Trailer
Plot summary
Frank 'Spig' Wead flies for the U.S. Navy and spends his career arguing that aircraft belong with the fleet. While still in training, he takes up a Vought UO-1 on a dare from an Army soldier, runs out of fuel and comes down in a pool at a garden party. He and John Dale Price work to show the Navy what aviation can do in combat, and Wead pushes the service into racing and endurance competitions, many of them against an Army team led by Captain Herbert Allen Hazard. He lives among his squadron mates, 'Jughead' Carson and others, and the flying and the time with them leave his wife Min and their children on their own.
Cast
Show all 20 cast
- Ray Bakeras Captain (uncredited)
- Peter Ortizas Lt. Charles Dexter (uncredited)
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about The Wings of Eagles (1957)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- The film is director John Ford's personal tribute to his late friend Frank "Spig" Wead, a naval aviator turned screenwriter who had died a decade earlier at age 52, and it drew on Wead's own 1944 magazine article "We Plaster the Japs."
