The Flight of the Phoenix (1965)

Frank Towns: Your theory's fine, but you get this mister... that engine's rated at two thousand horsepower and if I was ever fool enough to let it get started up it'd shake your patched-up pile of junk into a thousand pieces, and cut us up into mincemeat with the propeller.

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Frank Towns: I've lost five men, Lew. Gabriel in there, he's on the way, that'll be six. Are you asking me to try to kill the rest of them trying to get a deathtrap off the ground. I don't know... I don't know, Lew. It won't work... it just can't work.
Lew Moran: All right, then, it can't. Maybe it can't and we'll all be killed. But if there's just one chance in a thousand that he's got something, boy, I'd rather take it than just sit around here waiting to die.

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Lew Moran: Maybe Frank Towns, who's flown every crate they've ever built and could fly in and out of a tennis court if he had to, maybe that great hell-for-leather trailblazer's nothing more than a back number now. And maybe men like Dorfmann can build machines that can do Frank Towns's job for him, and do it better

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Robert Aldrich wanted Barrie Chase to do her exotic dance topless, but she refused.
At least one of the aircraft used once flew for the US Marine Corps. The passenger information board inside the fuselage shows VMR-253, a USMC transport squadron, and R4Q-1, the military type designation, and the military serial, BuNo, 126580.
Director Robert Aldrich's son (William Aldrich) and son-in-law (Peter Bravos) are the first two casualties in the film, killed by falling cargo during the opening credits as the disabled plane is descending for its crash-landing.
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