Copter crash on Tom Cruise’s movie set leaves 2 dead

Tom Cruise’s films are known to be often action-packed and choking with hair-raising stunts. It is sad to report that one of his movies has taken actual lives on set.

Yahoo Movie reported that a helicopter crash during the new movie shoot killed two people.

The small plane assigned to the crew of a movie starring Tom Cruise crashed in Colombia on Friday, killing two people, including a Los Angeles-based film pilot, and seriously injuring a third, the country’s civilian aviation authority said.

An official with the aviation agency, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the matter, said Cruise was not on the aircraft.

The official said an American, Alan Purwin, was killed along with the Colombian Carlos Berl. A third person aboard, American pilot Jimmy Lee Garland, was rushed to a hospital in Medellin.

The official said the twin-engine Aerostar ran into bad weather late Friday afternoon after taking off from the colonial town of Santa Fe de Antioquia for a short flight to Medellin.

Read also: For Tom Cruise, visit to daughter is Mission Impossible

Cruise, a trained pilot, arrived last month in Colombia to film a movie called Mena, about a pilot who worked for the late cocaine kingpin Pablo Escobar. (In an unfortunate coincidence, during shooting in Georgia in May, Cruise filmed a scene for the film involving a plane crash.)

Cruise’s spokeswoman, Amanda Lundberg, had no comment.

Purwin was founder and president of the Los Angeles-based Helinet Technologies, a company providing aerial surveillance technology to law enforcement and government agencies. On the company’s website, he’s described as “one of the top film pilots of his generation” with a list of credits from television and major Hollywood movies such as Transformers, Pearl Harbor, and Pirates of the Caribbean.

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