Goofs

The wreckage of the airplane is a tubular structure, meaning it was fabric covered. It was also a tandem cockpit. However, the airplane they were in was clearly a Cessna 172 with bulkheads, formers, and aluminum skin. It has side-by-side seating.

When Tommy Brown fell after being punched, his guitar's neck is pointing toward the camera. In next shot, the guitar lies in the opposite direction.

Columbo calls out to a mechanic working on an airplane in the hangar. The mechanic looks up and stands up straight. A second later, the mechanic is back under the cowl of the airplane working on the engine as if he never stood up.

The opening musical sequence includes footage from a live Johnny Cash performance, but the microphone used in the shots filmed for the episode differs from the microphone held by Cash in the live performance footage.

The cabin heater control on the plane is actually the alternator switch. It was just relabeled with a Dymo label.

The cabin heater in the aircraft being flown is operated by pulling a mechanical knob. Tommy Brown turns off the heater with a switch. The switch appears to be one appropriate for the aircraft, relabeled from some other function.

Tommy Brown says he's a licensed pilot; however, he violates a primary duty of a pilot. When he gets to the Bakersfield airport, he gets in the plane and goes his merry way. In reality, a pilot would do a pre-flight on the plane, including walking around the plane, checking the oil, engine, air-frame, etc.

Tommy Brown says he always takes a nap before he flies at night. Not being instrument-qualified, he would never fly at night.

As is typical in such depictions, Tommy uses his crutch on the injured side. But in order to relieve the pain and stress, the crutch would be better used on his good side to allow him to lean away from the injury and bear his weight. However this is a behavior many people do in real life, and it is still somewhat helpful.

When Columbo is talking to Mr. Grindell the funeral director, he says that his wife does all the shopping, but in Double Exposure (1973), Columbo mentions that he always does the grocery shopping.

However, Columbo masters the art of telling what is needed to hear to produce the intended response from the other person.

Columbo claimed that he realized Tommy Brown did not return his rental car at the Los Angeles airport when he noticed the rental tag on Brown's keys as Brown went through the security checkpoint. But since Columbo followed Brown to the airport, he already would have seen that Brown did not return his rental car, but rather left the car in a regular parking space.

However, Columbo probably did not know that it was a rental car and realized when seeing the policeman's keys that what he saw earlier was indeed a rental car tag.

The views of the plane in flight are reversed images. The N-number is seen backwards.

When Tommy is playing with the band in the back yard, it can be heard his singing is amplified. However, there is no microphone.

As Tommy Brown throws out the thermos, it can be seen that he is pushing hard on the door to open it. However, when he prepares to bail out, he first opens the door and then grabs his chute. It is clear that the door opens by its own weight.

The building where Edna Basket Brown's funeral celebration takes place is the same building (or facade) where The Great Santini in Now You See Him (1976) is performing his show.

There are several mistakes when Tommy is in the cockpit and the plane is in flight. The exterior shot shows the plane yawing and rolling, yet the yoke remains almost constant. A few shots of the RPM indicator show zero. When Tommy is putting on his parachute, he lets go of the yoke despite the turbulent flying conditions. The yoke eventually slides all the way forward which should indicate a severe dive, but the plane appears to still be flying evenly, and the altimeter does not move.

Edna Brown reminds Tommy Brown that she rescued him from a prison farm to help her build her tabernacle. When Tommy threatens to quit the crusade, she reminds him that he is guilty of the Mann act bringing an underage girl to a motel - and says "No, you won't quit the crusade! Statue of Limitations hasn't run out yet". What kind of holy evangelist is she to blackmail an ex-con?! let alone not report him to the authorities. Surely the Lord couldn't have sanctioned her to do such a thing.

When Columbo is on the phone pretending to set up a search party with the boy scouts, Tommy is strumming his guitar in the background. Tommy stops strumming but a final chord is still played.

Columbo tells Tommy Brown that he hears a difference in the musical arrangements of "I Saw the Light". The original one featured the murdered girl, who was a soprano. The second version was arranged for the new girl, who Columbo says is a contralto. But a contralto is lower, not higher, than a soprano, and the audio quite clearly demonstrates the addition of a much higher soprano voice to the vocal harmony. The writers should have reversed the voice designations.

John Dehner (who plays the aircrash investigator, Mr Pangborn) makes a mistake during the scene where he is examining the crash site. He says "The Pilot" then quickly changes it to "passengers" when he realises he has said the wrong thing. This could have been re-recorded, but they must have decided to leave it in.

When Columbo questions Tommy about the arrangement changes to his recording of "I Saw the Light", he plays his guitar. Johnny Cash plays a typical chord pattern, but it not the one that is heard. For example, the first chords heard (not accounting for the capo) are G, Em C, and D. What Johnny actually plays is G, C, D7th back to G and so on. Not only is the pattern wrong, but the timing of the changes become very noticeably out of sync. Cash is an accomplished guitarist, so there was no reason to fake his playing other than possibly for better sound quality. He may have gone through the motions of playing silently. Whoever added the track later was careless in not even coming close to matching what he was playing.

The odds of Tommy's parachute landing being anywhere near the scene of the plane crash would be near zero, especially since the plane continued flying after Tommy jumped out. Yet, Tommy managed to limp to the crash site on his injured leg.

The shadow of the boom mic can be seen on the wall in the upper left corner when Tommy Brown (Johnny Cash) and Edna Basket Brown (Ida Lupino) are arguing in the dressing room.

Columbo says that a Thermos is "metal inside glass". In fact, vacuum bottles are invariably glass inside metal; they wouldn't work the other way around.

When interviewing Tommy Brown for the first time Columbo says, "...that's what started your brother-in-law thinking you had something to do with murdering his sister." His phrasing wrongly implies he already deems the death a murder. He should have said, "...thinking you might have murdered his sister."