Spoilers, obviously, because we’re talking about the endings of stories. This will be about movies mostly, though novels are fair game. And if anybody has any high-concept rock albums that amount to aircraft suspense tales, throw 'em in.
Inspired by the climax of the current Snakes on a Plane, of course. The pilot and co-pilot are bitten by… um, some sort of creature, don’t recall what kind now… gila monsters?.. anyway, it’s not important. Point is, they’re incapacitated, and Good Burger has to step in to guide the jet to a safe landing.
Ditto the end of Executive Decision. The terrorists have killed the pilots, and were flying the plane themselves. When the terrorists get waxed, Kurt Russell has to strap in and extrapolate from his handful of small-plane lessons in order to save the day.
Ditto the end of any number of air-based action/suspense movies, to the degree that Airplane! was able to make fun of the cliche.
So here’s the question: Are there any movies (or books or whatever) where this doesn’t happen? The pilot at the beginning survives all the way through and is behind the yoke at the end when the jet touches down?
The only one I can think of is Die Hard 2, which had the subplot about Bonnie Bedelia and William Atherton in the circling bird, but that wasn’t really the primary story. Still, their original pilot does land the plane, so I guess it counts, barely.
“Starflight”, actually. I thought I was the only person who saw this, much less remembered it. One of the most hysterically awful films of all time. Makes Armageddon look like a doctoral disertation.
Well…“The Langoliers” sort of qualifies. The original pilots are whisked off into the great nothingness at the beginning of the movie, true, but we never even see them so they might not count. David Morse’s character, a pilot for the same airline who’s deadheading on the flight, does survive to fly the plane through the Glowing Cosmic Hoo-Ha (hey…that’s what it looked like!) and land it safely at the end.
Falling from the Sky: Flight 174 (also known as Freefall: Flight 174) is a 1995 television movie freely based on the story of the Gimli Glider. It follows the crew, their families and the passengers of the flight, set in 1983, from the preparations for departure to the crash landing in an abandoned airfield in Manitoba, and everything in between. Unlike the novel Freefall (by William and Marilyn Hoffer), the airline and flight number were changed from Air Canada Flight 143 to Canada World Airways Flight 174.
