New Airwolf design?

[The Wooksta!]

That's the one, Daddio!

[jcf]

AW 609 is the obvious choice.

[Weaver]

AW 609 is the obvious choice.

Unfortunately there's no kit of it that I know of.

It'll be a few years before there are any in service that are likely to be available for a TV company to hire too..

[jcf]

Crosskit a V-22 and a shortened fuselage Dash 8. It'd look close enough.

Mockups, models, and CG are all they'd need. A day's worth of air-to-air
with a company demonstrator would give them more than enough master
footage to generate just about any cheesy "action sequence" their hearts'
desire. They could do multiple seasons of eye-rollingly bad dreck, of course
they'd need to find a lead as craptastic as Jan Michael Vincent.

[Weaver]

Crosskit a V-22 and a shortened fuselage Dash 8. It'd look close enough.

Mockups, models, and CG are all they'd need. A day's worth of air-to-air
with a company demonstrator would give them more than enough master
footage to generate just about any cheesy "action sequence" their hearts'
desire. They could do multiple seasons of eye-rollingly bad dreck, of course
they'd need to find a lead as craptastic as Jan Michael Vincent.

It'd have to be scaleorama as well as cross-kitting: the AW609's cabin is about half the width of the Dash 8. It's actually a few inches narrower than a Learjet. Actually, looking at the dimensions, a 1/72nd Osprey cross-kitted with a 1/48th Learjet would work out pretty well.

It's funny how things have turned around. It always used to be crappy special effects, endlessly reused, that marked out a cheap TV show. These days, crappy CGI is the exception rather than the rule, and it's crappy physical stuff, like sets and props, that gives the game away.

[Weaver]

Just a thought: if you were making a new Airwolf series in 2018 and you didn't want to go all-CGI, then you could always have some cool designs made up as large-scale radio-controlled models and use those with CGI tweaks. Drone technology has come on so much in recent years that I bet you could get them to fly convincingly, without the little movements that give away the lightness of a small-scale flying model. The current wisdom in the SFX business seems to be that the best solution is to do as much as you can in-camera, with practical effects, then use CGI to clean it up and/or enhance it, rather than just running to all-CGI from the start. So if you want somebody flying around a room by magic, you don't do an unconvincing 100% CGI job, instead you literally fly them around the set on a nice, thick, safe cable (rather than the mostly-invisible-if-you're-lucky thin cables they used to use), getting real reactions and interactions from the actors, then use CGI to erase the cable.

[zenrat]

I agree with that.
For six seasons of the Dukes of Hazzard they threw real '68 to '70 Dodge Chargers across creeks, railway lines, barns etc.
And then for the last season they switched to models (cars, trucks and helicopters) and it looks terrible.  I don't know who they got to do the work but Thunderbirds from 20 years earlier looks much better.

[Scotaidh]

I was thinking that would look great as a Bristol Belvedere conversion ... and I just got one off EvilBay for a very reasonable cost.    Life is good!

[Spino]

TBH if I could find one I'd do a scale-o-rama of a 1:32 Bell 430 down to 1:48, off the top of my head.