerved once. “The only time I got nervous, and I couldn’t go watch it, was when he did True Lies, and he had to do that limousine scene,” she says, referring to the sequence where Chuck plucks a Jamie Lee Curtis stunt double from a limo flying off a bridge. They both cherish the autographed Jamie Lee photo, which shows her dangling from a Chuckpiloted copter. “She was a very brave girl,” he says, then recites her inscription: “Thanks for the ride of a lifetime, only with you.” True Lies remains his favorite movie, and its director, James Cameron, his favorite. “He likes to do things right and safely, and he doesn’t have a budget to worry about . . . We spent a million dollars on True Lies, and that was just on the aircraft,” Tamburro says. After having flown all over the country and in several parts of the world, Chuck keeps soaring; his latest movie was this year’s Furious Seven, and he’s about to go to Boston for a television shoot. (Until the TV series Banshee in 2014, he’d never flown here in his adopted hometown.) “Every job is different,” he says, without sounding the least bit jaded. Just experienced. Calm. “I don’t get excited. I enjoy my work obviously. It’s not like you get excited. It’s your profession.”