{"id":582388,"date":"2026-04-03T07:13:09","date_gmt":"2026-04-03T07:13:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/582388\/"},"modified":"2026-04-03T07:13:09","modified_gmt":"2026-04-03T07:13:09","slug":"the-luton-writer-behind-the-original-airplane","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/582388\/","title":{"rendered":"The Luton writer behind the original Airplane!"},"content":{"rendered":"

Arthur Hailey also enjoyed a long and successful career, as a best-selling novelist.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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!.<\/p>\n

It was Zero Hour! which would give Flight into Danger its most prominent legacy. <\/p>\n

A more melodramatic version of the story, it still retained Hailey’s structure and much of his dialogue.<\/p>\n

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!<\/a>.<\/p>\n

“As silly as we think Zero Hour! is now, and Flight into Danger, they were good pieces of drama,” David Zucker said. <\/p>\n

“They had the requirements for a good, interesting movie \u2013 comedy or drama.”<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

“Some of the lines I wrote are actually in there,” he said.<\/p>\n

“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’.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Arthur Hailey also enjoyed a long and successful career, as a best-selling novelist. But he told the BBC…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":582389,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[64,63,134,344],"class_list":{"0":"post-582388","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-movies","8":"tag-au","9":"tag-australia","10":"tag-entertainment","11":"tag-movies"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/582388","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=582388"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/582388\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/582389"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=582388"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=582388"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=582388"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}