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Ceiling Zero (by Frank Wead; Brock Pemberton, producer). The cycle of breezy institutional drama started by The Front Page has exploited the Salvation Army (Torch Song), the circus (Privilege Car), the side show (The Great Magoo), the hospital (Men in White) and even the penny arcade (Penny Arcade). But until Ceiling Zero came along, no playwright had felt qualified to dramatize the excitement and color surrounding the operations of a commercial airline. That job has fallen to Lieut. Commander Frank Wead, U. S. N. retired, leader of the Navy's 1923 Schneider Cup squadron, who turned to fiction and the cinema after he broke his neck by tumbling down a stairway at his San Diego home nine years ago.
In Ceiling Zero, Dizzy Davis, presented as the daredevil-great lover of the aeronautical world, goes back to work for Federal Air Lines at Newark, where he disrupts a pure romance between a hostess and the chief pilot, is partly responsible for a friend's fatal crash and at last goes out to die heroically in a fog over the Alleghenies. All this is accompanied by a buzz of ribaldry and shop talk (a program glossary explains that "cotton," "dirt," "gloom," "goo" and "bird-walking weather" all mean fog) from an assorted crew of mechanics, Government inspectors, plane manufacturers, insurance adjusters and fliers presided over by saturnine Osgood Perkins as the hard-bitten division superintendent.
There is one spectacular scene in which an aviator, whose receiving set has gone dead, is heard talking and joking by radio to the ground force just before he cracks up virtually onstage in an attempt to land in a fog. Largely because of this harrowing sequence, and the arrant Boy Scoutism among the pilots off duty, Ceiling Zero does not make a convincing advertisement for air travel.