Neil Bradshaw, a hotshot pilot, is too busy planning a record-breaking flight from Los Angeles to Manila to notice that his pretty colleague Joan Lawson is in love with him. To drum up publicity, the airline president enlists Bradshaw to fly sexy bombshell actress Diana Audre to her next film shoot. Falling for the dashing young captain, the starlet offers him a job in Hollywood. Enticed by a six-figure paycheck, Bradshaw leaves Joan and his dream of flying around the world behind. A spurned Joan decides to take the dangerous route herself and fly solo to Manila. Knowing that her piloting skills are not up to the trip, Bradshaw vows to stop Joan from risking her life, even if it means leaving his new career in Tinseltown behind.
Loves Takes Flight is inspired by the story of John Trent, a real-life aviator who was discovered by movie producer B.P. Schulberg (Trent is best remembered as the star of Monogram's Tailspin Tommy series.) Director Conrad Nagel had been a matinee idol during the silent era, appearing in classics like The Fighting Chance (1920), London After Midnight (1927) and The Mysterious Lady (1928). After the advent of sound, he would carve out a long-lived career as a character actor, with diverse credits including The Divorcee (1930), One Million B.C. (1940) and All That Heaven Allows (1955). He was the host of the radio program Silver Theater (1937-1940), its subsequent television version (1949-1950), Celebrity Time (1949-1952) and Broadway to Hollywood (1953-1954). Despite the fact that Nagel later described making Love Takes Flight as effortless, this would be his only turn behind the camera. Leading man Bruce Cabot is forever immortalized as the heroic Jack Driscoll in King Kong (1933), but also had memorable parts in Fritz Lang's Fury (1936) and Michael Curtiz's Dodge City (1939). His lifelong friendship with John Wayne led to him appearing in eleven of the Duke's pictures, beginning with Angel and the Badman (1947). Supporting player Edwin Maxwell is instantly recognizable for his parts in Oscar-winning films such as All Quiet on the Western Front (1930), Grand Hotel (1932), The Great Ziegfeld (1936) and You Can't Take It With You (1938). The lovely Astrid Allwyn played Claude Rains' daughter in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939). The Hays Office initially rejected Love Takes Flight for scenes containing excessive amounts of drinking; these scenes ended up being shortened to insure the film's release.