Tom Hanks Recalls Night-Flying With Apollo Astronaut Jim Lovell

During the deep dive into all things Apollo 13 amid preproduction for the film, Jim Lovell took me night-flying in his twin-engine Beechcraft Baron from a grass-strip airfield outside of Austin, Texas. No one was at the airport, so after a pilot check walkaround of the airplane, we took off.

Jim had given me an assignment—to fly his airplane. I am not a pilot. I have no license, although I could be trusted to, well, steer for awhile, which I did, but only after he placed a triangle-shape cardboard cutout over my side of the cockpit. The cutout was the same size and dimensions of the window of Aquarius, the Apollo 13 lunar module.

My assignment was to get to altitude, then attitude, find two stars in the night sky and fly toward them. Jim had had to find the same stars during the Apollo 13 mission in 1970 to establish the location and position of the crippled spacecraft or else he and his crew would have been lost. We had studied the star charts over dinner at his house, with his wife, Marilyn, coaching me.

Finding Antares was a bunt. It’s a big star, and I knew where it was in the sky from the Planetarium Astronomy class I had taken during my first year at Chabot College four years after Jim’s return from space on Apollo 13. I was able to throttle the airplane, then bank and crab it into a direct line with the big star.

“Good,” Jim said. “Now find Nunki.”

Nunki. Nunki is a very faint dot of light, a star I had never heard of, never seen and certainly never found in the night sky while flying an airplane over Texas. But we had looked at the charts, so after a bit of banking, steering, searching and eliminating other pips of starlight, I saw it in my cutout window, I thought.

“Yep. That’s Nunki,” Jim said. “Hanks, you were made for flying.”

Hah! The highest praise imaginable!

We continued on for another hour. I confessed that, despite the growls of the two engines, flying at night above the glow of Austin and guided by the stars of the cosmos created a sense of peace and place unlike any other.

“Yeah,” Jim said. “We keep it to ourselves, or else everyone would be up here. Take us back on 172.” He meant the compass heading that would return us to the airfield.

I flew the airplane all the way, descending at the right speed, the right approach, until we were only 500 ft. above the grass.

“I’ll take it now,” Jim said.

He would safely land the airplane, but first we had to buzz the landing strip to scare off any deer that might be feeding in the night. “Don’t want to run into a deer with you in the plane,” Jim said. “There’d go the movie.”

U.S. Navy Capt. (ret.) James Lovell, who died on Aug. 7 at age 97, was selected as an astronaut in 1962 and flew on the Gemini VII, Gemini XII and Apollo 8 missions before becoming commander of the nearly disastrous Apollo 13 mission to the Moon in 1970. Lovell’s book, Lost Moon, was the basis of the 1995 film Apollo 13, in which Tom Hanks portrayed Lovell.