Today is one of those days when EVERY AIRPLANE ARRIVING IN LOUISVILLE is flying over my house. I’m directly in the flight path of all the UPS flights arriving from the north and only 3.5 miles from Muhammad Ali Airport, so jets are coming in really low and really loud.

So, it’s the perfect time to look at airline disaster movies.

I remember watching “Zero Hour!” as a kid in Brooklyn on an old black-and-white small screen television.

Dana Andrews was in some of the classic movies of the 1940s like the murder-mystery “Laura,” the anti-lynching “The Oxbow Incident” and the post-war study of PTSD “The Best Years of Our Lives.” But my favorite Dana Andrews movie was 1966’s “Hot Rods to Hell,” about a family drive across country that ended up being a game of chicken against juvenile delinquents. I mean, look at this trailer:

Is that great overacting, or what?!

I remember watching “Airplane!” as a 25-year-old in a theater in Pennsylvania.

“Airplane!” seemed really familiar, but I thought it was because of “Airport,” which had come out 10 years earlier. But look at the YouTube comparison at the top. The male leads have essentially the same name (Ted Stryker and Ted Striker).

And both movies had a Los Angeles pro athlete in the cast as pilots. The later movie had the NBA Hall of Famer Kareem Abdul-Jabbar of the Lakers. The older movie had NFL Hall of Famer Elroy “Crazylegs” Hirsch, a wide receiver for the Rams.

The real humor of Airplane was that Leslie Nielsen, Lloyd Bridges and Robert Stack, all considered serious dramatic actors, completely were out of character and took their long-established movie personas into the world of the bizarre. The poster above doesn’t even list them!

“Airplane!” was “Zero Hour” on LSD.