A história é "Flight into Danger", de John Castle e Arthur Hailey. Minha professora da 5ª série nos contou a história em 1977 e estávamos nas extremidades de nossos assentos! Ele obviamente influenciou Avião!
Aqui está a entrada da wikipedia:
Flight into Danger is a 1956 Canadian television film starring Corinne Conley, James Doohan (who became famous later as Scotty in Star Trek: The Original Series), Kate Reid, Zachary Scott and Philip Gilbert. The 60-minute teleplay was written by Arthur Hailey, produced and screened by CBC Television, and broadcast on August 20, 1956 in the General Motors Theatre strand. In 1957, it was adapted into the feature film Zero Hour! and, more famously, parodied in the 1980 comedy, Airplane!. Hailey and John Castle novelised the story as Flight Into Danger: Runway Zero-Eight (1958), which was dramatized in 1971 as a Movie of the Week, Terror in the Sky.
In the play, an ex-Spitfire pilot is forced to take the controls of a large passenger plane when the pilots fall victim to food poisoning. The original play was purchased for screening by the BBC in the United Kingdom and was a major factor in its producer Sydney Newman being brought across to work in the UK. There he made a significant impact on the British television drama industry.