Speaker 1: So picture a brutal summer storm over Toronto.
Speaker 2: Oh wow, okay, setting the scene.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's August two thousand and five. The sky is
Speaker 1: practically black, just ripped open by constant lightning, and you
Speaker 1: were sitting in the back of Air France flight three
Speaker 1: five eight, which is this massive airbus A three forty,
Speaker 1: and it is violently bucking through the clouds, terrifying truly.
Speaker 1: You feel the wheels hit the tarmac, but like, it
Speaker 1: doesn't feel like a landing. It feels like the plane
Speaker 1: is skidding at over one hundred miles an hour. Oh geez, yeah,
Speaker 1: hitting what feels like three foot deep potholes. The cabin
Speaker 1: is shaking violently, luggage is just flying out of the
Speaker 1: overhead bins.
Speaker 2: I mean, that's literally everyone's worst nightmare.
Speaker 1: One flying exactly. Yeah, and suddenly a father sitting a
Speaker 1: few rows ahead of you, he looks out the window
Speaker 1: and in the reflection of the glass, he sees his
Speaker 1: daughter's face illuminated by this terrifying, bright orange aura of
Speaker 1: fire from outside the plane.
Speaker 2: Wow, it's just a moment of pure visceral terror. It's
Speaker 2: the kind of scenario that plays out in your deepest
Speaker 2: anxieties you know, like every time you feel an airplane
Speaker 2: drop through heavy turbulence or hear the landing gear clunk
Speaker 2: into place during a storm.
Speaker 1: Right, totally, Well, welcome to our deep dive today. We
Speaker 1: aren't just recounting terrifying moments, though. Our mission is to
Speaker 1: really unpack the anatomy of three harrowing aviation disasters.
Speaker 2: Yeah, we're getting into the weeds on this one.
Speaker 1: We are. We're going to look closely at the raw data,
Speaker 1: the physical mechanics, and really that razor thin margin between
Speaker 1: a miraculous survival and an absolute tragedy.
Speaker 2: Which is such a fascinating margin to study because when.
Speaker 1: You actually dig into these investigations, you realize how many
Speaker 1: interconnected systems keep you safe in the air, oh absolutely,
Speaker 1: and how incredibly small the cascade of failures needs to
Speaker 1: be to bring a commercial jet back down to Earth
Speaker 1: in the worst way possible.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that cascade. That's the fundamental truth of aviation accident investigation.
Speaker 2: An airplane almost never falls out of the sky because
Speaker 2: of like a single broken part or one bad decision.
Speaker 2: It is always a sequence, a chain reaction, exactly, a
Speaker 2: chain reaction where the links, you know, mechanical glitches weather
Speaker 2: anomalies and human psychology. They just tragically align.
Speaker 1: Okay, let's unpack this starting with the mechanics of that
Speaker 1: terrifying scene in Toronto Air France flight three five eight.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 1: So we have Captain Alan Rose and his co pilot
Speaker 1: Frederick no and they are fighting a storm that has
Speaker 1: already triggered a red alert at Pierson Airport.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I meaning ground crews aren't even allowed outside because
Speaker 2: the lightning is so intense.
Speaker 1: Wow. So they've been in a holding pattern, fuels getting tight,
Speaker 1: and they're finally cleared to land on runway two four left.
Speaker 2: And so you see the choice of runway provides the
Speaker 2: first link in.
Speaker 3: This chain because it's shorter, right right.
Speaker 2: Runway two four left happens to be the shortest runway
Speaker 2: at Pierson Airport. It's almost six hundred and fifty meters
Speaker 2: shorter than some of the others.
Speaker 1: Oh wow, that's a huge difference.
Speaker 2: It is. So you have a massive heavy passenger jet
Speaker 2: landing in blinding rain on the shortest available strip, and
Speaker 2: as they are descending, the wind shifts drastically.
Speaker 3: Just to make things worse, exactly.
Speaker 2: They are suddenly hit by a massive thirty three knot
Speaker 2: crosswind driven by a localized squall line right over the
Speaker 2: threshold of the runway.
Speaker 1: Thirty three knots pushing against the side of a massive
Speaker 1: metal tube. I mean, how do you even physically get
Speaker 1: the wheels on the ground in a straight line when
Speaker 1: the wind is trying to blow you completely off the runway.
Speaker 2: Well, pilots use a technique called crabbing. Crabbing like the animal, Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 2: You literally point the nose of the plane into the wind,
Speaker 2: so the aircraft is flying somewhat sideways relative to the runway.
Speaker 2: That sounds unnatural, it looks crazy if you watch it
Speaker 2: from the ground. But then right before the wheels touch,
Speaker 2: you use the rudder to kick the nose straight while
Speaker 2: dipping the wing into the wind so you don't drift. Okay,
Speaker 2: it requires intense physical effort. The copilot was fighting the
Speaker 2: yoke so hard just to keep the plane lined up
Speaker 2: that they came over the start of the runway twice
Speaker 2: as high as they should have been. O.
Speaker 1: No, yeah, and they floated. So by the time the
Speaker 1: tires finally slammed into the wet tarmac, they were nearly
Speaker 1: halfway down that already short runway.
Speaker 2: Okay, but Here's where it gets really interesting. They are
Speaker 2: halfway down the runway going way too fast, and they
Speaker 2: don't immediately break right.
Speaker 1: This is the crucial part.
Speaker 2: For a full seventeen seconds after touchdown, the plane's reverse
Speaker 2: thrusters are not activated.
Speaker 1: Which is an eternity in an airplane.
Speaker 2: Yeah. I mean imagine driving your car down a highway
Speaker 2: and pouring rain. You see dead stop traffic ahead of you.
Speaker 2: You take your foot off a gaz but you wait
Speaker 2: a full Mississippi count of seventeen before you even touch
Speaker 2: the brakes.
Speaker 1: You'd plow right into them.
Speaker 2: Exactly why the delay?
Speaker 1: Well, it comes down to task saturation and cockpit ergonomics.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: To understand this, you kind of have to look at
Speaker 1: how reverse thrusters physically work. Yeah, they don't actually run
Speaker 1: the engines backwards.
Speaker 2: Really, I was assuming they just spun the other way. No.
Speaker 1: Yeah, A lot of people think that when activated, pneumatic
Speaker 1: actuators open up heavy metal doors often called clamshells or
Speaker 1: cascades inside the engine.
Speaker 2: Cowling, Oh, I see, and these doors physically block the
Speaker 2: rearward flow of the jet exhaust and redirect it forcefully forward,
Speaker 2: acting as a massive aerodynamic brake. That makes sense, But
Speaker 2: to deploy them, a pilot has to physically pull up
Speaker 2: on specific levers mounted on the main throttles, and.
Speaker 1: The copilot couldn't reach them.
Speaker 2: The copilot was struggling so intensely with the lateral movement
Speaker 2: of the plane in that severe crosswind that his hand
Speaker 2: was basically clamped in a death grip over the throttle base.
Speaker 1: Just try and keep the plane straight.
Speaker 2: Exactly, and the captain, seeing the end of the runway
Speaker 2: approaching rapidly, simply couldn't get his hand in there to
Speaker 2: pull the reverse thrust levers.
Speaker 1: Wow.
Speaker 2: By the time they wrestled control and hit maximum reverse thrust,
Speaker 2: the physics of their momentum made it impossible to.
Speaker 1: Stop, so they just ran out a runway.
Speaker 2: Yeah, the plane overshoots the runway at high speed and
Speaker 2: plunges straight into a fifty foot instantly catching fire.
Speaker 1: And this is where the clock starts ticking for the
Speaker 1: two hundred and ninety seven passengers on board. We always
Speaker 1: hear flight attendants say to leave your baggage behind in
Speaker 1: an emergency, and you know, people always think, oh, I'll
Speaker 1: just quickly grab my backpack.
Speaker 2: Yeah. People always assume they have time, right, But there.
Speaker 1: Was a student on board Eddie Hoe who almost died
Speaker 1: because he hesitated trying to grab his laptop and his tuition money.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it is a deeply ingrained human instinct to gather
Speaker 2: your resources when threatened. But in an aviation fire, the
Speaker 2: environment becomes completely lethal in about two minutes.
Speaker 1: Two minutes, that's nothing.
Speaker 2: It's terrifying. It's a phenomenon called flashover. What's basically the
Speaker 2: intense heat causes the foams, plastics, and synthetic fabrics inside
Speaker 2: the cabin to off gas highly toxic smoke. Breathing it
Speaker 2: in will incapacitate and kill you long before the actual
Speaker 2: flames reach your seat.
Speaker 1: Oh wow.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that is the sole reason aviation regulations demand that
Speaker 2: an entire aircraft, even with half its doors blocked, must
Speaker 2: be able to be fully evacuated in ninety seconds.
Speaker 1: Ninety seconds to get almost three hundred panic people down
Speaker 1: the slides.
Speaker 3: That is wild, it is.
Speaker 1: And the flight attendants were fighting jam doors and steep
Speaker 1: angles because the plane was broken in the ravine, but
Speaker 1: miraculously every single person survived.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's known as the ninety second miracle.
Speaker 1: But when you look at this systemic side of things,
Speaker 1: it really shouldn't have required miracle. I mean, that fifty
Speaker 1: foot ravine wasn't a surprise to anyone at the airport.
Speaker 2: No, far from it. That ravine at the end of
Speaker 2: runway two four left was a documented historical hazard.
Speaker 1: It had caused problems before.
Speaker 2: Exactly decades earlier in nineteen seventy eight, and Air Canada
Speaker 2: DC nine rejected a takeoff and slid off the end
Speaker 2: of that runway into that exact same ravine. You're kidding, No,
Speaker 2: And a coroner's inquest following that crash explicitly recommended filling
Speaker 2: the ravine in to create a safety overrun area.
Speaker 1: But they didn't do it.
Speaker 2: It was never done.
Speaker 1: Man. Even if you don't move millions of tons of
Speaker 1: dirt to fill a ravine, there's technology that could have
Speaker 1: stopped this massive air bus safely.
Speaker 3: Right there is.
Speaker 2: It's an engineering solution called EMASS.
Speaker 1: EMASS.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Engineered material arresting systems.
Speaker 1: Okay, how does that work?
Speaker 2: Well? Instead of standard pavement at the end of a runway,
Speaker 2: you install a massive bed of highly engineered cellular cement blocks.
Speaker 2: It looks like regular tarmac, but it's designed to instantly
Speaker 2: crush under the weight of an aircraft.
Speaker 1: So kind of like driving a heavy truck into a
Speaker 1: runaway ramp filled with deep.
Speaker 2: Gravel, precisely the same concept. As the plane's tires crush
Speaker 2: the cellular cement, it absorbs the kinetic energy and physically
Speaker 2: drags the massive aircraft to a stop, usually without even
Speaker 2: damaging the landing gear. It's brilliant, it is, and it
Speaker 2: was widely used in the US at the time, but
Speaker 2: hadn't been installed in Toronto. So the absence of that
Speaker 2: passive safety system, combined with a short runway, an aerodynamic struggle,
Speaker 2: and a seventeen second braking delay created the perfect storm.
Speaker 1: Wow. So Air France showed us what happens when environmental
Speaker 1: factors and systemic hazards overwhelm a crew. But our next
Speaker 1: story shifts gears completely.
Speaker 2: Yeah, this one is very different.
Speaker 1: What happens with the environment is absolutely perfect, placid skies,
Speaker 1: no storms, but the airplane itself simply dies on you.
Speaker 2: Right. That brings us to July nineteen eighty three and
Speaker 2: the bizarre story of Air Canada Flight one forty three.
Speaker 1: So imagine you're a passenger cruising comfortably at twenty six
Speaker 1: five hundred feet over Canada. Suddenly in the cockpit. An
Speaker 1: alarm sounds, never a good sign, never, then another, and
Speaker 1: then comes the chilling moment. All the high tech digital
Speaker 1: screens simply go black. The engined school down to zero.
Speaker 1: There is no thrust, just silence, just the eerie sound
Speaker 1: of the wind rushing past the fuselage. Captain Bob Pearson
Speaker 1: and First Officer Maurice Quintal have just lost both engines
Speaker 1: on a state of the art Boeing seven sixty seven.
Speaker 3: Unbelievable Houtel gets.
Speaker 1: On the radio to air traffic Control and says, holy cow,
Speaker 1: I'm talking to a dead man.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, turning a ninety five ton commercial airliner
Speaker 2: into a very heavy unero dynamic glifeh is a pilot's
Speaker 2: worst nightmare, oh for sure. But what makes this case
Speaker 2: so fascinating is that it wasn't a mechanical failure that
Speaker 2: brought the engines down. It was a failure of mathematics, right.
Speaker 1: Because nineteen eighty three was an era of transition. Canada
Speaker 1: was switching to the metric system, and this brand new
Speaker 1: seven sixty seven was the first in Air Canada's fleet
Speaker 1: to use metric measurements for.
Speaker 2: Its fuel exactly, and the plan's digital fuel gauges were
Speaker 2: actually malfunctioning before the flight.
Speaker 3: Oh of course they were right, So to.
Speaker 2: Dispatch the aircraft, the ground crew had to manually measure
Speaker 2: the fuel using something called dripsticks. Dripsticks, Yeah, they are
Speaker 2: literally calibrated fiberglass tubes that drop down from the underside
Speaker 2: of the wings. The fuel inside the tank pushes a
Speaker 2: float down the tube, allowing the crew to measure the
Speaker 2: exact volume of fuel in centimeters.
Speaker 1: But an airplane engine doesn't care about the volume of
Speaker 1: the fuel.
Speaker 2: It cares about the mass, and that is the crucial
Speaker 2: link in the chain. To figure out the mass, you
Speaker 2: have to multiply the volume by the specific gravity of
Speaker 2: jet fuel.
Speaker 1: Okay, mass time right.
Speaker 2: So the flight required twenty two thy three hundred kilograms
Speaker 2: of fuel, But when the ground technicians and the pilots
Speaker 2: did the manual calculation, they used the conversion factor for pounds.
Speaker 1: Oh no, so they pumped in twenty two three hundred
Speaker 1: pounds of fuel. Yep, And since a pound is roughly
Speaker 1: half a kilogram, they took off with exactly half the
Speaker 1: fuel they needed to reach their destination exactly. And because
Speaker 1: the computer that usually acted as the flight engineer had
Speaker 1: been eliminated. In these newer two pilot cockpits, the lines
Speaker 1: of responsibility were blurred.
Speaker 3: No one caught the error exactly.
Speaker 2: So there they are at twenty six five hundred feet
Speaker 2: engines dead. And when the engines die, you don't just
Speaker 2: lose thrust, wild he steel lose You lose the massive
Speaker 2: generators that provide electrical power to the screens, and you
Speaker 2: lose the engine driven pumps that provide hydraulic pressure.
Speaker 1: And hydraulics are kind of important.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Without hydraulic pressure, you physically cannot move the massive ailerons
Speaker 2: and elevators on the wings and tail. You lose the
Speaker 2: ability to steal.
Speaker 1: Okay, wait, if they lose engines, electrical and hydraulics, how
Speaker 1: are they even moving the wing flaps to steer a
Speaker 1: ninety five ton.
Speaker 2: Brick that comes down to an obscure genius backup system
Speaker 2: called the ram air turbine or the RAT.
Speaker 1: The rat.
Speaker 2: Okay, it's a small propeller about the size of a
Speaker 2: ceiling fan tucked away in the belly.
Speaker 1: Of the plane well wind turbine.
Speaker 2: Holistically, when the systems die, a spring loaded door opens
Speaker 2: and this propeller drops down into the four hundred mile
Speaker 2: per hour slipstream beneath the aircraft. Oh wow, the wind
Speaker 2: physically spins the propeller, which dries a small hydraulic pump.
Speaker 2: It provides just enough pressure to let the pilots rustle
Speaker 2: the flight surfaces. It is raw kinetic energy conversion keeping
Speaker 2: the plane flyable.
Speaker 1: That is incredible engineering. And thank goodness for Captain Bob Pearson,
Speaker 1: because Pearson wasn't just a commercial pilot, he was an
Speaker 1: experienced glider pilot in his spare time.
Speaker 2: Which is the single most important coincidence in this entire story.
Speaker 1: Absolutely. So they are sinking, dropping about two thousand feet
Speaker 1: a minute. They quickly realize they aren't going to make.
Speaker 3: It to Winnipeg, not even close, right.
Speaker 1: So Quintle remembers an old Air Force base where you
Speaker 1: used to train in Gimli, Manitoba. So they aim for that.
Speaker 1: But as they get close, they face a massive physics problem.
Speaker 1: They're way too high and coming in way too fast.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and normally you deploy flaps to create drag or
Speaker 2: fly in a circle to bleed off altitude, but they
Speaker 2: can't do that right without engines. Circling is a death sentence.
Speaker 2: They would lose too much lift and crash short of
Speaker 2: the runway, and the RT doesn't provide enough hydraulic pressure
Speaker 2: to deploy the heavy flaps.
Speaker 1: So they have exactly one shot at this runway, just one.
Speaker 1: So Pearson does something absolutely wild. He executes a maneuver
Speaker 1: called a forward slip. You take a ninety five ton
Speaker 1: commercial airliner and you intentionally cross the controls, which is wait,
Speaker 1: how does crossing the controls actually work in a jet
Speaker 1: that size?
Speaker 2: Well, it is a violent, unnatural maneuver for commercial jet.
Speaker 2: Pearson turned the control yokes sharply to the right, which
Speaker 2: raises the right wing and tells the plane to turn right.
Speaker 1: Okay.
Speaker 2: At the exact same time, he stamped his left foot
Speaker 2: all the way down on the rudder pedal, forcing the
Speaker 2: tail to swing left.
Speaker 1: That sounds completely counterintuitive.
Speaker 2: It is. By doing this, he deliberately threw the plane
Speaker 2: out of its aerodynamic alignment. He forced the massive flat
Speaker 2: side of the fuselage to fly somewhat sideways into the
Speaker 2: two hundred mile per hour wind.
Speaker 1: It's like taking a massive eighteen wheeler semi truck and
Speaker 1: intentionally drifting its sideways down a steep, icy hill. Yes,
Speaker 1: like using the friction of the tire, sliding sideways to
Speaker 1: control your speed without picking up acceleration exactly, And the
Speaker 1: passengers are looking out the windows and the plane is
Speaker 1: banked so sharply they're staring straight down at a golf course.
Speaker 2: He essentially used the entire broad side of the airplane
Speaker 2: as a giant air brake, and it works. He slips
Speaker 2: the plane right down to the threshold of the runway
Speaker 2: and snaps it straight at the last possible second.
Speaker 1: But the climax here is pure cinematic terror. Oh yeah,
Speaker 1: because the the commission bas At Gimli isn't abandoned anymore.
Speaker 1: It's been converted into a drag racing strip, and on
Speaker 1: this particular Saturday, it's hosting a massive family camping weekend.
Speaker 1: One of the odds, right, people are having barbecues right
Speaker 1: next to the tarmac and right in the middle of
Speaker 1: the runway, two young boys are riding their bicycles.
Speaker 2: And remember, without engines, a gliding seven sixty seven is
Speaker 2: completely silent from the ground. There is no jet roar
Speaker 2: to warn the campers.
Speaker 1: Just a silent two hundred mile per hour metal beast
Speaker 1: dropping out of the sky behind them. The plane hits
Speaker 1: the concrete because they had no hydraulics to properly lost
Speaker 1: the nose gear. It collapses instantly with it sound like
Speaker 1: a shotgun blast. The nose of the plane grinds into
Speaker 1: the concrete, shooting a massive rooster tail of sparks and smoke.
Speaker 1: Captain Pearson is standing on the brakes, blowing out the
Speaker 1: main tires, desperately trying to steer this sliding behemoth away
Speaker 1: from the campers, just.
Speaker 2: Fighting the momentum.
Speaker 1: Yeah, the boys on the bikes are pedaling for their lives.
Speaker 1: The plane finally plows into a steel guard rail that
Speaker 1: had been installed down the center of the drags strip,
Speaker 1: and the friction drags it to a halt. Amazing, the
Speaker 1: nose stops just feet away from the campers. Everyone survives
Speaker 1: the Gimli Glider.
Speaker 2: It remains a masterclass in airmanship, human skill and instinct
Speaker 2: overcoming a catastrophic systemic math error.
Speaker 1: Which brings us to a darker question. Gimli proves that
Speaker 1: sometimes human skill can overcome a mechanical or systemic deficit.
Speaker 1: But what happens when the margin for air is absolutely zero.
Speaker 2: When everything is stacked against you?
Speaker 1: Exactly when the systemic negligence is so deep and the
Speaker 1: technology is so archaic that no amount of piloting skill
Speaker 1: can outfly the.
Speaker 2: Danger that takes us to April nineteen ninety six and
Speaker 2: the tragedy of US Air Force Flight IFO twenty one.
Speaker 1: This is a high profile flight. It's carrying thirty five people,
Speaker 1: including the US Commerce Secretary Ron Brown, along with a
Speaker 1: delegation of diplomats and business leaders. They are flying a
Speaker 1: specially designed Air Force CT forty three, which is essentially
Speaker 1: a modified Boeing seven thirty seven, into to Dubrovnik, Croatia.
Speaker 1: It's a trade mission to help rebuild the region after
Speaker 1: a brutal civil war, and they're flying directly into a
Speaker 1: massive spring thunderstorm.
Speaker 2: The conditions in Dubrovnik were incredibly challenging.
Speaker 1: Oh I bet.
Speaker 2: The airport had been utterly devastated during the war. It
Speaker 2: was completely stripped of modern navigation aids. There was no
Speaker 2: approach radar, meaning air traffic control couldn't see the planes
Speaker 2: coming in.
Speaker 1: Wow.
Speaker 2: Yeah. There was no instrument landing system or ILS, which
Speaker 2: is the standard technology that projects a precise electronic glide
Speaker 2: slope to guide a plane safely down to the runway.
Speaker 2: Center line.
Speaker 1: So how were they navigating? I read they were using
Speaker 1: something called NDB's non directional beacons.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and NDB is basically ancient technology in the aviation world.
Speaker 2: It essentially an am radio tower sending out a continuous ping,
Speaker 2: just a ping, just a ping. Inside the plane, you
Speaker 2: have an instrument with a single needle that points towards
Speaker 2: the source of that radio signal. That's It doesn't tell
Speaker 2: you how high you are, It doesn't give you a
Speaker 2: precise downward path. It just says the radio tower is
Speaker 2: generally in that direction.
Speaker 3: Wait, if this is a.
Speaker 1: VIP military flight carrying a US cabinet member, why wouldn't
Speaker 1: the commanders just ground the plane until the weather cleared.
Speaker 2: That's the million dollar question.
Speaker 1: Right, or at least wait until the airport installed modern radar.
Speaker 1: Why push a multimillion dollar jet through a thunderstorm using
Speaker 1: nineteen fifties technology.
Speaker 2: Well, the investigation revealed an intense culture of pressure. The
Speaker 2: military was operating under a mantra of you know, do
Speaker 2: more with less.
Speaker 1: Wow.
Speaker 2: There was massive political and scheduling pressure to complete these
Speaker 2: VIP missions, and military commanders were routinely issuing waivers that
Speaker 2: bypassed the rigorous safety checks required of standard.
Speaker 3: Commercial flights, So they're cutting corners.
Speaker 2: Basically, Yeah, they prioritized the mission schedule over safety margins.
Speaker 2: And to be clear, this is what the investigators found.
Speaker 2: It was a systemic issue across the board at the time.
Speaker 1: And that lack of margins proved fatal when the workload
Speaker 1: hit the crew. To properly fly the approach into Dubrovnik
Speaker 1: using those beacons, the plan should have had two automatic
Speaker 1: direction finder receivers.
Speaker 2: Right exactly, so the pilots could track two different beacons
Speaker 2: simultaneously to cross reference their position.
Speaker 1: But Flight IFO twenty one only had one receiver.
Speaker 2: Yeah, just one.
Speaker 1: So the pilot flying blind through a thunderstorm fighting turbulence
Speaker 1: has to constantly tune the radio back and forth between
Speaker 1: two different frequencies to try and triangulate where they are.
Speaker 2: It creates immense task saturation. You're just overloaded, I can imagine.
Speaker 2: The investigation suggests that the crew, overwhelmed by the clumsy
Speaker 2: beacon system just gave up on it and switched over
Speaker 2: to their inertial navigation system ORS to guide them in.
Speaker 1: What exactly is an I ins I know it's not
Speaker 1: a radio signal.
Speaker 2: No, an inertial navigation system relies entirely on internal gyroscopes
Speaker 2: and accelerometers.
Speaker 1: Okay, so it's all internal.
Speaker 2: Right before the plane takes off, you tell the computer
Speaker 2: its exact GPS coordinates on the tarmac. From that moment on,
Speaker 2: the gyroscopes measure every single turn, acceleration, and bank. The
Speaker 2: plane mane constantly calculating its new position based purely on
Speaker 2: its own movement.
Speaker 1: So it's like walking through a dense forest with a
Speaker 1: compass that's off by a millimeter. After ten steps, you
Speaker 1: don't even notice you're off the path, but after ten
Speaker 1: miles you're in a completely different county.
Speaker 2: That is the perfect analogy. It's a phenomenon called drift.
Speaker 2: Because the system is entirely self contained, tiny mechanical imperfections
Speaker 2: in the gyroscopes cause the calculated position to drift from
Speaker 2: the actual position over time. Okay, by the time they
Speaker 2: were on their final approach into Dubrovnik, navigating blindly through
Speaker 2: the clouds, their i ins had imperceptibly drifted off course
Speaker 2: by about seven degrees seven degrees.
Speaker 1: When you are flying at hundreds of miles an hour
Speaker 1: in a mountainous region, seven degrees means the difference between
Speaker 1: a runway threshold and a solid rock wall exactly. And
Speaker 1: to make this cascade of errors even worse, there was
Speaker 1: the fatal chart.
Speaker 2: Right, the approach chart the military crew was using every
Speaker 2: instrument approach has a minimum descent altitude, the absolute low
Speaker 2: twist height a plane is allowed to descend into the clouds. Okay,
Speaker 2: if the pilots hit that altitude and cannot visually see
Speaker 2: the runway lights, they must immediately abort the landing and
Speaker 2: pull up.
Speaker 1: But the military hadn't vetted the chart they were using.
Speaker 1: For Dubrovnik, the safe standard for that specific mountainous terrain
Speaker 1: should have been a minimum descent altitude of twenty eight
Speaker 1: hundred feet. Yeah, the chart the Air Force crew was
Speaker 1: given authorized them to descend to twenty one hundred feet.
Speaker 2: Which is a huge discrepancy. So consider the chain reaction here.
Speaker 2: You have an exhausted crew legally authorized by an unapproved
Speaker 2: chart to fly seven hundred feet lower than was actually.
Speaker 1: Safe, relying on a drifting internal navigation.
Speaker 2: System, right descending through a blinding storm looking for an
Speaker 2: airport they can't see. They flew perfectly straight, perfectly leveled
Speaker 2: directly into the side of Saint John's Mountain.
Speaker 1: The impact was devastating, tragically, Technical Sergeant Shelly Kelly actually
Speaker 1: survived the initial crash in the tail section.
Speaker 2: Which is just heartbreaking.
Speaker 1: It is, but because the airport had no radar, air
Speaker 1: traffic control had no idea where the plane was us
Speaker 1: It took rescuers hours to hike through driving rain and
Speaker 1: active mind fields left over from the war to reach
Speaker 1: the wreckage. She died in the ambulance on the way
Speaker 1: to the hospital. All thirty five people perished.
Speaker 2: The fallout was seismic. Commanders were relieved of duty. The
Speaker 2: Air Force was forced to fundamentally change its culture, installing
Speaker 2: modern flight data recorders on all military transports and strictly
Speaker 2: adhering to Department of Defense commercial standards for all airport approaches.
Speaker 1: It's a stark reminder that gravity and terrain do not
Speaker 1: respect rank, political urgency, or budget.
Speaker 2: Constraints, Absolutely not. They are unforgiving.
Speaker 1: So what does this all mean? When we look at
Speaker 1: Air France three point fifty eight, the Gimli Glider and
Speaker 1: Air Force IF twenty one, we see that aviation safety
Speaker 1: isn't just a pilot's hands on the yoke.
Speaker 2: Now, it's so much more than that is a tapestry.
Speaker 1: It's the physical engineering of the runway, like those crushed
Speaker 1: concrete emas systems. It's the meticulous specific gravity mathematics of
Speaker 1: a ground crew. It's the raw instinctual skill of cross
Speaker 1: controlling a heavy jet. And it's the unyielding rigidity of
Speaker 1: safety regulations. If you pull on just one or two
Speaker 1: of those threads, a delayed throttle, a metric conversion, or
Speaker 1: a single missing radio receiver, the whole tapestry unravels and.
Speaker 2: For you listening. The next time you board a commercial
Speaker 2: flight and you hear the flight attendants going through the
Speaker 2: safety briefing, pointing out the exits, telling you to leave
Speaker 2: your bags behind, don't tune it out.
Speaker 1: Seriously, pay attention.
Speaker 2: Remember the toxic smoke and the ninety second evacuation of
Speaker 2: Air France three point fifty eight. Those seemingly tedious rules
Speaker 2: are not arbitrary. They are written in the hard lessons
Speaker 2: and the physical realities of the past.
Speaker 1: They are the margin between life and death. And it
Speaker 1: leaves me with one final provocative thought. We saw Captain
Speaker 1: Pearson save his plane because he had the raw, manual
Speaker 1: flying skills of a glider pilot. Oh absolutely, he knew
Speaker 1: how to physically feel the aerodynamics of the aircraft when
Speaker 1: all the computers died. But modern airplanes are becoming increasingly automated.
Speaker 1: They practically fly themselves from takeoff to touchdown.
Speaker 2: They really did.
Speaker 1: Are we slowly breeding out that instinctual glider pilot skill
Speaker 1: when the screens go black tomorrow, Will the computer generation
Speaker 1: of pilots know how to manually sideslip a ninety five
Speaker 1: ton jetliner to safety?
Speaker 2: It's a scary thought.
Speaker 1: Or are we relying too much on the machines to
Speaker 1: never fail, because, as we've seen, the machines do fail,
Speaker 1: and when they do, you don't want to be staring
Speaker 1: out the window looking at an orange or a fire