Trailer
Plot summary
Pilot John Dooley and his crew of four are flying an Air Force mission in a Douglas C-47 Skytrain (the military version of the DC-3). They experience icy conditions in the uncharted wilderness near the Quebec-Labrador border. Dooley is a former airline pilot who had been pressed into duty hauling war supplies across the northern route to England. Unable to make radio contact for bearings, they land on a frozen lake far from settled country and can only provide an approximate position to rescuers. Compass readings were unstable in this region. Dooley must keep his men alive while waiting for rescue in the extreme winter cold with temperatures plummeting to -70 degrees Fahrenheit and limited food. At headquarters, Col. Fuller gathers fellow airmen, close colleagues of Dooley, who are determined to find the downed crew before the men succumb to hunger and the cold. The search pilots experience frustration and fear when their initial attempts are unsuccessful. From the sketchy data they have, it seems Dooley went down on the far side of a range of mountains that doesn't even appear on their maps. In the face of an approaching storm, they are unsure as to what their final attempt should be. A wrong decision will doom the missing crew. The downed crew are able to use a hand-cranked generator to send a weak signal that will hopefully be picked up.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Island in the Sky (1953)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
SPOILER
The film is based on a real flight on February 3, 1943, though its copilot was not killed as in the film. Writer Ernest K. Gann, then a search pilot with Air Transport Command, had been bumped from that mission by a more senior pilot.- Island in the Sky and The High and the Mighty are two of the earliest all-star disaster films, paving the way for Airport and its sequels more than 20 years later and for the Airplane! parodies.
- Both this film and The High and the Mighty were out of circulation for about 20 years because of legal issues. They were then restored, returned to television in July 2005 and released as special edition DVDs that August.
- Filming took place partly at Donner Lake near Truckee, California, where the California Department of Forestry felled trees so that aircraft runways could be fashioned in the four-foot-deep snow.
- The hand-cranked emergency radio the crew uses to contact rescuers was a real BC-778/SCR-578/AN-CRT3 transmitter nicknamed Gibson Girl. Its narrow-waisted shape let the operator hold it between the legs because cranking it required 80 rpm.
