15+ Real Travel Details in 1980's "Airplane!" That Seem Fake if You Weren't Alive Then

December 30, 2024

It changed the course of screen comedy. The 1980 deadpan-silly movie Airplane!, which was bootstrapped into blockbuster status by a team of outsider sketch comedy writers from the Midwest, signaled a new, absurdist mode for American humor. From the non sequitur flashbacks of The Simpsons and Family Guy to Adult Swim’s ironic skewering of mainstream entertainment tropes, a generation of comedy writers can point to the irreverent influence of Airplane!

But laughs aside, Airplane! also recorded a world of travel that has been all but lost to us.

If you weren’t alive in 1979, when the movie was shot, you may not have realized just how many things in Airplane! capture aspects of everyday travel that have since disappeared.

Using Surely You Can’t Be Serious: The True Story of Airplane! (St. Martin's Press), written by the film's trio of authors and directors (David Zucker, Jim Abrahams, and Jerry Zucker), as a guide, we took another trip on Trans American Two-Zero-Niner to compare the travel details in this comedy classic with the grim reality of air travel today. 

Receiving cooked meals in domestic economy class—a critical plot point in Airplane!—is the least of the changes to the flying experience since then. Surely you’ll enjoy noticing some passing details of air travel depicted in Airplane! that are no longer part of our flying lives.

Details of a lost travel landscape crop up in Airplane! while the opening credits are still appearing.

As the picture's main characters assemble at Los Angeles International Airport (LAX), you'll catch the curbside sign for the check-in area of Eastern Air Lines. Eastern, as it was known, wasn't famous for having a California presence, so it's a treat to find the sign captured here. Eastern did have something close to a monopoly on flights between New York City and Florida for the middle part of the 20th century, and the carrier was the official air partner of Walt Disney World during the resort's heyday in the 1970s and '80s.

Eastern began flying under that name in 1930. For a while, many airlines operating in the United States were given names, like the witches of Oz, that roughly described their geographic coverage. In 1978, the year before the filming of Airplane!, there were also airlines called Western, Southern, Northwest, North Central, National, and Continental. 

Eastern's financial health began wobbling in the mid-'80s and it went fully kaput after more than 60 years in January 1991.

The grumpy dude who is abandoned—with his taxi's meter running—by driver Ted Striker (Robert Hays) was actually a famous public figure at the time. He's Howard Jarvis, an abrasive, aggressive public critic of taxation who would have been well-known to residents of California in 1980. The year before filming, Jarvis led a noisy and successful bid to pass Proposition 13, which limits property tax increases on California homeowners. 

Jarvis' appearance is actually a setup for a joke with a delayed payoff. If you stay through the end credits of Airplane!, nearly 90 minutes later, you'll see a callback shot of Jarvis. After the entire film has unspooled and Striker has safely landed the plane in Chicago, Jarvis is seen still obediently waiting in the taxi for Striker to return.

Jarvis gets the last line in the whole movie: "Well, I'll give him another 20 minutes, but that's it!" The joke, which 1980 Californians would get on a whole other level, is that the infamously penny-pinching and antagonistic Jarvis would never have put up with a runaway cab fare. 

Post-credit stinger scenes like this were unusual in 1980, but thanks in part to the wild success of Airplane! (which made nearly $700 million at the box office in 2025 dollars), they're pretty common today. Marvel Studios in particular relies on post-credit scenes to tease upcoming projects and storylines.

Gen Z and Gen Alpha, you're probably not going to believe this, but once upon a time, airport terminals across the United States were swarmed with robe-wearing members of a certain spiritual sect who would attempt to extract donations from passersby by handing out flowers, singing, and serving vegetarian food. And no one could make them go away.

If you never experienced the airport advances of members of the International Society for Krishna Consciousness movement yourself, then the previous sentence may sound more outlandish than any of the made-up plot points in Airplane! But it's true.

In an era when curbside security was much more relaxed, groups of peaceful so-called Hare Krishnas frequently roamed the check-in areas of airports everywhere, distributing books and ticking off harried passengers by the planeful. In Airplane!, the airport panhandlers even attempt to beg from each other.

As the New York Times put it in 1976, "At least 20 of the nation's largest airports have tried to bar or restrict solicitations, but in most cases their attempts have been prohibited by the courts on constitutional grounds."

Airplane! tapped into a cultural frustration among air travelers by having other main characters, including a nun, fight off a series of airport glad-handers like it's a Kung Fu movie. 

When Captain Rex Kramer (Robert Stack) shows up midway through the film, he gets a few licks in on another fella, establishing a running joke. In 1980, more than a few Americans wished it was legal to do the same thing. It wasn't until 1992 that the U.S. Supreme Court officially granted airports the right to ban "begging" in terminals—a restriction that was eventually extended to leafleteers and others. 

Behind Elaine Dickinson (Julie Hagerty) and Striker early in the film, you can spot the illuminated sign of a kiosk selling travel insurance.

In the late 1970s, fewer people flew regularly than they do now, and many of those travelers were in the habit of purchasing travel insurance to cover accidents and cancellations. Credit card issuers weren't yet in the business of offering travel coverage automatically through purchases, so many people chose to buy coverage right there at the airport. You could do it near the check-in counters. 

Younger travelers surely know that airplane cabins, like many areas of public life in the late 1970s, were once divided into sections for smokers and non-smokers. (Usually, the smokers had to sit at the back of the plane.) So this gag about a "smoking" ticket was almost a gimme for the writers. 

Unpleasant fact about flying back then: Airplanes could sell out of seats in the non-smoking section, leaving passengers who didn't smoke with no other seating options except for the smoking section. It was a known risk of last-minute ticket purchases.

If you think that's bad, airlines didn't even have separate smoking sections before 1971. Passengers could smoke at any seat. Consumer advocate Ralph Nader campaigned for separate sections, which became the rule in 1973, the same year 123 passengers died in a Brazilian airliner fire believed to have been started by a cigarette.

It's the old story: Despite the situation, the tobacco industry fought every effort to curb smoking on flights using lawyers and lobbying. But by 1988, smoking was finally banned on domestic flights lasting 2 hours or less, and that was expanded to 6 hours by 1990. Bans on international carriers started appearing around the same time, and Delta Air Lines became the first U.S. carrier to ban smoking for flights of all lengths. 

By the way, that's what airline ticket folders looked like back before we could book flights at home. Travelers could only obtain a ticket from the airline or a travel agent. The tickets inside were printed on tissue-thin carbon paper that allowed for duplicate or triplicate sheets in red or black ink—gate agents would usually take one of the copies from you when you boarded. Tickets often came in cute paper folders printed with the airline's branding. Survivors are popular with collectors today. 

Fun trivia: The ticket agent is played by Susan Zucker, the sister of the movie's co-creators, David and Jerry Zucker. According to the latter in Surely You Can't Be Serious, "I told our DP [director of photography], Joe Biroc, to put a light on her, and he looks back at me and says, 'On an extra?' I said, 'It’s my sister.' He says, 'Gotcha!'"

The scene where the young couple is forced apart by the flight's departure is an old railroad platform joke from World War II times.

In its original form (seen here in 1944's Since You Went Away but repeated in other movies), a young enlisted man waves farewell to his girlfriend from a moving train as he's headed off to fight. In 1980, the war was just 35 years in the past, so most moviegoers would have instantly understood this corny old travel reference.

Back in 1980, full-service gas stations were still a common thing. When Captain Clarence Oveur (Peter Graves) gives his credit card to a service worker outside his cockpit window, that's a gag about how everyone paid for fuel in their own cars. 

And about that annoying clacking device: Magnetic stripes on credit cards were just taking hold then. When you made a purchase, the clerk usually had to put your card (which older people sometimes referred to as a "plate") in a machine with a piece of carbon paper and slide a roller across the card to make an impression of the embossed account numbers. There was no way to validate your account unless the vendor paused to call a central telephone line for vocal approval. The system was cumbersome.

Just to drive home the truth that airline travel was dramatically different in 1980, we're given a look at the kind of illuminated "no smoking" indicator light that real-world passengers would find over their seats. Just like the seat belt light of today, the sign would illuminate when smoking was forbidden and turn off when it was allowed. Seats in economy-class smoking sections usually had a little ashtray built directly into the armrests (and wow, was it disgusting).

This sign would have been instantly recognizable as a joke by movie audiences of the day because not only is the smoking section listed as being in the middle area of the plane, where it pretty much never was, but the no-smoking light also appears directly above an illuminated sign that, to our innocent, family-friendly eyes, appears to be an indicator for a wrestling section in the rear of the cabin.

Yes, little kids were frequently invited into the cockpit during a flight to meet the pilots and see the instruments. Seemingly every child who boarded an airplane lived in hope of being chosen by the stewardess (which is what they called female flight attendants back then) to pop into the cockpit. That tradition has been banned by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and individual airline policy ever since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.

Fun fact: The role played by Kareem Abdul-Jabbar (at left), First Officer Roger Murdock, was originally intended for Pete Rose, but shooting happened during baseball season, so Rose couldn't commit. Abdul-Jabbar had been a sports celebrity and activist ever since rising to fame on UCLA's basketball team in the 1960s, later playing for the Los Angeles Lakers. He agreed to do Airplane! because he wanted the money to buy a $35,000 rug.

Little kids were also frequently given little airline-themed trinkets as a welcome gift. Sometimes a youngster might get a model airplane, although the freebies were usually pocket-size and almost never as large as what Joey (Ross Harris) is given by Captain Oveur. More often, kids would receive something simpler and cheaper, like pin-on wings. You can occasionally find airlines that still give wings away today. 

Look behind Hagerty's Elaine and you'll see overhead storage space that's out in the open rather than in an enclosed compartment. The overhead racks were originally intended for light items like hats, coats, and briefcases. Airlines only began putting doors on that space to make it safer to use for heavier items.

Although the safer, enclosed bins were the norm in the industry by the time Airplane! was shot, movies and television shows tend to film airline scenes in cabins that have been removed from retired aircraft and re-assembled on the ground, sometimes in specialized filming facilities. This set was probably taken from an older aircraft that flew before the change was made. 

Another sign that Airplane! used vintage airline sets and props for filming: Elaine puts away a leather binder embossed with the word LOOK.

To keep passengers entertained, U.S. airlines used to stock loaner copies of popular magazines, which were usually kept in binders of some sort (in leather or clear plastic) on shelves in the service areas. Flight attendants would go down the aisle offering magazines to customers, but often by the time the flight was in the air, only the most boring titles were available because passengers learned to grab their favorites immediately after boarding. We compete for overhead bin space during boarding today, but back then, when checked luggage was free and we didn't carry so much stuff aboard, passengers competed for the best magazines instead.

We know this LOOK binder was already an antique by 1980 because Look magazine only published from 1937 to 1971. A rival of Life, another general-interest magazine, Look focused on photographs, which accounts for the periodical's larger-than-average size.

Next to Elaine, there are a bunch of tiny bottles with red-and-white strips stuck on them. Those are liquor tax strips, a memorable fixture of every grandpa's liquor cabinet in that era. The strips are a vestige of the Prohibition years. After the U.S. federal ban on alcohol ended in 1933, liquor tax strips began appearing on the seals of bottles, partly to indicate that proper duty had been paid, but also to reassure the public that the alcohol within was safe to drink—a consideration that had not been assured during the years when booze was contraband. 

When you ordered liquor on a flight, the little bottle would always come with one of those tax strips affixed to its neck. Big bottles at liquor stores had them, too.

By 1980, the safety connotations of liquor tax strips were mostly forgotten, and the Tax Reform Act of 1984 eliminated the requirement all together. Seemingly overnight, a ubiquitous aspect of American life vanished. But the tax strips have been preserved in Airplane!

The co-writers of the Airplane! screenplay were just "three white Jewish guys from Milwaukee," according to Jerry Zucker, so they asked Al White (left) and Norman Gibbs, who played the "jive"-talking passengers, to write their own dialogue—and Barbara Billingsley's, too. The former sitcom mom from Leave It to Beaver remained friends with the actors for years afterward.

But direct your attention to what the men are wearing. It was common in those days for passengers to dress up for flights. Jet travel had only really become prevalent in the late '50s and early '60s, so people were still prone to treating it like a special occasion. The economy cabin itself dressed up, too: Headrests usually had biblike covers, food was served on washable dishes, and cutlery for meals was made of metal.

Why is it funny when an air traffic controller is asked to check the radar range and instead looks in a microwave oven?

Audiences in 1980 would get it: The first microwave ovens sold as home appliances had the trade name Radarange because the ovens use radar-related technology. At the time, some early adopters used Radarange interchangeably with microwave. 

The appliances were expensive in the early days. The first microwave oven sold for countertop home use in 1967 cost $495 (equivalent to more than $5,000 today). But if you tried to use one to roast a turkey, it would still probably look as disgusting as this.

This one isn't a travel reference, but it's worth pointing out. When the aircaft disables a disco radio station (called ZAZ, after the last initials of Airplane!'s three creators) in Chicago, the reference for 1980 audiences was deeper—and much darker—than mere slapstick. 

When Airplane! was being filmed, there was a growing backlash in the United States to the then-popular genre of disco music, which was rising in cultural dominance. As much as 40% of the top singles chart was comprised of disco music. In July 1979 in Chicago—the period when Airplane! was filming—a disgruntled white radio station disc jockey named Steve Dahl organized and promoted a "Disco Demolition Night" at a baseball double-header in Comiskey Park, where disco records were blown up for a crowd that had swelled to as many as 50,000 protesters. The explosion damaged the field so badly that the second game had to be forfeited, and an ensuing riot of anti-disco demonstrators had to be dispersed by police. 

The filmmakers seemed to take the Chicago incident as fodder for a harmless joke—earlier in the picture, they used the disco hit "Stayin' Alive," with permission from the Bee Gees, in an innocuous flashback scene referencing John Travolta's iconic white-suited disco dance from 1977's Saturday Night Fever. Even Ethel Merman, who makes a cameo in Airplane!, released a disco album of her own in 1979.

In 1980, some audience members might have cheered when the plane killed the disco station. Today, sociologists widely interpret the anti-disco movement of the late 1970s as an expression by white working class Americans of racism, homophobia, and a resentment of urban culture.

In 1980, checking a piece of luggage on airlines cost nothing. It was, logically, considered part of the basic service (who travels without an extra set of clothes?) so checked luggage was included with your airfare.

When you checked your bag, which happened either at the terminal curb with a porter or at the check-in desk, a paper tag was affixed to your luggage that was printed with your destination's three-letter airport code—this was before bar codes were used—and a unique serial number. Passengers were given a claim check that matched the serial number, like a raffle ticket.

At most airports, it was the passenger's responsibility to ensure the serial number matched the luggage, just as it's true that airlines don't lift a finger to protect your luggage in the carousel area today.

Get more behind-the-scenes facts about the making of Airplane! from Surely You Can’t Be Serious: The True Story of Airplane! (St. Martin's Press), assembled by the filmmakers, David Zucker, Jim Abrahams, and Jerry Zucker.