Aside from compulsively watching movies and old TV shows, I love WWII airplanes. As a kid, I must have made a hundred model airplane kits and am pretty good at identifying vintage aircraft. So, it's not surprising I liked seeing "A Flight of Harks" since it featured a lot of great WWII planes--such as a P-51 and several B-25 bombers.
The show begins with some guy driving his Jaguar down the road like a nut. Monments later, a P-51 fighter plane comes out of the sky--shooting at the car! Soon, the car careens down a hill--killing the driver.
A bit later, a representative of an insurance company approaches Cannon and wants to hire him to investigate the insurance claim on the dead man. They think it is a false claim--that he killed himself to give his widow a nice settlement. Cannon insists his job is to investigate--and whether or not the claim is false, his goal is to uncover the truth. However, the direction this case goes comes as a surprise, as it turns out that a group of WWII flying vets are planning on staging a coup in an African nation!! And, apparently the dead man wanted no part of it--and that's why he's dead!
Talk about a strange plot!! "A Flight of Hawks" is definitely among the most unique shows done by this show. Perhaps the reason they chose the topic had to do with William Conrad, as he was a WWII fighter pilot! Regardless, it gets points just for creativity and for being incredibly unique. Well worth seeing, though the way the cops react to a diplomat pulling a gun on Cannon is simply confusing and stupid. While the man would have had diplomatic immunity, such a behavior would have gotten him deported--not an apology from the police!!
By the way, interestingly enough Martin Sheen appears in this episode as the same character he played earlier in the series ("Devil's Playground").