No Highway (1951)

No Highway in the Sky (aka No Highway) is a 1951 British black-and-white disaster film from 20th Century Fox, produced by Louis D. Lighton, directed by Henry Koster, and starring James Stewart and Marlene Dietrich, Glynis Johns, and Jack Hawkins. The film is based on the novel No Highway by Nevil Shute and was one of the first films that depicted a potential aviation disaster involving metal fatigue.

Although the film follows Shute's original 1948 novel closely, No Highway in the Sky notably omits references to the supernatural contained in the original novel, including the use of automatic writing to resolve a key element in the original novel's story.

Synopsis

Theodore Honey (James Stewart), an eccentric "boffin" with the Royal Aircraft Establishment, is working on solving a difficult aviation crash problem. A widower with a 12 year old daughter, Elspeth (Janette Scott), Honey is sent from Farnborough to investigate the crash of a Rutland Reindeer airliner in Labrador, Canada. He theorizes the accident happened because of the tailplane's structural failure, caused by sudden metal fatigue after 1440 flight hours. To test the theory in his laboratory, a rear airframe is being vibrated at a very high rate in daily eight-hour cycles.

Actors