Zander Dulac

Airport (1970) was so successful that it paved the way for three sequels. Unfortunately, none of them was on par with the original movie.

Airport 1975, directed by Jack Smight, was easily the worst one. Released four years later, it clearly reveals how quickly the franchise shifted from melodramatic ensemble drama to pure spectacle. The premise is simple to the point of absurdity: a midair collision between a small plane and a jumbo jet leaves the cockpit crew dead or incapacitated, forcing a flight attendant (Karen Black) to pilot the aircraft until rescue arrives. That’s it, a single setup stretched into nearly two hours of shouting, turbulence, and increasingly implausible heroics.

Where the first Airport balanced human drama with technical realism, Airport 1975 turns those elements into clichés, aiming for spectacle over story, and hysteria over tension. It’s both unintentionally hilarious and historically significant: the film that marks the moment when the “disaster movie” became self-parody.

The credits claim Airport 1975 is “inspired by the novel by Arthur Hailey”. In truth, there’s almost nothing of Hailey left. His original 1968 book and the 1970 film adaptation were grounded in procedural detail, exploring the complex interdependencies of an airport system under stress. His themes were about human competence, bureaucratic failure, and the beauty and danger of technological progress. The sequel jettisons all of that. The only surviving element from Hailey’s world is Joe Patroni (George Kennedy), the no-nonsense maintenance engineer, a minor character in the first film, now magically promoted to Vice President of Operations. Everything else (the midair collision, the stewardess at the controls, the nun with the guitar, the bizarre passengers) is original, though “original” may not be the right word. It’s really a pastiche of Hollywood sensationalism.

Everything that worked in Airport (the grounded realism, the professional tone, the believable human flaws) is mishandled here. The dialogue, once clipped and procedural, has devolved into a soap opera. The cross-cutting tension between the control tower and the plane, once exciting, now feels repetitive. And the star ensemble, once dignified, is now a circus of mismatched personalities: Charlton Heston growling as macho pilot Alan Murdock, Karen Black visibly miserable as the panic-stricken stewardess, and a gallery of celebrities who seem unsure whether they’re in a drama or a variety show. It was a hit at the box office but a critical embarrassment, the kind of movie that made the parody Airplane! (Abrahams, Zucker & Zucker, 1980) inevitable.

The first Airport reflected its time’s casual sexism, with stewardesses as glamorous accessories and female characters often defined by romance or hysteria. But Airport 1975 takes that dynamic and amplifies it into caricature. Karen Black’s Nancy Pryor, the film’s de facto protagonist, is portrayed less as a capable professional than as a trembling, weeping woman thrust into a responsibility she’s unfit to handle. Her male colleagues, especially Charlton Heston’s Murdock, talk about her as if she were a child. “She’s just a stewardess!” becomes a repeated line, almost a refrain. Instead of exploring the psychological tension of being alone in the cockpit, the film milks it for male heroics: the man on the ground shouting instructions, the woman barely coping, and the ultimate salvation arriving (literally) in the form of a male savior (Heston winched through the cockpit window).

Gloria Swanson, playing herself on board the doomed jet, is one of the movie’s strangest touches. The aging silent film legend, dictating her memoirs to her assistant mid-flight, brings a surreal, meta-textual layer, but not intentionally. But that’s not even the most bizarre or mismatched cast member. Linda Blair, just one year after The Exorcist, plays a sick child who never stops smiling, seemingly in a different emotional universe from everyone else. George Costanza’s father, Jerry Stiller, appears in a minor role, supposedly in comic relief. Erik Estrada, later famous as Poncherello in CHiPs, plays a swaggering co-pilot who dies minutes into the story. And to top it all, there’s the singing nun. Helen Reddy as Sister Ruth serenading Linda Blair with a folksy song on guitar is, by general consensus, one of the most excruciating scenes in the history of the genre. It’s meant to humanize the passengers and offer emotional respite, but instead it feels like the filmmakers mistook The Sound of Music for realism.

The movie’s central image, a gaping hole in the cockpit windshield, also provides endless unintentional comedy. In real life, of course, the sudden decompression from such an event would cause catastrophic structural failure and likely suck everyone out. In the movie, though, people stand around chatting calmly while wind whistles in the background, as if someone merely cracked a window. The absence of depressurization effects reveals the film’s approach to realism: none whatsoever. 

The passengers’ reactions to the crisis are so exaggerated and poorly acted that the film often feels like a parody of itself. Extras flail their arms, scream on cue, and faint in synchronized rhythm. The hysteria is theatrical rather than human, a kind of collective overacting that annihilates any tension.

By 1975, the disaster movie formula had become industrial: each picture needed a new set of celebrities, a new catastrophe, and a new way to out-shout the last. Subtlety and realism were casualties of the genre’s own success. Airport 1975 stands as the most transparent case of that self-destruction.

Airport ’77 (Jerry Jameson, 1977) was a step up from the previous fiasco, in tone, direction, and coherence. Universal tried to course-correct: bring in a new director, a more grounded script, and a cast packed with vintage Hollywood royalty. The setup this time is a privately owned Boeing 747, filled with art treasures and VIPs, that crashes into the ocean after being hijacked and ends up resting on the seabed. What follows is a hybrid between an air-disaster film and an underwater survival drama.

One of Airport ’77‘s most striking features is its cast, a cross-generational lineup that looks like a tribute to Hollywood history. James Stewart plays Philip Stevens, a wealthy art collector who owns the doomed jet. His presence lends gravitas even though his role is mainly confined to ground control. Stewart’s dignity elevates even the most ridiculous lines. Joseph Cotten and Olivia de Havilland, both legends of the 1930s and 1940s, add a touch of faded grandeur, their elegance underscoring how far the franchise has drifted from the sober professionalism of the 1970 original. Christopher Lee also gives a restrained, dignified performance, no small feat in a movie about a submerged 747.

Representing the “younger generation”, Jack Lemmon stars as Captain Don Gallagher, a responsible, unflappable professional, the kind of role he rarely played, and one he approaches with understated realism. Lee Grant and Brenda Vaccaro add spice to the cast, though their subplots are essentially filler. The result feels like an Old Hollywood reunion trapped inside a popcorn thriller. It’s oddly touching, even as the script doesn’t quite know what to do with all that talent.

The science of Airport ’77 feels shaky. Once the plane crashes and sinks intact to the ocean floor, the movie asks us to believe that it remains both structurally sound and pressurized hundreds of feet underwater. The final act, in which the Navy raises the plane using giant inflatable air bladders, is even less believable. While lifting submerged objects with buoyant devices is possible in engineering (and was famously dramatized decades later in Raising the Kursk), the notion of quickly elevating a fully intact 747 (probably a 200-ton object) in one piece is more fantasy than engineering.

Airport ’77 sits in an odd place in the series. It’s probably the best-made of the sequels, but also the most unintentionally elegiac, a movie about sinking that feels itself sinking. Watching James Stewart and Olivia de Havilland deliver dignified performances amid absurd circumstances mirrors Hollywood’s own decline into spectacle-driven excess.

By 1979, the Airport franchise was running on fumes. The first film had been a prestige studio production, but its sequels were increasingly mechanical. The Concorde… Airport ’79, directed by David Lowell Rich, is the final, delirious stage. It takes the disaster formula (star ensemble, airborne peril, melodramatic subplots) and cranks it to absurdity.

The premise is already ludicrous: a corrupt arms manufacturer (Robert Wagner) tries to assassinate his own girlfriend, TV journalist Maggie Whelan (Susan Blakely), because she’s about to expose his illegal weapons sales. Instead of silencing her discreetly, he decides to blow up the Concorde she’s flying on, killing a complete passenger list of diplomats, celebrities, and airline staff, to prevent the leak.

This is corporate damage control as interpreted by a Bond villain. Wagner’s company controls advanced missile systems, so he launches actual military-grade missiles at a commercial supersonic jet. When that fails, he sabotages the Concorde’s cargo door, causing havoc on board. It’s an escalating series of assassination attempts so disproportionate they cross into farce.

The script seems unaware of its own absurdity. It plays the attacks straight, with heroic music and solemn reactions. What might have been a tense espionage thriller becomes an accidental satire of late-1970s paranoia and corporate amorality. Capitalism so ruthless it’s literally self-destructive.

George Kennedy’s Joe Patroni returns for a fourth and final appearance, completing one of cinema’s strangest professional evolutions: from chief maintenance engineer (Airport) to vice president of operations (Airport 1975) to consultant and technical adviser (Airport ’77) to Concorde pilot (Airport ’79). It’s as if a car mechanic had become CEO and then suddenly started racing Formula One. Patroni’s transformation from blue-collar engineer to supersonic pilot is utterly implausible. He would need tens of thousands of flight hours, special Concorde training in France, and type certification for a craft that required two co-pilots with extensive test-flight experience.

By 1979, though, Patroni wasn’t a character anymore: he was an institution. Kennedy plays him with deadpan sincerity, as though he knows the entire film depends on his gravelly authority. In a way, Patroni’s improbable career mirrors the series itself, with each installment trying to ascend higher, faster, and further from reality, until it flies right off the edge of reason.

The movie’s centerpiece sequences feature the Concorde dodging heat-seeking missiles by performing aerial maneuvers worthy of a fighter jet. The real Concorde, of course, was a long, slender supersonic transport, fast but not agile. Its wings were optimized for high-altitude speed, not dogfighting. Pulling high-G evasive rolls and inverted dives would have shredded the airframe or knocked everyone unconscious. And yet, in the film, the jet performs full barrel rolls, vertical dives through mountain passes, and near-instant turns to dodge not one but two missiles. The sequence is scored like an action ballet. The audience is meant to gasp, instead they giggle. This was supposed to be the height of Cold War techno-thriller tension, but it ends up as the Looney Tunes version of aviation heroics. As if the missile ballet weren’t enough, the writers outdo themselves with a sequence in which Patroni’s co-pilot (French star Alain Delon, playing Captain Paul Metrand) decides to depressurize the Concorde mid-flight, open a cockpit window, and fire a flare gun to fool an incoming missile. It’s easily one of the most gloriously insane moments in 1970s Hollywood cinema.

Between missile attacks and cabin decompressions, the movie makes time for romance. Alain Delon, the embodiment of Gallic cool, falls for flight attendant Sylvia Kristel, fresh off her Emmanuelle fame. Their chemistry is surprisingly gentle and human, a calm interlude amid chaos, though their scenes feel like they belong in a different film entirely. The French setting gives the movie a veneer of sophistication, as if Universal wanted to borrow a bit of European chic to offset the silliness. But the romance feels underdeveloped and tonally dissonant. The script alternates between pseudo-poetic pillow talk and mechanical exposition about missile guidance systems. Still, Delon brings gravitas, and Kristel’s serene demeanor almost makes the nonsense around them seem poignant (for a few fleeting minutes).

In the final act, the Concorde is damaged by another attack, leaving it with a gaping hole in the fuselage and a hydraulic failure. Yet the crew manages to fly it manually and land on a snowy mountainside near the Alps. In reality, such damage would cause explosive decompression, catastrophic structural failure, and uncontrollable roll moments, especially at supersonic speed. The Concorde’s frame was built for pressure equilibrium, not patchwork survival. Even subsonic flight would be impossible with that kind of breach.

The snowy crash landing pushes the movie fully into fantasy. The plane glides gracefully onto a snowfield, passengers are mildly shaken, and everyone exits smiling. It’s not a disaster, it’s a ski commercial. The movie ends not with tragedy or awe, but with absurd optimism, the cinematic equivalent of a shrug and a champagne toast.

The Concorde… Airport ’79 was a commercial disappointment and a critical laughingstock. It didn’t just kill the Airport series, it effectively killed the disaster genre that Airport had popularized. Audiences had moved on to the new spectacle of space (Star Wars), realism (The China Syndrome), and adult drama (Kramer vs. Kramer). Airport ’79 felt like an artifact of a bygone era: glossy, inert, and oblivious.

The seventies were the decade of disaster movies, and no series represents that better than the Airport franchise.

Airport (1970), directed by George Seaton and produced by Ross Hunter, is one of the defining films of the disaster genre. In fact, it created it. Based on Arthur Hailey’s 1968 best-selling novel, the movie portrays the crisis-filled operations of a Chicago airport during a blizzard, culminating in a bomb threat aboard a Boeing 707. With its ensemble cast (Burt Lancaster, Dean Martin, Jean Seberg, Jacqueline Bisset, George Kennedy, Helen Hayes, Van Heflin), glossy production, and high-stakes melodrama, Airport was a massive commercial hit and an Academy Award success (ten nominations, one win).

It arrived at a time when commercial aviation symbolized progress, cosmopolitanism, and modern anxiety all at once. Its mixture of glamour, procedural realism, and human frailty struck a chord with audiences, and its influence extended into the 1970s with a slew of imitators and sequels.

Hailey’s novel was famous for its documentary-like realism and multiple intersecting storylines. The film stays broadly faithful to that structure and to most of the major characters: the beleaguered airport manager Mel Bakersfeld (Lancaster), the suave pilot Vernon Demerest (Martin), the PR officer Tanya Livingston (Seberg), and the elderly stowaway Ada Quonsett (Helen Hayes). However, Seaton streamlined Hailey’s more detailed bureaucratic and operational passages. The novel spent extensive time describing radar systems, air-traffic procedures, and administrative rivalries. That’s a level of depth the film could only suggest. The movie simplifies or romanticizes many subplots, turning the material into melodrama rather than procedural realism. Where Hailey focused on systems under stress, Seaton focused on people under pressure. Still, the adaptation preserves the novel’s essential tone: an almost reverent fascination with the machinery of modern air travel and the human fallibility that complicates it.

One of the most striking things about Airport today is how quaint it feels as a depiction of aviation culture. The film is an accidental documentary of late-1960s jet-age glamour and logistics. Air travel was a luxury, with passengers dressed formally, meals served with silverware, and airline staff exuding near-military decorum. Equally revealing is what’s absent. There are no metal detectors, no computerized boarding passes, and minimal security. Passengers stroll to the gate minutes before departure. The bomb plot hinges on the ability of a man to walk aboard with a briefcase of explosives, something unthinkable today. The airport itself, with its snowed-in runways, typewriters, and control towers filled with analog gauges, feels like a cross between a cathedral of modernity and a stage play about industrial hubris. And fifty years later, the movie’s casual sexism (stewardesses’ roles, Dean Martin’s flippant charm) and the mix of glamour and chaos in public infrastructure evoke a bygone age, not just of air travel but of optimism in technology.

Airport was Alfred Newman’s final score before his death, and it’s a masterclass in classical Hollywood orchestration. Newman, who had been one of the studio system’s most influential composers (with over forty Oscar nominations and nine wins), wrote a score that oscillates between stately grandeur and rising tension. His central theme, brassy, confident, and sweeping, embodies the romance of aviation. Yet his underscoring of the crisis scenes is crucial, with the gradual layering of suspenseful motifs during the bomb subplot sustaining the film’s tension when the dialogue threatens to drag. Newman’s use of brass and percussion gives mechanical urgency to the airport setting, while his leitmotifs for Ada Quonsett and D.O. Guerrero (Van Heflin) add warmth and pathos. Without Newman’s score, much of the film’s suspense would dissipate. The music provides propulsion, turning what could have been a talky ensemble drama into something that feels airborne.

In a cast of movie stars, Helen Hayes, the “First Lady of the American Theater”, shines in a different light. As Ada Quonsett, the elderly stowaway who sneaks onto planes for fun, she delivers the only entirely endearing and emotionally resonant performance. Her mixture of comic timing and gentle melancholy recalls the screwball heroines of an earlier age, grounding the film in humanity amid its mechanical chaos. Hayes won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for the role, and deservedly so. She brings both levity and wisdom, stealing every scene she’s in, a remarkable feat in a movie crowded with Hollywood glamour and technical spectacle. In a sense, she represents the innocence of travel itself: the wonder of flight before it became routine and impersonal.

Though often dismissed by later critics as glossy pulp, Airport deserves recognition for its craftsmanship and its influence. It codified a narrative structure that would dominate the 1970s: multiple intertwining stories converging on a single disaster. It also marks the transition between two eras, the last gasp of Old Hollywood studio gloss and the dawn of the modern blockbuster. The film’s pacing and melodramatic tone feel dated today, but its fascination with infrastructure and crisis management foreshadows the procedural realism of later television dramas. Its mix of star glamour and catastrophe spectacle became a blueprint for The Towering Inferno, Earthquake, and even Titanic. Airport is a polished, sometimes soap-operatic but ultimately iconic film, faithful in spirit to Arthur Hailey’s novel, fascinating as a window into the aviation world of its era, elevated by Alfred Newman’s majestic final score, and humanized by Helen Hayes’s luminous performance. It remains both a disaster film prototype and a nostalgic elegy for the Jet Age’s faith in order, beauty, and flight.