Over the weekend I watched The Flight of the Phoenix (1965) one of the great aviation films. Starring Jimmy Stewart, the film tells the harrowing tale of a plane forced down in the Libyan desert due to the engines becoming clogged by a sandstorm. Featuring an all star cast, Stewart is perfect in the role of the veteran pilot Frank Towns. An aviator for decades, Stewart rose from private to full Colonel in the Army Air Forces during World War II, leading bombing raids in Europe. He would stay in the Air Force reserves until 1968, rising to the rank of Brigadier General. In the film he represents the generation of aviation pioneers, beginning to die out. In 1965, it was only 62 years since Kitty-hawk, and pilots were still alive who had received their licenses from the Wright brothers.
His antagonist in the film is unemotional, albeit abrasive, German Heinrich Dorfmann (Hardy Kruger), a passenger on the flight, who hits upon the idea of cannibalizing remnants of the plane to build a new one, and using it to fly their way out of the desert before they die of thirst. A designer of planes, only late in the film is it revealed that he is a designer of model powered planes, Kruger and Stewart engage in a battle between knowledge gained in books and experience gained over decades of flying. Stewart opines at one point that the Earth is going to be inherited by the men like Kruger with their slide rules, yes the film is that old, and their computers. What the film illustrates well is that both knowledge and experience are crucial in making the plan work, along with the hard work of the surviving passengers. Tales of men, in exotic locales, triumphing over adversity is as old as The Odyssey , and the film is a nail biter which I highly recommend.
A fantastic film. I watched it when I was a young teenager many years ago. I highly recommend it. Hardy Kruger was very good in it. (He’s still alive too.)
Yep, at age 92.
The film was very good. In my younger days I read works by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry and Flight of the Phoenix reminded me of his novel Wind, Sand and Stars in which he recounts the true story of a mail flight crash in the Sahara. Saint-Exupery, the pilot, and his navigator-mechanic, Andre Prevot, survive the crash but have only fruit and a half fulI coffee thermos. Near death and hallucinating the two men are saved by a camel riding Bedouin who rehydrates them. I looked up Phoenix’s author, Elleston Trevor, but couldn’t find any connection between the two stories other than a Saharan crash. The Little Prince is based in part on Saint-Exupery’s hallucinations in the desert. Without the crash the that classic would not exist.