Zero Hour!

Watching this 1950s airborne drama now, you can see what a wonderful template it was for the spoof Airplane!. Passengers and crew on a jetplane suffer from food poisoning leaving stressed-out former pilot Dana Andrews as the man of the hour. He's forced to take over the controls - more than director Hall Bartlet does - much to the joy of wife Linda Darnell and the sneers of ground controller Sterling Hayden. It's solid entertainment and is adapted from a story by Arthur Hailey, whose later novel Airport would successfully kick off the trend for disaster movies in the 1970s.