Enemy fire could come from all directions. Air sickness threatened to fill up a vomit bag at any moment. Between engineering failures, bad weather and high-altitude personnel clashes, the bar for success was often just returning to the landing strip alive. Back on the ground, bar brawls and office politics awaited.

Masters of the Air manages to weave all of this together without ever losing its audience, threading a difficult needle of being chaotic, but not incoherent. Even a straightforward landing rumbles with tension, slipping viewers seamlessly into the shoes of airmen set permanently on edge.

Central to that balancing act is one of the show’s editors, Mark Sanger. After more than two decades in the industry, working on era-defining projects like Gravity and Children of Men, Masters of the Air is his first foray into TV editing. That meant the job involved assembling nine hours of story in the time it usually takes him to do one-and-a-half.

“It was in at the deep end,” Sanger tells me. “I needed to get an education in aviation and history very, very quickly.”

Clearly, he was a good student: at the RTS Craft & Design Awards 2024, his work on Masters of the Air won in the Editing – Scripted category. As he explains over Zoom, though, it wasn’t plain sailing.

“Not only were you dealing with the conventional things in an editor’s world – drama, characters, the emotions, how you best tell that story – but also, you were dealing with action sequences in a three-dimensional realm, in that you had planes at different altitudes that were all interacting with each other.”

To get to grips with things, Sanger requested that on-set conversations between the director, 1^st assistant director, military advisor and cast be recorded. Combined with the dailies and script supervisor’s notes, this made it possible to keep up with the “multi-layered chessboard” that were the show’s air battles, he says. Even small variations between takes – like switching the direction in which the planes were flying – could have major implications for the edit. As such, complete understanding of what was happening, and where, was essential.

Sanger’s solution was simple. He borrowed model planes from the art department and filmed them on his iPhone. During production, this was to establish the geography of the planes relative to each other. After shooting wrapped, Sanger started using the models to try different camera moves, which – combined with some dailies and storyboards –  formed some of the earliest rough cuts. These underwent minimal change right up until they were turned over to the VFX team, who used the cuts to create the finished product.

Once Sanger was happy the audience could understand what was happening, there was barely any need for tweaking, he explains. There was another, more practical reason for keeping things as they were.

“There’s a price tag allotted to each one of those [VFX] shots,” Sanger explains, “so everybody needs to be pretty sure that you’re going to stick with all of the shots that you turn over.”

Of course, there’s more to Masters of the Air than CGI. Even during the most action-heavy battle sequences, the show never loses sight of the human element. Shots stay inside the planes, Sanger notes, hammering home the airmen’s claustrophobia. Moreover, the camera does something rarely seen in fight scenes today: it lingers.

“Nowadays, there’s a lot of cutting that goes on in action sequences, and I think certainly, this story demanded something more immersive,” Sanger explains. “That was clearly what the intention of the director and the producers and the actors was, and as editors, we have to honour the material that we’re given.”

The subtlety of that approach quietly pays dividends throughout the show’s run. Close-ups held just a second or two longer than the audience might be used to help the show feel introspective – almost lyrical – even when nothing is said.

With the right actors, “there is more to be told in a look or a glance in terms of tension and suspense than there is in any form of dialogue,” Sanger says. “In that moment, what you have is the magic of cinema, effectively, in that all of the HODs [heads of department] have been working together – the costuming, the lighting, the camera guys, the director – [and] it all comes to fruition in that one singular moment with the actor.”

Rapid cuts do have their place in Masters of the Air. Horrific wounds that likely took hours of SFX and VFX work appear on-screen for only a moment, to stop the violence becoming gratuitous or “pornographic”, Sanger tells me.

This raises a question that’s both basic and very difficult to answer: when to cut, and when to linger? For Sanger, the decision is guided by the need to give the audience exactly as much information as the characters have – no more, no less.

“I much prefer it when the audience is only at the same level as the characters in the scene,” Sanger says. “It’s easier for the audience to sympathise and emphasise with the predicament if they’re immersed in it.”

“If the audience is ever ahead of the characters, I find that can be very frustrating. You wanna scream at the screen.”

Looking at the bigger picture, Sanger is candid about the state of the industry. He’s concerned about smaller-budget storytelling getting lost amidst the avalanche of flashier – but not necessarily better – high-end TV. Hollywood needs to ditch its obsession with remaking existing IP. AI has the potential to make things quicker and less creative, Sanger continued.

He acknowledges that he’s able to be so outspoken as one of the more established denizens of film and TV. Still, that’s not to say Sanger hasn’t paid his dues.

“I learnt from my multiple mistakes,” he says. “[The industry] is 10% creativity and 90% politics. If you get to spend 10% of your day being creative, then you’re a very, very lucky person.”

“Most of the time, you’re dealing with logistics and personalities. The biggest lessons I learnt were when I didn’t read the room: you need to know when to speak and when not to speak.”

Keeping schtum about the process with people who aren't in the industry also has its advantages, namely in helping an edit look seamless. It’s not entirely clear how anyone can play 3D chess without losing their mind, but perhaps it’s better when the audience don’t worry about that. The point, after all, is immersion. As Sanger puts it:

“I prefer it to be a bit of a magic trick.”