It isn't too often that people beat Steven Spielberg to the punch, but Pittsburgh Opera Center has a nifty little trinket, "Flight," on the docket this week, a work that soared long before Spielberg could hit the movie theaters with "The Terminal."

Both projects took "a nugget of a true story" about Mehran Karimi Nasseri, an Iranian refugee who fell victim to French bureaucracy and wound up living inside Paris' Charles de Gaulle airport for 16 years. Spielberg went with Tom Hanks in 2004. But a British duo, composer Jonathan Dove and librettist April de Angelis, had already collected 10 characters for an opera, "Flight," in 1996. They elected to present an ensemble piece where the travelers arrive at an airport and are held there overnight by an electrical storm.

That set up a number of dramatic situations. Yes, the Refugee is there with a "magic" stone and the Immigration Officer hard on his heels. A Minskwoman is pregnant and afraid to fly. The Older Woman is meeting a young love interest, while another couple, Bill and Tina, are trying to rejuvenate their own relationship. And there is an assortment of airline professionals to round out the cast.

While it didn't have the widescreen promotion that "The Terminal" had, "Flight" has enjoyed its own measure of success in the operatic world. England's The Sunday Times called it "one of the few successful comic operas of recent history."

Most new operas are lucky to accumulate a handful of subsequent performances after the premiere -- "Flight" has had upward of 50.

But Dove has shown considerable popularity along the way. His "The Ring Saga" reduction, which neatly consolidated its Wagnerian operatic inspirations, played here to critical acclaim. In a lengthy e-mail from South Africa, Dove writes that he learned "that it is worth taking trouble to develop interesting orchestra textures" from that opera, noting that "there are one or two 'homages' to 'The Ring' in 'Flight.' "

He also has no problems with developing works with a widespread operatic appeal, some of which have manifested themselves in community operas, where he can create with 200 people on stage and another 100 instrumentalists in the pit. "A huge group of performers also enables me to imagine something spectacular," he says, where he celebrates the place where the performers live, the stories of that place and the talents of everyone involved. "The only thing is that they are extremely demanding and rather exhausting, so I usually need at least a couple of years off in between!"

He's also just written three big music theater pieces in a row, "The Enchanted Pig," "Man on the Moon" and "The Adventures of Pinocchio." So he's taking a six-month sabbatical at his own expense to travel.

Right now Dove is staying with a music-loving friend on her farm near Johannesburg, South Africa. He took an "amazing" drive on a game preserve to see the animals. But when "the weather turned English," they headed for the sunshine of Kalk Bay.

While this is "pure pleasure" for him, Dove loves to use experiences that feed his imagination. He says that de Angelis first came across the Nasseri story. "It had an immediate mythic power -- the story seemed to say something about the human condition and the location immediately suggested music to me," explains Dove. "The idea of Nasseri's plight is operatic, but I didn't think an opera was the right place for all the specific detail of his story -- that would be better handled by a documentary. So we used his experience as the starting point for writing about the experience of flight in several senses."

Some of the characters were based on personal experience. For example, Dove once made a difficult journey to an airport during a rail strike to meet a "Significant Person" who never showed, a similar situation that happens to the Older Woman in the production.

He also made the mistake of thinking that a floundering relationship would be rectified by an overseas trip, like Bill and Tina. And he once sat with two people who were starting a new life in another country, which pops in with Minskman and Minskwoman.

"I think we had the feeling that the airport was potentially a kind of microcosm, with lighter elements [the lust of the Steward and Stewardess, Bill and Tina's self-help book] balancing the heavier elements [the Minskwoman's anxiety about the baby she is about to have and the impact it will have on her life and, most importantly, the Refugee's unhappy story]."

Still "Flight" was a risk -- it wasn't based on a well-known book, play or film at that time -- and it was Dove's first full-length effort. Up until the dress rehearsal, Dove was thinking that it had a lot of funny moments, but he couldn't be sure.

It was only at that dress rehearsal that he heard an audience laugh for the first time and, surprisingly and rewardingly enough, "that was when I realized that other people share my sense of humor."

And his opera really took "flight."

First Published: January 24, 2008, 10:00 a.m.