Best movies like Skyward

A real-time account of the events on United Flight 93, one of the planes hijacked on 9/11 that crashed near Shanksville, Pennsylvania when passengers foiled the terrorist plot.

Author Joel Garcia breaks his neck while hiking, and finds himself in a rehab center with Raymond, an exaggerating ladies man, and Bloss, a racist biker. Considerable tension builds as each character tries to deal with his new found handicap and the problems that go with it, especially Joel, whose lover Anna is having as difficult a time as he is.

A Hawaiian naval nurse weds a widowed officer partly because he has a crippled daughter.

Bill Marks is a burned-out veteran of the Air Marshals service. He views the assignment not as a life-saving duty, but as a desk job in the sky. However, today's flight will be no routine trip. Shortly into the transatlantic journey from New York to London, he receives a series of mysterious text messages ordering him to have the government transfer $150 million into a secret account, or a passenger will die every 20 minutes.

The true story of airman Douglas Bader who overcame the loss of both legs in a 1931 flying accident to become a successful fighter pilot and wing leader during World War II.

Based on Joni Eareckson's autobiography. She becomes paralyzed after breaking her neck in a swimming accident at age 17. Trying to cope with her new life, she learns to paint using her mouth.

Kelly Jordan and Andy Melton are former AAF fliers operating a cargo service over the South American mountain ranges in order to get enough money to return to Texas and buy a commercial line.

Chappy discovers a drug-smuggling scheme at his own air base. It turns out that the lives of some village people in Peru are at stake, and he decides to fly there with ancient airplanes and friends to free them.

When an in-flight collision incapacitates the pilots of an airplane bound for Los Angeles, stewardess Nancy Pryor is forced to take over the controls. From the ground, her boyfriend Alan Murdock, a retired test pilot, tries to talk her through piloting and landing the 747 aircraft. Worse yet, the anxious passengers — among which are a noisy nun and a cranky man — are aggravating the already tense atmosphere.

In 1940, the Royal Air Force fights a desperate battle against the might of the Luftwaffe for control of the skies over Britain, thus preventing the Nazi invasion of Britain.

In 1960, a pilot testing an experimental rocket powered aircraft accidentally flies into the future and finds himself in a sealed city whose people suspect he is a spy from outside their walls, but who want to keep him to procreate with the ruler's daughter because the majority of the inhabitants are sterile.

A young pilot in the German air force of 1918, disliked as lower-class and unchivalrous, tries ambitiously to earn the medal offered for 20 kills.

A seasoned pilot is condemned for an error which causes a crash. The pilot later dies in a crash with similar circumstances and an examiner looks for scientific reasons for the crashes.

Two pilots are in love with the same girl. On a flight over the Antarctic, the plane suddenly spins out of control and crashes into a snowbank. One of the pilots is injured and the other leaves him to die, so he can have the girl all to himself. However, the injured pilot survives and when he recovers he vows vengeance on the man who left him to die--especially after he finds out that he married the girl they were both after.

For Lieutenant Pete 'Maverick' Mitchell and his friend and co-pilot Nick 'Goose' Bradshaw, being accepted into an elite training school for fighter pilots is a dream come true. But a tragedy, as well as personal demons, will threaten Pete's dreams of becoming an ace pilot.

A draftswoman, the sister of an aging, alcoholic pilot, secretly uses her brother's ideas to solve design problems for an experimental military plane in an attempt to save the company and salvage her brother's reputation.

Betrayal and espionage abound as an experimental aircraft is readied for its maiden voyage.

Airplane passengers prepare for a crash landing in the ocean.

When an oil rig in the Gobi Desert of Mongolia proves unproductive, an aircraft crew are sent to shut the operation down and fly them out. On the flight out over the desert on the way to Beijing, Capt. Frank Towns and co-pilot A.J. are unable to keep their cargo plane, a C-119 Flying Boxcar, in the air when a violent sandstorm strikes. Crash-landing in a remote uncharted part of the desert, the two pilots and their passengers -- a crew of oil workers and a drifter -- must work together to survive by rebuilding the aircraft. Soon, low supplies and a band of merciless smugglers add even greater urgency to their task.

A cargo aircraft crashes in a sandstorm in the Sahara with less than a dozen men on board. One of the passengers is an airplane designer who comes up with the idea of ripping off the undamaged wing and using it as the basis for a replacement aircraft they will build to escape before their food and water run out.

After more than thirty years of service as one of the Navy’s top aviators, and dodging the advancement in rank that would ground him, Pete “Maverick” Mitchell finds himself training a detachment of TOP GUN graduates for a specialized mission the likes of which no living pilot has ever seen.

International Flight 42 is on course, when all of a sudden a massive and weird storm crops up around the plane. This sends the plane back in time to the year 1940- smack dab in the middle of WWII! Now, the crew and passengers must not only find a way back to their time, but fight off the Axis powers.

A military surgeon teams with a ranking navy flyer to develop a high-altitude suit which will protect pilots from blacking out when they go into a steep dive.

Flight 93 is a 2006 made-for-TV film, directed by Peter Markle, which chronicles the events aboard United Airlines Flight 93 during the September 11 attacks. It premiered January 30, 2006 on the A&E Network and was re-broadcast several times throughout 2006. The film focused heavily on eight passengers, namely Todd Beamer, Mark Bingham, Tom Burnett, Jeremy Glick, Lauren Grandcolas, Donald Greene, Nicole Miller, and Honor Elizabeth Wainio. It features small appearances from many other passengers, namely Donald Peterson and his wife, Jean, and also from flight attendant Sandra Bradshaw.

U.S. Navy pilot Lt. Jake Grafton and his bombardier buddy, Lt. Cmdr. Virgil Cole, are two soldiers embedded in the Vietnam War growing frustrated by the military's constraints on their missions. Despite the best efforts of their commanding officer, Cmdr. Frank Camparelli, to re-engage them, this disillusioned pair decide to take the war effort into their own hands with an explosive battle plan that could well get them court-martialed.

Amy is only 13 years old when her mother is killed. She goes to Canada to live with her father, an eccentric inventor who she barely knows. Amy is miserable in her new life... until she discovers a nest of goose eggs that were abandoned when a local forest was torn down. The eggs hatch and Amy becomes "Mama Goose". When Winter comes, Amy, and her dad must find a way to lead the birds South….

A propaganda film, made in the early months of World War II, dramatizing a new group of U.S. Army Air Force pilots receiving their wings from Lt. General H.H. Arnold. An off-screen narrator introduces four of them to us; we see them before the war, during flight training, and in their first assignments as pilots.

After an accident leaves her a paraplegic, a former soap opera star struggles to recover both emotionally and mentally, until she meets her newest nurse, who has struggles of her own.

Fictionalized story of British aerospace engineers solving the problem of supersonic flight.

An Air Force captain teaches pilots to fly jets but doesn't like it.

When Navy pilot Dale Heath takes off, he doesn't expect his navigational equipment to fail and must adapt when it goes out along with his radio. Heading straight for a commercial jet piloted by Dick Barnett, whose plane is full of passengers, Heath can't tell which way to turn in order to avoid a catastrophe.

At Portland, Oregon, playboy pilot Len Kendrick lands at the end of a cross-country record flight, met by his father J.P. Kendrick who owns Amalgamated Air Lines. Len is a media darling, adored by fans for his daring flights. He is in love with Amalgamated stewardess Kay Armstrong who is dating veteran pilot "Wad" Madison. Len dates her sister Penny who learns that his hard-drinking and recklessness has caused the death of his co-pilot. Penny knows that he was drinking before the fateful flight and only escaped prosecution by bribing a bartender. She leaves Len who ends up at Amalgamated as a line pilot, being tutored by Wad.

In the 1930s, once-great World War I pilot Roger Shumann performs as a daredevil barnstorming pilot at aerial stunt shows while his wife, LaVerne, works as a parachutist. When newspaper reporter Burke Devlin arrives to do a story on the Shumanns’ act, he quickly falls in love with the beautiful--and neglected--LaVerne.

War veteran pilots Dizzy Davis, Texas Clark and Jake Lee are working in an airline. Dizzy is fooling with one of the younger pilot's girl-friend and due to this he changes flights with Texas.

When terrorists try to seize control of a Berlin-Paris flight, a soft-spoken young American co-pilot struggles to save the lives of the passengers and crew while forging a surprising connection with one of the hijackers.

Kate Parks has spent the past year on tour promoting her book, an in-depth look at the attempted cover up of her husband's death in a plane crash. Now all she wants is to return home to her daughter, 15-year-old Samantha. But when a powerful solar flare strikes her flight home, killing the pilot, knocking out the co-pilot and frying all the electronic systems on the plane, it looks like she may not get there. As panic sets in among the passengers, Kate works with flight attendant Jake to manage the growing chaos and tension on the plane as she tries to keep 30,000 tons of steel hurtling through the air at 500 miles per hour. Flying blind, Kate tries to find a way to communicate with air traffic control - one way or another, this plane is coming down. With the passengers' lives on the line, Kate will have to find a way to land safely... or never see her daughter again.

An air-traffic controller quits after a plane crash but, years later, goes to help an airport that is in the path of a terrible storm.

Three airline hostesses combine their work crossing the Atlantic with searching for a rich handsome man to marry.

Citizens of San Francisco are stunned by the news that Robert Ironside, the city's hard-nosed, tough-talking chief of detectives, has been shot and left for dead while vacationing at his friend the Police Commissioner's rural retreat. Ironside survives the murder attempt, but the bullet has damaged nerves in his spine, leaving him a paraplegic. Unable to gain reinstatement as chief of detectives, Ironside gets permission to continue investigating criminal cases as a citizen volunteer. With the assistance of two former protegees, Det. Sgt. Ed Brown and Officer Eve Whitfield, and a newly-hired aide/driver, Mark Sanger, Ironside sets out to solve his first case as a civilian by finding the people responsible for the attempt on his life.

A convicted murderer is escorted by marshals on a regular flight from Phoenix to Dallas. Shortly after takeoff, two of his aides, traveling as ordinary passengers, take control and free him. He demands $20 million in bonds upon landing. And a sick passenger, bad weather or mechanical problems won't stop him.

When a new airplane that's equipped with a new computer that can fly the plane on its own, is about to have its first flight. But the son of the owner decides to upload more software, he doesn't bother to check if there are any viruses with it. And he also invites some potential investors to try it. So the plane appears to be working well but suddenly it veers off course and it can't be shut down. When the military learns of this and fears what if something happens if it's over a populated area; decides to shoot it down along with everyone on board. The man who built the computer whose wife is among the passengers thinks if he can get on board he might be able to shut it down and regain control of the plane. So the military using a new plane gets him on board. But what he didn't know is that both pilots are incapacitated so there's no one who can fly the plane.

On its maiden flight, the crew of America's first supersonic transport learns that it may not be able to land, due to an act of sabotage and a deadly flu onboard.

Director William A. Wellman adds another to his long line of salutes-to-aviation films in this bio of an aviation pioneer, John Montgomery (Glenn Ford.) In 1883 he built a practical glider despite the opposition of his friends, who thought he was crazy, and of his family, who were afraid that his dreams of flying would hurt his father's political ambitions. He pursues his education at Santa Clara University where the Jesuits lend a helping and understanding hand. An earthquake destroys what appears to be a working model for an airplane, but a gold-sorting machine Montgomery invented, and then neglected, promises to provide for his financial needs to keep working on his aircraft until he gets involved in costly lawsuits defending his invention.

Susan is a professional flautist who has been handicapped since childhood and is forced to wear a leg brace to get around. After breaking up with her boyfriend, she accepts the offer to travel to Europe on a concert tour. While in Paris, she comes up with an idea to disguise her leg by putting it in a cast and travel on her own to the French Alps to be treated without pity. Not looking to find romance, Susan however has become the interest of Peter, a news photographer. They soon fall in love and Susan is forced to decide if she should tell Peter the truth about herself.

Federal Airlines ace pilot Chick Faber is grounded by Flight Superintendent Bill Graves when a doctor says his eyesight is failing. Aided by Mary Norvell and Nan Hudson, Graves persuades Chick to take a job as teacher in the school for airline hostesses, and Chick and Mary get married. He learns that the Army is going to test a stratosphere plane that he and Artie Dixon designed and feels that he should make the first flight but permission is refused.

A bomb on board an airliner has an altitude-sensitive trigger. Unless a ransom is paid, it will explode when the plane descends to land.

Guy Martin helps restore XH558, the last airworthy Avro Vulcan bomber, to prepare it for its last ever flight, a 1000-mile farewell tour of Great Britain, before it is grounded.

An aircraft crashes in the Florida Everglades, killing 103 passengers. After the wreckage is removed, salvageable parts from the plane are used to repair other aircraft. Soon passengers and crew on those aircraft report seeing what they believe to be the ghost of the wrecked airplane's flight engineer.

Flight 90: Disaster on the Potomac is a true story based on the crash of Air Florida flight 90 on January 13, 1982 in Washington D.C. This movie follows the main players throughout the day, with a lot of care taken to re-create what actually went wrong, who died, and who survived. There is a lot of actual footage from the day, as well as accurate representations of aircraft type and airline.

Colonel Pete Moore (Glenn Ford) is commander of the Whitney Radar Test Group, which has been experiencing electrical difficulties aboard its aircraft. To ferret out the problem, he sends a four-man crew on Flight 412. Shortly into the test, the jet picks up three blips on radar, and subsequently, two fighters scramble and mysteriously disappear. At this point, Flight 412 is monitored and forced to land by Digger Control, a top-level, military intelligence group that debunks UFO information. The intrepid colonel, kept in the dark about his crew, decides to investigate the matter himself.