Harrison Ford’s films have made him one of the most recognisable adventure figures on screen — but off screen, flying is the passion he has chosen for himself.
And that passion continues to draw commentary.
After an April 2020 runway near-miss at Hawthorne Airport — and still-fresh memories of his March 2015 forced landing in a vintage PT-22 — online criticism resurfaced with a familiar tone: an 83-year-old star should not still be in the air.
Some users framed the incidents as proof of indifference to risk.
The criticism
“Reckless.”
“Too old.”
“Still flying because he cannot give it up.”
The accusation — repeated again and again online — was that Ford’s continued flying is no longer a matter of skill, but stubbornness.
The rebuttal from someone who sees it up close
Calista Flockhart — Ford’s wife since 2010 — rejects that narrative entirely.
“He has been a skilled pilot for more than 50 years… he was more careful than anyone.”
She has said the 2020 incident is being framed as a story about age, when the relevant question should have been the same one aviation investigators always ask first:
what actually caused the event that day?
The record, when checked, is more complex than one meme
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Ford did not begin flying professionally late in life — he began training decades ago.
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He has logged thousands of hours.
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He has flown rescue missions in Wyoming — the opposite of the caricature of selfish thrill-seeking.
And crucially — in the 2015 crash — the NTSB did not conclude he caused the engine failure.
They concluded a mechanical part failed.
They also noted that landing on a golf course rather than a street or densely populated area showed quick thinking.
Why this debate keeps resurfacing
Age is easy to frame as a headline.
Investigations, licence qualifications, meteorology reports and mechanical findings take longer to understand.
Aviation has always been a field where risk cannot be reduced to a single variable — not even age.
What the argument is really about
It is about whether a long résumé — including rescue flights, Young Eagles ambassadorship, and decades of incident-free hours — should be erased or condensed into one label:
“too old.”
Flockhart’s point is that Ford is not clinging to a past identity — he is continuing a discipline he has maintained with seriousness for most of his adult life.
Her framing is simple:
the incidents were part of aviation reality —
not a character trait.
And whether one agrees or not, her rebuttal shifts the conversation back toward evidence over assumption — and toward evaluating a pilot by skill, not by birth year.