The new film by Clint Eastwood, Sully: Miracle on the Hudson, was made as an Imax movie, allowing you to share the near-death experience of hundreds of people on a screen as high as five double-decker buses. The Sully of the title is Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger, a veteran US Airlines pilot played by Tom Hanks. The miracle is the real-life forced water landing he made in New York after Canada geese struck his plane on the climb out of LaGuardia in 2009. So we see the geese, albeit fleetingly. We see the engines, lost in flames. And we see the lurching descent to the river, from the sky, from the cockpit and from inside the cabin, jolting and shuddering as 155 passengers weep and scream and send wrenchingwonder now if it was a scriptwriter.

The ties between film and flight go deep, the two born in the same era of clanking innovation. In 1895, the Lumière brothers publicly screened moving pictures in Paris. Just eight years later, Orville and Wilbur Wright briefly got the Flyer 1 aloft in Kill Devil Hills, North Carolina. From there, the new technologies conquered the 20th century. Films were fuelled by mass popularity; flight by the bloody demands of the first world war. Eventually, they dovetailed in the obsessions of Howard Hughes.

Aviation pioneer and production mogul Hughes directed the 1930 epic Hell’s Angels, an action melodrama about sibling fighter pilots. It was a box-office hit, earning back double a vast budget (for then) of $3.8m and establishing a public taste for