Aviation accidents and incidents, particularly civilian airplane crashes or incidents threatening a crash or requiring an emergency landing, are a common theme in fiction. Films centered on such incidents make up a substantial subset of the disaster film genre, and influence how other stories within the genre are told. Works in this genre encompass both fictional depictions of the incidents themselves, and depictions of consequences such as investigations, lawsuits, and the effect on the lives of persons involved. A subgenre, the "plane crash survival movie", involves characters placed in a dangerous environment by an initial airplane crash. Airplane crashes have been described as "the easy and obvious device" for dramatically incorporating an airplane into the plot of a film, and as "a Hollywood staple", with various levels of praise or criticism directed to the realism of specific depictions.
A review of the genre by The Guardian following the release of the film, Sully, found that film to be "simply the next logical step in the long line of movies portraying with ever greater grim authenticity the waking nightmare of a plane going down". The Guardian noted that "in the age of mass air travel, the plane crash is one of the last great levellers", where everyone is equally at risk regardless of social status, but also found that "the thing about plane-crash movies is they come with happy endings, or at least the promise of one", and that the message is often "have faith in pilots". Notably, in some instances controversies have arisen from the release of films involving air crashes in proximity to unpredictably timed real-life air crashes. Another review assessing the 2012 film, Flight, also centered on a fictional airplane crash, stated that "when it comes to planes and pilots, Hollywood never gets it right", noting that contrary to some fictional accounts, pilots are almost never inebriated, and co-pilots are equally as qualified and capable as the assigned pilot for the flight.
Early films involving aircraft tended to focus on military air battles, or professional stunt flying activities, rather than depictions of civilian air incidents. An early example of the latter is seen in the events of the 1954 novel, Lord of the Flies, which was precipitated by a group of boys being marooned on an island in a plane crash. Harold Bloom writes that "[t]hrough the boys' dialogue... we learn that these boys and others were in a plane crash. The nose of the plane went down in flames, but the cabin crashed through the jungle trees, landing near enough to water to be pulled out to sea, perhaps with some boys still aboard". Bloom notes that the account provided has been deemed implausible by critics, as the story describes the child characters as having survived with no injuries, while leaving no adult survivors, and with the crash leaving a "long scar" in the jungle, but with no debris from the airplane.
Also in 1954, John Wayne starred in the film, The High and the Mighty, in which a veteran airline first officer, flying as a passenger on an airplane that has a catastrophic engine failure while crossing the Pacific Ocean, must help fly the plane to a safe landing. The High and the Mighty was one of the first films centered on a potential air disaster. This was shortly followed by Flight into Danger, a 1956 Canadian live television play written by Arthur Hailey and starring James Doohan, depicting the pilots at the controls of a Canadair North Star, a large commercial airliner, falling victim to food poisoning, leaving it to an ex-Second World War Spitfire fighter pilot among the passengers, to take over and safely land the unfamiliar aircraft. Hailey, a former British pilot in the Second World War, wrote the teleplay in only nine days and shopped it about as a screenplay. The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, barely four years old, bought the script for $600.
When Flight into Danger was broadcast live-to-air on April 3, 1956, on the network's General Motors Theatre, it was seen by two million people and received a resounding positive reaction. "In the words of one journalist, it was 'probably the most successful TV play ever written anywhere'." A kinescope of the live production was broadcast in August 1956 due to viewer demand.
In 1957, Flight into Danger was adapted into the feature film Zero Hour! and, in 1962, the story was adapted for an episode of the BBC series Studio 4. In 1964, a German version of the television film was produced under the title Flug in Gefahr. Czechoslovak radio (ÃÂeskoslovenský rozhlas) has produced it as part of the radio series Let do nebezpeÃÂÃÂ, directed by Jià ÂàHorÃÂiÃÂka. An Australian television version was produced in 1966. In Flight into Danger, Hailey created the template for future disaster films: character-driven plot lines built up among diverse characters would dominate, with brief episodes or flashbacks giving back stories, and all the individual stories coming together at the climax. Hailey and John Castle novelized the story as Runway Zero-Eight (1958), which was dramatized in 1971 as Terror in the Sky, a Movie of the Week. The story elements were more famously parodied in the 1980 comedy Airplane!.
Additional aviation-themed precursors to the popular disaster films of the 1970s included Jet Storm and Jet Over the Atlantic, two 1959 films both featuring attempts to blow up an airplane in mid-flight; The Crowded Sky (1960) which depicts a mid-air collision; and The Doomsday Flight (1966), written by Rod Serling and starring Edmond O'Brien as a disgruntled aerospace engineer who plants a barometric pressure bomb on an airliner built by his former employer set to explode when the airliner descends for landing.
Flight into Danger author Arthur Hailey also penned the 1968 novel Airport, which was adapted into the first of a series of films in the genre. The novel was poorly reviewed, with Mark Levin of The New York Times saying, "Mr. Hailey is a plodding sort of writer, but he has just the talent to suggest the crashing ennui of airport routine, where only a mortal disaster can provide color". In the same newspaper, Eliot Fremont-Smith wrote, "As for the formula, the possibilities seem all but inexhaustible. With 'Hotel' and 'Airport' successfully absorbed, can 'Shopping Center,' 'Parking Lot' and 'City Dump' be far behind?" Still, the book was commercially successful among readers. It spent 64 weeks on the New York Times best seller list, 30 of which were at #1, and became the biggest-selling novel of 1968. George Seaton wrote and directed the film adaptation, which was released by Universal in 1970, whittling down the subplots of the novel to focus on the air disaster, the need to land a bomb-damaged plane at a snow-hampered airport. With an all-star cast, the film was nominated for ten Academy Awards, including Best Picture. It earned $100.5 million at the domestic box office (the equivalent of $ million in ). Its success, combined with that of 1972's The Poseidon Adventure (set on a sinking ship), led to the proliferation of disaster movies of the 1970s.
Airport itself spawned the sequels, Airport 1975 (1974), Airport '77 (1977), and The Concorde ... Airport '79 (1979). In 1980, the highly successful parody film Airplane! was released, drawing on elements of Zero Hour! and the Airport film series. This was itself followed by a sequel, ', in 1982.
Directors have gone to great lengths to make plane crash scenes appear realistic. For example, for a scene in the 2020 film Tenet, in which a taxiing airplane is driven into a building (though without leaving the ground), the production demolished an actual airplane.
A review of the 2017 film The Mountain Between Us, which begins with a plane crash in remote mountains, notes the existence of the subgenre, the "plane crash survival movie". This subgenre involves characters placed in a dangerous environmentâÂÂtypically in frozen mountainous terrainâÂÂby an initial airplane crash. Films within this genre include Alive (1993), The Edge (1997), Cast Away (2000), The Snow Walker (2003), and The Grey (2010).
Another area frequently explored in media, more commonly in police procedurals and detective shows, is the investigation of an airplane crash to determine the cause, particularly where foul play is suspected to have been involved. Such investigations may involve dramatic elements such as forensic recreations of the crash site, discovery and examination of the flight recorder, autopsies of the deceased, and interrogation of suspects among the survivors.