Speaker 1: Picture this. It's June twenty fourth, nineteen eighty two. You're
Speaker 1: strapped into a window seat on British Airways flight nine.
Speaker 1: Oh Man. Yeah right, So it's pitch black outside. You
Speaker 1: are eleven thousand meters above the Indian Ocean, and suddenly
Speaker 1: this strange, shimmering white light begins to just cling to
Speaker 1: the wings outside your window, like.
Speaker 2: A glowing web of electricity.
Speaker 1: Basically, it's wrapping around the metal.
Speaker 2: And you know that actually resembles Saint almost fire, which
Speaker 2: is a totally known electrical phenomenon in aviation, right, But
Speaker 2: the thing is, Saint Almo's fire usually only happens when
Speaker 2: a plane flies through highly charged.
Speaker 1: Thunderclouds, which they weren't in.
Speaker 2: Right on this specific night, the weather radar in the
Speaker 2: cockpit showing that the sky is perfectly clear, I mean,
Speaker 2: there isn't a cloud for miles.
Speaker 1: But the strangeness doesn't stop with the lights, so an
Speaker 1: acrid sulfuric smoke starts pouring through the cabin vents. You
Speaker 1: can see passengers sweating, rubbing their eyes, coughing into their sleeves,
Speaker 1: and then people look out the windows and see something
Speaker 1: straight out of a nightmare. Massive forty foot jets of
Speaker 1: flame are shooting out from the backs of the engines.
Speaker 2: Which is never what you want to see at eleven
Speaker 2: thousand meters.
Speaker 1: Never, the seven forty seven's huge rolls Royce engines suddenly
Speaker 1: make this grating, violent rumbling sound. It's described as sounding
Speaker 1: like a cement mixer churning a load of heavy rocks. Wow,
Speaker 1: and then just dead silence. In the span of a
Speaker 1: minute and a half, all four engines have completely failed.
Speaker 2: Yeah, a four engine flame out on a seven forty seven.
Speaker 2: At the time, that was the scenario no crew.
Speaker 1: Had ever trained for, really, none at all.
Speaker 2: None, because it was considered a statistical impossibility. I mean,
Speaker 2: these aircraft were highly advanced machines, but they were absolutely
Speaker 2: not designed to operate as three hundred ton gliders.
Speaker 1: Well, welcome to today's deep dive. Today we are opening
Speaker 1: up three extraordinary real life aviation investigation.
Speaker 2: Files and these are some wild ones.
Speaker 1: They really are. We're going to explore the invisible forces
Speaker 1: that bring massive, you know, technologically anst commercial jets to
Speaker 1: the absolute brink of disaster. We're going to look at
Speaker 1: the physics of the environment, the mechanics of the aircraft,
Speaker 1: and I think, most importantly the psychology of the human
Speaker 1: beings sitting right there in that.
Speaker 2: Cockpit, because when the machines fail, the human mind is
Speaker 2: always the ultimate fail safe.
Speaker 1: Or tragically, the final failure point exactly.
Speaker 2: It is a really profound tension. We build these modern
Speaker 2: marvels of engineering and they're packed with redundant safety systems,
Speaker 2: but the volatile environment they operate in, combined with the complex,
Speaker 2: sometimes fragile psychology of the humans flying them, well, it
Speaker 2: introduces variables that no computer can ever fully control.
Speaker 1: So let's put ourselves right inside that terrifying cockpit on
Speaker 1: British Airways Flight nine. You've got Captain Eric Moody, First
Speaker 1: Officer Roger Greaves, and flight Engineer Barry Toalny Freeman.
Speaker 2: Right, and they're suddenly sitting in a silent falling metal tube.
Speaker 1: It's falling. To understand the physics of their situation, you
Speaker 1: kind of have to look at the glide ratio right.
Speaker 1: Without an thrust, a seven hundred and forty seven drops
Speaker 1: about one kilometer for every fifteen kilometers it moves.
Speaker 2: Forward, so they are basically falling toward the pitch black
Speaker 2: ocean YEP.
Speaker 1: And to make matters even worse, the cabin begins losing pressure.
Speaker 1: The air at eleven thousand meters is just way too.
Speaker 2: Thin to breathe, and that loss of cabin pressure really
Speaker 2: forces their hand. They have to initiate a rapid, incredibly
Speaker 2: steep descent just to get the aircraft down to an
Speaker 2: altitude where the passengers don't lose consciousness. So they are
Speaker 2: trading their most valuable resource, which is altitude, for breathable air.
Speaker 1: While they are plunging in the dark, the crew snaps
Speaker 1: into their highly trained emergency mode. They start running the
Speaker 1: standard three minute engine restart.
Speaker 2: Drill, which is standard procedure.
Speaker 1: But think about the terrifying math here. Falling at their
Speaker 1: current rate of descent, they only have enough time to
Speaker 1: run that full three minute drill maybe eight or nine
Speaker 1: times before they hit the water.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and recognizing that the flight engineer actually starts shortening
Speaker 2: the drill, Yeah, he modifies the procedure on the fly
Speaker 2: to cycle through it faster. They attempt to restart those
Speaker 2: engines up to fifty times fifty times fifty and nothing catches.
Speaker 2: There is just zero thrust.
Speaker 1: This is where Captain Moody makes what has to be
Speaker 1: I mean, one of the most famously calm announcements in
Speaker 1: all of aviation history.
Speaker 2: It's legendary.
Speaker 1: It gets on the PA system and in this perfectly
Speaker 1: measured tone, says U, ladies and gentlemen, this is your
Speaker 1: captain speaking. We have a small problem. All four engines
Speaker 1: have stopped.
Speaker 2: A small problem, right.
Speaker 1: We are doing our damnedest to get it under control.
Speaker 1: I trust you are not in too much distress.
Speaker 2: I mean it is the absolute epitome of the stiff
Speaker 2: upper lip, truly, But inside the cockpit the reality is
Speaker 2: just devastating. A jagged mountain range blocks their path to
Speaker 2: the nearest airport in Jakarta, and they're dropping fast, exactly
Speaker 2: at their current rate of descent, they simply won't clear
Speaker 2: the peaks. The captain has to make the brutal decision
Speaker 2: to turn the plane around and actually prepare to ditch
Speaker 2: into the pitch black, open ocean.
Speaker 1: Which is insane. Ditching a heavy jet at night is
Speaker 1: a maneuver that is incredibly dangerous, even when you have
Speaker 1: engine power, you know to control your descent.
Speaker 2: Oh absolutely, Doing it in a glider is almost certainly fatal.
Speaker 1: But then just as they drop past four thousand meters,
Speaker 1: preparing for impact, a miracle happens. The number four engine
Speaker 1: suddenly roars back to life, thank goodness, then number three,
Speaker 1: then one in two, all four engines come back online.
Speaker 2: It's unbelievable.
Speaker 1: They have just enough power to climb back up, clear
Speaker 1: the mountains and divert to Jakarta. But the nightmare isn't
Speaker 1: even over, not at all. As they approach the runway,
Speaker 1: those strange shimmering lights return. One of the engines starts
Speaker 1: violently surging and has to be shut down again, and
Speaker 1: the pilots realize they can't even see out the window.
Speaker 2: Yeah, the windshield is completely opaque.
Speaker 1: Like someone painted over it exactly.
Speaker 2: The glass had been essentially sand blasted. And to compound
Speaker 2: the terror, the ground equipment and Jakarta that provides the
Speaker 2: instrument glide path, the electronic beam that tells them their
Speaker 2: angle of descent is completely broken.
Speaker 1: Are you kidding me?
Speaker 2: I know they have to land this crippled, mostly blind
Speaker 2: seven forty seven manually. They're peering out of a tiny
Speaker 2: two inch sliver of side window that hadn't been scratched.
Speaker 1: That is just wild, and.
Speaker 2: Miraculously they do it. They grease the landing.
Speaker 1: It's a legendary piece of flying. Yeah, but this brings
Speaker 1: us to the core mystery of this whole deep.
Speaker 2: Dive, right, the why how does a perfectly.
Speaker 1: Healthy seven forty seven lose all four engines simultaneously. I
Speaker 1: remember reading the source material and thinking about the weather radar.
Speaker 2: Uh huh.
Speaker 1: They checked it. It was completely clear. So how can
Speaker 1: a force powerful enough to destroy four jet engines be
Speaker 1: totally invisible?
Speaker 2: Well, the answer lies in understanding the physics of what
Speaker 2: aircraft weather radar actually does. H Okay, it is designed to
Speaker 2: bounce radio waves off of moisture. It looks for water droplets, rain, hail,
Speaker 2: or snow.
Speaker 1: But the culprit here wasn't water exactly.
Speaker 2: The culprit that brought down flight lane was completely bone dry.
Speaker 2: It was Mount Gollongung, a massive volcano in Indonesia, had
Speaker 2: erupted just hours earlier, sending an enormous dense cloud of
Speaker 2: pulverized rock and volcanic ash fifteen thousand meters.
Speaker 1: Into the night sky, straight into their path.
Speaker 2: Drifting directly into their flight path.
Speaker 1: So, because the ash is just dry, microscopic ground up rock,
Speaker 1: the radarways just pass right through it.
Speaker 2: Right, It doesn't reflect a signal back to the cockpit
Speaker 2: at all.
Speaker 1: It is a literal invisible.
Speaker 2: Trap precisely, and that invisible dry rock explains every single
Speaker 2: terrifying thing the passengers and crew.
Speaker 1: Experienced, like the glowing lights.
Speaker 2: Yes, when you force a massive aluminum airplane through a
Speaker 2: cloud of highly abrasive dust at five hundred miles per hour,
Speaker 2: the friction strips electrons off the airframe.
Speaker 1: Oh wow, it.
Speaker 2: Creates intense localized static electricity. Yeah, that was the glowing
Speaker 2: web of Saint Elmo's fire on the wings. The abrasive
Speaker 2: rock also sand blasted the paint right off the nose
Speaker 2: of the plane and scratched the windshield glass totally.
Speaker 1: Opig and the sulfur smell in the cabin. That makes
Speaker 1: it almost sense. Now, it wasn't an electrical fire on
Speaker 1: the plane. It was actual volcanic gas bleeding into the
Speaker 1: air vents exactly. But let's look at the engines. How
Speaker 1: does dry dust choke out four massive jet engines? I mean,
Speaker 1: they're built to handle extreme conditions.
Speaker 2: They are, But we have to look at the thermodynamics
Speaker 2: of a jet turbine. A jet engine sucks in massive
Speaker 2: amounts of air, compresses it mixes it with aviation fuel
Speaker 2: and ignites it. Right, The combustion chamber inside that engine
Speaker 2: operates at around two thousand degrees celsius. Okay, Volcanic ash
Speaker 2: being pulverized rock has a melting point of about thirteen
Speaker 2: hundred degrees.
Speaker 1: Oh wow. Wait, So as the engines are inhaling millions
Speaker 1: of cubic feet of this ash, the rock is literally
Speaker 1: melting inside the engine core.
Speaker 2: Yes, it melted into a sticky molten glasslight goo.
Speaker 1: That's horrifying.
Speaker 2: It is this goo coated the turbine blades and the
Speaker 2: inside of the combustion chamber, which just violently disrupted the
Speaker 2: delicate aerodynamics of.
Speaker 1: The airflow, and that caused the flames.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that disrupts and cause massive compressor stalls and backfires.
Speaker 2: Those forty foot flames the passenger saw shooting out the back. Eventually,
Speaker 2: the molten rock choked off the airflow, entirely starving the
Speaker 2: engines of oxygen and causing them to flame out.
Speaker 1: The wildest part of this whole sequence to me, isn't
Speaker 1: that the engines stopped. It's that they restarted at all.
Speaker 2: It's a crazy piece of physics.
Speaker 1: Because think about what happens when the engines die the
Speaker 1: fire goes out, the combustion chamber rapidly cools down, and
Speaker 1: as the plane is gliding you know, falling out of
Speaker 1: the sky, it eventually drops below the bottom layer of
Speaker 1: the ash cloud into clean air, exact so that molten
Speaker 1: goo cools down, hardens back into a brittle glass like shell,
Speaker 1: and the sheer force of the cold air rushing through
Speaker 1: those dead gliding engines just shatters the rock.
Speaker 2: It chips right off.
Speaker 1: It chips off and blows out the back.
Speaker 2: That is the incredible twist of chemistry and physics that
Speaker 2: saved their lives. The engine essentially had to die in
Speaker 2: order to heal itself.
Speaker 1: It is so wild.
Speaker 2: Since the brittle rock was cleared out by the rushing air,
Speaker 2: the crew's frantic restart drills finally caught a spark and
Speaker 2: the fuel ignited.
Speaker 1: Man. So Flight nine is this perfect example of a
Speaker 1: crew overcoming a total mechanical failure caused by an invisible
Speaker 1: external environment. But what happens when the outside environment is
Speaker 1: perfectly safe, but the invisible threat is actually inside the cockpit,
Speaker 1: specifically inside the pilot's own brain.
Speaker 2: Yeah, this is where we cross into a highly treacherous
Speaker 2: intersection of human physiology and automated technology.
Speaker 1: Let's set the scene for February nineteenth, nineteen eighty five.
Speaker 1: A China Airline seven forty seven flight Zeozer six is
Speaker 1: cruising over the Pacific Ocean at forty one thousand feet
Speaker 1: middle of the night, pitch black again. It's a totally
Speaker 1: routine flight until the number four engine, the one on
Speaker 1: the far right wing, starts giving them weak thrust.
Speaker 2: Just weak thrust, not even a total failure, right, It's.
Speaker 1: Not a catastrophic failure at first, just a gradual loss
Speaker 1: of power. The crew tries to reignite the engine, but
Speaker 1: they're too high up. The air is too in for
Speaker 1: a relight. Yeah. But while they are hyper fixated on
Speaker 1: troubleshooting this one engine, the plane begins to bank to
Speaker 1: the right, It slows down, it stalls, and suddenly it
Speaker 1: just tumbles out of the sky.
Speaker 2: They enter an uncontrolled vertical dive from forty one thousand.
Speaker 1: Feet from a weak engine.
Speaker 2: Exactly to understand how a weak engine leads to a
Speaker 2: vertical dive, we have to look at the physics of
Speaker 2: asymmetric thrust.
Speaker 1: Okay, break that down for us.
Speaker 2: So when you lose power on the right side, the
Speaker 2: engines on the left are still pushing at full cruising power.
Speaker 2: Right right, that offset thrust vector causes the plane to
Speaker 2: yaw or twist to the right. The correct manual response
Speaker 2: is for the pilot to step heavily on the left
Speaker 2: rudder pedal to counteract that twisting force and keep the
Speaker 2: nose pointed straight.
Speaker 1: But the captain didn't step on the rudder. He left
Speaker 1: the autopilot engaged, assuming the computer would handle the imbalance.
Speaker 2: And that brings us to a phenomenon investigators called the
Speaker 2: automation illusion.
Speaker 1: Automation illusion.
Speaker 2: Yeah, we have to remember this is nineteen eighty five.
Speaker 2: The autopilot systems on those seven forty sevens were advanced,
Speaker 2: but they had a very specific limitation, which would the
Speaker 2: autopilot did not have a physical connection to the rudder pedals.
Speaker 2: It only controlled the ailerons the small flaps on the
Speaker 2: trailing edge of the wings wow wow, and the ailerons
Speaker 2: simply didn't have enough aerodynamic authority to stop a three
Speaker 2: hundred ton aircraft from rolling over when pushed by that
Speaker 2: asymmetric thrust.
Speaker 1: So the captain assumed the automation was flying the plane
Speaker 1: the way human.
Speaker 2: Would, and it absolutely wasn't.
Speaker 1: The plane is slowly rolling onto its back. You might
Speaker 1: wonder they have attitude indicators right the artificial horizon gauges
Speaker 1: glowing right in front of their faces.
Speaker 2: Right there on the dashboard.
Speaker 1: Why did they just look at the instruments, see the
Speaker 1: plane banking and correct it.
Speaker 2: This is where the human physiology comes in.
Speaker 1: I always think about this feeling like being in an
Speaker 1: office chair in a pitch black room.
Speaker 2: Oh, that's a good way to put it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Like if someone spins your chair around for thirty
Speaker 1: seconds and then suddenly stops, Your body still feels like
Speaker 1: it's spinning, but in the opposite direction.
Speaker 2: Exactly.
Speaker 1: If you try to stand up, you'll fall right over. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that is exactly what was happening to these pilots.
Speaker 2: That office chair analogy is the perfect way to understand
Speaker 2: spatial disorientation.
Speaker 1: Tell us about the biology of that.
Speaker 2: So the biology behind it involves your vestibular system, specifically
Speaker 2: the fluid inside the semicircular canals in your inner ear. Okay,
Speaker 2: when you are flying through thick clouds in the middle
Speaker 2: of the night, you have no external visual cues, no stars,
Speaker 2: no moon, no horizon.
Speaker 1: In darkness, just black.
Speaker 2: Your brain relies entirely on the fluid in those canals
Speaker 2: to tell you which way is up and whether you
Speaker 2: are turning.
Speaker 1: But the fluid lies to you profoundly.
Speaker 2: When an aircraft enters a slow, gradual bank like the
Speaker 2: China Airlines seven forty seven, did the fluid in your
Speaker 2: inner ear eventually catches up to the motion and settles.
Speaker 2: Oh man, your brain interprets that settled fluid is flying
Speaker 2: straight and level. When the plane suddenly drops into a
Speaker 2: steep dive, the changing g forces confused the vestibular system completely.
Speaker 2: Their bodies were screaming at them that they were flying
Speaker 2: relatively straight, maybe just a little turbulent.
Speaker 1: But their attitude indicators were showing them entering an extreme
Speaker 1: vertical role.
Speaker 2: Yes.
Speaker 1: Because the crew was entirely fixated on the engine problem,
Speaker 1: they just lost their situational awareness. They stopped scanning their other.
Speaker 2: Instruments, which is a classic mistake.
Speaker 1: When the captain finally did look at the attitude indicator,
Speaker 1: this reading was so extreme, I mean, showing the plane
Speaker 1: essentially upside down and plummeting. He assumed the instrument itself
Speaker 1: had suffered a mechanical failure.
Speaker 2: He trusted his lying inner ear over the literal gyroscope
Speaker 2: in front of him.
Speaker 1: That is terrifying.
Speaker 2: And the investigation uncovered another compounding biological factor, which was
Speaker 2: severe fatigue.
Speaker 1: Ah.
Speaker 2: Correct. The National Transportation Safety Board looked closely at the
Speaker 2: crew's circadian rhythms. The captain had crossed eighteen time zones
Speaker 2: in six days eighteen Yeah, his body clock was essentially
Speaker 2: a at two zero am. He was in the deepest
Speaker 2: trough of his biological sleep cycle.
Speaker 1: Which ruins your focus exactly.
Speaker 2: That profound level of fatigue physically impairs your cognitive bandwidth.
Speaker 2: It narrows your focus, making you hyper fixate on one
Speaker 2: minor problem like a weak engine, while completely missing the
Speaker 2: catastrophic fact that your airplane is flipping upside down.
Speaker 1: The descriptions from the passengers during this dive are just,
Speaker 1: I mean, pure nightmare fuel.
Speaker 2: It had to be horrific.
Speaker 1: They are falling out of the sky at mock speed.
Speaker 1: The g forces are so intense, peaking at five times
Speaker 1: normal gravity, that passengers felt like they weighed over one
Speaker 1: thousand pounds.
Speaker 2: Five g's in a commercial airliner.
Speaker 1: Yeah, people who weren't buckled in just popped up and
Speaker 1: were pinned to the ceiling. One passenger described looking at
Speaker 1: an older gentleman across the aisle and the g forces
Speaker 1: were so strong that his face was pulled back and
Speaker 1: contorted quote like he was lying on his side in
Speaker 1: a wax museum in a fire.
Speaker 2: Oh my god.
Speaker 1: The plane drops thirty thousand feet in just over a
Speaker 1: mint in the sheer speed, in aerodynamic stress, literally rip
Speaker 1: the landing gear doors off the bottom of the plane.
Speaker 2: The plane is basically disintegrating. But then at ninety five
Speaker 2: hundred feet they break through the bottom of the cloud deck.
Speaker 1: And that is the moment everything changes, because the second
Speaker 1: they pop out of the clouds, the captain sees the
Speaker 1: visual horizon line of the actual.
Speaker 2: Ocean, a true visual queue.
Speaker 1: Yes, his brain instantly recalibrates the visual data overrides the
Speaker 1: lying fluid in his inner ear. He realizes the instruments
Speaker 1: were right all along. Wrestles. The plane level pulls out
Speaker 1: of the dive with a severely damaged tail and links
Speaker 1: to San Francisco.
Speaker 2: It's amazing the wings didn't snap off.
Speaker 1: Truly with China Airlines, the captain's brain was lying to him,
Speaker 1: but the moment he saw the visual horizon, his instincts
Speaker 1: snap back and he saved the plane, right, But imagine
Speaker 1: being in a situation where the clouds never break. There's
Speaker 1: no horizon to save you. Yeah, the only thing that
Speaker 1: can prevent a crash is the pilot sitting right next
Speaker 1: to you. But the social dynamics in the cockpit actively
Speaker 1: prevent them from speaking up.
Speaker 2: And this brings us to a tragedy that forced the
Speaker 2: aviation industry to completely rethink the sociology of a cockpit
Speaker 2: right through a concept known as crew resource management or CRM.
Speaker 1: It's January third, two thousand and four, Charmelai Shake, Egypt.
Speaker 1: A flash Airline seven thirty seven is taking off at
Speaker 1: five zero am, again middle of the night. Once again
Speaker 1: it is a pitch black, moonless night. Yeah, but this
Speaker 1: time they are taking off directly over the Red Sea.
Speaker 1: So outside the window there isn't just a lack of stars,
Speaker 1: it is an absolute void of darkness. The water blends
Speaker 1: perfectly with the.
Speaker 2: Sky, no visual horizon at all.
Speaker 1: None. In the left seat, you have Captain Kudar Abdullah,
Speaker 1: a highly decorated military war hero with thousands of hours
Speaker 1: of flight time, very experienced, very In the right seat,
Speaker 1: first Officer Amer Alshaffi, who is decades younger. He's essentially
Speaker 1: young enough to be the captain's son.
Speaker 2: And historically commercial aviation drew really heavily from the military.
Speaker 2: Right the dynamic, it created cockpits with very steep authority gradients.
Speaker 2: The captain was viewed as an infallible commander, you know,
Speaker 2: and the co pilot was expected to be a silent
Speaker 2: subort in it. Just do what you're told.
Speaker 1: That dynamic is completely critical here. The flight plan for
Speaker 1: Flash Airlines calls for a climbing left turn to head
Speaker 1: toward Cairo, left turn right, But shortly after takeoff, instead
Speaker 1: of banking left, the plane begins a slow creeping right bank.
Speaker 2: Just like the China Airlines flight exactly.
Speaker 1: The captain, likely experiencing the exact same spatial disorientation we
Speaker 1: just talked about, is inadvertently steering the plane into a spiral.
Speaker 1: It rolls tighter and tighter, the nose drops, and the
Speaker 1: plane plunges into a.
Speaker 2: Dive and they don't pull out.
Speaker 1: No. It hits the Red Sea. It's seven hundred kilometers
Speaker 1: per hour. All one hundred and forty eight people on board,
Speaker 1: mostly vacationing families, are killed instantly. It's just awful there's
Speaker 1: a deeply heartbreaking detail from the recovery effort. Investigators found
Speaker 1: a passenger's postcard floating in the debris that simply read
Speaker 1: I think this card will arrive after me.
Speaker 2: That is devastating.
Speaker 1: This is a devastating loss of life, and it triggered
Speaker 1: a massive, highly complex international investigation.
Speaker 2: Yeah, the French actually deployed a specialized robot submarine to
Speaker 2: locate the black boxes one thousand meters down on the
Speaker 2: ocean floor.
Speaker 1: Because they needed to know what happened to the plane exactly.
Speaker 2: Investigators ran countless simulations. They tested over fifty different mechanical
Speaker 2: failure theories. I mean they looked for jammed spoilers, runaway ailerons,
Speaker 2: autopilot malfunctions, you name it.
Speaker 1: But they found zero mechanical faults. The plane was perfectly healthy.
Speaker 1: The evidence pointed away from the machine and squarely toward
Speaker 1: the men flying it.
Speaker 2: Right. It was a lethal combination of vertigo, the spatial
Speaker 2: disorientation over that featureless dark ocean, and a catastrophic breakdown
Speaker 2: of communication in the cockpit.
Speaker 1: When I look at the cockpit transcripts, it reminds me
Speaker 1: of driving on a pitch black highway with your headlights off. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you are the driver and you are slowly drifting toward
Speaker 1: the edge of a cliff. You can't see it, but
Speaker 1: the passenger sitting next to you can clearly see the cliff.
Speaker 2: Okay, I see where you're going with this.
Speaker 1: The problem is that passenger is so intimidated by you
Speaker 1: that they are too afraid to reach over and grab
Speaker 1: the steering wheel to save both your lives.
Speaker 2: Wow. That is a chillingly accurate analogy for the psychological
Speaker 2: environment inside Flash Airlines six o four.
Speaker 1: It's tragic.
Speaker 2: If we look at the cockpit voice recorder, it reveals
Speaker 2: a deeply fractured dynamic. Before they even took off, the
Speaker 2: first officer was having trouble seeing out the window because
Speaker 2: of the glare from the apron lights. Just a normal observation, right,
Speaker 2: He mentioned it, and the captain barked him insight, We're
Speaker 2: in sight.
Speaker 1: It sounds like a minor reprimand just a grumpy boss
Speaker 1: sure on the surface, but in the confined, high stakes
Speaker 1: environment of a cockpit, it reinforces a rigid, inflexible hierarchy.
Speaker 1: It tells the young, inexperienced co pilot, I am the master,
Speaker 1: you are the student. Do not question my authority, and.
Speaker 2: That seemingly minor social interaction became fatal just minutes later.
Speaker 2: How so well as the captain inadvertently banked the plane
Speaker 2: to the right instead of the left. The first officer
Speaker 2: actually saw it happening on his instruments.
Speaker 1: She knew they were banking wrong.
Speaker 2: He had the situational awareness the captain lacked. He saw
Speaker 2: the disaster unfolding, but instead of grabbing the controls or
Speaker 2: firmly commanding the captain to correct the bank, he just
Speaker 2: timidly states aircraft is turning right.
Speaker 1: He offers a mild observation, not a correction, and the captain,
Speaker 1: thoroughly disoriented by his inner ear, doesn't process it. Add
Speaker 1: to that, there was a third, highly experienced pilot sitting
Speaker 1: in the jump seat right behind them, observing the whole thing.
Speaker 2: That's the part that really gets me.
Speaker 1: He watched this entire death spiral happen and said absolutely
Speaker 1: nothing until the final second before impact, when he finally
Speaker 1: yelled to pull back the power, but it was far
Speaker 1: too late.
Speaker 2: It is maddening to analyze you have three highly trained
Speaker 2: professionals and a perfectly good airplane flies at full speed
Speaker 2: into the ocean because the junior pilot would literally raither
Speaker 2: die in a crash, then challenge the authority of the hero.
Speaker 1: Captain, which is why culture is so important.
Speaker 2: Absolutely, that psychological barrier is the core of why modern
Speaker 2: aviation places so much emphasis on crew resource management. You
Speaker 2: have to actively train crews to dismantle that military style hierarchy.
Speaker 1: You have to empower them.
Speaker 2: Yes, you have to empower the lowest ranking person in
Speaker 2: the room to speak up clearly, forcefully, and to take
Speaker 2: physical control of the aircraft if they see an error flash.
Speaker 2: Airlines fail to foster that culture. They relied on an
Speaker 2: outdated model where the captain is infallible and.
Speaker 1: In aviation, no human being is infallible none. So what
Speaker 1: does this all mean for us? We've gone on quite
Speaker 1: a journey today seeing how commercial aviation often learns its
Speaker 1: most vital life saving lessons the hard.
Speaker 2: Way, the very hard way.
Speaker 1: British Airways Flight nine taught the world that the sky
Speaker 1: can hide completely invisible dangers like dry volcanic ash that
Speaker 1: melts inside engines and basically laughs at weather radar.
Speaker 2: Yeah, physics is unforgiving.
Speaker 1: Kine Airlines zero zero six showed us the treacherous intersection
Speaker 1: of automation, profound physical fatigue and spatial disorientation, proving how
Speaker 1: a tired brain can just refuse to believe the very
Speaker 1: instruments designed to save it, and.
Speaker 2: Consider what that means for a reliance on technology in general.
Speaker 2: Flash Airlines six oh four prove that the best technology,
Speaker 2: the most airworthy plane, is completely useless if a rigid
Speaker 2: social hierarchy prevents a team from communicating effectively. So true,
Speaker 2: the ultimate failsafe is in a computer code. It's an
Speaker 2: empowered human being willing to speak the truth when it
Speaker 2: matters most.
Speaker 1: Which brings us to the end of today's deep dive.
Speaker 1: But before we go, we want to leave you with
Speaker 1: a thought to ponder off mic because these investigation files
Speaker 1: they aren't just about the mechanics of airplanes, are they
Speaker 1: not at all? They are fundamentally about human nature.
Speaker 2: They absolutely are. They are mirrors reflecting how we process information,
Speaker 2: how we trust our environments, and how we interact with
Speaker 2: one another under pressure.
Speaker 1: Think about your own life, your own workplace. How often
Speaker 1: do you put yourself on autopilot, assuming the systems or
Speaker 1: the leaders around you will just handle the imbalances until
Speaker 1: you completely lose sight of the bigger picture and find
Speaker 1: yourself upside down. A great question, and perhaps more importantly,
Speaker 1: if you are the junior person in the room and
Speaker 1: you clearly saw a disaster coming, would the culture of
Speaker 1: your organization allow you to speak up, challenge the hero
Speaker 1: in the room, and grab the controls.
Speaker 2: That's the real test
Speaker 1: Something to think about until next time.