mid-air derring-do. But success didn’t come cheap. Three pilots died making the film, with Hughes obliged to perform the climactic stunt himself. He crashed.

As commercial air travel grew, so did the appetite for movies about planes in trouble – John Wayne would star in The High and the Mighty (1954), later inspiring the goofery of Airplane! It was the age when something that for all human history had been unthinkable – travel above the clouds – began to verge on the commonplace. Still, every successful landing was a small triumph for science and progress. On screen, to save a flight was to save the onward march of mankind.

Denzel Washington was nominated for the Academy award for best actor for his role in Flight, 2012. Photograph: AP

For Hughes, therewere more crashes. The most notorious was the 1946 test flight of a military spy plane launched from his airfield at Culver City, California, close to the home of MGM and the soundstages where they shot The Wizard of Oz. High over Los Angeles, Hughes found himself unable to stop the plane going into an uncontrolled descent that ended in the decapitation of a Beverly Hills mansion. The crash turned up as an extended scene in The Aviator, Martin Scorsese’s biopic of Hughes, the director using all the va-va-voom you would expect as Leonardo Di Caprio hurtled to earth. The real Hughes was left with third-degree burns and his heart forced into the right side of his chest by the impact.

For any director, you can see how a