flight of phoenix

Watch trailer here


Pilot Frank Towns (James Stewart) and navigator Lew Moran (Richard Attenborough) are ferrying a mixed bag of passengers out of the Sahara desert, among them oil workers, a couple of British soldiers and a German who was visiting his brother. An unexpected sandstorm forces the plane down, damaging it and killing two of the men.

The survivors wait for rescue, but begin to worry, as the storm had blown them far off course, away from where searchers would look for them. When they spot a party of Arabs, Captain Harris (Peter Finch) goes to ask them for help, but Sergeant Watson (Ronald Fraser) refuses to accompany him. Instead, the doctor, because he speaks Arabic, goes with him. The next day, Towns finds their looted bodies, throats cut, and the Arabs gone.

As the water begins to run out, Heinrich Dorfmann (Hardy Kruger), a precise, arrogant German aeronautical engineer, proposes a radical solution. He claims they can rebuild a plane from the wreckage, using the only working engine and adding skids to take off. They set to work.

Later, Towns finds out that Dorfmann's job is designing model planes, not real, full-scale ones. Afraid of the effect on morale, he and Moran keep their discovery secret, though they now believe Dorfmann's plan is doomed. However, they turn out to be wrong. The plane is reborn, like the mythical phoenix, does fly, with the passengers lying on the wings, and carries them to safety.