You have to go pretty far back into movie history to reach a time before we were making movies about airplanes. The very earliest films saw us flying in a fantastical context (think of Georges Méliès and his Trip to the Moon), but it wasn’t long after the advent of the fixed-wing aircraft that movies began to imagine slightly more plausible airborne scenarios, with the flying aces of World War I serving as an early inspiration.
Many of the earliest movies involving airplanes were also war movies, but filmmakers realized relatively quickly that there was plenty of excitement to be found in the air even outside the realm of dueling biplanes, the 1920s and ‘30s being an era when human flight was only beginning to mature into a safe and convenient form of travel. Later, the air battles of the second World War provided decades of material for filmmakers. And, of course, there’s plenty of drama to be found on commercial airliners.
These are all films about the thrill of flying, inspired by the release of the long-delayed Top Gun sequel. Despite the mundanity of flying commercial, few of them suggest that air travel is in any way safe or peaceful. (There are few great movies to be made about soaring uneventfully through the clouds.) What these movies do provide are vicarious thrills for all of us who tend to clench our armrests a little too tightly during a slightly bumpy landing at Newark.