To commemorate the 30th anniversary of Airplane! here are 30 facts on Shirley the mother of all movie spoofs ...

1 Airplane! is a remake of a 1957 TV movie called Zero Hour!

2 The "food-poisoning on a plane" plot and many of the lines were lifted straight from the original.

3 They bought the rights to Zero Hour! so that's OK.

4 Zero Hour! was written by Arthur Hailey, who went on to write the hugely successful Airport book/movie franchise which Airplane! spoofs so mercilessly.

5 Thus Hailey is credited as a writer of a movie that basically takes the piss out of his own work.

6 Airplane! was the fourth highest-grossing movie of 1980 in the US, and the highest-grossing comedy in history until Ghostbusters.

7 Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, who played co-pilot Roger Murdock, is the highest-scoring NBA basketball player of all time, with 38,387 points.

8 The film's Shaft-inspired "jive" dialogue was all written on set by the two actors, Al White and Norm Gibbs.

9 They don't actually talk like that in real life.

10 In early 2010, the US Drug Enforcement Administration put out a recruitment ad for nine linguistics experts in "ebonics" (ie jive talk) to help them translate wiretaps.

11 The story of the DEA's ad was widely illustrated on US television with clips of the jive-talking scene from Airplane!

12, 13, 14 The three directors, David and Jerry Zucker and Jim Abrahams, all make cameos, as do their mothers and the Zuckers' sister, Susan Breslau.

Otto the autopilot. Photograph: Rex

15 Otto the autopilot has a Facebook page dedicated to him.

16 It was named after a different Jerry Zucker though. What are the chances?

17 Robert "Ted Striker" Hays voiced Iron Man in the 1990s TV cartoon series.

18 Hays was married to Cherie Currie, lead singer of the Runaways, in the 1990s.

19 It was the screen debut of Julie Hagerty, who went on to work with Woody Allen, Robert Altman and Todd Solondz.

20 In 2002, Hagerty was nominated for the worst supporting actress Razzie for Freddy Got Fingered.

21 The magazine Captain Oveur is reading in the airport is called Modern Sperm, from the "whacking material" section.

22 The German title for the movie translates as "The Incredible Journey In A Crazy Airplane".

23 Leslie Nielsen didn't like the line about the shit hitting the fan when he read the script. "People aren't going to laugh at that," he said.

24 Nielsen used to bring a whoopee cushion to line readings, to set the right comic tone.

25 He still uses a hidden fart machine during TV interviews.

26 Lorraine Kelly didn't know where to look when he used it on Good Morning Britain.

27 Leslie Nielsen's brother Erik was the deputy prime minister of Canada.

28 Last year, the Jerry Zucker Middle School of Science opened in South Carolina.

29 Air Mexico was apparently the only airline to screen Airplane! as an in-flight movie.

30 The best Airplane! reference is in the US version of The Office. Someone asks Michael Scott (Steve Carell), "Oh honey, surely you don't want that." He replies, "I surely do, and don't call me honey."

• This article was amended on 29 November 2010