Plot
In 2068, the New World Aircraft Corporation (NWAC) provides Brains, the inventor of the Thunderbird machines of the humanitarian International Rescue organisation, with an open brief to design a revolutionary aircraft. Although Brains is ridiculed when he proposes an airship for the 21st century, NWAC accepts his blueprints and builds Skyship One, which will circumnavigate the world on its maiden flight with pre-programmed stopover destinations. Alan, Tin-Tin, Lady Penelope and Parker will represent International Rescue as special guests. Brains, meanwhile, is forced to remain on Tracy Island when Jeff decides that International Rescue requires a Thunderbird 6. Contracted to design this latest addition to the Thunderbirds fleet with no specification, Brains produces a range of concepts, all of which are rejected by Jeff.
Alan and Tin-Tin travel to England in an old Tiger Moth biplane and join Penelope and Parker. As Skyship One embarks on its round-the-world voyage, the International Rescue guests are unaware that Captain Foster and the stewards have been murdered and replaced by agents in the pay of The Hood, who is operating under the alias of "Black Phantom" and is based at the disused El Hadim airfield near Casablanca in Morocco. Codenamed "White Ghost", the impostors are not required to demonstrate technical knowledge of Skyship One since it incorporates automated systems, meaning that the trip passes without incident as the airship visits such locations as New York, the Grand Canyon, then Rio de Janeiro and India.
Penelope has been warming to the dashing impersonator of Captain Foster, but uncovers a listening device in her room after Skyship One passes through the Egyptian Pyramids. Foster and his associates have secretly been recording and editing Penelope's speech to assemble a false transmission, which requests that Jeff dispatch Thunderbirds 1 and 2, with Brains on board, to El Hadim airfield where The Hood and his henchmen will be waiting to hi-jack the machines. When Skyship One makes its final stop in the Swiss Alps, Parker locates the editing equipment, but the transmission has been finished and is soon sent to John on Thunderbird 5. Alan determines the threat against International Rescue just in time for Penelope to contact Jeff in person and warn that Thunderbirds 1 and 2 are about to be ambushed. Dispatched by Jeff in accordance with the transmission, Scott and Virgil now open fire on and annihilate The Hood's hideout.
On Skyship One, Alan, Penelope and Parker battle Foster and his associates in a gunfight and kill two of the five White Ghost operatives, but are forced to surrender when Tin-Tin is captured as a hostage. One of the "Gravity Compensators" has also been damaged in the fighting, causing the airship to lose altitude. Crossing the English coast, it crashes into a radio mast at a missile base in Dover. With the airship balanced precariously on top of the mast and its anti-gravity field dropping, it is up to the Scott, Virgil and Brains to rescue all on board before it collapses onto the base. On Tracy Island, Gordon proposes that Alan's Tiger Moth, in storage at the NWAC Headquarters, is light enough to land on the airship without precipitating its fall.
Brains pilots the plane onto the top deck but is confronted by Foster and his two surviving associates. Holding Penelope hostage in the cockpit, Foster intends to abandon the others, but Alan shoots and kills the impostor. The Tiger Moth lifts off again with all hanging on to either the wings or undercarriage, just before Skyship One crashes to the ground and obliterates the evacuated missile base in a chain reaction. A shootout on board the Tiger Moth disposes of the last of the White Ghost agents, but a bullet has penetrated the fuel tank and the controls will not respond to Penelope. After narrow misses with a bridge on the unfinished M104 motorway and an exhaust tower, Alan and Penelope finally manage to ditch the plane into a field with Tin-Tin, Parker and Brains all unhurt. Back on Tracy Island, Brains unveils Thunderbird 6 as none other than the repaired, repainted and revamped Tiger Moth, which all agree has proven its value as a rescue aircraft.
Read more about this topic: Thunderbird 6
Famous quotes containing the word plot:
“There comes a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better for worse as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given him to till.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“After I discovered the real life of mothers bore little resemblance to the plot outlined in most of the books and articles I’d read, I started relying on the expert advice of other mothers—especially those with sons a few years older than mine. This great body of knowledge is essentially an oral history, because anyone engaged in motherhood on a daily basis has no time to write an advice book about it.”
—Mary Kay Blakely (20th century)
“Ends in themselves, my letters plot no change;
They carry nothing dutiable; they won’t
Aspire, astound, establish or estrange.”
—Philip Larkin (1922–1986)