RetroClips

The Flying Ace was made by Norman Studios in Jacksonville, one of the only Black-owned film production companies of the silent era, and it's the studio's only surviving complete feature, added to the National Film Registry in 2021. The best piece of trivia here is the trick behind the trick: despite being marketed as 'the greatest airplane thriller ever filmed,' the production reportedly used almost no real in-flight photography at all, the biplane was bolted to the ground the whole time, tilted and shot against a moving-cloud backdrop with wind machines doing the rest of the work.