Thunderbirds 2065 SkiCopter.

One of my greatest dreams was realized when I was invited to work in London on Thunderbirds 2065. Three new episodes of classic Thunderbirds.

I owe the guys at Century 21 a great deal for this opportunity. One of the tasks was to design and build the SkiCopter; a helijet craft with a passenger pod. The master pattern was built out of wood and detailed with kit parts as was done on the original.

I started on this, and other builds, here at Weta before heading over to London. I had help from co-worker Leonard with painting and detailing.

Model helicopters are hard to fly on wires because of the rotors. There are several was around this including filming the model upside down....

.... This was not an option because it is always in a landscape. So I thought that the best option was to put the rotors on outriggers based on the Osprey and give it a wide tail to fit three wires.

One hero model had motors and was rigged to fly on wires marionette style or slide down wires Lydecker style.

The pod gets ejected and floats to safety on a parachute. The chute was a rigid plastic shape and was lowered on a wire.

The SkiCopter spent most of its time flying through snow. Here it is being cleaned and readied for another take.

Flying though the snowy peaks.

A forced perspective airport where our heroes board the SciCopter.

The SkiCopter crashes into a mountain and explodes - its Thunderbirds, of course it crashes and burns. This one was a very quick build in balsa as we did not want to destroy a hero model.