C-130 News: Valley company flies onto silver screen

[casey]

MESA, AZ (KPHO/KTVK) -International Air Response is no stranger to the silver screen. Bane dangled out the back of an IAR airplane in the skies over Scotland for "The Dark Knight Rises" in 2012.

"Movies are great because you get exposure," Billy Grantham, CEO of International Air Response, said. "So when we go and do a major motion picture, the buzz is all over social media and our name is getting out there.”

Cars fell from 12,000 feet over the desert near Coolidge thanks to IAR's effort in Furious 7, the last in The Fast and the Furious franchise.

"People that drive cars out of planes are usually pretty fun people to work with,' Grantham said, talking about the stunt people who design the scenes shot using IAR's C-130s. "Once they get to know you, and you do a good job and price it fairly, you get called back."

But movies are only a fraction of IAR's business.

The company's bread and butter is oil-spill response all over the world. Its massive C-130s drop dispersants. IAR, which is based at Mesa Gateway Airport, cut its teeth in that industry following British Petroleum's Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010.

"A lot of it used to be done with smaller airplanes that carried less stuff to deal with the spill," Grantham said. "They realized during the Deepwater Horizon that an uncontrolled blowout can happen and that's a reality, that's a possibility."

The company also is planning to get back to its roots in wildfire response. It is completely rebuilding one of its five C-130s, making it into a tanker plane for dropping water and retardant on wildfires.

"First of all, if there's ever a huge emergency, we'd like to be able to help out," Grantham, said. "But also, it's a good business model for this airplane. It's almost like it was purpose built for this use."

Read more: http://www.kpho.com/story/29413753/valley-company-flies-onto-silver-screen#ixzz3eDvlUZEf

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