Hacker Cinema
No Highway in the Sky
1951 · Film · 98 min
Directed by Henry Koster
James Stewart plays aeronautical engineer Theodore Honey, the quintessential absent-minded professor: eccentric, forgetful, but brilliant. His studies show that the aircraft being manufactured by his employer has a subtle but deadly design flaw that manifests itself only after the aircraft has flown a certain number of hours. En route to a crash site to prove his theory, Honey discovers that he is aboard a plane rapidly approaching his predicted deadline.
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Nevil Shute was an engineer and he wrote some well respected novels like the nuclear war story On the Beach (made into a movie twice), A Town like Alice (made into a film and TV series), and No Highway (sometimes called No Highway in the Sky after the title of the film based on it), which actually deals with aircraft engineering and the problems involved in designing early jet airliners.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nevil_Shute
I recall first learning of "material fatigue" though the fictional movie No Highway in the Sky (1951) [1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Highway_in_the_Sky
One amazing story about this is that the film 'No Highway in the Sky' [1], which (almost) predicts this exact problem, was made a couple of years before these actual events took place.
[1] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0043859/