Special and visual effects came together in the film's two most difficult sequences: the aerial encounter between Bond's DC-3 and the villains' Marchetti, and the explosive climax in the desert.

The aerial sequence was especially daunting. "Most of the successful stuff that we shot were often not in the same shot together," Haug continues, "so you pick the best plate, whichever plane we liked the best: a DC-3 but not always, then you'd go find what you wanted the Marchetti to do in another plate someplace. So we would find the right action, do a postvis, comping the two together, saying this is how we wanted it to work: this one shot on a 50mm, this one shot on a 400mm and then we would take the stuff on the 400mm and map it onto a CG Marchetti and put it into the 50mm shot. Nvizage prevised the whole aerial sequence and [Second Unit Director] Dan [Bradley] was trying desperately to get a sort of map for the pilots so it would make sense what they needed to do, and so it was a complicated process. Dan was not a big fan of previs after having it stuffed down his throat before. And so the fact that he was in charge of it helped him understand what it could do for him. He did something rather interesting: After doing all those QuickTimes, he pulled out still frames from the animations and turned them into storyboards that he handed to the pilots."

All of the interiors in the DC-3 were shot against bluescreen in a gimble at Pinewood Studios. The background was made up of digitally-generated environments, which were mostly made up from plates shot in Mexico. Alex Wuttke supervised the shoot in Mexico for a month, recording data from the shoot and taking detailed reference photo reference for the digital environments. Back at Double Negative the team, led by Environments Supervisor, Guy Williams, used proprietary software Stig and dnDoubleVision to create these environments. A reconstructed DC-3 fuselage was rotated on two axles to roll from side to side and allow the nose to go up and down. This helped to give plausibility to the shots were Bond tries to gain altitude as quickly as possible. The DC-3 also had an engine in it that gave it quite an authentic feeling of engine shake, while onset lighting was pretty substantial to look like it was light from the sun.

At Double Negative, it was also decided to do a very detailed DC-3 model to cover all eventualities and this was modeled by Joel Prager, Jon Veal, Ged Wright, Charles Varenne and Dan Kripac. In the movie the DC3 is seen in extreme close up and brushed metal or aluminum are notoriously difficult materials to simulate or replicate. Led by CG Supervisor Kripac the team worked on extending Double Negative’s shaders to deal with this. In addition, the environment was digitally enhanced and in many cases completely replaced. For safety reasons the stunt plane was not permitted to fly too low, but the environment needed to tell the story of how the Marchetti was trapped, to help convey this the original plates was "canyonized" or extended to make them appear deeper and more treacherous than they were.

The aerial sequence was especially daunting because most of the assets were often not in the same shot together.

Meanwhile, Bond and Camille are forced to jump from the plane with only a single parachute between them. During their freefall, Bond eventually clings to Camille and manages to open the chute before crashing in a large sinkhole. It was decided that a sophisticated combination of CG and live action would provide a more visually realistic approach to the "Bodyflight" sequence.

While Wuttke was on set in Mexico, fellow Double Negative VFX Supervisor Wright oversaw the Bodyflight shoot in Bedford at a commercial facility with a flight simulator. Craig and Olga Kurylenko performed in a vertical wind tunnel in which the airflow is strong enough to support a person above the floor. The actors appear to be skydiving but did not need to wear a parachute during filming.

This method became known as "event capture" and involved shooting the action using 16 in-sync cameras: 8 4K Dalsas, 7 HD Cine Altas and 1 Arri 3 (hand-held in the simulator with the actors). Thus the team was able to reconstruct any digital move they wanted after the shoot using all the cameras. A procedural image-based modeling method was then devised that created a closed mesh representing the surface of the actors at each frame of the event capture.

"That was very dangerous," Forster admits. "And that was a real challenge for Kevin to finish up in time. And that hasn't been done before because usually they shoot parachute sequences against greenscreen with a fan, but your facial expressions will never be the same, and in that chamber it [approximates] the exact pressure of being up in the air as well and gives you the right facial expressions, but still you have to work out the background, which is really hard. This was a sequence I wish I had a little more time to work on."