The Outer Limits Season 2 Episode 17

The Probe

Enroute to Tokyo, a plane flies into a storm and the pilot is forced to ditch the plane into the eye of a hurricane. The crew and passengers awake on a life boat on a floor of solid plastic. Light beams carve off a chunk of the boat and whisk it away, and the group soon realizes that they have been captured by an alien space probe. Dodging an alien ""microbe"", they find telemetry equipment sending the probe's findings to some distance source. As the probe prepares to depart Earth, the passengers beg for their freedom, and the guiding intelligence at the other end finally protects them from the microbe and frees them while summoning a rescue ship.