LITTLE BIG SCREEN - "AIRPORT" & "COLUMBO"

"Tell me, Mrs. Quonsett, have you ever been a stowaway on any other airline?"

"Oh yes, my dear, but I like Trans Global the best." 

(from "Airport")

TGA (Trans Global Airlines, a fictional airline and the parent company of the film's Golden Argosy jet) doesn't have the "Oomph" enjoyed by Oceanic Airways as far as Toobworld goes.  In fact, I can find only one mention of it in a TV series.

'COLUMBO'

"THE MOST CRUCIAL GAME"

Lt. Columbo is seen striding through the LAX terminal in search of his main suspect, Paul Hanlon.  Overhead, a voice on the public address system requests that Mr. David North should report to the Trans-Global desk.

So Trans-Global does have a counterpart in the main Toobworld, but it's not enough of a reason to pull the entire "Airport" movie franchise out of the Cineverse and into Earth Prime-Time.  There's not even enough reason to suggest this was a Borderland melding of the two fictional universes.  (Three, if you want to count the original home in BookWorld.)  It's just a case in which the airline has a doppelganger in all three universes.

Just one more thing.......*

There is one David North listed officially in the Tele-Folks Directory.  He was one of the bikers who harrassed Jim Norton and his brother when they were kids and ended up killing the brother.  Soon after that, the bikers were killed themselves, but they were eventually sent back to finish what they had started by killing Jim.

I'm not sure of the timeline in the original Stephen King short story "Sometimes They Come Back" (I think King had 50s greasers in mind), but in the Toobworld timeline, this could have occurred in the early 1970s.  And that would be around the same time as this 'Columbo' episode takes place.  (The TV movie takes place around the same time it was broadcast - early 1990s.)

So it's pozz'ble, just pozz'ble, that this biker was the same David North being called to the Trans-Global desk.  Why he was in Los Angeles, away from his home state of Maine is unknown.

Or it could be a TV character in which we never knew the first name.  For example:

• He could be "Mr. North", an Australian who appeared in two episodes of 'Angels' back in the early 1980s.  
• "David" could be the proper first name for an old cowboy usually known as Sandy North ('The Adventures Of Champion').

And there are countless other shows with characters with the last name of North who could have had fathers or sons by the name of David and who could have been traveling by Trans-Global Airlines that day when Lt. Columbo was there.

And for alls I know, there might still be more than one David North out there in TV Land.  It's just that the "ever-reliable" IMDb hasn't included them yet.

BCnU!

* See what I did there?