Wing-walking on a flying DC-3 in aussie movie?

[Frank N. O.]

I was just looking at a DVD movie my brother had bought cheaply a while ago, it's called Sky Pirates and is appearently an aussie movie from 1986 http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0091964/
I was looking thrue some of the scenes and I suddently found something unbelievable. The hero is flying a DC-3/C-47 and gets shot at by a fighter and the right-hand engine catches fire but the hero can't put it out with the interior controls so he climbs up thrue a hatch in the roof and then climbs to the engine itself. Now, there are close-ups taken from below with the actor that are obviously on the ground with a small wind-machine, but there are also larger views from above the plane where it zooms out to show the whole plane in the air with a person (dressed like the hero) outside of the plane! First at the cockpit roof hatch and then, after a close-up of the hero falling straight down the side and onto the wing, at the engine and the person is moving, how did they do that?

The interior views looking out thrue the cockpit window shows the classic shaking camera-footage of clouds put in a screen in front of the cockpit in a studio/hangar but the exterior views looks like a real plane filmed from another real plane with real ground underneath and a real moving person (ie, not a dummy). Now I know a DC-3 can fly slow (although not sure how slow) and the in-air shots only show the person's limbs moving and the face was hidden so that could mean it was a stuntman strapped on from the ground but still, could that really be real? Edit: Ok, looked again and took two screengrabs and the dude actually started to move back towards the cockpit while holding the rope so he couldn't have been tied to the fuselage completely (see second screengrab).

Frank

[Futeki]

I would say its a blue/green screen. The plane is probably on the ground and the screen in the background is footage taken from a plane flying over somewhere.

[Frank N. O.]

The way it looks when it's moving then it's gotta be the biggest blue-screen I've ever seen since the way the clothes move it clearly looks like a human and not a stop-motion puppet or some other trick. I tried looking on youtube and the closest I could find was a german trailer (under the title Dakota Harris) and at 0:35 there's a short part of one of the clips that looked real to me.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8gGXE06EytQ

Frank

[Jupiter]

Look pretty real indeed... Problem is that you don't see the entire aircraft, so very hard to tell. Aerial shots of action outside of planes is done for real sometimes though, like most of the action sequences on the twin beech in "Octopussy".

[vldflight]

Chuck could do it

[Baradium]

They had blue screens back then?

DC 3s can go pretty slow


from  http://www.douglasdc3.com/dc3throt/dc3throt.htm

Stall Speeds for the DC-3 are :

With FULL FLAPS about 58 knots and with NO FLAPS about 65 knots


That's pretty doable speed wise...