William P. Suitor

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William P. "Bill" Suitor (* 1945 ) is an American test pilot who completed over 1200 flights with a rocket backpack without serious injury. He has worked as a stuntman or film double in numerous television productions and movies. He became known as the man flying with the flight scene in Thunderball (1965) and his flight into the stadium at the opening ceremony of the 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles , which was seen by an estimated more than two billion viewers worldwide. Suitor lives in Niagara Falls, New York . He holds numerous flight records with the rocket backpack.

Life

In 1964, 19-year-old Bill Suitor, who occasionally mowed the lawn of his neighbor, the inventor of the rocket backpack Wendell F. Moore , and had talked to him, was hired off the street as a test pilot for the rocket backpack. He stayed with Bell Aerosystems until May 1970, when the company got into trouble due to the lack of further government funding and the rights to the rocket backpack were sold. Suitor, who was one of about three people who could handle the rocket backpack, then went to Hollywood and worked as a test pilot with the Nelson Tyler NT-1 rocket backpack from 1970 to 1984. Later he was the only person to fly the American Rocket Belt Company's RB-2000. This company ingloriously ended in a mysterious criminal case that continues to preoccupy the American public to this day.

The 1965 James Bond film Thunderball contains the spectacular escape scene in which James Bond aka Sean Connery escapes from captivity with the help of his rocket backpack. While studio recordings with Sean Connery are shown during take-off and landing, the flight scenes with the rocket backpack from six individual flights by the stuntmen (three by Gordon Yaeger and three by Bill Suitor) are cut together, because the design of the rocket backpack only stayed in the air for a few seconds. The shrill whistling of the rocket nozzles was replaced on the soundtrack by the sound of an activated CO 2 fire extinguisher.

In 1987 Suitor wrote a book about his experiences with the rocket backpack.

Filmography

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Short biography of William P. Suitor (en) ( Memento of March 8, 2011 in the Internet Archive )
  2. ↑ Paul Brown: The rocketbelt Caper - A True Tale of Invention, Obsession, and Murder , Lulu Press 2005, ISBN 1-4116-2984-1
  3. ↑ To the flight scene in the movie Thunderball (en) ( Memento from July 23, 2008 in the Internet Archive )
  4. ↑ William P. Suitor: rocketbelt Pilot's Manual , 1987, ISBN 978-1-926592-05-3
personal data
SURNAME Suitor, William P.
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Suitor, Bill
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American test pilot
DATE OF BIRTH 1945