When Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation hit theaters in 2015, audiences lost their minds over one sequence: Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) clinging to the outside of a military Airbus A400M as it roars down the runway and lifts into the sky at 165 knots. No green screen. No body double for the wide shots. Just Cruise, a harness hidden under his jacket, and eight—yes, EIGHT—takeoffs strapped to the door of a real plane flying at 5,000 feet.

Cruise didn’t just “hang on.” He trained for months with the Royal Air Force in Britain. Engineers modified the A400M with a special rig and eye-level cameras bolted to the wing (the ones you see in the final film). For safety, he wore custom contact lenses to protect his eyes from jet blast, bird strikes, and debris flying at over 190 mph. Tiny earpieces let director Christopher McQuarrie scream directions while Cruise couldn’t hear anything over the engines.

The scariest part? Takeoff. Every time the plane accelerated, Cruise was slammed sideways by wind and G-forces. One small pebble kicked up from the runway could have blinded him instantly. The crew ran tests with a dummy first—on the very first takeoff, the dummy’s head smashed into the fuselage so hard it cracked the fiberglass. They had to redesign everything.

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They shot at RAF Wittering airbase in England. The pilot, a veteran Airbus test pilot, had to perform a “soft” takeoff to keep Cruise alive—too steep and he’d be ripped off; too shallow and the plane wouldn’t clear the trees. They only had a 15-minute window each dawn because the light had to be perfect and the wind had to be below 10 knots. Cruise did all eight takeoffs himself. No stunt double ever sat in that rig.

Between takes, he’d climb back inside freezing and shaking, eyes bloodshot from the wind. When McQuarrie asked if he wanted to use a double for the final takeoff, Cruise just laughed and said, “We’ve come this far.”

Ten years later, Cruise himself says Rogue Nation’s plane stunt remains the most dangerous thing he’s ever done—even more than hanging off the Burj Khalifa or the HALO jump in Fallout. Why? Because once that plane left the ground, there was zero safety net. If anything went wrong—cable snap, bird strike, engine flameout—he was gone.

The sequence lasts less than two minutes on screen. But those two minutes cemented Tom Cruise as the last true daredevil movie star. No CGI. No excuses. Just a 53-year-old man proving he’ll risk everything for the shot.