We’re reviewing both of these TV movies side-by-side as result of their basis in the December 1972 crash in the Florida Everglades near the Miami International Airport of Eastern Flight 401 scheduled from New York JFK to Miami. The flight ended with 101 fatalities: the pilots and flight engineer, two of the 10 flight attendants, and 96 of 163 passengers; 75 passengers and crew survived. The crash was documented in the national best-selling paperback Crash (1977) by Rob and Sarah Elder. The supernatural aftermath of the crash was documented in the equally popular The Ghost of Flight 401 (1976) by John G. Fuller.

Paramount and Universal Studios quickly adapted the properties into TV movies: Paramount Television produced Crash (1978), aka The Crash of Flight 401 in its video shelf life, for ABC-TV. Universal Studios optioned the supernatural tales and retained Fuller’s book title for their NBC-TV movie.

Barry Shear (Madam Sin) directs The Crash of Flight 401 with William Shatner starring as National Transportation Safety Board Investigator Carl Tobias (purely narrative; not a factual character), under pressure to exonerate Lockheed, the manufacturer of the wide-body L-1011. Eddie Albert (TV’s Green Acres, the POTUS in Dreamscape) and Lane Smith (District Attorney Jim Trotter in My Cousin Vinnie) star as the surviving Eastern Airlines’ captain and flight engineer under investigation for causing the crash. The passengers and FAA personnel read as a who’s who of ’70s television: Adrienne Barbeau (who returned to the passenger cabin in the 2020 horror-parody Exorcism at 60,000 Feet), Lorraine Gary (Jaws), Christopher Connelly (Raiders of Atlantis), Ron Glass (TV’s Barney Miller), Ed Nelson (Roger Corman’s Rock All Night and Night of the Blood Beast), and Joe Silver (Rabid).

The late Steven Hilliard Stern (This Park is Mine) directs The Ghost of Flight 401, a tale concerned with the ethereal sightings of pilots Robert Loft and Don Repo on other planes that had salvage parts from the wreckage. Ernest Borgnine stars as flight engineer Dom Cimoli alongside Russell Johnson (TV’s Gilligan’s Island) as Captain Loft; Gary Lockwood (of the TV Movie Earth II) is the FAA investigator on the case. The rest of the cast features a young Kim Basinger with a when-you-see-’em-you-know-’em TV and feature-film character actor feast of Robert F. Lyons, Allan Miller, Alan Oppehheimer (a quickly gone-and-replaced Six Million Dollar Man TV movie cast member), Eugene Roche, and Hal Holbrook’s then wife, Carol Eve Rosen.

As is the case with all TV movies of the ’70s, while they’re up against the budget, the production values are high and — according to the comments of IMBb users involved in and experienced both incidents as airline industry workers — are technically accurate. The acting, of course, is excellent across all quarters.

Barry Shears’s 80-plus credits, which began in the early ’50s, were mostly in episodic TV, Tarzan and Police Woman in particular. His dozen-plus TV Movies include Power (1980; Joe Don Baker as Jimmy Hoffa), Undercover with the KKK (1979; a true story about an FBI infiltrator), and Strike Force (1975; with an early Richard Gere in a cop vs. drug dealer drama).

Other works in Stern’s superior TV movie oeuvre (on U.S. TV and cable; in Canada, they ran as theatrical features) are the James Brolin-starring The Ambush Murders (1982), the pre-stardom Tom Hanks-starring Mazes and Monsters (1982), and the Ned Beatty-starring (Ed and His Dead Mother) Hostage Flight (1982).

You can watch The Crash of Flight 401 and The Ghost of Flight 401 courtesy of You Tube. In addition to ABC and NBC airing both of these fact-based airline movies, ABC also broadcast the adventure-drama SST Death Flight, while NBC took the subject matter into a sci-fi turn with The Disappearance of Flight 412; CBS-TV broadcast the horror-fantasy The Horror at 37.000 Feet, which also starred William Shatner. We’ve also reviewed all of the theatrical forefathers that inspired the “Big Three” TV Networks’ airline telefilms with our “Airport: Watch the Series” featurette.

And don’t forget: We’re TV movie crazy around here, so be sure to catch up with a wide-array of TV movies from the ’70s and ’80s with our tributes “Lost TV Week,” “Week of Made for TV Movies,” and “Sons of Made for TV Movies Week,” and “Grandson of Made for TV Movie Week.” And here we are, with another “TV Week” because, well, TV Movies rock. And there will be another one: that’s bank.

We reviewed a gaggle of airline disaster TV movies this week, so be sure to check out our “Airline Disasters TV Movie Round Up” feature with links to all of the reviews.

About the Author: You can learn more about the writings of R.D Francis on Facebook. He also writes for B&S About Movies.

Before there was The Asylum Studios. Before there were mockbusters. Before there were an endless stream of direct-to-DVD and direct-to-streaming variants of popular movies, there were the “Big Three” networks’ (ABC, CBS, and NBC) endless stream of TV movies that knocked-off popular theatrical films. In the case of this Jud Taylor-directed (TV’s Star Trek and Man from U.N.C.L.E.) airline thriller, it was made by NBC in the midst of the Airport disaster flick series of films made between 1970 and 1979 (read out “Airport: Watch the Series” featurette), which also included ABC’s SST Death Flight and CBS’s The Horror at 37.000 Feet. While ABC’s offering was an adventure-drama and CBS’s a horror-fantasy, NBC’s offering took a sci-fi turn.

Glenn Ford (Jonathan Kent in Superman ’78, but since this is B&S About Movies, we remember him best for The Visitor and Happy Birthday to Me) is an Air Force Colonel in investigating an Air Force base’s rash of electrical disturbances aboard its aircraft. To pinpoint the in-flight problem, he dispatches the four-man crew of Flight 412 piloted by Captain Bishop (David Soul of Salem’s Lot). Shortly into the flight, the flight makes radar contact with three unidentified craft and reports them as U.F.Os; two fighter jets are dispatched and force Flight 412 to land at a remote, abandoned military airfield in the American Southwest desert. Sequestered in a barracks and their craft hidden away in a dilapidated hangar, government officials begin to interrogate and convince the crew they did not see flying saucers. Meanwhile, Ford’s Colonel — and Bradford Dillman — refuse to accept Flight 412 simply vanished — and that it has anything to do with alien contact.

At the time of this NBC-TV production, Peter Hyams had not yet scripted the conspiracy-similar Capricorn One; he came up with the idea back in 1969 while working on the Apollo broadcasts for CBS-TV. Completing the script in 1972, no production company wanted to make it; that is until ITC Entertainment (Space: 1999, Saturn 3) put Capricorn One into pre-production in late 1975 and commenced filming in late 1976. In a coincidence: Capricorn One was — based on its casting of the then popular James Brolin and O.J Simpson — pre-sold to NBC to secure its TV rights, which assisted in augmenting the production’s budget.

While a ratings success during its initial October 1974 broadcast on NBC, contemporary critics decry Flight 412 for its overuse of stock footage (which leads to the boondoggling jets switching from U.S. Marine McDonnell Douglas F-4B Phantom II fighters to Grumman F9F Panthers; the latter didn’t fly in the ’70s as they were retired after the ’50s, this according to aeronautical critics), recycling newsreels of individuals speaking of their “close encounters,” and voice-over narration to advance the plot. But those critics seem to miss the point: that the “plot” was based on “fact” and made to resemble a documentary about a “real event” involving a military U.F.O encounter. Flight 412 became a frequently-ran film on NBC’s late night programming blocks and UHF-TV syndication until the mid-’80s, at which time it was given a VHS release.

Courtesy of its casting of Glenn Ford, David Soul, and Bradford Dillman, the film is easily available as a still-in-print DVD and streams on Amazon Prime. But we found You Tube freebies HERE and HERE and on Daily Motion. You can also enjoy it as part of Mill Creek’s Nightmare Worlds 50-film pack, which afford us to do another take on this film.

Other network TV movies parked at the Hollywood hangers are Paramount Studios-ABC’s The Crash of Flight 401 and Universal Studios-NBC’s The Ghost of Flight 401; both are concerned with a real-life, 1972 Eastern Airlines crash and its supernatural aftermath. Don’t forget that we wrapped up our week of airline flicks with our “Airline Disasters Round Up” feature.

About the Author: You can learn more about the writings of R.D Francis on Facebook. He also writes for B&S About Movies.