Rivière rang up to learn the latest messages from the planes in flight.

Night Flight (1931) by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

Bryan Alexander picked up on my post from yesterday and added

...the long decades of in-flight UFO stories, which form the background for these. Not to mention that terrific Twilight Zone Shatner episode (YouTube).

There's something different about these airborne fears, apart from general anxieties concerning air travel (fear of crashing). It's a mix of features: the loss of control in a large vehicle controlled by someone else, the associations with dreaming (since many sleep), being closer to the skies and space. And the general complex of technology anxieties are all in play, too.

Commenter Mark of The Analytical Engines adds Arthur Conan Doyle's "The Horror of the Heights" (1913)

A visitor might descend upon this planet a thousand times and never see a tiger. Yet tigers exist, and if he chanced to come down into a jungle he might be devoured. There are jungles of the upper air, and there are worse things than tigers which inhabit them.

and the Doctor Who serial "Time-Flight" (1982) by Peter Grimwade, in which BA Concordes on approach to Heathrow disappear from the radar, as they are sent back in time 140 million years. Psychic energy keeps the passengers and crew hallucinating that they have in fact landed at Heathrow airport, not in the Jurassic.

TEGAN: Ladies and gentleman, we do apologize for the delay. Your flight is now ready for boarding. Would you care to proceed to your aircraft immediately?

For time-traveling aircraft, Gardner Campbell also adds The Odyssey of Flight 33 (1961) by Rod Serling

A Global jet airliner, en route from London to New York on an uneventful afternoon in the year 1961, but now reported overdue and missing, and by now searched for on land, sea, and air by anguished human beings fearful of what they'll find. But you and I know where she is, you and I know what's happened. So if some moment, any moment, you hear the sound of jet engines flying atop the overcast, engines that sound searching and lost, engines that sound desperate, shoot up a flare or do something. That would be Global 33 trying to get home from the Twilight Zone.

and then there's Stephen King's The Langoliers (1990),

So I was flying with some guys who had a small jet and I said, as, this would be really great if only you didn't, ah, have to be aware through the whole thing. If you could just get on and there'd be a black place in your mind. And the guy says to me, well, we can lower the oxygen back there and you'd go right out.

Or the more recent Flightplan (2005).

Ms. Sherin, there are 425 passengers on this flight who are NOT receiving any attention at the moment because everyone of my flight attendants is busy conducting a search for a child that none of them believe was ever on board. I'm sorry if you think we could be doing more to meet your needs, but you'll have to take it up with Customer Service after we land. Fair enough?