Steve Austin, A man barely alive. We can rebuild him. We have the technology. We can make him better than he was. Better...stronger...faster."
The opening sequence of The Six-million Dollar Man featured NASA's 1967 footage of a real-life accident of the Northrop M2-F2 lifting body tumbling end for end down the runway caused by piloting error. The pilot, Bruce Peterson actually survived reasonably unscathed, although he lost an eye due to an infection acquired while in the hospital.
The opening credits actually used footage of two different lifting bodies; the HL-10, shown dropping away from its carry plane, and the M2-F2 shown in the unstable flight/crash sequence. (The aircraft was actually referred to as being an “HL-10” in the series, and the real HL-10 was used in a later episode; however, in the 1987 TV film The Return of the Six Million Dollar Man and the Bionic Woman Austin refers to it as the "M3F5", which is the name used for the aircraft that crashes in the original Cyborg novel.)
