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.