The Movie was based on a novel by Nevil Shute  just called "No Highway"

Shute  was actually an aeronautical engineer in another career path.  I always understood the No Highway book/film was based very loosely on the tragic history of the Vickers Viscount, one of the first Jet airliners in the world,  and which suffered several catastrophic, unexplained  (at the time ) crashes, and as a result the reality of metal fatigue  caused by  pressure cycling became known as an issue in aircraft.

 Neville Shute was a quite succesful author, and several of his books were made into movies, and  some of them  several times.  A couple of his well known successes  are  " A Town Like Alice"   which Id suspect perhaps isn't so well known in Nth America, but "On the Beach" would be.

I read a good few of his books  in my youth.

I can't answer your specific aeronautical engineering questions.