WTF is 808FX?
I guess tail numbers are different for every aircraft owner. Sometimes they’re a significant set of characters (within the FAA’s formatting regulations) like birthdays, initials, something like that. Or they’re just something that’s easy to say and sounds cool when you say it. Or they’re a random grab from the FAA’s sequence generator.
For me, it’s the TR808 drum machine, and my real-life profession, visual effects. The Roland TR-808 is the original electronica/techno drum machine. Everybody since Kraftwerk has used it and it carries some of my favorite sounds ever, and I pretty much grew up hearing it, growing up in the Detroit area in the 80’s. As for the FX part, you can see my work in The Fifth Element, Titanic, We Were Soldiers, and The Italian Job, to name a few. The hours are long, the work is hard, but to quote George C. Scott in “Patton:” “God help me, I do love it so.” So let’s see if I can make something of that tail number before it expires.
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