Speaker 1: So I want you to picture a pitch black night
Speaker 1: in October. The year is nineteen ninety six. You're standing
Speaker 1: right on the tarmac at Jorge Hwavez International Airport in Lima, Peru.
Speaker 1: The air is really heavy, and there's just this dark
Speaker 1: expanse of the Pacific Ocean waiting just beyond the end
Speaker 1: of the runway.
Speaker 2: Right. It's a very atmospheric scene.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And roaring down that tarmac is Aero Peru flight
Speaker 1: six oh three. It's a state of the art, seventy
Speaker 1: five million dollars Boeing seven five seven, and it's bound
Speaker 1: for Santiago, Chili. Inside the cabin, you know, you've got
Speaker 1: sixty one passengers and nine crew members just settling into
Speaker 1: their seats, listening to that familiar hum of the jet engines.
Speaker 2: Just a totally normal flight.
Speaker 1: For them, exactly. But they are completely unaware that before
Speaker 1: the wheels even lifted off the pavement, a catastrophic, literal
Speaker 1: two cent mistake had already doomed their.
Speaker 2: Flight, which is just a chilling thing to visualize, because
Speaker 2: you know, what we're about to look at here isn't
Speaker 2: a mechanical failure in the traditional sense of the word.
Speaker 2: It's really the beginning of this agonizing thirty minute battle
Speaker 2: between man and machine. We're looking at a scenario where
Speaker 2: a highly advanced computer system, which was designed explicitly to
Speaker 2: keep humans safe, suddenly just turns against its crew in
Speaker 2: the total darkness of night.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and in this deep dive, we are stepping directly
Speaker 1: into the shoes of aviation accident investigators. We're going to
Speaker 1: meticulously reconstruct those horrific thirty minutes, decode the cockpit voice recorders,
Speaker 1: and unravel the whole chain of human errors that caused
Speaker 1: a perfectly fliable, entirely physically intact aircraft to plunge into
Speaker 1: the ocean. So, okay, let's unpack this.
Speaker 2: To really understand how things deteriorated so quickly, we have
Speaker 2: to look at who was actually at the controls that night. Okay,
Speaker 2: Aero PERU six oh three was in the hands of
Speaker 2: two of the airline's absolute best pilots. You had Captain
Speaker 2: Eric Schreiber, who was fifty eight years old, and first
Speaker 2: Officer David Fernandez, who was forty two. These were heavily
Speaker 2: seasoned veterans, right, they knew what they were doing absolutely,
Speaker 2: and they were flying a relatively new four year old
Speaker 2: Boeing seven fifty seven. I mean, this was the dawn
Speaker 2: of the new generation of computer controlled glass cockpit aircraft.
Speaker 2: Pilots were specifically trained to rely heavily on this central
Speaker 2: data system to reduce both mechanical and human errors.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and you can see that confidence. I mean, they
Speaker 1: go through their pre flight checklists and the captain even
Speaker 1: makes a joke on the voice recorder about their precision.
Speaker 1: He says something like not even Swiss, you know, joking
Speaker 1: about how on time they are. And the takeoff roll
Speaker 1: is just absolutely flawless. They hit their speeds, they rotate,
Speaker 1: lift off, the landing gear comes up smoothly. But then
Speaker 1: almost immediately the nightmare begins. The ltimeters, which are the
Speaker 1: primary altitude instruments on their screens, they are inexplicably stuck
Speaker 1: at zero like they are climbing up, but the plane
Speaker 1: says they are still.
Speaker 2: On the ground, which is terrifying.
Speaker 1: It is, so, before we get into the ensuing panic,
Speaker 1: can you just explain the mechanics here, like, how does
Speaker 1: a modern jet actually know how high up it is?
Speaker 2: Well, it's a great question, and it's completely fundamental to
Speaker 2: this entire tragedy. Aircraft determine altitude and speed using something
Speaker 2: called the pittastatic system. Okaystatic, Yeah, simply put, these are
Speaker 2: small external sensors located on the outside of the fuselage.
Speaker 2: You have static ports, which are basically just small flush
Speaker 2: holes on the side of the plane that measure ambient
Speaker 2: outside air pressure.
Speaker 1: Got it.
Speaker 2: As a plane climbs higher into the atmosphere, obviously, the
Speaker 2: air gets thinner and the pressure drops. The altimeter measures
Speaker 2: that drop in pressure and basically translates it into altitude
Speaker 2: on the screen.
Speaker 1: So if the altimeters are stuck in zero, that means
Speaker 1: those static chords aren't sensing any change in outside air
Speaker 1: pressure at all. Yeah, the computer basically thinks they're still
Speaker 1: just sitting on the runway at sea level exactly.
Speaker 2: But it doesn't stop with the altitude. The air speed
Speaker 2: indicators also start to fail on them. Yeah, because air
Speaker 2: speed is measured by the pit to tubes. These are
Speaker 2: little forward facing probes that stick out and catch the
Speaker 2: ram air as we call it. As the plane flies forward,
Speaker 2: the computer compares that high pressure ram air entering the
Speaker 2: front of the pit to tube with the ambient still
Speaker 2: air from the static port.
Speaker 1: So it's using the difference between the two to figure.
Speaker 2: Out the speed right exactly. The difference between those two
Speaker 2: pressures tells the plane exactly how fast it's moving through
Speaker 2: the air. But at the static port is compromised, your
Speaker 2: air speed calculations are completely corrupted to wow.
Speaker 1: So they are climbing out over the dark Pacific Ocean.
Speaker 1: There are no city lights reflecting below them, there is
Speaker 1: no visible horizon ahead of them, and they have zero
Speaker 1: accurate data on how high they are or how fast
Speaker 1: they're going. I mean, they are flying entirely blind.
Speaker 2: They are. And that's when the plane's central flight computers,
Speaker 2: sensing that the aerodyamic physics aren't making any sense anymore,
Speaker 2: begin to flood the pitch black cockpit with alarm, just
Speaker 2: a wall of noise, a literal wall of noise. First,
Speaker 2: they get a rudder ratio warning, which triggers an amber
Speaker 2: light and a really loud horn. The rudder steers the
Speaker 2: plane left and right, and normally the system restricts how
Speaker 2: much the rudder can physically move as the plane goes faster,
Speaker 2: just so a sudden pilot input doesn't snap the tail
Speaker 2: off right.
Speaker 1: That makes sense, but.
Speaker 2: Because the computer has no idea how fast the plane
Speaker 2: is flying, it just throws a fault warning, and next
Speaker 2: the autopilot simply gives up and disconnects entirely.
Speaker 1: I actually noticed in the accident reports that right after
Speaker 1: the autopilot disconnects they get something called a mock trim warning.
Speaker 1: What on earth is mock trim?
Speaker 2: So when a heavy jet flies at very high speeds,
Speaker 2: like approaching the speed of sound, the aerodynamic center of
Speaker 2: lift on the wing physically moves backward. This causes the
Speaker 2: nose of the aircraft to pitch down heavily, which is
Speaker 2: something called mock tuck. The mock trim system automatically adjusts
Speaker 2: the elevators on the tail to keep the nose level
Speaker 2: at those high speeds.
Speaker 1: But I'm guessing it needs the speed data to do that.
Speaker 2: Exactly, to do that, the computer needs to know your speed.
Speaker 2: Without speed data, the system fails, triggering a master caution
Speaker 2: and a master warning. So now they have blaring red
Speaker 2: lights and another loud oral alarm.
Speaker 1: It's just a relentless cask of noise. Like, let's put
Speaker 1: ourselves in that cockpit for a second and think about
Speaker 1: the psychological terror of this. Imagine you are driving down
Speaker 1: a pitch black, winding Mountain Highway at night, you can't
Speaker 1: see out the windows. Suddenly your speometer starts violently fluctuating
Speaker 1: from zero to one hundred and twenty miles per hour.
Speaker 1: Your GPS map just starts spinning in rapid circles, and
Speaker 1: your car's central computers starts screaming in audio alarm that
Speaker 1: you are somehow simultaneously driving in reverse and accelerating into
Speaker 1: a wall.
Speaker 2: That is a perfect analogy.
Speaker 1: It's just entirely disorienting, Like without visual references outside, your
Speaker 1: brain just cannot process what the machine is telling you.
Speaker 2: That analogy perfectly captures the psychological overload they were experiencing.
Speaker 2: The plane's computer was generating all these cryptic advisories which
Speaker 2: were designed to help, but because the foundational data that
Speaker 2: static air pressure was corrupt, the warnings just created a
Speaker 2: terrifying maze of confusion.
Speaker 1: Yea.
Speaker 2: And what's truly tragic here is that despite all of
Speaker 2: this electronic screaming, the physical aircraft was perfectly fine. Captain
Speaker 2: Schreiber could have kept that plane aloft for hours, but
Speaker 2: very sensibly he decided to turn back to Lima first.
Speaker 2: After Fernandez gets on the radio and immediately declares an emergency.
Speaker 1: Right, They tell the air traffic controller in Lima they
Speaker 1: have no basic instruments. They desperately ask for help. They
Speaker 1: essentially ask the tower to tell them their speed and
Speaker 1: their altitude from the ground radar. And here's where a
Speaker 1: momentary sense of relief kind of washes over the cockpit
Speaker 1: because the tower comes back and confidently reports that the
Speaker 1: plane is climbing.
Speaker 2: Yeah, a huge sigh of relief for them.
Speaker 1: Exactly. The controller says they are at four thousand feet,
Speaker 1: then six thousand, and eventually the tower confirms they are
Speaker 1: maintaining a safe altitude of nine thousand, seven hundred feet.
Speaker 1: So the pilots are reassured. They think, okay, our screens
Speaker 1: are broken, but the tower has eyes on us.
Speaker 2: But this is where the technical reality of the situation
Speaker 2: turns a crisis into a fatal trap. The air traffic
Speaker 2: controller genuinely believe he was helping them, but you have
Speaker 2: to really understand how air traffic control radar actually works.
Speaker 1: Okay, break that down for us.
Speaker 2: His radar screen was not calculating the plane's true altitude
Speaker 2: independently by say, bouncing a radio wave off the metal
Speaker 2: hull of the Boeing. That would be called primary radar.
Speaker 2: In commercial aviation, controllers rely heavily on secondary surveillance radar,
Speaker 2: which basically interrogates the aircraft's transponder.
Speaker 1: Wait, man, are you saying the transponder gets its data
Speaker 1: from the plane's own computer.
Speaker 2: I am.
Speaker 1: So the broken aircraft was lying to the pilots, lying
Speaker 1: to the transponder, beaming that lied down to the tower,
Speaker 1: and then the tower was just echoing that exact same
Speaker 1: lie back up to the cockpit as if it were
Speaker 1: a confirmed fact.
Speaker 2: That is precisely what happened. The plane's erratic air data
Speaker 2: computer was sending junk altitude readings down to the radar
Speaker 2: unit in LIMA, and the controller was just reading those
Speaker 2: exact same junk numbers back to the crew.
Speaker 1: Wow. That is an absolutely devastating design flaw. I mean,
Speaker 1: it's like a doctor asking a delirious, hallucinating patient what
Speaker 1: their heart rate is, writing it down, and then reassuring
Speaker 1: the patient that their vitals are perfectly fine because the
Speaker 1: chart says so, all without ever actually checking a real monitor.
Speaker 2: That is a brilliant way to put it. Honestly, it
Speaker 2: highlights a really critical mental model we use in systems engineering,
Speaker 2: which is false redundancy.
Speaker 1: False redundancy.
Speaker 2: Yeah, a redundant safety system is only as strong as
Speaker 2: its independent data sources. If two systems are relying on
Speaker 2: the exact same corrupted data stream, you don't have redundancy
Speaker 2: at all. You just have an echo chamber. The pilots
Speaker 2: thought they had an independent lifeline, but they were actually
Speaker 2: just being poisoned by their own corrupted.
Speaker 1: Data and that false sense of security really sets the
Speaker 1: stage for the most contradictory, totally impossible moments of the
Speaker 1: entire flight, because while the tower is telling them they
Speaker 1: are safe at nearly ten thousand feet, the plane's computer
Speaker 1: just completely loses its mind.
Speaker 2: Right, we reach a point where the pilots are trying
Speaker 2: to manage their descent back to Lima, but the airspeed
Speaker 2: indicator on the captain's screen suddenly plummets to zero, and
Speaker 2: then it races all the way up to over three
Speaker 2: hundred and fifty knots. They get a really loud over speed.
Speaker 1: Warning, and overspeed means what exactly it means?
Speaker 2: The computer thinks the plane is flying so incredibly fast
Speaker 2: that the aerodynamic forces will literally rip the wings off
Speaker 2: the aircraft in midair.
Speaker 1: Okay, so their natural reaction is to throw on the
Speaker 1: speed brakes, trying to slow this massive jet down. But
Speaker 1: almost immediately, while that overspeed alarm is still blaring in
Speaker 1: their ears, they get a stall warning. The computers now
Speaker 1: saying they're falling out of the.
Speaker 2: Sky, completely conflicting information.
Speaker 1: Yeah, before we get to the pilot's reaction, I just
Speaker 1: want to clarify something for our listeners who might just
Speaker 1: think of a stall as like, you know, a car
Speaker 1: engine dying. Can you explain the actual aerodynamics of an
Speaker 1: aviation stall, like what is mechanically happening to the wing?
Speaker 2: Absolutely, an aerodynamic stall has absolutely nothing to do with
Speaker 2: the jet engines. It's all about the angle of attack,
Speaker 2: which is the angle at which the wing meets the
Speaker 2: oncoming air. Okay, So, for a wing to generate lift,
Speaker 2: air has to flow smoothly over the curved top surface.
Speaker 2: If the plane flies too slow or if the no
Speaker 2: is pitched up way too high, that smooth airflow basically
Speaker 2: detaches from the wing. It becomes turbulent. When that boundary
Speaker 2: layer of air separates, the wing instantly loses its lift
Speaker 2: and gravity just takes over. The plane literally drops out
Speaker 2: of the sky. When this happens, it triggers a stick shaker.
Speaker 2: The pilot's control column begins vibrating violently, just aggressively shaking
Speaker 2: their hands to physically warn them that the wings are failing.
Speaker 1: So we have an overspeed warning screaming that they are
Speaker 1: flying too fast, and a violent stick shaker vibrating their
Speaker 1: arms to the bone saying they are flying too slow
Speaker 1: at the exact same second. Yes, how is that even
Speaker 1: physically possible? I know you said the sensors are broken,
Speaker 1: but how does the computer calculate two extreme opposites at once.
Speaker 2: This goes back to the physics of that trapped air
Speaker 2: we discussed earlier. Remember, the static port was somehow sealed
Speaker 2: at sea level, so it trapped thick, dense, high pressure
Speaker 2: air inside the system. Okay, as the plane climbed up
Speaker 2: to what it thought was ten thousand feet, the outside
Speaker 2: air actually became very thin and low pressure, but the
Speaker 2: static port couldn't sense it. So the airspeed computer is
Speaker 2: looking at the dynamic PTO tube which is bringing in
Speaker 2: real thin air from the sky and comparing it against
Speaker 2: that trapped, thick sea level air in the static port.
Speaker 2: Oh easy, because of that massive artificial pressure differential, the
Speaker 2: computer miscalculates and decides that the plane must be flying
Speaker 2: at supersonic speeds, hence the overspeed alarm.
Speaker 1: But the plan wasn't actually flying that fast.
Speaker 2: No, it wasn't at all. In fact, because the pilots
Speaker 2: were terrified of tearing the plane apart from the overspeed warning,
Speaker 2: they pulled back the throttles and deployed the speed brakes.
Speaker 2: They slowed the plane down so much that the wings
Speaker 2: genuinely did lose lift. Wow, the actual physical wings began
Speaker 2: to stall. So the air speed computer, totally blind by
Speaker 2: the trapped air, was screaming overspeed, while the aerodynamic sensors
Speaker 2: on the wings, which were working perfectly fine, felt the
Speaker 2: loss of lift and triggered the stick shaker.
Speaker 1: It is an im possible paradox, like, if you speed
Speaker 1: up to fix the stall, you think you'll tear the
Speaker 1: plane apart. If you slow down to fix the overspeed,
Speaker 1: you drop into the ocean. And amid this absolute coffeity,
Speaker 1: I mean the amber lights, the red lights, the horns,
Speaker 1: the stick shaker, another voice suddenly cuts through the cockpit,
Speaker 1: the ground proximity warning system, A very calm, automated voice
Speaker 1: just says too low terrain and This.
Speaker 2: Is the great heartbreaking irony of Flight six oh three.
Speaker 2: Out of all the bells and whistles going off that night,
Speaker 2: the ground proximity warning was the only accurate alarm in
Speaker 2: the entire.
Speaker 1: Cockpit, which is just awful to think about.
Speaker 2: It is because it uses an independent radio altimeter that
Speaker 2: bounces a beam directly down at the ground. It was
Speaker 2: sensing their actual physical rate of descent.
Speaker 1: Toward the water, but they didn't believe it.
Speaker 2: How could they? I mean, they had been battered by
Speaker 2: false data and severe alarm fatigue for twenty five minutes,
Speaker 2: and tragically the air traffic controller had just reassured them
Speaker 2: again when the ground proximity alarm goes off. Captain Schreiber
Speaker 2: even asks the tower where you know? Are you sure
Speaker 2: you have us on radar? And the tower replies, yes,
Speaker 2: we have you. You are maintaining nine seven hundred feet.
Speaker 1: So they ignore the one machine telling them the truth.
Speaker 1: They just keep trying to fly the plane, trying to
Speaker 1: intercept an instrument landing signal, just trying to make sense
Speaker 1: of the absolute madness. The chilling climax comes when they
Speaker 1: ask the tower, what do we do with the landing gear?
Speaker 1: And in that split second the realization hits them. You
Speaker 1: could hear the impact on the voice recorder. The left
Speaker 1: wing violently clips the water. The aircraft flips, it cartwheels
Speaker 1: and sinks into the dark Pacific, taking all seventy lives
Speaker 1: with it.
Speaker 2: It is a truly devastating end to a very heroic struggle.
Speaker 2: They fought that plane all the way down to the water.
Speaker 2: But you know, when a plane crash is intact into
Speaker 2: the ocean, it becomes a ghost ship. For the investigators,
Speaker 2: the task is incredibly daunting. You basically have to reverse
Speaker 2: engineer the physical city of the aircraft solely from the
Speaker 2: digital screams left on the black boxes.
Speaker 1: Right, which brings us to Guido Fernandez. He had just
Speaker 1: been appointed Peru's lead accident investment instigator, and the very
Speaker 1: first call he gets at four point thirty in the
Speaker 1: morning is about aero PERU six ZH three. But this
Speaker 1: wasn't just his first case. The co pilot, David Fernandez,
Speaker 1: was his own nephew.
Speaker 2: You really have to admire his stoicism. Here he flies
Speaker 2: out to the crash site in a Navy helicopter. He
Speaker 2: meets with the air traffic controller whose account of the
Speaker 2: plane's altitude is just baffling to him. Recognizing the massive
Speaker 2: conflict of interest and the sheer technical complexity, Fernandez calls
Speaker 2: in the National Transportation Safety Board from the United States,
Speaker 2: bringing in an investigator named Richard Rodriguez.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and Rodriguez actually suggested that Fernandez step down because
Speaker 1: of the emotional conflict, but Fernandez refused. He stayed completely
Speaker 1: objective through the whole thing. So together they start looking
Speaker 1: at the evidence. The Peruvia Navy finds the wreckage and
Speaker 1: the debris field is very tight. Why is that specific
Speaker 1: detail so important?
Speaker 2: A tight debris field is a crucial piece of forensic evidence.
Speaker 2: If a plane breaks up in mid air, say from
Speaker 2: an explosion or from an act will overspeed that tears
Speaker 2: the wings off, the debris is scattered over miles of ocean.
Speaker 2: A tight concentrated debris field proves the seven to fifty
Speaker 2: seven hit the water entirely intact at a high speed.
Speaker 2: They were flying a perfectly healthy airplane right into the ocean.
Speaker 1: So the US Navy brings in these remote operated underwater
Speaker 1: vehicles to find the black boxes. They pulled the flight
Speaker 1: data and cockpit voice recorders from the ocean floor, and
Speaker 1: they immediately dropped them into coolers full of fresh water
Speaker 1: just to stop the corrosive salt water from destroying magnetic tapes.
Speaker 2: A very smart move.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Back in Washington, the NTSB digitizes the faint audio
Speaker 1: revealing the sheer, overwhelming chaos of the alarms, but the
Speaker 1: voice recorder really only tells them how the pilots reacted.
Speaker 1: The flight data recorder is what actually solves the.
Speaker 2: Mystery, precisely because when the NTSB looked at the data
Speaker 2: points on the graph for the flight, everything was chaotic,
Speaker 2: the air speed wildly swinging the pitch and roll all
Speaker 2: over the place, but the data line for static air
Speaker 2: pressure was perfectly flat, perfectly flat, from the moment the
Speaker 2: plane sat at the gate and lima to the moment
Speaker 2: it hit the water. The static pressure never changed a
Speaker 2: single millibar. It was just a straight horizontal line. The
Speaker 2: investigators knew immediately the static ports were sealed.
Speaker 1: Here's where it gets really interesting, because of that flatline
Speaker 1: on the graph, they know exactly what to look for,
Speaker 1: so they send the underwater robots back down scanning this
Speaker 1: submerged wreckage specifically for those static ports, and they find it.
Speaker 1: Captain Schreiber's static port was completely sealed over with a
Speaker 1: piece of standards silver duct tape.
Speaker 2: A single piece of tape on a seventy five million
Speaker 2: dollar machine.
Speaker 1: It's unbelievable, like, how does that even happen? As you
Speaker 1: dig into the NTSP reports, you see it's a textbook
Speaker 1: example of the Swiss cheese model of failure, where the
Speaker 1: holes in multiple layers of defense just perfectly align. Right
Speaker 1: before the flight, a maintenance worker was cleaning the outside
Speaker 1: of the plane. Standard procedures to cover the static ports
Speaker 1: so you don't get high pressure water or cleaning fluid
Speaker 1: inside those sensitive tubes, taped them over, but he forgot
Speaker 1: to take the tape off when he was done.
Speaker 2: That's the first hole in the cheese. Then the quality
Speaker 2: inspector who was supposed to sign off on his work
Speaker 2: simply didn't check it. Hole number two. The maintenance supervisor
Speaker 2: for that shift actually called in sick, and his replacement
Speaker 2: didn't notice the tape either. So there's hole number three.
Speaker 1: And finally whole number four. Captain Schreiber himself. Before every
Speaker 1: single flight, the pilot does a mandatory walk around to
Speaker 1: the aircraft to visually inspect it. But remember the context here.
Speaker 1: It was late at night. The static port on a
Speaker 1: Boeing seven fifty seven is fifteen to seventeen feet up
Speaker 1: in the air.
Speaker 2: That's high up.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and the worker had used standard silver duct tape
Speaker 1: which blended perfectly with the silver metallic fuselage of the
Speaker 1: aero Peru jet. Schreiber stood on the dark tarmac with
Speaker 1: a flashlight, looked up and he simply missed it.
Speaker 2: And when the plane took off, it carried that trapped
Speaker 2: sea level air pressure inside those taped overports, setting off
Speaker 2: the entire deadly chain reaction. We just discussed.
Speaker 1: It's staggering, but as we look at the source material,
Speaker 1: there's a detail that is just incredibly frustrating. This exact
Speaker 1: scenario had happened before. Just eight months prior, in February
Speaker 1: nineteen ninety six, a German charter flight called Burgeonaire crashed
Speaker 1: in the Dominican Republic. One hundred and eighty nine people died. Wow,
Speaker 1: it was a Boeing seven to fifty seven, It was
Speaker 1: at night, and it was caused by a block Pittow
Speaker 1: tube that triggered the exact same contradictory the rhetor ratio
Speaker 1: of the max trim, the overspeed, the stall warning.
Speaker 2: It was essentially a dress rehearsal for the Ara Peru
Speaker 2: disaster exactly.
Speaker 1: So if you were sitting there listening to this, you're
Speaker 1: probably screaming the same question I am. If this exact
Speaker 1: scenario just killed one hundred and eighty nine people, how
Speaker 1: on earth did the Aero Peru crew not know about it?
Speaker 1: How were they not trained to recognize this specific pattern
Speaker 1: of alarms?
Speaker 2: Well, that highlights a really tragic systemic failure in aviation
Speaker 2: communications at the time. You'd have to remember airlines back
Speaker 2: in the nineties were fierce siloed competitors. There wasn't this
Speaker 2: high level of share to open source safety information that
Speaker 2: we've come to expect today.
Speaker 1: Right, They kept things close to the chest.
Speaker 2: Yeah, three months after the Burgeon air crash, Boeing did
Speaker 2: issue safety bulletins to airline carriers about these pittastatic problems.
Speaker 2: But the urgent warnings about how confusing these cryptic advisories
Speaker 2: could be, well, they simply hadn't trickled down to the
Speaker 2: training departments at Aero Peru yet.
Speaker 1: And because of that lack of communication, the families of
Speaker 1: the Aero Peru victims were just left demanding answers. A
Speaker 1: Miami lawyer took on the case on behalf of forty
Speaker 1: one of the passengers and crew, and the legal argument
Speaker 1: they used against Boeing is actually fascinating. They used a
Speaker 1: concept called foreseeable misuse.
Speaker 2: It's a very powerful legal concept and product design. The
Speaker 2: argument is essentially this, if you build an airplane that
Speaker 2: requires its highly sensitive mission critical sensors to be covered
Speaker 2: with tape just to wash the airplane, you as the manufacturer,
Speaker 2: must foresee that eventually a human being is going to
Speaker 2: forget to take that tape off.
Speaker 1: Right, it's bound to have.
Speaker 2: Exactly if a simple, entirely predictable human error can bring
Speaker 2: down a jet and kill seventy people, the system design
Speaker 2: itself is fundamentally flawed. You just cannot design a system
Speaker 2: that requires human perfection.
Speaker 1: But while Boeing and the lawyers were fighting that out
Speaker 1: in civil court, the Peruvian justice system found a much
Speaker 1: simpler scapegoat that two dollars an hour maintenance worker, the
Speaker 1: guy who stuck the tape on the plane, was sent
Speaker 1: to jail for criminal.
Speaker 2: Negligence, which is wild.
Speaker 1: I know, if you're listening to this, you're probably thinking
Speaker 1: what I'm thinking, How is it fair to throw the
Speaker 1: lowest guy on the ladder in a cell when the
Speaker 1: multi billion dollar manufacturer designed a plane that could be
Speaker 1: destroyed by a piece of stationary tape.
Speaker 2: It is deeply controversial in safety engineering. Blaming the lowest
Speaker 2: person on the totem pole might satisfy a public desire
Speaker 2: for a villain, but it really doesn't fix the system. However,
Speaker 2: this accident also sparked a massive ongoing debate among veteran
Speaker 2: pilots about airmanship. Oh really, Yeah, there's a core aviation
Speaker 2: concept called flying by the numbers. Many seasoned pilots argue
Speaker 2: that the moment the computer screen started acting crazy, Schreiber
Speaker 2: and Fernandez should have ignored all the alarms, turned off
Speaker 2: the automated systems, and just flown the plane using basic physics.
Speaker 1: What is flying by the numbers actually mean?
Speaker 2: Mechanically, though, it means setting a standard pitch, which is
Speaker 2: the physical angle of the airplane's nose relative to the horizon,
Speaker 2: and setting a standard engine power percentage. You know from
Speaker 2: your training that if you set the nose at three
Speaker 2: degrees up and the engines at seventy percent thrust, the
Speaker 2: airplane will fly straight and level at a safe speed.
Speaker 2: It's just physics.
Speaker 1: So you just ignore the screens.
Speaker 2: You don't chase the false computer data. You rely on
Speaker 2: the fundamental aerodynamics of the aircraft. The argument is that
Speaker 2: we cannot reduce pilots to you know, push buttonists. The
Speaker 2: human being has to remain a pilot, especially when the
Speaker 2: machine breaks.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. The fire out
Speaker 1: from this tragedy was immense, though. In nineteen ninety nine,
Speaker 1: Bowling in Aero Peru settled the lawsuits out of court.
Speaker 1: Sham's families received an average of about one million dollars
Speaker 1: per victim, and that's an exceptionally high amount, and it
Speaker 1: was awarded specifically because the investigation proved the passengers and
Speaker 1: crew were awake, aware, and experienced conscious terror during that
Speaker 1: whole thirty minute plunge.
Speaker 2: And Aero Peru just couldn't survive the financial and reputational hit,
Speaker 2: combined with rising debt. The national airline went bankrupt shortly after.
Speaker 2: But on the positive side, Boeing significantly changed its training
Speaker 2: protocols regarding potote static failures. They changed the design of
Speaker 2: the systems to better isolate faults and strict new regulations
Speaker 2: were implemented, requiring brightly colored, standardized covers with long remove
Speaker 2: before flight streamers for those ports.
Speaker 1: So what does this all mean? We look back at
Speaker 1: nineteen ninety six, at this cascade of errors, and it's
Speaker 1: really easy to dismiss it as a historical aviation anomaly.
Speaker 1: But there is a much deeper lesson here that applies
Speaker 1: to all of us today. We spent our lives designing
Speaker 1: brilliant automated systems to save us from our own human errors.
Speaker 1: Lie on complex algorithms, GPS, networks, and digital sensors to
Speaker 1: guide our cars, manage our finances, and dictate our daily decisions.
Speaker 2: So we really do.
Speaker 1: But what happens when that very automation is corrupted by
Speaker 1: a tiny two cent human mistake. We've become so incredibly
Speaker 1: reliant on the computer telling us what is real, that
Speaker 1: we are forgetting how to trust our own senses. Think
Speaker 1: about your own life, your own work. If the screens
Speaker 1: go dark, if your GPS spins out, if the algorithms
Speaker 1: suddenly go blind, do you still know how to fly
Speaker 1: by the numbers? Do you still know how to steer