User Reviews

These are my favorite kinds of twilight zone episodes- no one has any tragic flaw, no one has done anything wrong or is evil, but weird phenomena simply occur for no apparent reason. The banter of the stewardesses is a charming look into a bygone sensibility. I also enjoyed the pilot's tragic sense of responsibility and his wish to take care of his passengers. It was interesting how they pulled off the prehistoric leg of the journey viz. the dinosaurs on the ground with what were probably limited access to special effects.And incidentally, my first viewing of this episode many years ago was when I learned that JFK airport used to be called Idlewild. The final speech of the pilot, and Rod Serling's final voice-over is chilling. These people are possibly forever trapped in the twilight zone. What will they do for food? I guess eventually they will have to land in some time period just to survive, and deal with the consequences of temporal dislocation. Highly recommended.

This episode gives you a good idea of how The Twilight Zone would take a given concept and then rework it to produce a number of different stories. In the series' first season you had #1.18 - The Last Flight, in which a British fighter pilot from World War II found himself transported into a 1960's future via a mysterious cloud formation. Here the theme is used to generate a time travel story that carries an entire plane load of passengers back into the past while a worried Captain (John Anderson) valiantly attempts to set things right.

I found it interesting that the 1939 version of LaGuardia field cleared Runway 22 for the Global Flight emergency landing. The TZ episode aired prior to this one in 1961 was titled "Twenty Two", and ended with the mid-air explosion of Flight 22 after a harrowing story line. I have to wonder if this was all done on purpose by Rod Serling and his creative staff as some kind of nod and wink to the viewers. Pretty cool in any event.

The other cool thing watching early TV is catching references to place names of an era gone by, in this case, the mention of Idlewild Airport before it became John F. Kennedy International following the assassination of the President. I'm glad to see some viewers are learning a bit of history by watching one of their favorite shows.

Say, how come the cockpit crew managed to see dinosaurs on a prehistoric Manhattan Island and none of the passengers did? The bigger puzzler for me though was why the show ended the way it did without a successful resolution to the fate of Flight Thirty Three. The show did that occasionally, and I felt similarly perplexed with the ending of #1.11 - And When The Sky Was Opened. The outcome here is left hanging, perhaps allowing for the viewer to come up with an ending for themselves. But that's not the kind of short cut I was looking for here, and certainly not the fate those passengers should have expected to close out the story.

A jet airliner is returning to New York when the plane catches a tail wind which sends it through a time barrier from 1961 to the prehistoric age! How the crew get back home is the mystery in this absorbing sci-fi story as the jet airliner becomes "hungry" for fuel with passengers obviously becoming as worried as the pilots and stewardesses wondering how the hell they are to escape their current predicament. This episode spends almost the entire time inside the cockpit with the actors, John Anderson, Paul Comi, Harp McGuire, Wayne Heffley, and Sandy Kenyon communicating in "pilot speak", which feels entirely genuine and authentic, their fear, anxiety, and bewilderment understandable and reasonable. I liked the fact that these men, who could go apesh%t after seeing a brontosaurus chewing on leaves from a tree below(not to mention the absence of cities or people), remain level-headed and focused, determined to find a way back to the civilization they know. The ending, interesting enough, is certainly a haunting one, because trips through a time barrier could never possibly result in a positive outcome. The lack of jet fuel is another deterrent towards the pilots' goal to get home to their America. Good suspense scenes such as the dead air space, peculiar "speed" feeling Anderson has while traveling through the time barrier, and discoveries outside the plane only enhance the episode's already tip top performances from a solid cast of true professional television actors.

It is fascinating to contemplate the alteration to the time-line if Flight 33 had landed in New York in 1939. Since the Boeing 707 owed much of its layout to the B-52 strategic bomber, the US Army Air Corps would most likely reverse-engineer this gift into a military bomber, capable of outrunning any Axis fighter of the period, and flying at altitudes that would make it immune to enemy AA artillery fire. In a war where the enemy possessed nothing comparable until the Me262 jet fighter entered service in 1944, the air war over Germany and Japan would have been one-sided. Combine this with the passengers' historical knowledge of what was to come (the Battle of Britain, Pearl Harbor, the Soviet A-bomb spies, and the Cold War), the course of world history might have radically changed.

A commercial airliner finds itself transported back in time to the past after passing through a sound barrier. Can the flight crew find a way to return to the present before the plane runs out of fuel? Director Jus Addiss relates the riveting story at a snappy pace, ably crafts an intriguing air of mystery, and builds plenty of suspense. This episode further benefits from the way Rod Serling's smart script draws the flight crew in a realistic manner as consummate professionals who are thrust into a fantastic situation that's beyond their usual experience and ability to understand. The excellent acting by the top-rate cast rates as another significant asset, with John Anderson, Paul Comi, Sandy Kenyon, Wayne Heffley, and Harp McGuire all contributing strong and convincing portrayals of the bewildered flight crew. Moreover, Serling's admirable refusal to wrap things up in a neat little bow at the end results in this episode concluding on a chillingly ambiguous note instead. A knockout show.

I always enjoy this one. It's simple, unexplainable, and free of moral lessons.

Fight 33 is on its way from London to New York and passes through a time barrier -- "somehow, some way," as Captain John Anderson puts it.

It's done in low key. Nobody shrieks or tears his or her hair out over the fact that Flight 33 of Global Circumcisional Airlines has passed into some sort of time warp. There's a slight bump and a flash of light. The ground speed rockets. Finally, down below, there is Manhattan island, only there's nothing there but dinosaurs. The fact that 70 million years ago, Manhattan looked nothing like it does today is of no importance.

Pilot Anderson tries to bust back into the present by regaining altitude and pushing the air speed up. No dice. New York city looks more like New York, with skyscrapers and all that, but they're still suffering from jet lag. It's 1939 and no one on the ground has ever heard of radar, and there is no Idlewild Airport.

Anderson could have landed at LaGuardia and they'd all have been hailed as heroes -- this being 1939 and 1939 being a critical year in world history. But, no. Anderson decides to try again to get back to the 1960s, the fool.

Well, there may be no moral and no message, but it's full of suspense and surprises and is entirely entertaining.

Civilization disappears because of a sudden boom, giving airline pilots John Anderson and Paul Comi a brief view of a clay brontasaurus feeding where the museum of natural history would be in Manhattan. Then comes the second boom which brings them back on course over the city, but is it the right era? This science fiction time travel episode of "The Twilight Zone" is rather strange but engrossing, giving us the question of do we know everything that there is out there when we fly the not always friendly skies?

While this is a quite enjoyable episode, It's rather strange in the fact that there's no real bang in spite of the shaking that goes on aboard the aircraft. The surprises here are big, and there certainly could have been a continuation after the conclusion. Betty Garde, who went on to appear in one of the leads of a future major episode, plays one of the passengers here, but her role is really just a cameo, one of the ensemble rather than involved in the plot. I would call this a memorable episode simply for its twists rather than anything else in the episode, hence my lower rating for an episode that is probably considered one of the more popular.

In "The Odyssey of Flight 33" a transatlantic flight is caught in a wind current, increasing to unheard of speeds and discovering itself thrown into the past to the time of the dinosaurs. They must figure out a way to get themselves back to present day or risk being stuck in the past forever.

This was a really strong episode. It's a quiet one, we're in the cockpit for most of the runtime, but it has a palpable tension throughout. The acting is really good and even that claymation dinosaur isn't half-bad for the era.

I love that it ends on a cliffhanger too. We don't know where this plane ends up. It could still be flying around the Twilight Zone to this day...

A superb episode of the twilight zone remembered by almost everyone who saw it. the idea of a plane blundering into a predicament no one could possibly forsee much less guard against. the crew are heroic professionals who do their best to deal with an unsoluable problem.The horrible final joke that fate plays on them occurs when they think that they have escaped their dillemaonly to find that their solution to the problem is no solution at all.They have come back they think to the New York of 1961 only to find that it is the almost but not quite New York of 1939.In other words they have to hit it it exactly right,precisely right.Close doesn't count except in horseshoes.The Captain knows that they can't drop into 1939.it will cause to many problem,possibly disasterous. And the fuel of 1939 was aviation gasolene not usable in a jet.Jet fuel is kerosene with additives.Landing in 1939 is simply not feasible,they have no alternative but to keep trying to get back to theit own time however hopeless that is!

This is a very memorable Twilight Zone episode and without sounding ghoulish, I immediately thought of it following the tragic disappearance of MH370 in 2014.

One scene sticks out. As the flight takes off on its fateful trip, a flight attendant excitedly tells the pilots that at their destination one of her colleagues has a hot date or something like that. If this was a parody, I would expect the flight attendant to drop by the cabin during the flight crisis and exclaim "My colleague still has a hot date waiting!!!"

Wah Chang is the special effects supremo for The Odyssey of Flight 33, and at the time he would have been one of the few Americans of Chinese descent to be in this field, so good on him.

***SPOILERS*** On what first is a non eventful non-stop flight across the Atlantic Ocean in the spring of 1961 Flight 33 runs into what seems like a jet-stream accelerating it's speed to almost 3,000 mph. What's strange is that it's in fact flying at its normal 400 mph but the air that it's flying though is as much as ten times as fast! With the plane's Captain Farver, John Anderson, not being able to make heads or tails in what he and his plane is going through and at the same time trying to keep the passengers from panicking he decides to make a low level flight over Manhattan Island and finds to his surprise he had traveled back in time to the age of dinosaurs!

It takes a wile for Captain Farver and his crew to realize that Flight33 had somehow broken through the time barrier and with fuel running low he aims the plane into the same jet-stream in order to get back to the present before the plane crashes! Sure enough Captain Fraver does get caught into the mysterious Jet-stream and goes back into the future, the future after 60.000.000 B.C, but falls some 20 years short of his target 1961! Ending up flying his plane over Flushing Medows but this time it's 1939 the year of the New York World's Fair! Insteasd of landing and saving himself and his passengers & crew the Captain decides to give it just one more try and thus ends up, with his plane almost out of fuel, in danger of getting lost forever in a time and space black hole or crashing, in whatever time period he's in, into the dark and endless reaches of the "Twilight Zone".

P.S A lot like the real life episode of the now missing Flight 370 over the vast Indian and Pacific Oceans that has disappeared with its passenger & crew of some 250 into thin air some two weeks ago and as of today, March 19,2014, seems to have vanished into some kind parallel universe in the time/space continuum?

I'm generally interested in dramas based around aircraft, eg "Airport" is one of my all time favourite films, but sadly, Rod Serling let me down. I have every episode of the "Twilight Zone" but I can't bring myself to watch "King Nine Will Not Return" as we basically get one character who spends most of the episode bellowing at the top of his voice. I have "Sole Survivor" based on the same wreck in the desert, I probably watch that, every couple of months, though I am a big fan of Richard Basehart.

Here, the only thumbs up I can give is for the ever dependable John Anderson. Paul Comi was given little to do, other than ask Anderson to confirm what he'd seen, I always found him to be stiff, make that wooden. That saying that looks will get you everywhere.....

The aged trolley dolly was annoying beyond belief. She reminded me of the unwanted neighbour who invites himself to your home, drinks your beer/whiskey and clears your fridge of snacks then leaves. Her belly aching to the Capt about misbehaving kids was pretty unbelievable...she couldn't be there for her looks, yet she couldn't do her job either. Good thing that pilots get to lock the door these days.

As for the woman passenger, I dread getting someone like her sat next to me on a train, but at least I CAN get off at the next station, on a 707, you're stuck with her late aunt's liver, unless you can knit yourself a parachute. I'm sure that "Airport"'s villain, D. O Guerrero was just begging his bomb to go off early as Ada Quonsett-Hut was chewing his ear like an angry German Shepherd.

The ending here was classic "Twilight Zone" in that the viewer decides. I think "The Arrival" where we get to witness aircrash investigator Harold J Stone unravel because of "that one case he couldn't nail down" was far more fulfilling. Some say Flight 33 should've landed in 1939, think of the millions to be made...you know just what'll be popular in 1940..... By the way, does anyone know why a 707 navigator would be sitting in a garden chair?