"The Odyssey of Flight 33" was the eighteenth episode of The Twilight Zone, and was first broadcast in February of 1961. It starred John Anderson, Paul Comi and Sandy Kenyon as the flight crew of the eponymous Flight 33. As an interesting cast note, both John Anderson and Sandy Kenyon portrayed Abraham Lincoln in other performances.
Flight 33 is en route from London to New York City when something happens. The planes ground speed races out of control, going over thousands of miles per hour while the air speed stays constant. They think that they've hit a freak jetstream, but the viewers knows better: Flight 33 has been transported into the Twilight Zone, which in this case means that it has become unstuck in time, something our steely crew resolves to fix. This particular episode takes the twist ending in one of the few directions it hasn't been taken so far on the show.
The Twilight Zone, as the title suggests, often focuses on situations and locales that are somehow in-between. When watching this episode, it struck me how ideal a location an airliner is for this type of mood. When you enter an airplane, you are effectively cut off from the rest of the world, and instead are temporarily placed in a place with its own specific customs and rules. An airplane is also intrinsically a place of danger, and a place with an obvious and important authority figure to protect people from the danger. In short, this episode probably works because it takes a circumstance that is already otherworldly and anxiety-provoking, and casts that real world feeling into a fantasy story.