No Highway in the Sky (1951) on Netflix
Engineer Theodore Honey thinks a new airliner has a fatal flaw that appears after certain flight hours. On a flight to a crash site, he learns his plane is nearing that limit.
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- Netflix3.6/5
- IMDb7.1/105,123 votes
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Plot summary
Theodore Honey is an aeronautical engineer and absent-minded professor testing a theory that the new Rutland Reindeer airliner has a structural weakness in its tailplane. His fatigue test suggests failure will occur after 1,440 flight hours. When a Reindeer crashes in Labrador at 1,407 hours, his colleague Dennis Scott suspects Honey is right, and Honey is sent to inspect the wreckage. Aboard a Reindeer crossing the Atlantic, Honey learns that the plane has already flown 1,422 hours at takeoff. He has not confirmed the theory, but he alerts the captain and advises a passenger on the safest place to sit.
Cast
Show all 15 cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about No Highway in the Sky (1951)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Three years after No Highway in the Sky, and six years after Nevil Shute's novel, two de Havilland Comets, the world's first jet passenger airliner, crashed fatally; investigators found metal fatigue caused both, though in the main fuselage, not the tail section.
- In November 1950, The Hollywood Reporter claimed that James Stewart underwent an emergency appendectomy in London while No Highway in the Sky was in production.
- No Highway in the Sky was one of the first films to depict a potential aviation disaster involving metal fatigue.
- The film introduced the word "boffin" for the under-appreciated, seemingly self-centerd and eccentric scientist, as distinct from its earlier use for a scientist making vital and appreciated contributions.
