The film opens by introducing Ted Stryker (Dana Andrews), a deeply troubled former Royal Canadian Air Force fighter squadron leader. During the closing days of World War II, Stryker made a split-second command decision to push through heavy fog over Germany. The decision resulted in six of his colleagues in their planes crashing and dying. Haunted by severe survivor’s guilt and PTSD, Stryker has spent the post-war years drifting from job to job, unable to hold down employment or maintain his self-respect.
Back in Winnipeg, his disillusioned wife, Ellen (Linda Darnell), decides she has had enough. While Ted is out, she packs their young son, Joey, and leaves a note stating she is taking the boy and flying to Vancouver to start a new life. Panicked and desperate, Ted rushes to Winnipeg Airport and manages to buy a ticket on the exact same flight: Cross-Canada Air Lines Flight 714, a four-engine Douglas DC-4. Once airborne, Ted confronts Ellen, begging for another chance, but she coldly replies that she cannot love a man she no longer respects.
Trouble begins during the in-flight dinner service managed by stewardess Janet Turner. Passengers are given a choice of meat or fish. Shortly after the meal, a severe wave of food poisoning sweeps through the aircraft. Dozens of passengers - including young Joey - alongside the co-pilot and the primary pilot, fall violently ill. A doctor on board determines that the fish was the culprit. Before losing consciousness entirely, the captain manages to engage the plane's autopilot.
With the flight deck incapacitated, Stewardess Turner searches the cabin for anyone with aviation experience and discovers Stryker. Ted is thrust into a nightmare scenario: not only has he never flown a multi-engine transport plane of this size before, but his severe psychological trauma means he hasn’t even stepped foot inside an aircraft cockpit in ten years.
Flight 714 cannot land at any airport east of the Canadian Rockies due to a blanket of thick fog, forcing them to push all the way toward Vancouver. On the ground in Vancouver, air traffic control contacts Captain Martin Treleaven (Sterling Hayden), a tough-minded former war commander who despises Stryker because of the wartime tragedy. Treleaven also has no confidence in Stryker's ability to handle the pressure, warning that Stryker will crack under stress. However, with no other options, Treleaven is forced into the radio room to talk Stryker through the complex instrument layouts and landing procedures.
As Ted wrestles with the throttles, the immense stress triggers vivid, debilitating flashbacks to his wartime disaster. During one panic attack, he momentarily loses control of the plane, nearly clipping a mountain ridge. To make matters worse, a panicked passenger bursts into the cockpit shouting that Ted isn't even a real pilot, threatening to spark a full-scale cabin riot until the doctor calms the passengers down. Ellen steps up to assist Ted directly in the cockpit, taking over the radio communications.
Treleaven orders Stryker to circle the airport in a holding pattern until the coastal fog lifts. However, realising that the food-poisoned passengers are rapidly deteriorating and running out of time, Stryker makes the daring, high-stakes decision to ignore Treleaven's advice and attempt an immediate blind landing through the zero-visibility fog. Guiding the heavy aircraft down strictly by instrument gauges and Treleaven's harsh, barking radio instructions, Stryker brings the plane in. It is a rough, jarring touchdown that shears off the landing gear, but the plane stays upright. As we know from the Airplane! film, Flight 714 comes to a halt with no fatalities among the passengers. Medical crews rush aboard to treat the food poisoning, and Ted successfully exorcises his wartime demons - earning back the respect and love of Ellen.
So, Jim Abrahams, David Zucker and Jerry Zucker didn't just parody Zero Hour! - they apparently bought the rights to Arthur Hailey’s original 1957 screenplay and lifted whole chunks of dialogue, character archetypes, camera angles and plot points, playing them straight for comic effect!
Ted Stryker becomes Ted Striker in Airplane!, and Robert Hays plays him as a shell-shocked cab driver with a drinking problem with identical trauma flashbacks. Linda Darnell's cold, estranged wife who leaves her husband to seek a new life is mirrored directly by Julie Hagerty’s stewardess Elaine, who dumps Ted because he can't hold down a job. Airplane! spoofs this mercilessly by turning every minor inconvenience into an over-the-top combat reenactment in Stryker's mind (complete with grass skirts and tribal drums).
Sterling Hayden's hard-nosed, skeptical air traffic controller who bears a grudge against Stryker becomes Lloyd Bridges' legendary glue-sniffing, pill-popping tower chief McCroskey ("Looks like I picked the wrong week to quit..."). The pragmatic medical professional on board who diagnoses the food poisoning becomes Leslie Nielsen’s deadpan Dr Rumack, delivering iconic lines like "Surely you can't be serious? I am serious, and don't call me Shirley." The exact moment of panic when stewardess Turner has to comb the cabin for an experienced pilot is recreated beat-for-beat when Stewardess Elaine asks the passengers in the cabin for help.
The tense radio interactions where the ground crew debates whether Stryker can handle the controls are played with total deadpan seriousness in 1957, making the transition to Leslie Nielsen and Lloyd Bridges' frantic panic in 1980 effortlessly funny. There's also the very funny scene where everyone's queueing up to 'slap' the hysterical woman with increasingly heavy objects down the line - again, lifted from a very short, much more sympathetic scene in the first film.
The tight, claustrophobic camera angles filming the pilot and co-pilot slumped over their gear after falling ill were lifted straight out of the 1957 film, and the nail-biting climax where the plane has to punch through zero-visibility fog guided entirely by ground-to-air radio instructions shares the exact same pacing and tension - right down to the heavy impact and gear shearing off on touchdown.
As you probably know if you have got this far, Airplane! is a priceless comic film, enjoyed by generations over the last five decades - and it never seems to date, somehow. Still as wickedly funny as it was on first watch. Watching Zero Hour! now is very funny because it's such a piss-take of so much of that original film - it makes me want to just go and watch Airplane! for the 101st time! Watch Zero Hour! and enjoy the same thrills as you pick up on all the nods and events later made into comic gold!
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