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Dear Allan,

I thoroughly enjoyed issue 74’s article on the Airport cycle of disaster movies from the 1970s. I was too young to see them at the time of their theatrical releases but remember watching them on TV in the early-mid 1980s. There might even have been one hired from the local video rental shop by my dad at one point (we had a Betamax machine from 1981 to circa 1985 so had a smaller choice of movies than the VHS section).

The article about the movies set at airports or on-board passenger liners was also interesting but whilst it was never going to be complete, I am surprised Roger Crow, who wrote the article neglected the most obvious movie that was an Airport film in all but name, Starflight One: The Plane That Couldn’t Land. (1983).

Originally made as a ‘Movie of the Week’ for the ABC TV network in the US, this film was picked up by Orion Pictures and sold for theatrical distribution abroad. It was released in the UK by the Rank Organisation in May 1983, three months after its US TV debut.

Like the Airport pictures that came before it, there were a handful of recognisable names in the cast (Lee Majors, Ray Milland, Lauren Hutton, Terry Kiser, Jocelyn Brando) and concerns the aforementioned Starflight One, a brand-new hypersonic aircraft that flies on the edge of the atmosphere on its maiden flight.

However when a satellite-carrying rocket being launched nearby goes off course and self destructs, the debris hits Starflight causing it’s rocket engines to malfunction and it actually ends up in a low altitude orbit, unable to return to earth due to the lack of a protective heat shield. Can the geniuses behind the design of the ship, coupled with its resourceful pilot, Captain Cody Briggs (Lee Majors) work out a way to save the passengers and bring it back safely?