Synopsis

Set in a futuristic space age, the video follows a woman trying to reach Flight Commander P. R. Johnson on Mars through an intergalactic telephone operator. She asks about his health, misses him, and tries to keep their family connection alive while he is away at war. The visual presentation cuts between her lonely phone call and Richard Anthony Hewson in a stark space setting, turning the song's science-fiction premise into an intimate story about separation, homesickness, and love across an impossible distance.

Factoids & Trivia

• Richard Anthony Hewson said the story is set during a 100-year war on Mars. The song's telephone conversation imagines a future in which contacting someone in space is still difficult and highly unusual.

• The idea came partly from Hewson's own experience of calling home after working in Hollywood on *Xanadu*. Since mobile phones did not exist in the early 1980s, he used the idea of an operator-assisted call as the basis for the science-fiction scenario.

• The female vocal was performed by Hewson's then-wife, Liz. She was not a professional vocalist, and her unpolished, vulnerable delivery became one of the recording's defining qualities.

• Hewson recorded the track at his home studio, using synthesizers, a drum machine, strings, and saxophones to combine an intimate soul ballad with futuristic electronic production.

• "Flight 247" is sometimes interpreted as a reference to BBC Radio 1's former medium-wave broadcasting wavelength. That explanation is considered unlikely, since Radio 1 had moved from 247 metres several years before the single was released.

• Released in March 1985, the single reached No. 6 in the United Kingdom and also made the Top 10 in the Netherlands and Sweden.

• The song was later remixed in 1999 and again in 2007. The 2007 version featured newly recorded vocals by Emma Charles while retaining elements of the original synthesizer and drum-machine arrangement.

• In 2024, the RAH Band released a separate AI-generated video for the song, created by The Dor Brothers. It was presented as a new visual interpretation arriving 40 years after the song's creation.