Pima Air & Space Takes Their Digital Marketing To New Heights With Drone Footage

CS Design Studios Captures Drone Footage at Pima Air & Space

The Pima Air & Space Museum is one of the largest non-government funded aviation and space museums in the world. The museum features over 300 historical aircraft, sitting on over 80 acres. The museum opened its doors to the public in May of 1976 and over the past forty years, has grown immensely to encompass five indoor exhibit hangars (two dedicated to WWII).

CS Design Studios was able to go onsite and capture drone footage of some of the many aircraft present on site. Some of the planes present include a DOUGLAS VC-118A LIFTMASTER aircraft, as well as a Boeing 747. We’ll go ahead and highlight some facts about these two specific aircraft.    

A few interesting facts about the Boeing 747:

This particular one was built by Boeing Aircraft Company at Everett, Washington and delivered to Pan American World Airways on March 21, 1970.  It is the twenty-fifth 747 built.  Following Pan Am’s practice of naming its aircraft, this airplane flew with the name “Clipper Star of the Union” until 1982 when it was renamed “Clipper Ocean Spray.”   In March 1992 it was purchased by General Electric for use as an engine test bed.  Since then the plane has flown more than 3,000 hours carrying various test engines for GE as they develop the engines that power many of the planes that are replacing the 747 in airline service.  General Electric donated the aircraft to the Pima Air & Space Museum in November 2018.

And now on to the DOUGLAS VC-118A LIFTMASTER:

The name of the aircraft may not ring a bell at first.  However this aircraft served as the official Air Force One for Presidents Kennedy and Johnson.It was the last propeller driven aircraft to be designated as the primary Presidential transport.  Both Presidents preferred to travel in the larger, faster jet aircraft and the VC-118 was used primarily for short trips to airports that were too small for the big Boeings.  Once the VC-137 became the primary Presidential aircraft the VC-118 was used as a back up plane and to transport lower ranking VIPs.

For this shoot we decided to capture some of the footage early in the morning as the sun was rising to get some of the more cinematic affects.  During this time of day shadows are highly visible which helps to define the terrain features which can be harder to see during mid afternoon. The weather was nice and visibility was very clear that day.  We made sure to shoot with a high frame rate that would make sure that the end product was a smooth video with no stuttering. We used a combination of orbit, fly through, and 360 pan shots to create the video seen above.  A few slow motion shots were added to get a clear image of the aircraft. Everything went smoothly and we were honored that Pima Air and Space chose us to capture these iconic shots.