Rescued in Mid-Air is a 1906 British short silent drama film directed by Percy Stow and produced by the Clarendon Film Company.

The film seems to be the oldest one featuring an airborne rescue operation.

[1] A young woman is hurled into the sky when her bicycle is hit by another cyclist.

She floats for a moment suspended from her umbrella before clinging to a steeple, from which she is rescued by a crazy-looking scientist in his flying machine which eventually crashes.

The film was distributed in the United Kingdom by Gaumont British Distributors[2] and was a public success.

A swirling view gradually slows down to reveal a view of the woman hanging from her umbrella floating in front of a background of moving clouds.

A bearded man dressed in white comes out and the men point towards the sky.

The bearded man comes onboard, cranks the engine on, holds a lever in one hand and the tiller in the other and the machine lifts off.

The bottom of the screen shows rooftops while the top shows the flying machine, its wing flapping, superimposed on a background of clouds, moving towards the viewer.

The crowd seen on 11 enters right running away from the camera, waving and looking upwards.

The flying machine is first coming towards the camera, then veers right towards the house.

The woman is still clutching to the steeple as the flying machine moves towards it.

The flying machine has crashed on the ground and the two passengers climb out of the wreck unhurt.

The cyclist seen in 1 pushes his bicycle towards the camera in the company of another man.

The cyclist hugs the woman and shakes hand with the pilot.

[4] Thomas Elssaer and Adam Barker have noted in particular that "the practice of cutting away for one shot from the enclosing scene was quite established by (then) but the idea of doing this repeatedly was not.

(Here) the shots alternate repeatedly between aerial events and happenings on the ground.

[7] Leonardo Quaresima and Laura Vichi have however mentioned an earlier film about aviation, Drama in the Air, directed by Gaston Velle in 1904.

The illusion of the flying machine is obtained by combining double exposure, with the upper half masked off while the lower was exposed, and vice versa,[8] and superimposition, with a white coloured flying machine and pilot used to minimize background print-through.