"No Highway in the Sky" interesting Jimmy Stewart aviation movie

Bill Watson

Bill Watson

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Well, it's a bit of an aviation movie or perhaps a disaster movie from 1951.

No Highway in the Sky

...with James Stewart, Marlene Dietrich and Glynis Johns.

Stewart plays an absent minded yet loveable engineer who determines that the fictional "Reindeer" airliner will crash due to metal fatigue in the tail after n-hours of flight. I thought this was some kind of fictional account of what happened to the Comet but the movie predated the Comet's fatigue problem by 5 or 6 years (?!).

Not a great movie or aviation must see but entertaining nonetheless. It is playing on TWC on Free Movies on Demand under FXM retro.
 
Bill Watson said:
Stewart plays an absent minded yet loveable engineer who determines that the fictional "Reindeer" airliner will crash due to metal fatigue in the tail after n-hours of flight. I thought this was some kind of fictional account of what happened to the Comet but the movie predated the Comet's fatigue problem by 5 or 6 years (?!).
Click to expand...

About 2 1/2 years. The movie was released in June 1951, the first Comet loss attributed to metal fatigue was in January 1954.
 
I first saw this movie when I was about 5 years old. I was terrified of airplanes for some time....
 
No Highway in The Sky is one of the great aviation novels written by Nevil Shute. It was first published in 1948.

IIRC the aero engineer gets all nervous when he finds out he's flying in an airliner that he knows is likely to fail. The stewardess puts a sleeping pill in his Ovaltine to shut him up. :)
 
I always loved the scene of retracting the gear on the ground when I was a kid even though I was told that "real" airplanes have mechanisms preventing that.

Of course, I guess my Navion isn't a real airplane.
 
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