Airplane! watch as "Otto" takes control of the plane, inflates a female companion, and takes off. Jerry Zucker, Jim Abrahams, and David Zucker (collectively known as Zucker, Abrahams and Zucker, or ZAZ), wrote "Airplane!" while they were performing with the Kentucky Fried Theatre, a small theatre they had founded in 1971. To obtain material for comedy routines, they routinely recorded late night television and reviewed the tapes later primarily to pull the commercials, a process Abrahams compared to "seining for fish". During one such taping process, they unintentionally recorded the 1957 film "Zero Hour!", and while scanning the commercials, found that
Stout Metal Airplane Stout Metal Airplane Stout Metal Airplane Division of the Ford Motor Company was an American aircraft manufacturer founded by William Bushnell Stout as the Stout Metal Airplane Co. in 1922. The company was purchased by Ford Motor Company in 1924 and later produced the Ford Trimotor. At the height of the Depression, Ford closed the aircraft design and production division in 1936, temporarily re-entering the aviation market with the production of the B-24, at the Willow Run aircraft factory during World War II. In 1909 Henry Ford lent three factory workers to his 15-year-old son Edsel, and Edsel's friend Charles