By Richard Winters
My Rating: 3 out of 10
4-Word Review: Stewardess pilots the plane.
A businesses man (Dana Andrews) suffers a fatal heart attack while piloting his private plane causing his aircraft to fly directly into the cockpit of a Boeing 747, which kills the co-pilot (Roy Thinnes), the navigator (Erik Estrada) and seriously injures the pilot (Efrem Zimbalist Jr). This forces the plane’s head stewardess (Karen Black) to take control of the plane even though she has no experience. Those at the control tower try to direct her via a headset on what to do, which helps steady the jet while they devise a way to get a professional pilot onto the craft in order to land it.
Compared to Airport this is a real letdown. In the first film the individual passengers came off like real people all suffering from their own personal dilemmas, but here they’re more like cardboard caricatures that barely have any speaking lines and there only to show panicked expressions and not much else.
The dialogue and ‘drama’ quickly becomes inadvertently campy. Linda Blair plays a Pollyanna-like girl suffering from an undisclosed illness who befriends a nun (Helen Reddy) who breaks out into an impromptu song on a guitar that would have most passengers complaining of noise pollution. Playing herself is aging silent film actress Gloria Swanson who dictates her autobiography into a tape recorder as she is on the plane, which seems dumb because it allows the other passengers to overhear it although at least for their benefit it will allow them to avoid having to buy the book once it’s published since they will know all about the juicy details already. The only entertaining passenger is Myrna Loy as a tipsy old lady who enjoys drinking boilermakers.
The plane’s excessively wide interior and its large seats make it seem more like the inside of a luxury train. The plane even has a winding stairwell at the center of it for people to walk up. I’ve flown on many jets in my life and have never seen one with an upstairs/downstairs. If you’ve been on a plane that has had one then please let me know. (Note since this review was written one of the followers to this blog, Rob, has supplied us with pics of an actual 747 from that era and proves that indeed these things described above did exist at one time in a plane, so please be sure to check-out his links to pics in the comments section.)
The special effects get badly botched. The sequence involving the small engine plane crashing into the jet looks fake as the plane gets shown through the cockpit window and is quite obviously matted in on a bluescreen. You can clearly tell too that an inflatable dummy was used as the co-pilot when he gets sucked out through the hole that is formed from the crash. The scene where the replacement pilot (Ed Nelson), who tries to board the plane to help land it, is killed when his release cord becomes caught in the jagged metal, comes-off as unintentionally funny instead of horrific.
The outdoor aerial footage shot over the Wasatch Mountains is the film’s one redeeming element. I also enjoyed Karen Black in what is likely her definitive role. She has played so many kooky, offbeat characters that it’s interesting seeing her portray a normal one. I just wished that she would’ve piloted the plane the whole way through and even landed it. Having Charlton Heston, as a professional pilot, literally ‘drop-in’ and takeover is far less compelling. It also seems quite sexist by intimating that women aren’t capable of taking on challenges to their completion and at some point a man must step-in even when the women seem to be handling the situation quite well without them.
My Rating: 3 out of 10
Released: October 18, 1974
Runtime: 1Hour 47Minutes
Rated PG
Director: Jack Smight
Studio: Universal
Available: DVD, Amazon Video, YouTube
Scopophilia 
The Boeing 747 *did* have a spiral staircase and had an upper level that, I think, may have been a lounge:
https://airandspace.si.edu/multimedia-gallery/14406hjpg
It was also, apparently, a pretty spacious aircraft. That was before airlines were trying to squeeze as many people as possible on an airplane. Here are some cool pictures:
https://sploid.gizmodo.com/traveling-in-a-boeing-747-in-the-1970s-was-pretty-damn-1504637666
Here’s a picture from the outside that shows the upper level:
I don’t know if any airlines still flies 747s but United apparently was flying them until 2017.
Thanks for your blog. It is one of the very few that I read faithfully.
Thanks for your comment and links to pics!
She was not a pilot. He was. Stop crying sexism where it does not exist.
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Intimating that women can’t take on airport or airplane challenges certainly feels wrong to me. I can remember the first time I was on a plane with a female pilot and I felt safe enough. It’s all the more understandable why some of these Airport films may not hold up so well.