Talaat Captan’s Air Hollywood was the subject of a national TV news feature in May 2019. In “Inside Air Hollywood, where iconic scenes are filmed,” reporter Chris Welch visited the Los Angeles studio where productions shoot air-travel scenes on the ground, and spoke with Captan about why he built it. The report ran on the national news pages of several Scripps-owned local stations, including WXYZ in Detroit, 10News in San Diego, WMAR-2 in Baltimore, NewsChannel 5 in Nashville and Denver7. Here is a summary of what it covered and some background on the sets it showed.
A studio built around a filmmaker’s problem
The report introduces Captan as a former movie producer and a self-described aviation enthusiast who started Air Hollywood after running into obstacle after obstacle while trying to film airplane scenes. Getting access to working airports and real aircraft, he explained, was extremely difficult. Rather than treating that as a dead end, he saw a gap in the market. In his words to the reporter: “Then, I realized there’s an opportunity here.”
That opportunity became the world’s first aviation-themed film studio, founded in 1998. The fuller version of the story, which begins on the set of the airport disaster film Ground Control, is told on this site in How Talaat Captan Turned a Ground Control Setback into Air Hollywood.
What the cameras saw
The feature describes Air Hollywood as a place where almost any part of a trip can be staged indoors, from the airport security checkpoint to the aircraft cabin. At the time of the visit, the report counted four aircraft sets, and it noted that Captan keeps them as close to working order as possible. The cockpit electrics work, and so do the overhead bins, so actors can handle the cabin the way real passengers and crew would.
That attention to function is a theme that runs through Air Hollywood’s own description of its stages. Its sets are built for production, with fly-away walls that let a camera sit where a fuselage wall would be, practical lighting, and room for crew. The studio’s analog cockpits come from real aircraft, with original switches and gauges rewired to work. A closer look at those techniques is in How Talaat Captan’s Air Hollywood Films Airplane Scenes Without a Real Plane.
The report also links the facility to the classic comedy Airplane!. Air Hollywood itself notes that its vintage analog cockpit, an actual Convair 880 with an engineering panel, is the cockpit mock-up used in that film.
How a set on the ground feels like a flight
The most striking part of the segment is the explanation of how a stationary set convinces an audience, and the actors, that they are in the air. Captan showed the reporter that the aircraft platform sits on airbags and hydraulics, so the whole cabin can be lifted and shaken to imitate turbulence. With the window shades down and the sound effects running, he said, people really do feel as though they are on a plane.
This is the same idea behind the turbulence platform under Air Hollywood’s narrow-body 737 cabin, and it explains why the studio’s sets are used for more than film and television. The realism that sells a bumpy flight on screen also helps nervous travelers practise flying in a safe setting, through programs such as FearlessFlight and the free mock flights of Open Sky for Autism.
The 1970s Pan Am cabin
The report also points to the replica 1970s Pan Am aircraft Captan built at the studio. That 747 set, with its upper-deck lounge, became the home of the Pan Am Experience, the immersive dinner experience that recreates the golden age of international air travel. CNN Travel’s look at the experience is summarized in CNN Travel on Talaat Captan and the Pan Am Experience, and more about Captan’s role is on the Pan Am Experience founder page.
Why the feature still matters
Most viewers watch an in-flight scene without wondering where it was shot. Short television features like this one are useful because they open the door on the craft behind those scenes in a couple of minutes, and they show the problem-solving that turned one producer’s frustration into a long-running business. The segment captures the core of Air Hollywood in a simple way: build the airplane for the camera, make it behave like the real thing, and filmmakers no longer have to fight for time at a working airport.
The studio has kept growing since 2019, adding new programs and preparing a move to a new home on Stage 2 in Valencia. Key dates are collected in Talaat Captan and Air Hollywood: A Timeline of Milestones, and Captan’s biography is on the Air Hollywood founder page.
The original report is available from WXYZ (link below). More coverage of Talaat Captan’s work is collected on the Press page.
