Speaker 1: Picture this. You're sitting in a dark cockpit, flying, you know,
Speaker 1: thousands of feet over the black expanse of the ocean.
Speaker 1: It's the middle of the night. You can't see the
Speaker 1: horizon at all, right.
Speaker 2: Just pitch black outside exactly.
Speaker 1: Just the glowing instruments in front of you. And then
Speaker 1: suddenly the control column in your hand starts violently shaking,
Speaker 1: like literally rattling your bones. The stick shaker, Yeah, the
Speaker 1: stick shaker warning. It's designed to startle you screaming at
Speaker 1: your nervous system that your plane is stalling, you're losing
Speaker 1: lift and about to just fall out of the sky.
Speaker 1: And here's the nightmare. At the exact same time, a blaring,
Speaker 1: piercing claxon starts going off in the cabin, telling you
Speaker 1: that you're flying way too fast, the overspeed alarm. Right,
Speaker 1: So if you speed up to fix the stall, you
Speaker 1: might literally rip the wings off the plane. But if
Speaker 1: you slow down, it's all the overspeed you plummet into
Speaker 1: the sea. What do you do?
Speaker 2: I mean, it is the ultimate aviation nightmare. It's a
Speaker 2: scenario where the absolute most critical data you rely on
Speaker 2: to survive has just well, it's turned into a deadly
Speaker 2: unsolvable riddle.
Speaker 1: It's terrifying, it really is.
Speaker 2: And as investigators, you know, when we pull the wreckage
Speaker 2: out of the ocean and listen to the cockpit voice
Speaker 2: recorders of these events, we aren't just looking at a
Speaker 2: broken piece of metal. We are looking at a psychological
Speaker 2: pressure cooker.
Speaker 1: And that's exactly what we're going to explore in today's
Speaker 1: deep dive. We are peeling back the layers on some
Speaker 1: of the most harrowing real life aviation disasters in history
Speaker 1: to really understand what investigators call the cascade.
Speaker 2: Of errors, because it's never just one thing.
Speaker 1: No, never, it's how a you know, a microscopic failure
Speaker 1: like a tiny insect, or a hidden mechanical flaw, maybe
Speaker 1: a math mistake, how that interacts with human panic, our
Speaker 1: blind faith, and technology and just the raw will to survive.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And to understand how terrifyingly fast that cascade happens,
Speaker 2: you just have to look at the Dominican Republic in
Speaker 2: February of nineteen ninety six.
Speaker 1: Oh right, Burgionnaire Bursionaire.
Speaker 2: Flight three oh one. It's a Boeing seven fifty seven,
Speaker 2: and it's accelerating down rainslick runway into this pitch black night.
Speaker 2: Almost immediately during the takeoff roll, the captain notices his
Speaker 2: air speed indicator isn't working. It's just stuck at.
Speaker 1: Zero, which is obviously a huge red flag huge.
Speaker 2: But as the plane lifts off the tarmac, the gauge
Speaker 2: suddenly seems to wake up. It just starts registering speed again.
Speaker 1: But it's a phantom reading, right, I mean, the real
Speaker 1: crisis kicks in when they hit cruising altitude and they
Speaker 1: engage the autopilot exactly.
Speaker 2: And here's the fatal flaw in the system's logic. At
Speaker 2: the time, the autopilot gets its flight data solely from
Speaker 2: the captain's instruments, solely the captain right, and because of
Speaker 2: a microscopic blockage on the outside of the plane, that
Speaker 2: gauge starts falsely feeding the computer a terrifying narrative. It
Speaker 2: tells the autopilot the plane is accelerating wildly, approaching this
Speaker 2: catastrophic speed of three hundred and fifty knots.
Speaker 1: Oh wow.
Speaker 2: So the computer, doing exactly what it's programmed to do
Speaker 2: to save the plane, pitches the nose up dangerously high
Speaker 2: to act as like a massive air break.
Speaker 1: Wait, I'm confused, though, if the captain's gauge was broken,
Speaker 1: What about the first officer's gauge? Didn't the plane have
Speaker 1: you know, backup sensors?
Speaker 2: It did, It absolutely did. The first officer's airspeed indicator
Speaker 2: was working perfectly. The actual plane was flying at a
Speaker 2: perfectly normal.
Speaker 1: Speed, so they were fine.
Speaker 2: They were physically fine. But the autopilot wasn't looking at
Speaker 2: the first officers side. It only cared about the captain's
Speaker 2: corrupted data. So the computer pitches the nose up so
Speaker 2: aggressively that the plane physically loses its ability to fly.
Speaker 1: It starts stalling, and that leads to the exact nightmare
Speaker 1: scenario we started with. Yes, you've got the physical stick
Speaker 1: shaker violently vibrating the control columns, warning the pilots of
Speaker 1: a stall. Yeah, But simultaneously, the overspeed alarm is just
Speaker 1: screaming because the autopilot's corrupted data still thinks they're going too.
Speaker 2: Fast, and the human brain simply cannot reconcile two completely
Speaker 2: contradictory emergencies in the seconds they have available.
Speaker 1: I mean, imagine driving your car down the highway right,
Speaker 1: your speedometer says you're doing one hundred fifty miles per hour.
Speaker 1: But your engine is actively sputtering, choking and dying. How
Speaker 1: do you process that?
Speaker 2: You can't.
Speaker 1: You have an alarm screening slowdown and a physical vibration
Speaker 1: screaming speed up.
Speaker 2: And in that moment, overwhelmed by the overspeed alarm, the
Speaker 2: captain actually pulled back on the throttles. He reduced engine
Speaker 2: power when the stalling plane desperately needed it. Yeah, the
Speaker 2: seven fifty seven rolled, dropped its nose and plummeted into
Speaker 2: the ocean. There were no survivors.
Speaker 1: God, and when the recovery teams finally pulled the wreckage
Speaker 1: from the seafloor, they found the culprit. And honestly, this
Speaker 1: is the part that haunts me.
Speaker 2: The wasp.
Speaker 1: Yes, the microscopic assassin that brought down a multi ton
Speaker 1: commercial jet was a squatter, a tiny insect called a
Speaker 1: mud dauber wasp.
Speaker 2: It's unbelievable. The plane had been sitting on the tarmac
Speaker 2: for nearly three weeks and the maintenance crew, for whatever reason,
Speaker 2: hadn't put the protective covers over the pitto tubes.
Speaker 1: Those are the little L shaped pipes on the outside
Speaker 1: of the fuselage.
Speaker 2: Right right, the ones that take in air to measure speed.
Speaker 2: A mud Dauber wasp had flown in and built a
Speaker 2: tiny nest inside the captain's pitto tube, completely plugging it.
Speaker 1: Just a bug. Yeah, But you know what makes this
Speaker 1: tragedy so deeply unsettling. It isn't just the wasp, it's
Speaker 1: the culture inside that cockpit, because, like you mentioned, the
Speaker 1: first officer's airspeed indicator was working perfectly the entire time, right.
Speaker 2: And this is where we hit the human element of
Speaker 2: the cascade, because the cockpit voice recorder reveals that the
Speaker 2: first officer and a relief pilot in the back actually
Speaker 2: recognized the stall. He knew, they knew they were looking
Speaker 2: at the correct data. They even gently suggested to the
Speaker 2: captain to push the nose down, but they didn't force
Speaker 2: the issue, which is wild.
Speaker 1: Why. I mean, if you know the plane is falling
Speaker 1: out of the sky, once'd you just grab the yoke
Speaker 1: and save your own.
Speaker 2: Life because of a psychological concept called the authority gradient,
Speaker 2: don'kat what is that? So in the mid nineties, aviation
Speaker 2: culture in a lot of parts of the world was
Speaker 2: incredibly hierarchical. The captain was practically a god in the
Speaker 2: cockpit right culturally and procedurally, that junior first officer felt
Speaker 2: he couldn't just ripped the controls away from a senior commander,
Speaker 2: even as the ocean was literally rushing up to meet them.
Speaker 2: He let deference override survival.
Speaker 1: That rigid hierarchy is just it's terrifying. It's a tragic
Speaker 1: example of how a missing physical safety net, you know,
Speaker 1: a simple plastic cover for a tube, paired with human hesitation,
Speaker 1: leads to absolute disaster. But at least the missing tube
Speaker 1: cover was an accidental emission. What happens when a safety
Speaker 1: net is intentionally turned off?
Speaker 2: Well, that brings us to August nineteen ninety seven and
Speaker 2: Korean air flight eight oh one.
Speaker 1: Another really tough one to listen to.
Speaker 2: It is so we are looking at a fully loaded
Speaker 2: seven forty seven approaching the island of Grom in heavy
Speaker 2: erratic rain. It's past midnight. The captain is absolutely exhausted
Speaker 2: fighting through what we call a top hat thunderstorm.
Speaker 1: Which is a storm cell so dense it can essentially
Speaker 1: absorb bradar right.
Speaker 2: Right, creating this blind wall of water. Now, normally an
Speaker 2: airport has a glide slope beacon. It's an electronic that
Speaker 2: acts as like an invisible highway, guiding the plane at
Speaker 2: a perfect angle right down to the runway threshold.
Speaker 1: But on this night, Guam's glide slope is completely out
Speaker 1: of service for maintenance.
Speaker 2: Out of service, so the pilot has to perform what's
Speaker 2: called a manual step down approach. Without the electronic glide path,
Speaker 2: you have to use distance markers. It's honestly like walking
Speaker 2: down a staircase in pitch darkness.
Speaker 1: Right, you descend to a specific altitude, wait until your
Speaker 1: instruments tell you you've traveled a certain distance, and then step
Speaker 1: down to the next altitude exactly.
Speaker 2: But here's where the psychology of exhaustion kicks in expectation bias,
Speaker 2: hallucinating what you want to see. Yes, when a human
Speaker 2: brain is desperately tired and under immense stress, it often hallucinates.
Speaker 2: The captain, desperate to break through the clouds and just
Speaker 2: spot the runway, descends far too early on the final step.
Speaker 1: He thinks he sees the glow of the airport.
Speaker 2: He does, but what he's actually flying a seven forty
Speaker 2: seven into is the rugged, jungle covered terrain of Nimt's
Speaker 2: hill miles short of the right.
Speaker 1: It's horrific, and the survival. Details from this crash are
Speaker 1: just unbelievable. The plane is tearing through the jungle, disintegrating,
Speaker 1: and you have a passenger, Berry Small, who was actually
Speaker 1: a helicopter pilot himself.
Speaker 2: Right, very Small.
Speaker 1: His leg was saved from completely shattering against a metal
Speaker 1: seat crossbar for one specific reason. He had tucked his
Speaker 1: soft carryon bag under the seat in front of him,
Speaker 1: and the bag absorbed the impact of his shins flying forward.
Speaker 2: It just highlights how microscopic variables decide life or death
Speaker 2: in these massive events.
Speaker 1: And right near him was an eleven year old girl,
Speaker 1: Rika Matsuda.
Speaker 2: Ah.
Speaker 1: She survived virtually unhurt because her legs were simply too
Speaker 1: short to reach that same deadly crossbar that crushed the
Speaker 1: limbs of all the adults around her. Wow, and very
Speaker 1: Small actually spent years after this crash fighting for safety changes.
Speaker 1: He realized that the horrific fire that swept through the cabin,
Speaker 1: the fire that actually killed dozens of people who had
Speaker 1: survived the initial impact, it was heavily fueled by duty
Speaker 1: free alcohol stored in the overhead bin.
Speaker 2: Oh that makes sense.
Speaker 1: Yeah, the impact broke the bottles, an oxygen from the
Speaker 1: damaged ceiling missed with hundreds of liters of high proof flicker.
Speaker 2: Just a horrific scenario. But you know, the true shock
Speaker 2: of the Korean air investigation wasn't the alcohol or even
Speaker 2: the pilot's expectation.
Speaker 1: Bias, which is the system on the ground.
Speaker 2: Exactly when investigators dug into the systemic failures on the ground,
Speaker 2: they found something chilling. Guam's airport was equipped with an MSA,
Speaker 2: a Minimum Safe Altitude Warning system. It's a radar system
Speaker 2: specifically designed to alert air traffic controllers if a plane
Speaker 2: is flying dangerously low, so they can literally radio the
Speaker 2: crew and tell them to pull up.
Speaker 1: But the FAA had intentionally disabled it for arriving flights.
Speaker 2: They had they modified the software. The controllers had complained
Speaker 2: that the radar system was giving them too many nuisance readings.
Speaker 2: Nuisance readings, Yeah, it was beeping too often because of
Speaker 2: the surrounding hills. So to stop the annoying alarms, they
Speaker 2: pushed the systems tracking radius eighty kilometers out over the
Speaker 2: open ocean.
Speaker 1: So they essentially turned off the electronic safety net protecting
Speaker 1: the mountains right around the airport.
Speaker 2: They turned it off.
Speaker 1: That is exactly like taking the batteries out of your
Speaker 1: smoke detector because it goes off every time you make toast,
Speaker 1: only to end up sleeping through your house burning down.
Speaker 2: It's the perfect analogy.
Speaker 1: I mean, why do we sacrifice crucial safety for momentary convenience.
Speaker 1: If that system had been left on, the controller would
Speaker 1: have seen the seven forty seven dropping below the step
Speaker 1: down altitude and could have worn them.
Speaker 2: It's a really sobering reality about systemic complacency. When we
Speaker 2: get annoyed by our own safety systems, we disable the
Speaker 2: very thing designed to save us.
Speaker 1: It is, but you know, it's one thing to silence
Speaker 1: an alarm because it's annoying. It's an entirely different nightmare
Speaker 1: when the machine itself is secretly plotting against you.
Speaker 2: And that leads us to the longest, most agonizing investigation
Speaker 2: in aviation history, the ten year hunt for a mechanical
Speaker 2: serial killer.
Speaker 1: Ugh, just the phrase aviation serial killer gives me chills.
Speaker 2: Well, it chilled the higher industry. In nineteen ninety one,
Speaker 2: United Flight five eighty five was on a routine approach
Speaker 2: into Colorado Springs, clear day, slightly bumpy winds. Suddenly the
Speaker 2: Boeing seven thirty seven violently rolled onto its back, dropped
Speaker 2: its nose, and plummeted straight into the ground.
Speaker 1: Do survivors none.
Speaker 2: Three years later, in nineteen ninety four, USAir flight four
Speaker 2: to twenty seven is approaching Pittsburgh, calm, sunny evening. Out
Speaker 2: of nowhere, the exact same thing happens. The plane snaps
Speaker 2: violently to the left and dives into the earth.
Speaker 1: And what made this so terrifying for investigators was the
Speaker 1: total lack of evidence. I mean, in both cases, the
Speaker 1: planes were perfectly.
Speaker 2: Fine, completely fine.
Speaker 1: The engines were running at full capacity at the moment
Speaker 1: of impact. The pilots were highly experienced. There was no bomb,
Speaker 1: no structural failure on the wings. You just have perfectly
Speaker 1: good seven thirty seven Dash, which is literally the most
Speaker 1: popular passenger jet on Earth, suddenly turning upside down and
Speaker 1: falling out of the sky.
Speaker 2: Investigators were chasing ghosts. I mean they strongly suspected the rudder,
Speaker 2: the huge vertical panel on the tail that steers the
Speaker 2: nose left and right, hit some how jammed. But every
Speaker 2: time they recovered the parts from the craters and tested
Speaker 2: them in the lab, they worked flawlessly. The pressure on
Speaker 2: the investigators was immense. If they couldn't find the cause,
Speaker 2: they might have had to ground the entire global fleet
Speaker 2: of seven thirty seven.
Speaker 1: And then in nineteen ninety six they finally get their breakthrough.
Speaker 1: East Wind Flight five seventeen is approaching Richmond, Virginia. Suddenly
Speaker 1: the plane snaps into that same terrifying role at this time,
Speaker 1: right the pilot, Captain Brian Bishop, does what he's trained
Speaker 1: to do. He stands on the opposite rudder pedal with
Speaker 1: all his weight to counteract the role, but the pedal
Speaker 1: won't budge. He is fighting for his life, muscles straining,
Speaker 1: but miraculously, after thirty seconds of sheer terror, the rudder
Speaker 1: just releases on its own.
Speaker 2: He manages to regain control and land exactly and for
Speaker 2: the first time in a decade, investigators have a completely
Speaker 2: intact plane, an undamaged tail section, and a living pilot
Speaker 2: to interview.
Speaker 1: So what did they find Because if the parts worked
Speaker 1: in the lab, why did they feel.
Speaker 2: The sky well, because the lab wasn't the sky. They
Speaker 2: realized they had to subject the rudder's power control unit
Speaker 2: that's the mechanical muscle that moves the rudder, specifically a
Speaker 2: component called a dual servo valve to the most brutal
Speaker 2: environmental testing imaginable.
Speaker 1: To recreate the flight conditions.
Speaker 2: Yes, they had to recreate the extreme conditions of flight.
Speaker 2: So they soaked the valve in dry ice to simulate
Speaker 2: the sub zero temperatures at thirty thousand feet, then suddenly
Speaker 2: blasted it with superheated hydraulic fluid thermal shock, precisely extreme
Speaker 2: cold instantly meeting extreme heat. And under that precise thermal shock,
Speaker 2: they discovered something horrifying. The valve didn't just jam. It
Speaker 2: jammed and then it function in reverse.
Speaker 1: Oh my god, here's where it gets absolutely terrifying. I
Speaker 1: want you, the listener, to imagine your car starts sliding
Speaker 1: on an icy bridge. You do exactly what you've been
Speaker 1: trained to do since drivers at beast. You steer into
Speaker 1: the skid to regain control. But a microscopic temperature flaw
Speaker 1: has secretly wired your steering wheel backwards, so when you
Speaker 1: turn right, the wheel snap left.
Speaker 2: Exactly.
Speaker 1: That is exactly what happened to those pilots in Colorado
Speaker 1: and Pittsburgh. The plane started to drift in the wind.
Speaker 1: They pushed the rudder pedal to correct it, and the
Speaker 1: frozen valve reversed. The command slamming the rudder to the
Speaker 1: extreme opposite side. The very action trained to save their
Speaker 1: life is what pushed them into a death spiral.
Speaker 2: It's tragic. Boeing spent hundreds of millions of dollars redesigning
Speaker 2: and replacing those valves worldwide. It was a flaw born
Speaker 2: of incredibly complex engineering reacting to extreme unforeseen environmental variables
Speaker 2: Bowing didn't know was there.
Speaker 1: But what happens when an aerospace giant actually knows about
Speaker 1: a fatal flaw and actively chooses to ignore it Because
Speaker 1: finding a hidden flaw is one thing, Covering one up
Speaker 1: is entirely different.
Speaker 2: Yeah, this is where engineering failure crosses into corporate hubris.
Speaker 2: In nineteen seventy two, American Airlines Flight ninety six took
Speaker 2: off from Detroit. As the DC ten climbed past eleven
Speaker 2: thousand feet, the rear cargo door suddenly blew completely off
Speaker 2: the side of the plane.
Speaker 1: And the pressure difference was so massive that the explosive
Speaker 1: decompression actually collapsed the passenger cabin floor down into the
Speaker 1: cargo hold, and when the floor caved in, it completely
Speaker 1: severed the hydraulic cables that ran through it, the cables
Speaker 1: that controlled the tail. Captain Bryce McCormick was left flying
Speaker 1: a crippled monster.
Speaker 2: But he pulled off one of the most heroic saves
Speaker 2: in aviation history.
Speaker 1: He really did. He used draw engine thrust. Imagine steering
Speaker 1: a massive commercial jet without a steering wheel, unbelievable. He
Speaker 1: powered up the left engine to turn right and powered
Speaker 1: up the right engine to turn left. Against all odds,
Speaker 1: he wrestled that plane back to the runway in Detroit, and.
Speaker 2: When investigators looked at the blown off door, they found
Speaker 2: a fundamental catastrophic design flaw. Usually, airplane doors are plug doors.
Speaker 2: They open inward, meaning the higher air pressure inside the
Speaker 2: cabin physically pushes the door tighter into its frame, sort
Speaker 2: of like a bathtub stopper.
Speaker 1: So it's physically impossible for them to.
Speaker 2: Blow out exactly, But to maximize his luggage space, McDonald
Speaker 2: Douglas designed the DC ten cargo door to open outward.
Speaker 1: Which means the only thing keeping the door from blasting
Speaker 1: open in flight are the metal locking pins.
Speaker 2: Right, and the locking mechanism was deeply flawed. A baggage
Speaker 2: handler could force the external handle closed, and the indicators
Speaker 2: in the cockpit which show the door was securely locked,
Speaker 2: even if the metal pins hadn't actually engaged around the frame.
Speaker 1: So the door was literally a ticking time bomb waiting
Speaker 1: for the cabin pressure to pop it open. Yes, and
Speaker 1: the Safety Board saw this and demanded the FAA issue
Speaker 1: an immediate Airworthiness Directive, an AD that would have legally
Speaker 1: forced McDonald douglas to ground the planes and fix the
Speaker 1: doors immediately.
Speaker 2: But that didn't happen. Unbelievable, the head of the FAA
Speaker 2: and the head of McDonald douglas made a private gentleman's agreement.
Speaker 2: They agreed the manufacturer would fix the problem voluntarily, just
Speaker 2: avoiding the public relations nightmare and the massive financial hit
Speaker 2: of an official government grounding.
Speaker 1: A gentleman's agreement over passenger lives.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Two years later, a Turkish Airline's DC ten takes off
Speaker 1: from Paris. A baggage handler forces the door shut, the
Speaker 1: pins don't actually lock, The cockpit says everything is fine,
Speaker 1: and at eleven thousand feet the door blows off, just
Speaker 1: like before the floor collapses, but this time all the
Speaker 1: hydraulic lines are severed. Captain Bryce McCormick's trick with the
Speaker 1: engines won't work here because the plane immediately pitches down,
Speaker 1: the pilots have absolutely zero control. The plane plows into
Speaker 1: a forest outside Paris at five hundred miles an hour.
Speaker 1: Three hundred and forty six people die in what was
Speaker 1: at the time the worst crash in human history, and.
Speaker 2: The tragedy is compounded by what investigators found during the
Speaker 2: ensuing lawsuits. They uncovered a document known as the Applegate Memo,
Speaker 2: written by a product engineering director at the company the
Speaker 2: smoking It the smoking gun. It proved in black and
Speaker 2: white that the manufacturer knew about this catastrophic flaw before
Speaker 2: the Detroit incident even happened. They had actually had a
Speaker 2: cargo door blow out during a ground pressure test years earlier,
Speaker 2: but they choose not to change the fundamental design because
Speaker 2: it would delay production.
Speaker 1: I mean, are we as a society just okay with
Speaker 1: the dark concept of tombstone technology, the reality that aviation
Speaker 1: safety regulations are almost always written in blood?
Speaker 2: It seems that way sometimes.
Speaker 1: Is the math of corporate risk assessment fundamentally evil when
Speaker 1: human lives are the currency. They knew the door was
Speaker 1: a bomb, but fixing it was too expensive.
Speaker 2: It reeses really profound questions about accountability when profit motives
Speaker 2: intersect with public safety. The rigid systems of corporate self
Speaker 2: regulation failed completely.
Speaker 1: They really did. So we've spent this entire deep dive
Speaker 1: looking at how rigid systems, rigid cockpit hierarchy, rigid corporate greed,
Speaker 1: rigid computer programming create these cascades of disaster. So I
Speaker 1: want to end by looking at the flip side. What
Speaker 1: happens when the system completely dies and fluid rule breaking
Speaker 1: human ingenuity is the only backup plan we have. Let's
Speaker 1: talk about the miracle at gimli Oh.
Speaker 2: It's a perfect counterpoint. July nineteen, teen eighty three, Air
Speaker 2: Canada Flight one forty three, a state of the art
Speaker 2: Boeing seven to sixty seven, is cruising at twenty six
Speaker 2: thousand feet over central Canada. Suddenly, warning alarms flood the tokpit,
Speaker 2: fuel pressure drops, the left engine dies. Wow minutes later,
Speaker 2: the right engine dies. The cockpit goes totally dark and silent,
Speaker 2: save for a few battery powered stand by instruments. They
Speaker 2: are in a ninety five ton glider and the cause.
Speaker 1: Of this is almost comical in its simplicity. It was
Speaker 1: a cascading human error. Based on elementary school math. Canada
Speaker 1: was transitioning into the metric system at the time. The
Speaker 1: seven sixty seven was the first plane in the fleet
Speaker 1: to use kilograms instead of pounds for fuel calculations. The
Speaker 1: ground crew and the pilots, who double checked the work
Speaker 1: at the conversion factor mixed up. The plane required twenty
Speaker 1: two thousand, three hundred kilograms that fuel to reach its destination,
Speaker 1: but they loaded twenty two three hundred pounds, which is.
Speaker 2: Roughly half the fuel they actually needed, right.
Speaker 1: So they literally run out of gas in the middle
Speaker 1: of the sky. Incredible, But here is where human intuition
Speaker 1: steps in. Captain Bob Pearson just happens to be a
Speaker 1: high experienced glider pilot in his spare time.
Speaker 2: What luck.
Speaker 1: Seriously, he flies small engineless planes on the weekends. So
Speaker 1: he now has to somehow glide a massive commercial jet
Speaker 1: to a decommissioned Air Force base in Gimli, Manitoba, without engines,
Speaker 1: without full hydraulics, and without most of his instruments.
Speaker 2: And as they approach Gimli, Pearson realizes they're coming in
Speaker 2: too high and too fast. Normally you just circle around
Speaker 2: for another try or apply thrust.
Speaker 1: But without engines, he can't do either exactly.
Speaker 2: He has one single shot at the runway, so.
Speaker 1: He uses a radical maneuver called a forward slip. If
Speaker 1: you've never seen this, it is wild. You cross the controls,
Speaker 1: turning the steering yoke hard one way while pushing the
Speaker 1: ruttor pedals hard the opposite way. It intentionally unbalances the plane,
Speaker 1: turning the entire massive fuselage sideways into the wind, basically
Speaker 1: turning the body of the plane into a giant air brake.
Speaker 1: You drop altitude incredibly fast without gaining forward speed. Passengers
Speaker 1: are looking out their side windows, not at the horizon,
Speaker 1: but straight down at the ground.
Speaker 2: It's an aggressive, violent maneuver that goes against everything a
Speaker 2: commercial jet is designed to do, but it works. However,
Speaker 2: as they approach the runway, they face another horrifying surprise.
Speaker 1: Right the airbase wasn't empty.
Speaker 2: No, the decommissioned airbase is being used that day for
Speaker 2: a sportscar rally. There are campers, families and drag racers everywhere.
Speaker 1: On the tarmac, and because they have no hydraulic power,
Speaker 1: they have to use gravity to drop the landing gear.
Speaker 1: They literally just let them fall. The heavy back wheels
Speaker 1: lock into place, but the lighter nose gear fails to
Speaker 1: lock so they hit the runway, the nose gear classes
Speaker 1: and the front of the plane slams onto the concrete
Speaker 1: send them this massive blinding shower of sparks. The plane
Speaker 1: grinds down the runway, shedding speed, and stops just short
Speaker 1: of two young boys who are riding their bicycles right down.
Speaker 2: The middle of the strip, and everyone survived. I mean,
Speaker 2: the sheer airmanship and lateral thinking required to pull off
Speaker 2: a forward slip in a commercial airliner is stagger It
Speaker 2: wasn't in any Boeing manual.
Speaker 1: No, it is the ultimate irony. You have the most sophisticated, computerized,
Speaker 1: state of the art passenger jet in the sky. It
Speaker 1: totally fails because of a simple metric conversion error. And
Speaker 1: what saved to everyone wasn't a backup computer or a
Speaker 1: safety system. It was a grassroots, almost archaic wind in
Speaker 1: your hair gliding technique performed by a guy relying entirely
Speaker 1: on feel.
Speaker 2: And if we synthesize everything we've looked at today, I
Speaker 2: think this is the grand takeaway from a single mud
Speaker 2: dauber wasp plugging a tube to a hidden reversing servovalve
Speaker 2: to a catastrophic gentleman's agreement over a cargo door to
Speaker 2: a pounds to kilograms mix up. Aviation safety, like so
Speaker 2: many complex systems we rely on, is just an incredibly
Speaker 2: fragile web.
Speaker 1: And that's exactly why understanding this matters to you. We
Speaker 1: all exist in complex webs of technology in our daily lives,
Speaker 1: from the semi autonomous cars we drive to the algorithmic
Speaker 1: medical systems we rely on. Understanding the weak points, how
Speaker 1: human panic, rigid hierarchy, or expectation bias plays into them.
Speaker 1: It makes us better navigators of our own lives and
Speaker 1: our personal systems fail when the screens go dark, Do
Speaker 1: we have our own backup skills to rely on?
Speaker 2: Exactly? We build the machines to be as perfect as possible,
Speaker 2: but we have to be prepared to step in with raw,
Speaker 2: fluid human ingenuity when the machines inevitably fail us.
Speaker 1: So I'll leave you with this provocative thought. As we
Speaker 1: rapidly approach an era of fully autonomous AI flown aircraft,
Speaker 1: we might finally eliminate the human errors that cause some
Speaker 1: of these disasters. No more math mix ups, no more
Speaker 1: tired pilots hallucinating runway lights. But when the AI gets
Speaker 1: confused by a blocked sensor or encounters a cascading mechanical failure.
Speaker 1: It wasn't programmed to understand who will be sitting in
Speaker 1: the cockpit to break the rules, who will pull off
Speaker 1: a miracle side slip to save the day. We're removing
Speaker 1: human error also remove the very human intuition required for
Speaker 1: our greatest saves.