Word: pilot
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...dust clouds that broke up the pilots' formation and forced one of them to turn back came as a surprise. The crews might have been able to handle the dust had they known about it, but security had kept the pilots from meeting their weather forecasters. Strict radio silence had kept them from learning that, despite the dust en route, the air was clear at Desert One. Later, the pilot who had aborted said he would have gone on had he known that...
...original, that is, when it was plot enough to have a regular plane with a pregnant stewardess--no fancy water dives, Concordes or singing nuns for Arthur Hailey). She was the one who divided her time between stealing the little liquor bottles and getting it on with unhappily married pilot Dean Martin when the co-pilot left the cockpit. And then there was Earthquake, that child of the San Andreas fault, which co-starred Charlton Heston, a house that chased after its inhabitants and the marvels of Sensurround. And what about Hurricane, Avalanche, The Black Hole or even Tidal Wave...
LIKE ITS PARENT film, Airplane! is the story of some smelly fish--fish that makes you break out in a cold sweat, experience severe muscle spasms, puke your guts out and then faint dead away. It all sounds rather dull until some passengers, the navigator, the co-pilot and the pilot (played by the wonderfully straight Peter "Good morning Mr. Phelps" Graves) happen to choose fish for dinner. Then things begin to happen. The plane goes out of control, the stewardess switches on the automatic pilot and the doctor (played by Leslie "Watch me tackle that wave" Nielsen) manages...
There really isn't any plot here but that doesn't matter. The best choice these neophyte directors made was using serious actors. Aside from Graves, Robert "Name Your Game" Stack fills in as the pilot who's handed the assignment of guiding flight 209 to the ground and Lloyd "Sea Hunt" Bridges plays the glue-sniffing, heavy-drinking chain-smoking director of the Chicago airport. Mixed in with the emergency, as one might guess, is a romance between the Air Force pilot turned taxi driver, played by the ingenuous Robert Hays, and the stewardess who takes over...
...child's life-support system loose with a merry swoop of her guitar. On the ground, an increasingly harassed airport manager (Lloyd Bridges) reverts to bad habits as the pressure increases ("I guess I picked the wrong week to stop sniffing glue"). There is also, naturally, a senior pilot (Robert Stack) who is expected to talk the plane in. He is supposed to be lovably gruff, but is, in fact, just plain meanspirited. Veteran Actors Bridges, Graves and Stack are all wonderfully alive to the opportunity to send up roles they have had to play straight for most...