Neal Page is trying to return to his family for Thanksgiving in Chicago after being on a business trip in New York City, but is held up by an advertising executive who spends the entirety of the meeting looking at the three pictures to choose to launch their ad. On their way out, he tries to find a cab and successfully hails one, but is beaten to the punch by another man (Kevin Bacon in a cameo appearance). Del Griffith, a traveling salesman, interferes by leaving his trunk by the side of the road causing Neal to trip while racing a man for a cab, then inadvertently snatching the taxi ride that Neal bought from an attorney. The two meet again on the flight from JFK Airport to O'Hare; the plane is diverted to Wichita due to a blizzard in Chicago. What should have been a 1-hour and 45-minute New York-to-Chicago flight turns into a three-day ordeal, in which everything that can go wrong does.
The plot-summaries of the shorts are listed below in the order that they run in the DVD release, which is not the chronological order. Chronologically, the order would be:
In a dystopian near-future, Detroit, which is now bankrupt and overrun with crime, gives Omni Consumer Products (OCP) control of its struggling police force. The company plans to replace the poor, run-down sections of Old Detroit with the high-end "Delta City," but must first address the city's high crime rate. As an alternative to existing law enforcement, OCP senior president Dick Jones (Ronny Cox) offers the prototype ED-209 enforcement droid, but it accidentally kills a board member during a demonstration. The OCP chairman, nicknamed "The Old Man" (Dan O'Herlihy), decides instead to back Jones' young rival, Bob Morton (Miguel Ferrer), and his experimental cyborg police officer program, "RoboCop.
Geoff Carter (Cary Grant) is a pilot and the manager of Barranca Airways, a small, barely solvent company owned by "Dutchy" Van Ruyter (Sig Ruman) carrying airmail from the fictional South American port town of Barranca through a high pass in the Andes Mountains. Bonnie Lee (Arthur), a piano-playing entertainer, arrives one day and becomes infatuated with Carter, despite his fatalistic attitude about the dangerous mountain flying, and stays on in Barranca (not at Carter's invitation, as he insists on telling her). One of the characters dies due to irresponsible flying.
On the morning of September 11, 2001, four al-Qaeda terrorists Ziad Jarrah, Saeed al-Ghamdi, Ahmed al-Nami, and Ahmed al-Haznawi pray in their respective hotel rooms before arriving at Newark Liberty International Airport. The quartet wait at a gate after getting through security to board San Francisco-bound United 93. After 40 minutes of delay due to traffic the plane takes off, flown by captain Jason Dahl and first officer Leroy Homer, with all four terrorists on board.
The blue collar Kerrigan home, in the outer Melbourne suburb of Coolaroo, is filled with love as well as pride in their modest lifestyle, but their happiness is threatened when developers attempt the compulsory acquisition of their house to expand the neighbouring airport.
In 1957 Brooklyn, New York, Rudolf Abel retrieves a secret message from a park bench and reads it just before FBI agents burst into his rented room. He prevents discovery of the message, but other evidence in the room leads to his arrest and prosecution as a Soviet spy.
Kay Miniver (Greer Garson) and her family live a comfortable life at a house called 'Starlings' in Belham, a fictional village outside London. The house has a large garden, with a private landing stage on the River Thames at which is moored a motorboat belonging to her devoted husband Clem (Walter Pidgeon), a successful architect. They have three children: the youngsters Toby (Christopher Severn) and Judy (Clare Sandars) and an older son Vin (Richard Ney) a student at a university. They have live-in staff: Gladys (Brenda Forbes) the housemaid and Ada (Marie De Becker) the cook.
Jack Powell and David Armstrong are rivals in the same small American town, both vying for the attentions of pretty Sylvia Lewis. Jack fails to realize that "the girl next door", Mary Preston, is desperately in love with him. The two young men both enlist to become combat pilots in the Air Service. When they leave for training camp, Jack mistakenly believes Sylvia prefers him. She actually prefers David and lets him know about her feelings, but is too kindhearted to turn down Jack's affection.
Boxer and amateur pilot Joe Pendleton (Robert Montgomery), affectionately known as "the Flying Pug", flies his small aircraft to his next fight in New York City, but crashes when a control cable severs. His soul is "rescued" by 7013 (Edward Everett Horton), an officious angel who assumed that Joe could not have survived. Joe's manager, Max "Pop" Corkle (James Gleason), has his body cremated. In the afterlife, the records show his death was a mistake; he was supposed to live for 50 more years. The angel's superior, Mr. Jordan (Claude Rains), confirms this, but since there is no more body, Joe will have to take over a newly dead corpse. Mr. Jordan explains that a body is just something that is worn, like an overcoat; inside, Joe will still be himself. Joe insists that it be someone in good physical shape, because he wants to continue his boxing career. Joe keeps saying the body they find "has to be in the pink".
The story opens against the backdrop of idyllic hilly terrain with Indian air force officer Arun Varma (Rajesh Khanna) crooning "Mere sapno ki rani" atop an open jeep along with his co-pilot Madan (Sujit Kumar), while Vandana (Sharmila Tagore), the daughter of a doctor Gopal Tripathi (Pahadi Sanyal) demurely sneaks glances at him from a mini train. After a brief romance, they have a secret wedding.
Takako Ishikawa (Nobuko Otowa) is a teacher on an island in the inland sea off the coast of Hiroshima after World War II. During her summer holiday, she goes back to Hiroshima to visit the graves of her parents and younger sister, who were killed in the bomb attack. She sees a beggar and realizes he is a man called Iwakichi (Osamu Takizawa) who used to work for her parents, now burned on the face and partially blind. She visits him at his home and asks about his family. His grandson, Tarō, is now in an institution. She visits the institution and finds the children barely have enough to eat. Takako offers to take Iwakichi and his grandson back to the island, but he refuses, running away.
The Stooges are the Wrong brothers (a parody of the Wright brothers), a trio of aviators in the "Republic of Cannabeer, P.U." who receive an army draft notice. The notice says the brothers have been granted a 30-day deferment of duty on account of their claims that the plane they are inventing, the “Buzzard”, will revolutionize flying. Curly proudly announces that their plane has put them among other "great inventors" like Robert Fulton, Thomas Edison, Alexander Graham Bell and Don Ameche.