Flightplan (Flightplan – Ohne jede Spur)

Working from Peter A. Dowling and Billy Ray's script, the German director Robert Schwentke made Flightplan in 2005, a psychological thriller built around a mystery. Touchstone Pictures and Imagine Entertainment produced it as a US-German co-production. Jodie Foster stars, with Peter Sarsgaard, Sean Bean, Erika Christensen and Kate Beahan; Matt Bomer makes his film debut.

Foster plays Kyle Pratt, a recently widowed American aircraft engineer living in Berlin. She flies to New York with her six-year-old daughter Julia and her husband's coffin. In flight she wakes to find the girl gone, while the crew insist no child boarded and no such name is on the passenger list. Kyle must search for her daughter and prove her sanity at the same time. The cramped two-deck aircraft and post-9/11 anxiety feed the tension.

The idea came from Dowling in 1999; Ray later took over the script, removed the terrorists and turned the lead into a woman, with Foster in mind. The premise recalls Hitchcock's The Lady Vanishes. The film opened in the US on September 23, 2005 and in Germany on October 20 and drew mixed reviews, yet grossed over $223 million on about $55 million and earned two Saturn nominations. Flight attendants' unions called for a boycott over its portrayal of cabin crews.