discovers that the fish served during meal service has caused food poisoning. With the flight crew incapacitated, Elaine contacts the Chicago control tower for help and is instructed by tower supervisor Steve McCroskey to activate the plane's autopilot, a large inflatable dummy pilot dubbed "Otto", which will get them to Chicago but not be able to land the plane. Elaine and Rumack convince Ted to take the controls. When Steve learns Ted is piloting, he contacts Ted's former commanding officer, Rex Kramer—now serving as a commercial pilot—to help talk Ted through the landing procedure. Ted becomes uneasy when Kramer starts giving orders and he briefly breaks down amid more wartime flashbacks. Elaine and Rumack both bolster Ted's confidence and he manages to once again take the controls. As the plane nears Chicago, the weather worsens, complicating the landing. With Elaine's help as co-pilot and Rex's guidance from the tower, Ted is able to land the plane safely, despite the landing gear shearing off, and the passengers suffer only minor injuries. Rescue vehicles arrive to help unload the plane. Impressed by Ted's display of courage, Elaine embraces and kisses him, rekindling their relationship. The two watch as "Otto" takes control of the plane, inflates a female companion, and takes off. Cast Production 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 theatre group they 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 it to be a "perfectly classically structured film" according to Jerry Zucker. Abrahams later described Zero Hour! as "the serious version of Airplane!". It was the first film script they wrote, completed around 1975, and was originally called The Late Show. The script originally stayed close to the dialog and plot of Zero Hour!, as ZAZ thought they did not have a sufficient understanding of film at the time to structure a proper script. ZAZ's script borrowed so much from Zero Hour! that they believed they needed to negotiate the rights to create the remake of the film and ensure they remain within the allowance for