Air Force One | Rickenbacker Airport — Ohio Concrete Standing In for Ramstein

When the crippled 747 needs somewhere to come down, the script sends it to Ramstein Air Base in Germany. The runway it actually crosses belongs to Rickenbacker, twelve miles south of downtown Columbus.

The choice was not arbitrary. Rickenbacker began as Lockbourne Army Air Field in 1942, spent the Cold War as a Strategic Air Command base with B-47s and later KC-135 tankers on alert, and was renamed for Eddie Rickenbacker, the Columbus-born ace who shot down twenty-six aircraft in the First World War. It has the runway length, the wide aprons and the low utilitarian buildings that a Cold War installation is supposed to have, because that is precisely what it was. The Ohio Air National Guard still flies refueling aircraft from the military side — a quiet joke, given the midair refueling sequence that nearly kills everyone earlier in the film.

Today the civilian half handles freight, so the traffic is cargo widebodies rather than fighters. There is no terminal to wander. Park on the public roads along the perimeter in the late afternoon, watch a 747 freighter rotate off the same concrete, and the scene arrives without any help from the soundtrack.