Airplane! is anAmerican comedy film, first released on 27 June 1980, produced, directed, and written by David Zucker, Jim Abrahams,and Jerry Zucker. Airplane! starredRobert Hays, Julie Hagerty, Leslie Nielsen, Robert Stack, Lloyd Bridges, Peter Graves, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, and Lorna Petterson. For release in Australia, Japan and the Philippines, Airplane! was re-titled as Flying High.

Airplane! is a spoof of the disaster movie genre. It is unique among film parodies in that Airplane! is a virtual remake of the 1957 Canadian airplane disaster movie Zero Hour. The earlier film featured Dana Andrews in the role of Lt. Striker, for instance, and Airplane! includes numerous jokes and gags that derive directly from the 1957 film. The plot device of the food poisoning incident, which figures prominently in the story line of Airplane!, also came from Zero Hour!.

When the pilots of a commercial airliner suffer food poisoning after eating their in-flight meals, it falls to Ted Striker (Robert Hays), an ex-fighter pilot, to conquer his fear of flying, fly the airliner to its destination, and land it safely. Adding to the complex psychological challenge for Striker is the fact that his ex-girlfriend Elaine (Julie Hagerty) is a flight attendant on the ill-fated aircraft. Nielsen portrays a doctor on board.

The plot of Airplane! is a well-traveled one. The story of an in-flight medical emergency, caused by food poisoning, with the passengers being rescued by a former military pilot.

Airplane! is very close to Zero Hour!, although Zucker, Abrahams, and Zucker transform the original drama into a comedy. As they explain in the DVD commentary for Airplane!, they discovered Zero Hour! when they were taping late-night commercials to spoof. They then bought the rights to it. Airplane! lifts its major characters and most of its story line from Zero Hour! even at times recreating the earlier film scene for scene, and line for line. Many of the best known lines of Airplane! are repeated verbatim, for example, “Can you face some unpleasant facts?” and “Looks like I picked the wrong week to quit smoking.” The “wrong week” line becomes a running gag— as the emergency escalates, so does the potency of the drug (“Looks like I picked the wrong week to quit smoking/drinking/amphetamines/sniffin’ glue.”) Even the odd sportscameo remains intact. In Zero Hour!, the cameo is by Elroy “Crazy Legs” Hirsch; in Airplane! it is basketball star Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.

Airplane! uses elements from the films Airport and Airport 1975, which are also based from novels and screenplays written by Arthur Hailey. The elements lifted from Airport 1975 included the guitar song — in Airport 1975 sung by a nun (Helen Reddy); in Airplane! sung by flight attendant (Lorna Patterson) who borrows the guitar from a nun(Maureen McGovern) — and the sick little girl for whom the guitar song is played —Linda Blair in Airport 1975 and Jill  Whelan in Airplane!. The twist to the borrowed material in Airplane! has the well-meaning singer swinging the guitar repeatedly into the little girl’s life-critical intravenous drip and unplugging it.