Airport

Airport is a 1970 American disaster drama set during a fierce snowstorm in the Midwest, where the manager of a major Chicago airport, Mel Bakersfeld, is doing everything he can to keep it running despite blocked runways, stranded aircraft and mounting pressure. His workload is complicated by strained relations with his wife, while his brother-in-law Vernon Demerest, a senior pilot, prepares to command a flight to Rome. Among the passengers on that aircraft is a man with a bomb, planning to destroy the plane so that his family can collect on his life insurance. Once the threat becomes known on the ground, the crew must try to stop him while the flight is already in the air.

The film was directed and written by George Seaton, whose earlier credits include Miracle on 34th Street and The Counterfeit Traitor, and produced by Ross Hunter. Burt Lancaster heads the cast as Mel Bakersfeld, with Dana Wynter, Dean Martin, Barbara Hale, Jean Seberg and Jacqueline Bisset among the credited performers, in a production with seventy cast members in all. Made for a budget of about ten million dollars, it earned roughly one hundred million worldwide, a strong return that reflected its broad commercial appeal. On IMDb it holds a 6.6 rating from around twenty-four thousand votes, and on TMDB a 6.5 from a much smaller number of votes, while the critics' score stands at 6.3 from eighteen reviews.