Happy Flight

A flight due to leave Tokyo for Honolulu. The first officer is sitting his captain's examination for the first time, a young cabin attendant is on her first long flight, the ground crew is wrestling with baggage, the tower is handling dozens of aircraft at once, maintenance is running the last check and the airport's bird patrol is out on the runway. After the aircraft takes off, a fault appears. Shinobu Yaguchi's film is not a disaster film but a work film: it is built on showing how many people stand behind a single flight. The director had made films before about an amateur group learning a craft, and the mould here is the same. When the fault appears there is no heroics; everyone is at their own desk running their own checklist, and the solution comes from there. That it was shot with the airline's cooperation shows in how accurate the details are.