The career event Harrison Ford found “thoroughly embarrassing”
A few iconic names dominated cinema in the 1980s, including Tom Cruise, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Michael Keaton and Mel Gibson, but few had the impact on the industry that Harrison Ford enjoyed. One of the trio of actors who led the Star Wars franchise to significant success, Ford also thrived as the whip-cracking explorer Indiana Jones and the no-nonsense futuristic cop Rick Deckard in Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner.
Although his career had been thriving long before the release of Star Wars in 1977, George Lucas’ seminal sci-fi flick would change Ford’s fortunes considerably. Suddenly considered a major box office force, the actor magnetised collaborations with other esteemed filmmakers such as Francis Ford Coppola, Peter Weir, Alan J. Pakula and Wolfgang Petersen, among many others.
Known for his heroic action roles, it turns out that Ford isn’t too dissimilar from his on-screen persona in real life, with the actor getting into some considerable scrapes through his time as a pilot. Whilst the first came in 2014 when he was crushed by the door of the Millennium Falcon, the very ship that his character, Han Solo, pilots in the Star Wars movie, on a London soundstage, the second occasion was entirely more life-threatening.
The incident occurred in March 2015, when Ford fractured his pelvis and shattered a vertebra after crash-landing his open-cockpit plane on a golf course in Venice, California. No one was killed, and, thankfully for the actor, it was discovered that nobody was to blame for the accident, with the crash being due to the fault of a damaged piece of machinery.
Yet, it was the third accident, and the second aviation mistake, that Ford finds the most “embarrassing”, with the actor landing the plane on the taxiway of John Wayne Airport in Orange County, California, instead of the runway.
“It’s thoroughly embarrassing,” the actor admitted in an interview with GQ from 2017, “Officially, I admitted to two of the common mental processes that can lead a pilot to making a mistake—distraction and fixation”.
Still, Ford gives a good excuse for his poor piloting, having been returning from visiting his 101-year-old aunt who had just been put into a hospice, “So I was thinking about a couple of other things. And it was a good landing. In the wrong place”.
After landing and being told his mistake over the radio, Ford was quick to admit his mistake: “I thought that I would suffer the consequences…I knew I fucked up. I knew what process I would have to go through. I even knew it would be in the newspapers. I didn’t know it would be for weeks. And that I would be Mike Flynn’s new best friend. Because he was in the shitbox, and it took him out of the news cycle”.
Take a look at a news clip reporting on the incident below.
