There are plane movies—the sort that you might want to watch when you're stuck in the middle seat of a long flight—and then there are plane movies that are actually about planes. Given how a lot of movies about airplanes feature plane crashes, a lot of these sorts of plane movies may not actually be the best movies to watch when you're cruising at 20,000 feet. But if you're safely seated on a couch closer to sea level, there are few things better than an exciting, high-flying film.
These are 32 of the best plane movies ever made, and both passenger planes and military aircraft are represented. Most of the movies are action-packed in one way or another, which makes sense. Planes are exciting! They're hulking tubes of metal, and everybody inside is careening through the sky in seeming defiance of the laws of gravity. That's inherently cinematic. The only thing that could make that more thrilling would be something like, to pick a random example, releasing dozens of deadly snakes inside the plane.
32. Superman Returns
Year: 2006
Director: Bryan Singer
Superman Returns is kind of a dud and definitely doesn't top many lists of the best Superman movies around. While Brandon Routh is capable as the Man of Steel, the film is oddly morose, bogged down with fidelity to the Richard Donner films, and generally lacking in action. However, there's one scene that even the many critics agree is exceptional: the standout set piece where Superman rescues Lois Lane (Kate Bosworth) and the rest of the passengers on a crashing plane after an experimental space shuttle launch goes wrong. It's exhilarating, visceral, and seeing Superman contend with a plane as it plummets from the sky lives up to the promise of that very first Superman movie: you will believe a man can fly.
31. Twilight Zone: The Movie
Year: 1983
Directors: John Landis, Steven Spielberg, Joe Dante, and George Miller
The '80s Twilight Zone movie had four great directors, each tackling one of the best episodes of the classic anthology series. Mad Max director George Miller remade "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet," an iconic 1963 episode that starred William Shatner as a nervous flyer who sees some sort of gremlin outside tearing the wing of the plane apart—but he can't get anybody to believe him. The movie version stars John Lithgow, and while it's a bit more action-packed and lacks a little bit of the scrappy charm of the original, it's still pretty fun.
30. Shadow in the Cloud
Year: 2020
Director: Roseanne Liang
There's a good 20 or so minutes near the beginning of Shadow in the Cloud that are legitimately great. Chloë Grace Moretz stars as a flight officer who boards a B-17 Flying Fortress as part of a secret mission during World War II, and while she's inside one of the gun turrets, she spies some sort of winged creature outside of the plane. She's trapped inside the turret, and the viewers are trapped there with her, so we can only hear the rest of the crew on the radio as they struggle to deal with this gremlin. It's tense, tight filmmaking that almost feels more like a radio play in a really effective way. Once she gets out of the turret, though, Shadow in the Cloud gets a lot stupider and sloppier—though not without some goofy highs.
29. Flight Risk
Year: 2025
Director: Mel Gibson
Mark Wahlberg, sporting a very unflattering haircut, plays a hitman who has disguised himself as a pilot in order to take out an informant (Topher Grace) and the Deputy U.S. Marshal protecting him (Michelle Dockery) while they're on a small airplane flying to Anchorage. Even though Dockery's character begins to suspect that the pilot isn't who he claims to be, she's not in the clear: this would-be assassin is the only person who knows how to fly and land the plane. A late-era Mel Gibson thriller, Flight Risk is a fairly pulpy movie, and it doesn't purport to be anything more than it is.
28. Redtails
Year: 2012
Director: Anthony Hemingway
Making a movie about the Tuskegee Airmen, a famed Black group of the United States Army Air Force during World War II, was a longtime passion project for George Lucas, and Lucasfilm made a rare non-Star Wars or Indiana Jones movie about them in 2012. Starring Terrence Howard and Cuba Gooding Jr., Redtails is clearly well-intended and not without its thrills and moving moments, though it's held back by cliches, flat characters, and a tone that some critics thought was too upbeat.
27. Plane
Year: 2023
Director: Jean-François Richet
Perhaps the most perfectly named movie ever made, Plane stars Gerard Butler as the pilot of a plane (hence the title) who is flying over the South China Sea when lightning strikes, causing his plane to make an emergency landing. He manages to land on an island, but a rebel sect operating out of the island takes the passengers hostage, and only Butler's pilot and a criminal who was aboard the plane to be extradited (Mike Colter) can save them. Plane is good, though regrettably once they land very little of it takes place on, you know, the plane. (It comes back near the end, though, and there's an incredible use of the plane's landing gear that shouldn't be spoiled other than to say it's pure cinema.)
26. Snakes on a Plane
Year: 2006
Director: David R. Ellis
At one point during the production of Snakes on a Plane, the movie was going to be retitled Pacific Air Flight 121. Samuel L. Jackson, who stars as an FBI agent protecting a witness on a flight that the mob has released dozens of deadly snakes on, strongly objected to this change. And he was right! So much of Snakes on a Plane's power comes from the fact that it's just called "Snakes on a Plane." It's exactly what it says on the tin. The actual film is silly enough but underwhelming, though to be fair, anything is going to be underwhelming compared to what you might imagine a movie called Snakes on a Plane might be.
25. Non-Stop
Year: 2004
Director: Jaume Collet-Serra
Released four years before Taken truly cemented Liam Neeson's late-career turn as an action star, Non-Stop was a preview of his genre chops. Neeson stars as a Federal Air Marshal on a flight from New York City to London. When he starts getting threatening texts, it sets off a chain of events involving murders in the sky and a bomb threat—and he's being framed as the suspect. It's an absurd movie, but if you can endure the logical turbulence, it's not a bad ride as an actioner.
24. Flight
Year: 2012
Director: Robert Zemeckis
Most of this drama deals with the aftermath of William "Whip" Whitaker Sr.'s (Denzel Washington) incredible crash-landing; it's a character study about addiction that is perhaps goofier than it seems to realize. The crash itself, though, is incredible; when both engines go out, Whip stays impossibly cool under pressure, turning the plane upside-down at one point. It's certainly up there with the greatest plane crashes in cinema history. (The crash in Cast Away, another Robert Zemeckis movie, is probably the scariest crash in any movie, though it's debatable if enough of the movie is plane-focused to make it count as an airplane movie.)
23. Carry-On
Year: 2024
Director: Jaume Collet-Serra
Carry-On is exactly what you hope a mid-level Netflix action flick will be. Taron Egerton stars as a TSA agent at LAX who is working on Christmas Eve when a terrorist (Jason Bateman) blackmails him into letting a nerve agent through security. Can Ethan (Egerton) figure out how to thwart this terrorist attack without the mastermind hurting his pregnant girlfriend, who also works at the airport? A bunch of people looking for something to watch on Netflix around the holidays in 2024 streamed Carry-On to find out, and they were not disappointed.
22. Passenger 57
Year: 1992
Director: Kevin Hooks
A pre-Blade Wesley Snipes stars as Chief John Cutter, a former cop, soldier, and Secret Servant agent who currently works security for an airline during the '90s flick Passenger 57. While on a flight from the United Kingdom to Los Angeles, Cutter's plane is hijacked by terrorists who wish to free their leader (Bruce Payne), who had been captured and was in custody and en route to his trial. It's the same basic formula that Con Air and Air Force One would perfect five years later, though it's never not fun to see Snipes in a movie.
21. Society of the Snow
Year: 2023
Director: J. A. Bayona
The harrowing story of Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571 (a flight whose passengers, including the national rugby team, were stranded in the Andes Mountains for two-and-a-half months without food) had previously been adapted into a movie, 1993's Ethan Hawke-led Alive. However, J. A. Bayona's 2023 Netflix movie is more intense, unflinching, and ultimately inspiring, and the plane crash that starts the whole ordeal is seat-grippingly difficult to watch, as it should be. Society of the Snow is one of the best drama movies you can watch, as well as a great plane flick.
20. Airport
Year: 1970
Director: George Seaton
This star-studded disaster movie, about a bomb threat on a plane during a snowstorm, was a massive success when it came out. Unfortunately for it, Airport's place in history has largely been eclipsed by Airplane!, the 1980 spoof movie that parodied Airport and other big disaster flicks of the era. Even so, Airport—the genuine article—is a good movie, and you can see why it was such a success… even if you do keep waiting for Leslie Nielsen to pop in with a deadpan one-liner.
19. Flightplan
Year: 2005
Director: Robert Schwentke
Like many of the best thrillers that are primarily set in an airplane, Flightplan takes full advantage over how inherently confined the setting is. Once you're up in the air, there's nowhere to go other than the inside of the plane. Jodie Foster stars as a widowed mother on a flight from Berlin back to the United States with her 6-year-old daughter. When she falls asleep, she wakes up to discover that her daughter is missing, and nobody on the plane has any memory or any record of her having a child with her in the first place. It's a locked-room (err, locked-fuselage) mystery as Foster's character tries to find her little girl and prove she's not crazy.
18. Up in the Air
Year: 2009
Director: Jason Reitman
George Clooney stars in this drama as a man whose job as a corporate downsizer (read: the guy who tells you you've been laid off) is constantly flying from place to place. As he attempts to train a new hire (Anna Kendrick) and show her all his frequent flying tricks, he begins to suffer a crisis of conscience. Up in the Air is not subtle about its metaphor—Clooney's mercenary life in the skies means he doesn't really have a home or a purpose—but it's a well-done film that taps into the darker side of flying as a liminal space.
17. Final Destination
Year: 2000
Director: James Wong
Only the opening scene of Final Destination takes place on an airplane, but the impact of the ill-fated Flight 180 is too big to not consider the film to be an excellent plane movie. Devon Sawa stars as a high school student who has a horrifying premonition that the plane he and his classmates are on is going to explode shortly after takeoff, killing them all. He manages to get off the plane, which does indeed explode. However, it seems Death wasn't done with them; the "survivors" begin to die in grotesquely elaborate ways.
16. Top Gun
Year: 1986
Director: Tony Scott
"I feel the need—the need for speed!" Tom Cruise's first stint in the cockpit as Pete "Maverick" Mitchell isn't quite as immaculately thrilling as the sequel almost 40 years later, but the original Top Gun is an exceptional '80s action classic. Tony Scott, a master at this type of stuff, pulls off the deceptively difficult job of making the speeding F-14A Tomcats actually look like they're going as fast as they are on the big screen, something that's hard to convey when they're cruising through the skies with no points of reference.
15. Con Air
Year: 1997
Director: Simon West
Nicholas Cage, in one of his most-Nicholas Cage-y roles, stars as Cameron Poe, a former Army Ranger and stand-up guy who was sentenced to a stint in jail after he accidentally killed somebody in self-defense following a fight at a bar. When he's freed from prison, he's eager to meet his daughter for the first time and catches a ride with an airplane transporting other, actually dangerous criminals. When the bad guys, led by Cyrus "The Virus" Grissom (John Malkovich), hijack the plane, only Poe can save the day. Con Air is absurd, and it rules.
14. Zero Hour!
Year: 1957
Director: Hall Bartlett
Zero Hour! is another one of the old movies that Airplane! was riffing on when it spoofed the aerial disaster genre, and in fact, the 1980 comedy's plot is most directly lifted from this 1957 flick. All the same, it's a good movie, starring a haunted World War II pilot who, in the years after the war, finds himself aboard a passenger plane when the pilot and co-pilot get incapacitated. Though he hasn't flown in years—and has never flown anything this big—he's the only hope of getting them safely on the ground. While watching, it probably helps to pretend that you've never seen Airplane! before.
13. The Wind Rises
Year: 2013
Director: Hayao Miyazaki
Hayao Miyazaki is famous for his love of airplanes, and he is also famously a pacifist (a contradiction the great anime director is well aware of). He explores this disconnect in his 2013 film The Wind Rises, the only one of his films to be based on a true story and set in the real world. It's a (somewhat fictionalized) biopic of Jiro Horikoshi, an engineer who wanted nothing more than to build beautiful, powerful flying machines. But, because he was alive and working during World War II, he was creating weapons of war, like the A6M 'Zero' fighter. This deadly fighter was also infamous for its use in kamikaze missions near the conflict's conclusion. Is his creation worth the cost? Can it be?
12. Five Came Back
Year: 1939
Director: John Farrow
A classic '30s melodrama that helped invent the disaster film as a genre, Five Came Back follows a group of passengers on a small plane flying to Panama City, ranging from a young couple eloping to a convicted killer being extradited. When it crashes in a dangerous and remote part of the Amazon rainforest, the survivors must attempt to make it back to civilization. And, well, the title is a bit of a spoiler as to how many of them make it back. It's also notable as an early role for Lucille Ball.
11. The Flight of the Phoenix
Year: 1965
Director: Robert Aldrich
James Stewart, Richard Attenborough, Peter Finch, Ernest Borgnine, and many more star in this classic survival flick about a cargo airplane that crashes in the Sahara Desert. With no chance of rescue, their only hope is to build a new, functioning plane out of the wreckage of their original aircraft, though even with one airplane designer among the survivors, it is a long shot. The Flight of the Phoenix is a tense, well-made work of '60s Hollywood. However, the 2004 remake (which stars Dennis Quaid) can be avoided.
10. Air Force One
Year: 1997
Director: Wolfgang Petersen
Harrison Ford stars as one of the greatest fictional presidents in movie history, playing the POTUS when terrorists supporting a neo-Soviet sect led by Egor Korshunov (Gary Oldman) hijack the plane. President James Marshall initially escapes capture; however, and rather than eject to safety, the commander-in-chief decides to fight back and kick the terrorists off of his plane. It's a great premise and makes for one of the best action romps of the '90s.
9. Sully
Year: 2016
Director: Clint Eastwood
The Miracle on the Hudson, when Chesley "Sully" Sullenberger safely landed his plane in New York City's river after his plane lost both engines shortly after takeoff, is an astounding event. Not one of the 155 people aboard died or was even injured. Clint Eastwood's movie about the event, which stars Tom Hanks as Sully, isn't especially flashy. It doesn't need to be; it's just a tight film about impossible grace under pressure and dealing with the aftermath of such an impressive and traumatic experience.
8. United 93
Year: 2006
Director: Paul Greengrass
Paul Greengrass's film about United Airlines Flight 93—the only one of the four planes that were hijacked on 9/11 that didn't reach its intended target, thanks to the heroic actions of the passengers—is a difficult watch. As well it should be; it's a harrowing and emotional movie about a still-raw event, and Greengrass wisely avoids exaggerating or artificially raising the stakes. They're high enough, and the film treats the story with the dignity it deserves.
7. Catch Me If You Can
Year: 2002
Director: Steven Spielberg
Stealthily a great Christmas movie in addition to being a great airplane movie, Steven Spielberg's snazzy crime drama stars Leonardo DiCaprio as a con artist who jetsetted around the country and made gobs of money posing as a Pan American World Airways pilot and forging checks. Tom Hanks plays the FBI agent who pursues him, and they have a bunch of close calls, several of which take place during the holiday season. It's a delightfully stylish game of cat and mouse, though there's an earnest emotional heart underpinning it all. Catch Me If You Can also features a great score by John Williams.
6. Airplane!
Year: 1980
Directors: Jim Abrahams, David Zucker, and Jerry Zucker
Jim Abrahams, David Zucker, and Jerry Zucker—who collectively went by ZAZ when they directed a film—spoofed the trend of star-studded '70s disaster movies like Airport (as well as older films like Zero Hour) and created one of the funniest comedies ever made. Airplane! is astoundingly, beautifully joke-dense, full of clever quips and gags that are so stupid they loop all the way back around to being sublime. It's also the movie responsible for Leslie Nielsen's turn as a comedic actor; prior to his hilariously deadpan turn as a doctor aboard the troubled airliner, he was a more traditional dramatic player.
5. The Aviator
Year: 2004
Director: Martin Scorsese
Leonardo DiCaprio stars as the eccentric innovator, businessman, filmmaker, and pilot Howard Hughes in Martin Scorsese's biopic. As you might imagine from all those descriptors, it's an epic, as Hughes led a fascinating life. The movie covers his escapades in the cockpit, his relationship with Katharine Hepburn (played by Cate Blanchett, who became the first person to win an Oscar for playing somebody who had won an Oscar), and Hughes's struggle with obsessive compulsive disorder.
4. Doctor Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb
Year: 1964
Director: Stanley Kubrick
Putting Doctor Strangelove on a list of great plane movies might be stretching the limits of what counts as a plane movie—many of the best sequences of Stanley Kubrick's black comedy about nuclear holocaust take place on the surface or in underground bunkers—but it's all because of an airplane. An unstable brigadier general, Jack D. Ripper (Sterling Hayden), has ordered a thermonuclear strike on the Soviet Union, and the rest of America is scrambling to stop the plane. However, Major T. J. "King" Kong (Slim Pickens) is determined to carry out the mission his B-52 bomber has been assigned. (For a non-satirical take on this same premise, check out Sidney Lumet's Fail Safe, released the same year as Doctor Strangelove.)
3. Wings
Year: 1927
Director: William A. Wellman
The first movie to win Best Picture at the Oscars (and the only silent film to do so), Wings is a thrilling war epic that still astounds a century later. The film follows two World War I fighter pilots who join the Army Air Service at the same time and develop a rivalry over their mutual attraction to a girl (Clara Bow)—but there's camaraderie there, too. The dogfights and action in Wings are visceral and exciting despite its age, perhaps because the only way to film such scenes back then was to actually record real planes flying through the air and doing incredible stunts.
2. Top Gun: Maverick
Year: 2022
Director: Joseph Kosinski
Tom Cruise saved the day and arguably saved cinema when he returned as Pete "Maverick" Mitchell in this sequel to the '80s classic Top Gun. Released as theaters were opening up again after the pandemic, Top Gun: Maverick is the ultimate popcorn movie. Following Maverick as he trains a new crop of pilots for a dangerous mission against an unspecified enemy, the film's plot is generic (if you've seen even a handful of action movies, you can probably see every beat coming), but that doesn't matter when the execution is this sublime, the characters so fun, and the sequences of aerial action so exhilarating.
1. Porco Rosso
Year: 1992
Director: Hayao Miyazaki
Perhaps Hayao Miyazaki's most joyous work—and the one that's the most unabashed celebration of the anime legend's love of airplanes—Porco Rosso is a delightful story about a pilot pig, air pirates, scrappy engineers, and resisting fascism. Porco Rosso (Michael Keaton in the English dub) was an Italian World War I flying ace who was cursed to have the head of a pig. Still, he's spending his interwar years chilling and moonlighting as a mercenary pirate hunter in the Adriatic in his specialized seaplane. When the pirates pool their resources to hire a cocky American ace (Cary Elwes in the dub) to take him down, it sets the stage for a duel, all while Porco is trying to avoid the new fascist Italian government. It's a truly wonderful, delightful film.
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