Please does anyone remember a this episode?

Back in the seventies I remember watching a Columbo episode where the murderer wasn't liscensed to fly planes, but borrowed a plane and flew it crosscountry to commit the murder. He then used as his alibi the fact that there was no way he could have been at the scene of the murder because he was so far away. Columbo suspects otherwise but can't find his name on commercial flight records.

Thanks for your help!

it was johnny cash

was it?

Sorry, there's no "Columbo" like that. But the Johnny Cash episode, "Swan Song", has a couple of those elements, with variations.

He did fly a plane (he was a licensed pilot) to commit the murder -- by crashing the plane with the victims inside, and escaping in a home-made parachute, which he hid in the woods.

Later flies out of town, hoping to convince Columbo he's away (this is long after the murder) and unavailable to retrieve the parachute, which Columbo is looking for. But he doubles back (I believe he took a commercial flight, although he could have flown a chartered plane), and of course he gets caught pulling the parachute from its hiding place.

As you can see, it's pretty different from what you remember. Maybe what you saw was a different show, not "Columbo".

Memory can play tricks on us. It's pretty common for even devoted fans to have mistaken recollections about the show. People will absolutely insist that they saw a "Columbo" guest-starring, say, Peter Lorre or George C Scott, or whoever -- people who clearly never appeared on the show.

I know one woman, who's an old Columbo fan, and she still insists that she saw an episode where Columbo's brother is falsely accused of murder, so Columbo travels to the small town where his brother lives, to clear him of the crime. Not a bad idea for a "Columkbo" episode, except it never happened. By the way, does anybody here recognize this plot? Could it have been, oh I don't know, a Rockford Files or something?

There was an episode of the 1980s short-lived series "J.J. Starbuck" in which the murderer (Patrick O'Neal, who of course also played the role of a killer on "Columbo") was proven guilty because he knows how to fly a helicopter. Maybe this is somehow involved in the plot memory.

Ah, J.J. Starbuck. Not destined to become one of the classics, but it did have a few nice Columboesque stories. In addition to the O'Neal episode, there were a couple of nice ones with Kelsey Grammer as a classic pianist (there would be a fantastic Columbo villain, just ask Bart Simpson) and Richard Mulligan (Soap) as a children's book author. Starbuck himself was a Texas millionnaire who criminals tended to view as an eccentric rich hayseed.

The show (by Rockford creator Stephen Cannell) also was noteworthy for resurrecting Ben Vereen's conman character Tenspeed Turner from the Cannell comedy P.I. series Tenspeed and Brownshoe. Unfortunately, about that time, the show turned from Columbo-style mysteries to cheesy adventure-type plots.