Arthur Hailey also enjoyed a long and successful career, as a best-selling novelist.
But he told the BBC in 1974 he had lost interest in writing for television when the days of live TV drama ended, as he didn’t find it as exciting.
Flight into Danger was remade for television several times, including in the US, Germany, and Australia. There was also a novelisation, and in 1957 a feature film version called Zero Hour!.
It was Zero Hour! which would give Flight into Danger its most prominent legacy.
A more melodramatic version of the story, it still retained Hailey’s structure and much of his dialogue.
A television broadcast of it in the 1970s was seen by the writer-director team of David Zucker, Jerry Zucker and Jim Abrahams, and they were inspired to turn it into Airplane!.
“As silly as we think Zero Hour! is now, and Flight into Danger, they were good pieces of drama,” David Zucker said.
“They had the requirements for a good, interesting movie – comedy or drama.”
Hailey himself took the parody in good spirit. He told BBC Radio 2 in 1997 that after he and his wife had been to see Airplane! she had asked him what he thought of it.
“Some of the lines I wrote are actually in there,” he said.
“But it was very funny, and then I thought about it and I said, ‘Well, that play has been so good to us and we’ve squeezed so much out of it, if anyone can get a little more mileage good luck to them’.”