Speaker 1: Picture this. You are sitting in a commercial airliner, a
Speaker 1: DC nine, cruising at about fourteen thousand feet. It's April
Speaker 1: nineteen seventy seven, Southern Airways Flight two forty two. You've
Speaker 1: been flying for just a few minutes, really, just a
Speaker 1: quick hop from Huntsville to Atlanta, and suddenly the sky
Speaker 1: just turns violent.
Speaker 2: And we're not talking about a little turbulence here.
Speaker 1: No, I mean baseball sized hail is just battering the fuselage.
Speaker 1: It's so loud that passengers later described it as like
Speaker 1: being trapped inside a metal barrel while someone outside just
Speaker 1: throws rocks at it.
Speaker 3: It's a terrifying image, it really is.
Speaker 1: And up in the cockpit that same hail completely shatters
Speaker 1: the thick windshield and then comes the most terrifying sound
Speaker 1: of all, which is just well silence. Both engines die, Yeah,
Speaker 1: all the electrical power cuts out. You're essentially in a
Speaker 1: forty ton metal tube in the pitch dark, plummeting in
Speaker 1: fifty six feet per second.
Speaker 2: I mean, it is the absolute definition of an aviation nightmare.
Speaker 2: You know. We like to think of commercial flight as
Speaker 2: this perfectly engineered, highly predictable.
Speaker 1: Systems, right, like everything is under control.
Speaker 2: Exactly, and most of the time it is. But when
Speaker 2: you introduce the ultimate unpredictable variable, which is just the
Speaker 2: raw physical power of mother nature, that illusion of total
Speaker 2: control can shatter just as quickly as that cockpit windshield did.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And to understand how highly trained professionals end up
Speaker 1: in these utterly terrifying scenarios, We've put together a deep
Speaker 1: dive today using this massive stack of sources.
Speaker 3: Not a lot to cover, we do.
Speaker 1: We're looking at declassified National Transportation Safety Board crash reports,
Speaker 1: some incredibly harrowing transcripts from cockit voice recorders, and this
Speaker 1: really fascinating MIT study on pilot psychology.
Speaker 3: It's some pretty heavy material, it is.
Speaker 1: But our mission today is to essentially put on our
Speaker 1: accident investigator hats and take you inside three true stories
Speaker 1: of commercial plane crashes. We want to understand exactly what
Speaker 1: happens when fierce weather, complex machinery, and human psychology all collide.
Speaker 2: And I think the real through line in all these
Speaker 2: investigations is that these aircraft were highly reliable, right, and
Speaker 2: the pilots were extensively drained.
Speaker 1: They weren't amateurs, not at all.
Speaker 2: We are rarely looking at a single glaring error. In
Speaker 2: these cases, we're looking at a cascade. We're looking at
Speaker 2: how advanced technology can actually create illusions and how the
Speaker 2: human brain processes or fails to process those illusions under
Speaker 2: just unimaginable pressure.
Speaker 1: So let's start by going right back into that terrifying
Speaker 1: cockpit of Southern Airways Flight two forty two.
Speaker 3: Okay, let's do it.
Speaker 1: The pilots were flying toward this massive thunderstorm system. They're
Speaker 1: looking at their weather radar and they spot what looks
Speaker 1: like a clear hole right like a safe passage straight
Speaker 1: through these towering thunderheads. So they steered directly for it.
Speaker 1: But that hole, it actually did not exist.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and this is where we encounter a physical phenomenon
Speaker 2: called radar attenuation.
Speaker 1: Okay, break that down for us.
Speaker 2: So in nineteen seventy seven, the weather radar on that
Speaker 2: GC nine it worked by sending out radio waves. Those
Speaker 2: ways bounce off precipitation like rain or hail, and then
Speaker 2: they returned to the receiver, which basically paints a picture
Speaker 2: of the storm.
Speaker 3: On the pilot screen.
Speaker 2: That makes sense, But the rain and the hail in
Speaker 2: this specific storm cell were so incredibly dense that the
Speaker 2: wall of water actually absorbed the radar signal entirely.
Speaker 1: Wait, let me take sure and visualizing this right, So
Speaker 1: the radar waves hit the storm, but instead of bouncing
Speaker 1: back to the plane to say, hey, there's a huge
Speaker 1: storm here, they just got swallowed up.
Speaker 2: That is the tragic irony of the whole thing. The
Speaker 2: waves couldn't penetrate the wall of water to see what
Speaker 2: was behind it, and the water was just too thick
Speaker 2: to reflect the signal back properly.
Speaker 1: Wow.
Speaker 2: So to the radar receiver, a lack of a returning
Speaker 2: signal just means a lack of weather. It painted a
Speaker 2: blank black space right in the absolute most violent core
Speaker 2: of the storm.
Speaker 1: So it's basically like a mirage in the desert. You
Speaker 1: know you're dying of thirst, you see a shimmering oasis,
Speaker 1: you run toward it, but it's just a trick of
Speaker 1: the light.
Speaker 3: That's a great way to put it.
Speaker 1: Only here the pilot saw a safe, clear passage precisely
Speaker 1: because the danger was so overwhelmingly dnse that it actually
Speaker 1: blinded their instruments. They flew directly into a monster.
Speaker 2: They really did, and that decision triggered this massive mechanical cascade.
Speaker 2: The Pratt and Whitney investigator who looked at the engines
Speaker 2: after the crash, a guy named Al Weaver. He uncovered
Speaker 2: a really fascinating mechanical failure.
Speaker 1: Right because the engines.
Speaker 2: Dined exactly and the hail didn't actually fly into the
Speaker 2: engine and destroy the internal workings directly, which is what.
Speaker 3: You might think.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I assumed you just shreded the insides.
Speaker 2: No, what the massive hail did was it dented the
Speaker 2: engine cowlings, you know, the aerodynamic outer casings, and that
Speaker 2: physical denting is what blocked the bleed valves.
Speaker 1: Okay, wait, I'm stuck on this part. I mean, hail
Speaker 1: is just ice right, It's a metal casing. How does
Speaker 1: a dented outer casing cause an entire jet engine to
Speaker 1: literally shut down? That seems like a pretty massive design flaw.
Speaker 2: It definitely sounds counterintuitive, but it all comes down to
Speaker 2: flu dynamics. Jet engines operate by sucking in air, compressing
Speaker 2: it incredibly tightly with these spinning blades, mixing it with fuel,
Speaker 2: and then igniting.
Speaker 1: It right sucks, squeeze, bang, blow right exactly.
Speaker 2: So to keep that immense pressure balanced, engines have these
Speaker 2: bleed valves that release the excess pressurized air. Okay, when
Speaker 2: those valves got blocked by the hail damage, the air
Speaker 2: just couldn't vent. So the pressure built up inside the
Speaker 2: compressor stage until it became so great that the airflow
Speaker 2: violently reversed direction. It literally blasted forward.
Speaker 3: Out the front of the engine.
Speaker 1: Oh wow.
Speaker 2: In aviation, this is called an engine surge or a
Speaker 2: compressor stall. The engines basically start violently choking.
Speaker 1: Okay, so the engines are choking, they aren't getting the
Speaker 1: right airflow. But why did they completely destroy themselves? Like
Speaker 1: couldn't the pilots just I don't restart them once they
Speaker 1: glid it out of the hail.
Speaker 2: And that brings us to the fatal human factor in
Speaker 2: this chain. When an engine surges and chokes like that,
Speaker 2: the standard procedure is to pull the throttles back to
Speaker 2: reduce the fuel and clear the surge.
Speaker 1: I don't want to ease off.
Speaker 2: Exactly, but you have to put yourself in that cockpit.
Speaker 2: They are being battered by a massive storm, They're losing
Speaker 2: altitude rapidly, and air traffic control has literally just instructed
Speaker 2: them to climb to fifteen thousand feet.
Speaker 1: Oh man, So they need power.
Speaker 2: Right under intense psychological pressure to just keep the plane
Speaker 2: in the sky, the captain advanced the throttles to gain power.
Speaker 1: He pushed the throttles up when the engine was already
Speaker 1: actively choking.
Speaker 2: He did, and it forced the engines to try and
Speaker 2: suck in even more air, which exacerbated that pressure build
Speaker 2: up to truly catastrophic levels.
Speaker 1: Because the air still has nowhere.
Speaker 2: To go exactly, So, this intense blocked pressure bent the
Speaker 2: internal steel compressor blades back and forth, vibrating them violently
Speaker 2: until the metal suffered fatigue and just snapped oh cock.
Speaker 2: The engines then ingested their own broken steel blades. They
Speaker 2: literally shredded themselves from the inside out. In a matter
Speaker 2: of seconds, they had turned a commercial jet into a
Speaker 2: forty ton glider.
Speaker 1: With what maybe six minutes of glide time.
Speaker 3: Left, Yeah, barely anything.
Speaker 1: So they are frantically searching for an airport. And this
Speaker 1: is where the technological illusions strike again, because they were
Speaker 1: actually quite close to Cornelius Moore Airport, which had a
Speaker 1: runway that probably would have saved them. It was right there,
Speaker 1: but the Atlanta air traffic controllers couldn't direct them there
Speaker 1: because Cornelius More didn't have a specific beacon to show
Speaker 1: up on the controllers' radar screens. The controllers literally could
Speaker 1: not see the airport on their scopes to guide this
Speaker 1: crippled plane to it.
Speaker 3: Which is just heartbreaking.
Speaker 2: So, left with absolutely no radar guidance and zero engine power,
Speaker 2: the first officer, who was actually a former Navy pilot,
Speaker 2: he had to attempt a completely improvised visual landing on
Speaker 2: a rural stretch of Highway ninety two in New Hope, Georgia.
Speaker 1: And the touchdown, from what I read it was initially smooth,
Speaker 1: but they were just coming in way too fast, yeah,
Speaker 1: with obviously no engine reverse thrust to slow.
Speaker 3: Round because the Asians were gone.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so they bounced, they hit a gas station, and
Speaker 1: the plane just broke apart in a massive fireball.
Speaker 2: Ye.
Speaker 1: Seventy two people lost their lives that day.
Speaker 3: It's a tragedy.
Speaker 2: So on flight two forty two, we really see what
Speaker 2: happens when technology, you know, the weather radar of the
Speaker 2: air traffic control scopes, essentially goes blind. But what happens
Speaker 2: when the technology doesn't just go blind but actively masks
Speaker 2: the danger, like pretending everything is perfectly fine. That's what
Speaker 2: we see decades later, way up at thirty three thousand feet.
Speaker 1: Right, Let's move to August two thousand and five. This
Speaker 1: is West Caribbean Airways flight seven oh eight. We are
Speaker 1: on a late night charter flight from Panama to Martinique.
Speaker 1: The plane is an MD eighty, heavily loaded with passengers
Speaker 1: returning from vacation.
Speaker 3: A very different scenario.
Speaker 1: Very different, But the atmosphere in the cockpit is really heavy.
Speaker 1: The airline itself is in deep financial trouble. The captain
Speaker 1: actually hasn't been paid in six.
Speaker 3: Months, six months, it's unbelievable.
Speaker 1: Yeah, he is actually working a second job at a
Speaker 1: local bar just to feed his family. So you have
Speaker 1: a crew that is financially stressed, deeply exhausted, and they're
Speaker 1: flying right through hurricane.
Speaker 2: Season weather, and you really cannot separate that psychological backdrop
Speaker 2: from the mechanical events that follow. You have a captain
Speaker 2: whose cognitive bandwidth is just already stretched to the absolute limit.
Speaker 2: Oh absolutely, So as they encounter this stormy weather, they
Speaker 2: decide to climb to thirty three thousand feet to try
Speaker 2: and get above the worst of the turbulence. The outside
Speaker 2: temperature plummets, and the captain notices ice starting to form
Speaker 2: on the windshield wipers. So to protect the plane, he
Speaker 2: turns on the anti icing.
Speaker 1: System, which is totally standard procedure. You do not want
Speaker 1: ice accumulating on the wings and destroying your aerodynamic lift.
Speaker 3: No ice is lethal.
Speaker 1: But turning on the anti icing system on a jet
Speaker 1: like the MD eighty, yeah, it isn't like you know,
Speaker 1: flipping on the electric rear defroster in your sedan. It
Speaker 1: relies on bleed air.
Speaker 2: Yes, those exact same compressor stages we talked about earlier.
Speaker 2: To heat the wings and the engine cowlings to actually
Speaker 2: melt the ice, the plane physically bleeds off intensely hot
Speaker 2: compressed air from the engines and routes it right through
Speaker 2: the wing.
Speaker 1: Okay, hold on, I want to make sure you understand
Speaker 1: the physics here too. Yeah, if you are stealing compressed
Speaker 1: air from the engine to heat the wings, doesn't that
Speaker 1: mean you have less air going into the combustion chamber
Speaker 1: to create actual thrust.
Speaker 2: You've hit the nail on the head. You are directly
Speaker 2: robbing the engines of thrust to generate heat.
Speaker 1: Wow.
Speaker 2: And because the plane was incredibly heavy with passengers and
Speaker 2: fuel and the air at thirty three thousand feet is
Speaker 2: extremely thin. Anyway, the engines were already working near their
Speaker 2: maximum capacity just to maintain altitude.
Speaker 1: They're already struggling.
Speaker 2: Exactly, so when they turned on the anti ice, they
Speaker 2: essentially stole the last remaining horsepower. The plane just didn't
Speaker 2: have enough thrust to stay at.
Speaker 3: Thirty three thousand feet. It slowly began to loose speed,
Speaker 3: but the.
Speaker 1: Pilots didn't notice because of the autopilot.
Speaker 2: Right, and this is the invisible trap. The autopilot's primary directive,
Speaker 2: which was programmed by the crew, was to maintain an
Speaker 2: altitude of thirty three thousand feet no matter what.
Speaker 3: No matter what.
Speaker 2: As the plane lost speed from the lack of thrust,
Speaker 2: it naturally started to sink. So to stop the sink,
Speaker 2: the autopilot quietly angled the nose of the plane higher
Speaker 2: and higher. It increased the angle of attack to generate more.
Speaker 1: Lift, so it's compensating.
Speaker 2: Yes, the autopilot was trading speed for altitude and entirely
Speaker 2: masking the decay and speed from this exhausted crew.
Speaker 3: It pitched the.
Speaker 2: Nose up so high that the plane was pushed to
Speaker 2: the absolute brink of an aerodynamic stall.
Speaker 1: And the stall is basically the point where the air
Speaker 1: can no longer flow smoothly over the wings, and the
Speaker 1: wings simply stopped flying exactly.
Speaker 3: They become dead weight.
Speaker 1: And the really tragic detail in the crash report here
Speaker 1: is that the manufacturer Boeing had actually issued a bulletin
Speaker 1: warning about this exact scenario, you know Autopilot's masking speed
Speaker 1: decay at high altitudes in the MD eighty. But the
Speaker 1: financially troubled airline apparently never passed that vital bulletin down
Speaker 1: to their pilots.
Speaker 2: It's infuriating. So the trap is set by the technology,
Speaker 2: and then the weather is what finally springs it. The
Speaker 2: plane is barely hanging in the thin air, pitched up,
Speaker 2: flying nangerously slow. They fly over the storm system and
Speaker 2: suddenly encounter a twenty mile.
Speaker 1: Per hour updraft, just a sudden gust of wind, yeah.
Speaker 2: Gust of vertical wind, and it pushes the nose up
Speaker 2: just a fraction more, and that's all it takes. The
Speaker 2: airflow over the wings completely separates. The plane enters a full.
Speaker 1: Stall, and because of the violent disruption of air entering
Speaker 1: the engines during the stall, both engines experience what's called
Speaker 1: a rollback right, like they automatically throttle down to protect themselves.
Speaker 1: So the captain, who's already exhausted, he's stressed about his finances,
Speaker 1: he hears this blaring stall warning. He feels the violent
Speaker 1: shaking of the aircraft, and he looks down to see
Speaker 1: his engine dials dropping, and he immediately assumes he has
Speaker 1: suffered a dual engine flame out.
Speaker 2: And this is just a textbook tragic case of a
Speaker 2: cognitive tunnel vision. Under extreme stress, the human brain latches
Speaker 2: onto a narrative and it simply discards all contradictory.
Speaker 1: Evidence, like he made up his mind instantly he did.
Speaker 2: The twenty one year old co pilot, meanwhile, looks at
Speaker 2: his instruments, sees the extreme nose up attitude and the
Speaker 2: decaying speed, and he correctly identifies the real problems.
Speaker 3: It's a stall. It's a stall.
Speaker 1: But the captain doesn't listen.
Speaker 3: He doesn't even acknowledge him.
Speaker 1: Because to recover from an aerodynamic stall, you have to
Speaker 1: push the nose down, You have to point the plane
Speaker 1: toward the ground to pick up speed and get the
Speaker 1: air flowing smoothly over the wings.
Speaker 2: Again, yes, you have to fight your instincts, but.
Speaker 1: The captain, thinking he's lost his engines and wanting to
Speaker 1: stay in the air as long as possible, he does
Speaker 1: the exact opposite. He pulls back on the control column.
Speaker 1: He wrestles the plane to hold the nose.
Speaker 2: Up, and by pulling back he destroyed any chance of recovery.
Speaker 2: The plane plummeted nine thousand feet in just thirty seconds.
Speaker 1: Oh my god, nine thousand feet Because.
Speaker 2: The nose was held aggressively up. The plane didn't really
Speaker 2: die of like a dart. It fell flat, almost like
Speaker 2: a leaf dropping from a tree. For three agonizing minutes.
Speaker 2: It crashed in a remote region of Venezuela, claiming the
Speaker 2: lives of all one hundred and sixty people on board.
Speaker 1: It is chilling. I mean, the radar hit the storre
Speaker 1: arm on flight two forty two, the autopilot hit the
Speaker 1: stall on flight seven oh eight. We've looked at the
Speaker 1: mirage of radar and the invisible trap of the autopilot
Speaker 1: at cruising altitude. But you know, the most dangerous phase
Speaker 1: of flight isn't necessarily up in the clouds.
Speaker 3: No, it's really not.
Speaker 1: It's when the runway is right in front of you,
Speaker 1: and the psychological pressure to just finish, the job becomes
Speaker 1: totally overwhelming.
Speaker 2: And that brings us to American Airlines Flight fourteen twenty
Speaker 2: in June nineteen ninety nine.
Speaker 1: Let's get into this one.
Speaker 2: The flight is delayed over two hours, leaving Dallas Fort
Speaker 2: Worth for Little Rock, Arkansas. The crew is bumping right
Speaker 2: up against their fourteen hour legal duty limit, so the
Speaker 2: clock is ticking loudly. If they don't get this plane
Speaker 2: on the ground soon, they will legally time out. They'll
Speaker 2: have to cancel the flight and strand all the passengers.
Speaker 1: You can just feel the pressure mounting. You have dispatchers
Speaker 1: back at airline headquarters playing this high stakes global game
Speaker 1: of chess right trying to squeeze flights through tightening weather
Speaker 1: windows just to keep the network moving.
Speaker 3: Everyone wants to get it done, and you just want.
Speaker 1: To get home. The crew is exhausted and wants to
Speaker 1: go to a hotel. It's this massive invisible weight pressing
Speaker 1: down on the slight deck. And you know you've probably
Speaker 1: felt a mild version of this yourself. Oh absolutely, You're
Speaker 1: driving home late at night, you're exhausted, and a blizzard starts.
Speaker 1: You know you should pull over at a motel, but
Speaker 1: your brain insists I'm only ten miles away. I can
Speaker 1: make it. Now. Multiply that pressure by one hundred passengers
Speaker 1: and a massive corporation breathing down your neck.
Speaker 2: Right, and in aviation psychology, this is known as get
Speaker 2: their itis. It is a mission oriented mindset where the
Speaker 2: intense desire to complete the task completely overrides rational safety protocol.
Speaker 1: It's a deadly mindset.
Speaker 3: Extremely so.
Speaker 2: As flight fourteen twenty approaches Little Rock, the pilots are
Speaker 2: navigating what the dispatcher called a bowling alley, basically a
Speaker 2: narrow clear path between two massive, violent thunderstorms.
Speaker 1: But storms move.
Speaker 2: Exactly as they get closer to the airport, those storm
Speaker 2: cells start merging right over the runway, and.
Speaker 1: The passengers describe the approach as terrifying. The cabin was
Speaker 1: pitch black, and then suddenly these massive kaboom type lightning
Speaker 1: strikes just illuminated everything.
Speaker 3: Yeah, horizontal rain battering the windows.
Speaker 1: The plane is being violently thrown around. The wind on
Speaker 1: the ground is shifting so wildly that air traffic control
Speaker 1: has to switch their landing runway at the very last minute,
Speaker 1: which forces the pilots to execute a complex turning visual
Speaker 1: approach right as the weather goes from bad to severe.
Speaker 2: And the crosswinds are gusting up to forty five miles
Speaker 2: per hour.
Speaker 1: That's huge.
Speaker 2: It is well beyond the airline's safety limit for landing
Speaker 2: on a wet runway that was capped at ten knots
Speaker 2: or about eleven miles per hour.
Speaker 1: They were at forty five.
Speaker 2: Yes, but in the chaos of the shifting runway and
Speaker 2: the blaring alarms, the pilots get confused about the dry
Speaker 2: versus wet wind limits. They become entirely task saturated, They
Speaker 2: lose sight of the airport in the rain, and.
Speaker 1: The cockpit voice recorder captured a quote that just stops
Speaker 1: you in your tracks. The captain, who has over ten
Speaker 1: thousand hours of flight experience, gets frustrated wrestling the plane
Speaker 1: and says, out loud, I hate droning around visual at
Speaker 1: night in weather without having any clue where we are. Yeah, wait,
Speaker 1: I have to stop here. If an incredibly experienced veteran
Speaker 1: cat it admits out loud that he has no clue
Speaker 1: where he is while getting battered by a severe storm,
Speaker 1: Why on earth didn't he abort the landing? Why not
Speaker 1: push the throttles up, go around and fly to another airport.
Speaker 2: Well, that is the million dollar question that investigators had
Speaker 2: to answer. And to understand why he didn't pull up,
Speaker 2: we have to look at a truly fascinating and terrifying
Speaker 2: study conducted by MIT.
Speaker 1: Okay, what did they find.
Speaker 2: Researchers tracked two thousand encounters between commercial jets and severe
Speaker 2: thunderstorms at Dallas Fort Worth Airport. They found that out
Speaker 2: of those two thousand encounters, two out of three pilots
Speaker 2: deliberately flew into the thunderstorms rather than diverting around them.
Speaker 1: Two out of three commercial pilots chose to fly into
Speaker 1: a severe storm. That is staggering.
Speaker 2: It is the MIT researchers dug into the data to
Speaker 2: find the risk factors what made a pilot more likely
Speaker 2: to press on into danger, and they found three main triggers.
Speaker 2: If the flight was running behind schedule, if the flight
Speaker 2: was taking place at night, and if the plane immediately
Speaker 2: in front of them had successfully landed.
Speaker 1: And in flight fourteen twenty had almost all of those right.
Speaker 2: They were two hours late, it was pitch black, and
Speaker 2: they felt an overwhelming compulsion to finish the job. The
Speaker 2: psychology of get their itis completely normalized the danger they
Speaker 2: felt they simply had to land, so.
Speaker 1: They forced the jet down through the storm. But in
Speaker 1: the frantic overloaded moments right before touchdown, you know, fighting
Speaker 1: the violent crosswind, trying to spot the runway lights, and
Speaker 1: the blinding horizontal rain, both the captain and the first
Speaker 1: officer miss one single crucial item on their pre landing checklist.
Speaker 2: Just one thing.
Speaker 1: They forget to arm the ground spoilers.
Speaker 2: And that omission is fatal. The spoilers are the large
Speaker 2: rectangular panels on the top of the wings that automatically
Speaker 2: flip up the moment the wheels touch the ground right.
Speaker 2: A lot of people think spoilers act like parachutes to
Speaker 2: cause aerodynamic drag, but their primary purpose is to literally
Speaker 2: spoil or destroy the lift of the wings.
Speaker 1: Because by destroying the lift, you dropped the full heavyweight
Speaker 1: of the aircraft right under the tires.
Speaker 2: Yes, without weight on the tires, the wheel brakes simply
Speaker 2: cannot grip the runway. The anti skid system actually won't
Speaker 2: let the brakes engage if the wheels aren't firmly planted.
Speaker 1: So, because the exhausted crew forgot to arm those spoilers
Speaker 1: when they touched down at over one hundred miles per
Speaker 1: hour on a soaking, wet runway. The wings were still
Speaker 1: acting like wings, They were still flying, they were still
Speaker 1: generating lift. The plane was technically on the ground, but
Speaker 1: it had almost no weight on its wheels. The brakes
Speaker 1: were entirely useless. The MD eighty skidded down the runway,
Speaker 1: shot off the end, plunged down a twenty five foot embankment,
Speaker 1: and violently slammed into a steel catwalk. It's awful eleven
Speaker 1: people died, including that highly experienced ten thousand hour captain.
Speaker 2: It is just a devastating demonstration of task saturation. I mean,
Speaker 2: the human brain is a powerful computer, but it can
Speaker 2: only handle a finite number of inputs. When the extreme
Speaker 2: weather demanded one hundred and ten percent of their cognitive
Speaker 2: bandwidth just to keep the wings level, basic procedural memory
Speaker 2: like reaching over and pulling a lever to arm the spoilers,
Speaker 2: It's simply fanish.
Speaker 1: It really makes you think when you look at the
Speaker 1: entirety of these three investigations, a really chilling pattern emerges
Speaker 1: in every single case. It wasn't just a physical storm
Speaker 1: that brought the aircraft down. It was the lesal intersection
Speaker 1: of weather complex systems and human limits.
Speaker 3: It really was.
Speaker 1: It was the weather radar completely masking a deadly hailstorm
Speaker 1: on flight two forty two. It was the autopilot silently
Speaker 1: hiding a lethal stall on flight seven oh eight. And
Speaker 1: it was the sheer psychological pressure of get their itis
Speaker 1: blinding a veteran crew on flight fourteen twenty.
Speaker 2: And you know, these findings force us to ask a
Speaker 2: really difficult question about the future of aviation. We are
Speaker 2: constantly adding new layers of technology to cockpits, predictive weather radar,
Speaker 2: automated wind shear detection, highly intelligent.
Speaker 1: Auto pilots, right wher sounds.
Speaker 2: The goal is always to make flying safer, but the
Speaker 2: unintended consequence may be that we are actually desensitizing pilots
Speaker 2: to the raw reality of the sky. If an advanced
Speaker 2: system only sounds a blaring alarm when the aircraft is
Speaker 2: actually inside the hazard, does that incredible technology actually encourage
Speaker 2: a pilot to fly much closer to the edge of
Speaker 2: disaster than they ever would have dared to in an older,
Speaker 2: analog plane.
Speaker 1: It's the idea that a better safety net might actually
Speaker 1: encourage the acrobat to take riskier leaps, but it also
Speaker 1: makes me wonder about the ultimate conclusion of this trend.
Speaker 1: If human psychology and task saturation are the weak links,
Speaker 1: the industry's eventual answer might just be to remove the
Speaker 1: human entirely like fully autonomous AI driven commercial flights.
Speaker 3: It's something people are talking about.
Speaker 1: Because an AI doesn't need a paycheck, it doesn't get exhausted,
Speaker 1: and it doesn't suffer from get their itis. It will
Speaker 1: abort a landing without a second thought.
Speaker 2: That is a fascinating and frankly provocative prospect. An AI
Speaker 2: definitely wouldn't feel the pressure of delayed passengers. But the
Speaker 2: counter argument is exactly what we saw on flight two
Speaker 2: forty two. What a perfectly logical AI understand that a
Speaker 2: blank space on a weather radar isn't clear skies, but
Speaker 2: actually a wall of hail so thick it defies the sensors.
Speaker 1: That's a great point.
Speaker 2: Human pilots, for all their psychological vulnerabilities, possess intuition. When
Speaker 2: the technology lies, or when nature produces a completely unprecedented
Speaker 2: chaotic event. Human intuition might be the only thing capable
Speaker 2: of improvising a landing on a rural highway to save
Speaker 2: twenty lives.
Speaker 1: It is a profound balance between the flawless logic of
Speaker 1: a machine and the adaptable survival instinct of a human.
Speaker 1: We really owe an incredible debt to the investigators who
Speaker 1: comb to the wreckage to uncover these lessons, and to
Speaker 1: the survivors who share their story so the industry can evolve.
Speaker 1: We really do well thank you for joining us on
Speaker 1: this deep dive. The next time you fly, as you
Speaker 1: sit back and listen to the hum of the engines,
Speaker 1: take a moment to look out at the clouds. Think
Speaker 1: about the incredible invisible forces at play outside that window,
Speaker 1: the complex psychology of the humans managing them, and maybe
Speaker 1: take a little comfort in knowing just how much we've
Speaker 1: learned from the storms of the past. See you next time.