As Frank Sinatra’s standard Come Fly With Me rings out in John Travolta’s directorial debut, you’re left assured the actor, star of Grease, Get Shorty and Pulp Fiction, wants to take you for a ride. This one-hour movie, bowing on Apple TV after receiving its world premiere out of competition at the 2026 Cannes Film Festival, comes inspired by Travolta’s own love of the golden age of aviation, as he adapts his own 1997 children’s book, Propeller One-Way Night Coach.
The Sixties-style opening animated credits sequence sets the tone, orienting us to the time period. It’s December 28, 1962, at Idlewild airport. Jeff (debut actor Clark Shotwell) is an 8-year-old aviation enthusiast and he’s about to take his first ever plane ride, accompanying his actress-mother Helen (Kelly Eviston-Quinnett) as they zig-zag across the States on a TWA propeller plane, stopping at various destinations before reaching Los Angeles.
While it might be hard to grasp for modern audiences, back then, you’d save money by taking a circuitous airborne route across the States. And so Jeff and Helen board a series of flights, stopping in Pittsburgh, Dayton, Denver and Chicago along the way. Not that Jeff cares. “This would begin an experience I would never forget,” he says in the voiceover (provided by Travolta) that narrates his inner thoughts throughout.
Firing his boyish imagination, he is utterly captivated. “Why don’t people live in airplanes?” he ponders, as he and his mother take to the skies. Certainly, Travolta makes this era of flying utterly appealing, even travelling in cattle class. It’s a time when people dressed up to take such journeys, when the furnishings felt luxurious and the food and drinks service tasted divine. And, yes, you could still smoke on planes.
Emerging like a childish flight of fancy, Jeff’s journey is one of innocence to a little more experience. He witnesses his mother cuddle up to Harry, a lawyer from Pittsburgh, on one of the legs of their journey. But he’s not so naive that he doesn’t know what she’s doing. “Are you married?” he asks, impertinently, fully aware the man has a wife back home.
It’s not the only time he embarrasses her, telling the pilots in the cockpit that his mother is going to LA to make a movie with Paul Newman (when in fact, she’s just going there in the hope of finding work). He also develops a childish crush on Doris (the director’s daughter, Ella Bleu Travolta), the kindly air hostess, who makes sure his journey is one he’ll never forget.
Radiating Mad Men vibes (the drinking, the smoking, the couture, and the attitudes of the time), there are some amusing touches, notably the repeated serving of chicken cordon bleu, which turns Jeff’s stomach. Scored with a wealth of music from the era, it’s a romantic nostalgia piece that Travolta conjures, aided by gorgeous costumes and cabin interiors, and a surprise or two in the story along the way.
Some of it doesn’t quite ring true. Would an eight-year-old really comprehend that one of the stewardesses has “been in a concentration camp”, and know what that is? Probably not. But there’s a yearning in Propeller… for a simpler time, when air travel didn’t involve enormous queues, body scanners and putting your liquids in a tiny plastic bag.
With Travolta dedicating the film to his entire family, “all of whom are my life’s inspiration”, this old-fashioned tale may not appeal to kids today. But it’s hard to be down on a film that gets up in the air and back down to land inside an hour, entertaining its audience with wit and whimsy.
Propeller One-Way Night Coach is available on Apple TV from 29 May.
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