What is Airplane! about?
An ex-fighter pilot is forced to take over the controls of an airliner when the flight crew succumbs to food poisoning.
Does it have a happy ending? (spoiler-safe)
Yes. It lands on a happy note.
Airplane! (1980)
An ex-fighter pilot battles food poisoning and absurd antics at 30,000 feet in this brisk, crowd-pleasing comedy.
Absurdist, with big broad humor. A comfort watch at a brisk pace.
Streaming on Paramount+, Kanopy (free), Hoopla (free) and YouTube (free).
Airplane! parents guide
Some innuendo or implied sex, which is more than most PG titles carry. Beyond that, mild language and nothing scary.
- Scare
- Not scary
- Jump scares
- None noted
- Gore
- No gore
- Violence
- No real violence
- Sex and nudity
- Mild
- Mild means innuendo, or sex implied off screen, with no nudity.
- Language
- Mild
- Mild words like damn, hell or crap.
How we rate: an AI reads what is known about each title and tags it 0 to 3; we check the tags against a hand-rated set and correct them by hand when readers tell us. Estimates, not a scene-by-scene review. Spot a mistake? Tell us.
Cast and crew
Directed byJerry Zucker, David Zucker, Jim Abrahams
StarringRobert Hays, Julie Hagerty, Leslie Nielsen, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Lloyd Bridges, Peter Graves
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Airplane! is on our Set in Los Angeles, Under 90 minutes, 1980s, Comedy on Paramount+ and Comedy on Kanopy lists.
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- “funny but not stupid, under two hours”
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Lists with the same feel: Weird and surreal and Gentle.
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Uses the TMDB API; not endorsed or certified by TMDB. Intensity, content, tone and pace tags are CouchRot's own.