One of Christopher Reeve's hobbies was flying. At the time the movie was made and released, Reeve flew his own six-passenger twin engine Beechcraft plane. Reeve was a qualified pilot with around 2,000 hours flying experience and had commercial, instrument, and multi-engine ratings. Reeve once said: "I thought it would be fun to mix acting and airplanes. Flying is something that comes naturally to me; it certainly helped me with Superman."
Though set in the northwestern United States, this movie was actually shot in the former Yugoslavia.
In his biography, Christopher Reeve claims this film's failure, along with Street Smart (1987), Switching Channels (1988), and Superman IV: The Quest for Peace (1987), knocked him off the A-list in Hollywood, and as such, Reeve would have to read or audition for major roles for the rest of his career.
To prepare for his role as a mail aviator, Christopher Reeve studied the history of mail flight of the period the film was set. Reeve once said: "Although the life of a mail pilot in 1928 was specialized and may seem a little remote, people will understand him. There was an article in a 1926 National Geographic about this new daring breed of men written much the same way they wrote about the astronauts in the sixties. They were cheating death. If you got to be thirty-five, you were known as an old pilot."
In his autobiography "Still Me" (1998), Christopher Reeve said: "The producers had no idea that I could actually fly a Stearman, but agreed with me that if I did my own piloting, we would have opportunities to make the film more realistic than if we use a double. I could throw a couple of mailbags into the plane and then hop in, start the engine, and take off, all in one shot. We would also be able to film air-to-air from a helicopter instead of having to cut to close-ups shot in the studio."