7^th October 1969

30^th April 1972 – only a fortnight after the events in Hambledown.

It’s evening at London airport. A plane is coming in to land and air traffic control are giving their final instructions. The pilot is insistent on using "auto-land" even though weather conditions are fine. The landing is far from smooth and the plane comes to rest in the middle of the runway. When the controller can’t raise them on the radio he orders security to board the plane. They find the passenger cabin empty and there is nothing in the cockpit but a tape recorder with the missing pilots voice.

After only five minutes we are taken to a swish Parisian apartment where a glamorous secretary with big hair and thick glasses is frantically scribbling in her notebook. Lying on the sofa, dictating furiously and puffing away on one of his yellow cigarettes is Jason King. His prose reaches fever pitch, the secretary has stopped jotting and is now just gazing in awe at Jason when the doorbell rings and Stewart shatters the mood of bubbling sexual tension.

Anton Rodgers plays Terrell, the personal assistant to business god Ralph Voss. He looks very young and has an extremely unconvincing moustache. It is so unconvincing that I’m almost convinced it has to be real. Rodgers would go on to play Alec in the staggeringly popular sit com "May to December".

Basil Dignam plays Finch – the sensible accountant who is ultimately taken in by those with infinitely less naivety. Dignam is one of those actors who did the full ITC circuit, notching up appearances in every show you can think of.

Angela Lovell plays Ralph Voss’s secretary. She gets to be chatted up by Jason and… that’s about it. He compliments her on her typing skills. These days her technique would set alarm bells ringing in Voss Industries’ health and safety department. She’s more at risk of RSI than a teenage boy who has got hold of a lingerie catalogue.

John Gabriel plays the heavy. I only mention him because he looks like the slightly harder brother of Mister "Bullet" Baxter from Grange Hill.

She’s got the Anita Harris this week. She spends the first half of the episode tending to Auntie – Department S’s computer. A typically massive contraption, Auntie is fed data by a troop of mini Annabelle's in sensible smocks and gives her answer via a telex machine. In this case her answer is always "I have no idea". Later, she gets out of the office, out of her sensible smock and dons a leather miniskirt and waistcoat combination. She potters about Ireland in that before donning a simple yellow mini-dress in which, it must be said, she looks rather lovely.

Her other brief outfit is a reconnaissance ensemble of black trousers and tight black polo neck. Not terribly sexy you might say. Well, it is included here because she comes out of the bathroom with the jumper over her face and we get a solid five second shot of her bra before she pulls it down. Shameless. We also see lots of girlie photos on the insides of lockers when Stewart visits a mechanics’ hanger. Though one of them has a picture of a dog on his locker door. Pervert.

Jason rattles off two solutions in two minutes during his first meeting with Stewart and is happy for that to be the end of his involvement. We don’t meet him again until he’s donned oily overalls and decided to have a rummage round in the service corridor of the mysterious plane. He emerges from the duct and tells Stewart that the innards of a plane are fascinating and he could spend many a happy hour in said corridor. Towards the end he sits confidently at the controls of a plane about to start crashing and gives the impression he’s going to fly it.

We see a close up of "Identity, Mark Caine" but no details of the plot. Jason later cites as evidence for his latest theory a novel in which the passengers on a yacht are gassed and thrown overboard. Sadly, this book isn’t named so we can’t rush out to our local libraries and borrow it.

Stewart breaks with tradition near the end of this week’s adventure when he wears a jumper which is very nearly a shade of brown which is not entirely unlike green. For the rest of it he is in unmistakeable brown. A brown suit, brown suede jacket, brown polo neck and brown trousers. He does however have special lungs as some poisonous gas is used to knock out Jason and Annabelle but it has absolutely not effect on Stewart what so ever. He doesn’t even affect a slight wobble. He just breathes normally and gets on with things.

Ralph Voss is an extremely important man – he's the Bill Gates of a conglomerate which employs over a hundred thousand people in Britain. His company is on the verge of some massive loans, money which is needed to fund an ambitious expansion plan. Sadly, while travelling incognito from New York to London, Ralph Voss has a heart attack and dies.

Not wanting to send the share price crashing and thus scupper the loans, his right hand man, Terrell, and chief accountant, Finch, hit upon a plan to hide the news of his death. They land the plane at Voss Industries’ headquarters in Ireland (the tail wind means they are ahead of schedule), bribe the passengers to stay in a nearby hospital for the duration, send the plane over to London (with a pilot who hides in the service corridor until the fuss dies down and makes his escape) and no one will ask any questions about Ralph Voss because they have a much better mystery.

But Terrell is greedy – he wants to siphon off as much money as possible and do a runner. He sends all the passengers up in a plane (with Department S on board too) and plans to crash the plane in the sea shortly after making his escape.

He doesn’t succeed and Jason lands the plane successfully… by switching on the auto-land.

The second plane related episode of the series so far (shot back to back to save money) has an intriguing premise and the resolution does make sense. But the idea that such a complicated plan could be arranged on the fly and executed from scratch within a thirty minute window is a little far fetched. The entire plan is carried out because they assume people will find out Voss was on the plane but it ignores that Ralph Voss’s disappearance would do just as much damage to the share price as his death (possibly more as it would create uncertainty while nothing is more certain than death). Not for the first time they feel the need to augment the solution with some good old fashioned crime and it feels like a prosthetic nose glued rather inexpertly over the top of a perfectly satisfactory real nose.