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The Fast & Furious franchise is a constant stream of increasingly insane stunts and tricks. What started as a character drama with bits of high-speed racing throughout has evolved into an extreme, overblown action franchise with, by the time Furious 7 (2015) comes around, the crew driving sports cars out of an airplane and parachuting to the Azerbaijan mountains.

A scene like this automatically raises the question, “Is this possible?” And then its follow-up, “If so, did they actually do it?”

Surprisingly, the answers are yes - and yes. The Furious 7 filmmakers avoided using CGI whenever possible to make the stunts authentic, and that included dumping real cars from a real airplane. In the days where film can artificially create anything, they opted for authenticity.

In planning the scene, a whole bunch of test cars were dropped from planes, more or less to see what happened. They wanted to gauge the speed, what happened to them on the way down, and figure out how to properly choreograph the fall of several cars at once.

Jack Gill, the stunt coordinator for Furious 7, told NPR “We talked about it for a long time before we actually went out there and decided to pull the trigger, because trying to get this many cars out of the plane together — and they all had to fall in succession, one right after another — if one falls a little faster than the other, you’ve got problems. So, you know, there was a rehearsal period of about two weeks where all we did was just drop cars out of C-130s with parachutes so we could figure out how we’re going to do this.”

After they figured everything out, the real scene happened. Two planes were used to drop two cars each. More than 10 cameras were set up - some inside the plane, a couple mounted on each car, a few on the ground, some in a helicopter filming the shot from the air, and skydivers working on the scene (who jumped out of the planes right after the cars) were wearing helmet cams.

Spiro Razatos, a stuntman on the film, told Business Insider ““Sometimes a piece of debris would come off the car, so skydivers had to watch out for that.” There were also spotters keeping an eye on how close the cars were getting to the skydivers. “On the radio you’d hear people say, ‘Skydiver, 200 feet you have a car gaining on your two o’clock.””

One car’s parachute didn’t open. Needless to say, it didn’t look too good when it hit the ground.

After the car drop was completed, it was a standard matter of editing the footage from the variety of cameras together to create a compelling scene, and then adding the actors into the cars.

Here’s a video on the making of the scene: