John Travolta is a plane nerd and has been all his life. This saw him learning to fly aged 15, enrolling in an aviation class, which led to him pick up his wings when he was 22, when he earned his first pilot’s license.

At the same time his acting career was also taking off, getting his break on the sitcom Welcome Back, Kotter, and then film roles in 1977’s Saturday Night Fever and 1978’s Grease. The rest, as they say, is history.

He’s circling around at the tail end of his career now, making his directorial debut with an adaptation of the 1997 children’s novel Propeller One-Way Night Coach, that he also wrote, that features a semi-biographical story of his own first flight experience.

1962 and young Jeff (Clark Shotwell) has just been informed by his mum Helen (Kelly Eviston-Quinnett), that they have to go to Hollywood, where a friend of hers will try to get a role in a film.

As exciting as that sounds – to his mum at least – the most exciting part to Jeff is how they get there – by plane. He is a big fan of all things aviation, and can’t wait to embark on their long distance journey over the USA.

Travolta clearly is passionate about flying. Unfortunately this doesn’t translate well into his directorial debut, on all fronts.

The script is so dull, it never gets off the ground. It’s not helped, at all, by a monotone narrator – Travolta himself – who sounds like he’s reading his book for the thousandth time in a row. It’s the kind of narration that would make the perfect app to listen too if you have trouble sleeping.

And then there’s the acting; you would think that Travolta would have an impressive list of contacts to draw on, but gives a relative unknown the position of the mother figure. She gives a generic performance, that could well be down to Travolta’s inexperience behind the camera, which lacks vision.

This may also be the same excuse for Shotwell, making his acting debut, who gives an extremely tepid performance as the young boy.

The result is tantamount to a boring stranger telling you, in detail, a very boring story for an hour. Actually, that would be more appealing, because you could at least just say, up front, that they were boring you, and walk away, feeling justified for doing so.

It could have been a charming coming of age tale, but it just simply lacks direction, which is ironic considering he’s a qualified pilot.

To be fair, the art direction is striking, but it’s unusual for it to do so much of the heavy lifting of a film.

It wouldn’t be a surprise to learn that it contains frames of propaganda regarding the ‘Church’ of Scientology, which he’s been a member of since 2975, burning a call-to-action message of enrolling into our retinas; but if that were indeed the case, at least it would have a purpose. Also, if you play his exceedingly dull narration backwards, it gives you a 10% discount code for all Scientology merch, which is something.

It may be based on a personal memory of Travolta’s, but his film adaption of it just isn’t worth the trip.