Rating: 
Don’t watch this on your phone. Come to that, your TV screen isn’t going to be big enough either. To do full justice to Masters Of The Air (AppleTV+), you’re going to have to hire a cinema.
This World War Two aerial drama, following the men of the U.S. Air Force’s 100th Bomb Group on suicidally courageous missions over Germany, is visually immense.
We see vast skyscapes filled with Flying Fortress bombers, weaving through cloudbursts of anti-aircraft flame and flak, as Luftwaffe fighters scream out of the sun with all guns blazing.
In one early sequence, a squadron of planes races up a Greenland fjord before Austin Butler, as the pilot hero Major Gale ‘Buck’ Cleven, lands in a hurricane.
In another, hapless navigator Harry Crosby (Anthony Boyle) directs his crew to the wrong side of the Channel, before they struggle back to base for a crash landing in an East Anglian field – with U.S. jeeps racing from all directions to the rescue.
In one early sequence, a squadron of planes races up a Greenland fjord before Austin Butler, as the pilot hero Major Gale ‘Buck’ Cleven, lands in a hurricane
Kai Alexander portraying Sgt. William Quinn in ‘Masters of the Air’
Austin Butler as Major. Gale ‘Buck’ Cleven and Callum Turner portraying Major. John ‘Bucky’ Egan
The spectacle never lets up. One heart-stopping tableau follows the next, with a vividness and authenticity that has never been possible before in television history.
This is 1943 and the Americans are just arriving in Europe… three years late, as always, but very welcome.
The only unsteady moment in the story comes at the very start, and it’s quite unnecessary.
We meet Buck and his girlfriend in a bar back in the States, dancing to the sound of Artie Shaw and drinking with Buck’s best pal, a fellow airman… called Bucky.
A long and repetitive banter follows, explaining why they have the same nickname. It’s a confusing distraction, especially as what’s special about their friendship is how different they are.
Buck Gayle is laconic, undramatic, a lanky and idealistic young man from the cowboy country of Wyoming.
Butler plays him sulky as Elvis, uncompromising as John Wayne. Major John ‘Bucky’ Egan (Callum Turner) is loudly, wildly reckless – apt to start a fight in an Arctic bar with a narwhal tusk for a sword, or take a bet with all the locals in an English pub that he will stand with an apple on his head for their darts champion to skewer like William Tell.
The accents and costumes are impeccable. The hairstyles are less assured, all more or less modern, which is odd but scarcely relevant.
The spectacle never lets up. One heart-stopping tableau follows the next, with a vividness and authenticity that has never been possible before in television history
Austin Butler, Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks at the world premiere of ‘Masters Of The Air’
Sawyer Spielberg, Callum Turner, Steven Spielberg, Austin Butler, Tom Hanks and Gary Goetzman attend the world premiere
Tom Hanks and Callum Turner at the premiere of ‘Masters of the Air’ in Los Angeles
Produced by Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks, who also made wartime epic Band Of Brothers more than 20 years ago, every episode places intense emphasis on its technical brilliance.
Long tracking shots take us through crowds, so that we catch snatches of conversation as we pass, or along the entire fuselage of a bomber, showing us each of the ten crew as they sweat, curse and struggle.
Based on historian Donald L Miller’s book, the script bombards us with military detail.
As scores of airmen cram into a barn-like briefing room, their intelligence officer unloads facts by the ton: ‘Along the Frisian Islands from Northern Eye to Lange Hoog, you can expect concentrated flak from identified batteries consisting of 88mm and 105mm guns guided by Wurzburg radar, on a straight nine-mile run to the target.’
The checklist on takeoff is equally thorough: ‘Transfer valves off, switches off, valve flaps open and locked, throttles are closed…’
Far from being dull, these litanies become the tense precursor to flights into terror.
When one raid has to be aborted and the German fighters swarm in mercilessly, we already feel as though we are in those planes beside the crews – airborne aluminium deathtraps that can explode into infernos in an instant.
As the credits roll, you’ll believe you’re lucky to have survived.
