The Concorde... Airport '79 (1979) on Netflix
PG19792h 3mActionDramaThriller
Federation World Airlines' new Concorde flies from Washington to Paris and Moscow. Reporter Maggie Whelan is aboard with documents that tie her boyfriend, Kevin Harrison, to illegal arms sales.
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- Netflix3.0/5
- IMDb4.5/107,694 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes25%
Trailer
Plot summary
Television reporter Maggie Whelan is taking both legs of the first commercial flight of Federation World Airlines' new Concorde, from Washington to Paris and on to Moscow before the 1980 Olympic Games. Just after she boards at Dulles Airport, documents reach her showing that her boyfriend, Dr. Kevin Harrison, chairman of the aerospace contractor Harrison Industries, is complicit in selling arms to enemy regimes. Maggie still loves Kevin; he promises to make a public statement about the sales, and she intends to report the story from Moscow. Kevin instead plans to destroy the documents by bringing the Concorde down with Maggie aboard, blaming a technical fault or activists opposed to the jet. Captains Joe Patroni and Paul Metrand are at the controls.
Cast
- Stacy Heather Tolkinas Irina Markov
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about The Concorde... Airport '79 (1979)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- The Concorde flown in the film, registered F-BTSC, had carried Pope John Paul II in 1989 and was the aircraft destroyed as Air France Flight 4590 on July 25, 2000, when it hit runway debris on takeoff and crashed in the town of Gonesse, killing all 109 people on board plus four on the ground.
- Sylvia Kristel wrote in her memoirs that Alain Delon, unhappy with the size of his trailer, insisted on being given director David Lowell Rich's larger trailer; Rich complained to Lang, who supported Delon.
- The film's second-act plot to bring down the Concorde, in which the cargo hold door blows off and causes an explosive decompression and loss of control, closely resembles the real Turkish Airlines Flight 981 crash six years earlier, though it is unknown whether this was coincidence or the writers' direct inspiration.
- Flight scenes with fibreglass model aircraft used blue screen compositing, but the white Concorde model reflected the blue screen and spoiled the compositing; painting the model in a yellow primer color stopped the reflection, and the yellow was filtered out later during color balancing.
- It took producer Jennings Lang several years to get permission from Air France to use the Concorde, and the airline asked for changes to the film's story and dialogue.
- Model makers shaped small number eleven Exacto knife blades and used them as tiny antenna details on the model aircraft, which also served as a warning to handlers to be more careful and stop knocking the models off.
