"The Sandbaggers" was created by Ian Mackintosh, a Scottish former naval officer turned television writer, who had previously achieved success with the acclaimed BBC television series "Warship". He wrote all the episodes of the first two series of "The Sandbaggers", but in July 1979, during the shooting of the third series, he and his girlfriend—a British Airways stewardess—were declared lost at sea after their single-engined aircraft went missing over the Pacific Ocean near Alaska, following a radioed call for help. Some of the details surrounding their disappearance have caused speculation about what actually occurred, including their stop at an abandoned United States Air Force base and the fact that the plane happened to crash in the one small area that was not covered by either U.S. or Soviet radar.