Second in the Airport quadrilogy, Airport 1975 puts cross-eyed stewardess Nancy (Karen Black, The Pyx) in the pilot’s seat when the 747 on which she serves coffee, tea and boilermakers accidentally collides head-on with a tiny, twin-engine plane.

That’s the fate that befalls the D.C.-to-L.A. commercial flight, disrupted by the sudden, rear-projected and laughably out-of-scale appearance of a Beechcraft Baron, due to a heart attack suffered by the man behind the stick (Dana Andrews, Curse of the Demon). The resulting hole in the 747’s cockpit sucks the co-pilot — or an obvious dummy stand-in — up and out to his doom, so have your finger ready on the rewind button; the scene’s a hoot.

Because Airport 1975 taxied in an era when women weren’t let near “a man’s job,” Nancy is judged ill-equipped to navigate the terrain and put the plane down in Salt Lake City, so airlines ops exec Joe Patroni (George Kennedy, reprising his role from the 1970 original) makes the Executive Decision for a midair transfer of someone more experienced via an umbilical cord from a helicopter. Even Nancy’s he-man boyfriend (Omega Man Charlton Heston) thinks the idea equates to insanity, to which a visibly vexed Patroni yells forcefully enough to provoke an aneurysm, “Goddammit, there isn’t any other way!”

Hollywood corn rarely comes as sweet as this enjoyably self-important sequel, directed by Jack Smight (The Illustrated Man) with costumes by the prestigious Edith Head. Actually released in 1974 no matter what the title says, Airport 1975 adheres to the rules of the decade’s white-hot disaster genre, namely in casting more stars than any movie needs. In the cockpit, we have Erik Estrada as the horndog navigator, but that was pre-CHiPs fame.

No matter — the cabin is jam-packed with has-beens, never-quite-weres and a couple of bona fide legends, including:
• a quip-happy Sid Caesar;
• folksinger Helen Reddy as a nun;
• Sunset Boulevard’s Gloria Swanson playing herself in what would be her cinematic swan song;
• Myrna Loy, Norman Fell, Jerry Stiller and Conrad Janis all trying to out-drink one another;
• and, most famously, The Exorcist’s Linda Blair as a girl being rushed to her kidney transplant — an audience-manipulative element that made for prime roasting material in 1980’s feature-length spoof, Airplane! —Rod Lott

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