Trivia

This film features the original 1935 Hughes H-1 RACER. It set the transcontinental non-stop speed record on 1 January 1937 over a distance of 2,490 miles at and average speed of 332 mph taking 7 hr., 28min., 25 sec. The plane is on display at the National Air & Space Museum and was also featured in the movie The Aviator (2004). Only one was ever built, but subsequently several replicas have been fabricated.

Models were mostly used, but also notable is the use of footage of the experimental Hughes H-1 Racer during Howard Hughes record-breaking trans-American aircraft flight from Burbank, Calif., to Newark, N.J. in 1937.

It appears that the actual airport scenes were shot at Grand Central Air Terminal in Glendale, Ca. Howard Hughes had a hangar there which is logical as actual footage shows him in the HR-1.

This was the last film written by Nathanael West. He is the author of the critically acclaimed, scandalous 1933 novel Miss Lonelyhearts. Like fellow writers William Faulkner and F. Scott Fitzgerald, he rode his reputation to Hollywood in the 1930s, though unlike them he never won any first-rate assignments. Instead, he languished in B movies for four years, rarely making more than $350 a week. At the same time, however, he developed the material for his surrealistic Hollywood novel, The Day of the Locusts. RKO finally raised his salary to $400 a week on the strength of Men Against the Sky (1940)'s good reviews. He didn't get to enjoy his new success, however. Shortly afterward, he and wife Eileen McKenney West (the subject of the hit play My Sister Eileen) were killed when their car was hit by a train in El Centro, California, while returning from a hunting trip that had been overshadowed by the death of their friend F. Scott Fitzgerald. It wasn't until the 1950s that he would win fame as a major American novelist and critics would look back to his B movies for some sign of the mordant wit found in his novels.

Paul Mantz, noted movie stunt pilot, was the aviation consultant.

Men Against the Sky (1940) is based on a story by John Twist, with a screenplay by novelist Nathanael West, the film is about aircraft development and the dangers of flying in the period before World War II.