Alexey Gushchin is a young pilot. He is wayward, but has high moral principles, and sometimes does not obey the orders of his superiors, for which he was expelled from the border troops, as well as from military and military transport aviation. Having a bad characterization on his hands, Alexey comes to his father Igor Nikolaevich Gushchin, who worked as an aircraft designer in the past, to live with him and find a new job. The father calls his friend Pyotr Sergeyevich Shestakov, in which he proposes his son's candidacy for the position of pilot in the airline Pegasus Avia, based at Moscow's Vnukovo Airport, of which Shestakov is the director. Gushchin meets his co—pilot colleague Alexandra Kuzmina, who has to fight against public prejudice about a female pilot. An affair ensues between Alexey and Alexandra, which soon ends in a quarrel. Leonid Zinchenko is married, but his wife Irina constantly complains about her husband's absence from home because of work, and her son Valera has dropped out of school and does not obey his parents. An attempt to attract the wife of a colleague of Nikolai Sinitsyn, Elena, to pull up her son in English, fails, as Leonid soon discovers them in an intimate setting and quickly realizes that his family is on the verge of disintegration. Flight attendant Andrey is trying to establish a relationship with his foreman Victoria, but she does not feel reciprocal feelings, showing sympathy for Gushchin. The next departure of a regular flight is delayed due to VIP passenger Petritsky. He behaves defiantly, rude to the stewards. Alexey, ignoring Zinchenko's ban, gets into an altercation, and then into a fight with a VIP passenger and his assistant. Passengers are removed from the plane, and Gushchin is going to be fired, but Leonid stands up for him before the leadership. The director of the airline decides to send Zinchenko to Asia so that he can wait out the hype around the Petritsky scandal and at the same time overtake the Tu-204 chartered by the airline there. Leonid takes Alexandra and Alexey as co-pilots, and Victoria and Andrey as flight attendants, and also takes Valera with him. But on the way to the destination airport, they receive information about an earthquake on the volcanic island of Kanwoo in the Aleutian Islands, as a result of which there are dead and injured. The crew heads to the island and lands at the local airport. The only suitable airport for an emergency landing is Yelizovo Airport surrounded by hills in Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky, but a powerful thunderstorm front is approaching it. Zinchenko gets in touch with the dispatcher, who reports problems on board his plane — when departing from the Canvas, the fuel tank in the left wing was damaged, which causes a rapid drop in the level of jet fuel, so the plane cannot reach the shore, and landing on water in a storm will lead to disaster. The conversation is overheard by Gushchin, who decides to ferry people from AN-26 to Tu-204 right in the air. Alexey's father, who knows the design of the Tu-204, comes to the rescue. During the transfer, the cargo basket breaks, as a result of which 11 people die, but most of the passengers, as well as the pilots Zinchenko and Kuzmin, manage to move to the Tu-204 before the An-26 runs out of jet fuel and it falls into the ocean. Weather conditions at the Petropavlovsk airport are deteriorating, but the crew decides to land. Alexey is afraid to land a plane with one engine and a failed landing gear in a thunderstorm, but Leonid reminds him that he has already successfully performed this on a simulator. The Tu-204 makes a hard landing, but everyone on board is saved.