In this ""Pilot"" episode of the ABC half season spin-off of the original 1983 blockbuster smash hit under the same name starring Roy Scheider, Warren Oates and Malcolm McDowell, The Blue Thunder Unit take on a ruthless pilot who has been recently aerially assassinating police helicopter units over Los Angeles. In an attempt to settle an old long-lasting score with Frank Chaney, the pilot and leader of The Blue Thunder Unit, the crazed comedian who calls himself ""P.V.C."" contacts Chaney, Braddock and the rest of the team and warns Chaney personally that he is going to blow him out of the sky for what he did a year ago when he destroyed his aircraft with a 12-gauge shotgun during an unsuccessful drug bust while he was a police officer, plus to make sure that he succeeds in transporting a scheduled shipment of drugs over the Mexican border. Still continuing to wipe out airborne police units when very cannily evacuating the entire Astro-Division Building, and with the acknowledge of how the
A paramilitary group who call themselves the ""Posse Magistratus"", have been the prime suspects for a series of bank robberies, and one particulary involving a heavily-modified World War II fighter plane. In order to track down this plane and stop the whole game, Chaney and Wonderlove attempt to track it down, based on various aerial police sightings. When accomplishing this, Chaney spots gun mounts on a plane that they performed an unauthorised thermograph upon, and results in not in the state of valid evidence to charge the Sheriff who owns it for the state-threatening operations. However that same day, the same World War II figher plane attacks them, and ends up being shot down by Chaney in Blue Thunder. To posess reliable and sufficent evidence to charge the ''Posse Magistrates'' of the crimes they have took out, Ski goes undercover as a mechanic, but it isn't long until Chaney and Wonderlove discover that the group plan to kill one of the cities' main councilmen at the Queen Mary s
Aggie Mills, an former flame of Chaney's who he knew back in the Vietnam War, comes for help via the FBI to distort a much-growing drugs & gun smuggling ring, extending to more places than just Los Angeles. When the first operation is not a success, and turns out to be a smokescreen, Bubba and Ski are assigned to go undercover as truck mechanics, but they also accidentally discover that Aggie Mills is not all what she says she is, and happens to be associating with the man in-charge of the whole operation, Harold Longstreet. When Bubba and Ski are caught red-handed while placing a radar receiver on one of the trucks, in order for Chaney and Braddock to know where the drugs and the weapons are being ferried from, its a race against time for Chaney and Wonderlove to save their two crew members, and prevent Longstreet and Mills from getting away, unconvicted.
An F-86 Sabre jet is stolen from an airfield by a group of KGB mercenaries, followed by an intense but unsuccessful chase by security personnel. The subsequent day, FBI agent Bruce Walsh informs Captain Braddock, Chaney and the Blue Thunder crew to participate immmediately in an in-depth search for the lost jet fighter, which with the proper treatment could be converted into a lethal weapon which could not be recovered by the government.
The witness, also his confidental secretary, who could put her employer, corrupted financier Richard J. Lassiter behind solid steel bars is rescued by the Blue Thunder unit from an estate where her kidnappers were previously holding her hostage, until Lassiter's court-trial was finished. He has been sentenced for 25 years for fraud, extortion and imtimidation, and is scheduled to be transferred to Greenlake Penitentiary, a medium-security facility, located in the Central part of the state.
Madame Eva Parada, the president of Sumora, is inviting major U.S. business corporations to set-up branchs in her country, by signing lease agreements, however a small rebel group, who call themselves ""The Revolutionary Forces of Sumora"", are not tolerating this happening.
Chaney's arch rival is given control of Blue Thunder after Chaney is reassigned for breaking off a drug stake out in order to pursue kidnappers
The Space Shuttle Argo, privately funded and arranged without any governmental interference, becomes under threat by a group of weapon dealers who don't want their sales of bacterial weapons falling down heavily because of this. This is because, the shuttle has successfully performed an gene-splicing experiment in outer space, relieving the American Space Industry after it is set for the shuttle to re-enter orbit, but there is one slight problem.
Chaney must convince the granddaughter of a dead mobster to turn her grandfather's business documents over to the FBI before his old business associates kill her to get them
A pair of professional killers, disguised as highway patrol officers, and organised crime connected, perform an unsuccessful attempt on the life of Lisa Ritchie at an exclusive restaurant, located near Farrow Beach of the Pacific Coast Highway.
The Blue Thunder team journeys to a small Caribbean island to prevent American mercenaries, who have been hired by the KGB, from killing the Prime Minister