Speaker 1: Picture this. You're like sitting in a really comfortable window seat, right, yeah,
Speaker 1: twenty three thousand feet above the Mediterranean Sea.
Speaker 2: Just a beautiful view out the window.
Speaker 1: Oh gorgeous. It's a sun drenched afternoon, August six, two
Speaker 1: thousand and five, and you're surrounded by all these excitedly
Speaker 1: chatting vacationers. They're on their way down to the Tunisian
Speaker 1: resort island of Durba.
Speaker 2: Everyone's just ready for the beach exactly.
Speaker 1: You can feel that cool air from the overhead vent
Speaker 1: and you've got this steady, reassuring hum of the turboprop engines.
Speaker 1: That's just been the soundtrack of your flight for the
Speaker 1: last forty nine minutes, right.
Speaker 2: Does that constant background noise you tune out?
Speaker 1: Yeah? But then suddenly that hum just stops.
Speaker 2: Wow.
Speaker 1: Not a sputter, not like a you know, a cough, Yeah,
Speaker 1: just terrifying, inexplicable, suffocating silence.
Speaker 2: That is just bone chilling.
Speaker 1: It really is both engines on this perfectly functioning passenger.
Speaker 2: It's that sudden, violent transition from a totally routine holiday
Speaker 2: flight into this immediate desperate fight for survival.
Speaker 1: It's unthinkable. So welcome to this deep dive. Today we
Speaker 1: are unpacking the tragic, multi layered story of tune inter
Speaker 1: flight eleven fifty three.
Speaker 2: It's a heavy one today.
Speaker 1: It is our sources today, the official accident reports, some
Speaker 1: incredibly harrowing survivor testimonies, and the recovered flight data. They
Speaker 1: uncover exactly what happened in the skies that day, and
Speaker 1: we are.
Speaker 2: Going to examine those split second life or death decisions
Speaker 2: made during a brutal ten minute plunge into the sea. Right,
Speaker 2: but beyond just the survival aspect, we have to forensically
Speaker 2: examine the shocking, entirely preventable chain of human errors and
Speaker 2: well mechanical mismatches that brought a reliable aircraft down from
Speaker 2: a clear blue sky.
Speaker 1: Okay, let's unpack this. To understand how a plane just
Speaker 1: drops out of nowhere, we have to look at who
Speaker 1: and what was on board when it took off from
Speaker 1: Tunis that morning.
Speaker 2: Makes sense. Where do we start?
Speaker 1: Well, the aircraft itself was a French made at R
Speaker 1: seventy two. It's a twin engine turboprop which is known
Speaker 1: in the aviation industry for being a real warhorse.
Speaker 2: Oh. Absolutely, they're incredibly relied, biable, they don't need excessive
Speaker 2: maintenance and they really don't guzzle fuel at all.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so they're perfectly suited for these short island hopping
Speaker 1: flights across the Mediterranean.
Speaker 2: And in command you have a highly qualified crew. You
Speaker 2: got Captain Shaffik Garbi, a forty five year old military
Speaker 2: trained pilot. He had a flawless flight record and like
Speaker 2: over seven thousand flight hours.
Speaker 1: That's a lot of experience, it is.
Speaker 2: And he's flying alongside his twenty eight year old co
Speaker 2: pilot Ali Caballer. So they started their day flying from
Speaker 2: Tunisia up to Bari, Italy.
Speaker 1: Right, and that was specifically to pick up thirty four
Speaker 1: Italian passengers heading down to Jerba for vacation exactly. And
Speaker 1: as we go through this data, I think it is
Speaker 1: so crucial to remember the human steaks here. We're not
Speaker 1: just analyzing data points on a digital flight recorder.
Speaker 2: Oh, these are real people's lives.
Speaker 1: Take Luca for example, he's a thirty one year old
Speaker 1: police officer and he's there with his fiance Paola. They
Speaker 1: had just met the previous winter and were busy planning
Speaker 1: their wedding for the following year.
Speaker 2: Oh man, that's heartbreaking.
Speaker 1: And what's really chilling is the reason they were sitting
Speaker 1: on this specific aircraft. They originally wanted to go to
Speaker 1: Cape Verde for their trip, okay, but Paolo was deeply
Speaker 1: worried about the risk of terrorism flying out of a
Speaker 1: massive international hub.
Speaker 2: Oh wow.
Speaker 1: Yeah. They specifically chose this smaller regional flight to Jerba
Speaker 1: because they genuinely believed it was the safer option.
Speaker 2: It is just a devastating irony. I mean, they made
Speaker 2: a highly calculated decision to mitigate risk, only to find
Speaker 2: themselves at the center of an unprecedented aviation emergency. Right
Speaker 2: because for the first forty nine minutes of this flight,
Speaker 2: everything is completely routine. The passengers are mingling, there's a
Speaker 2: young biology student named Barbara celebrating the end of her
Speaker 2: final exams with her fiance. Just a normal flight, totally normal.
Speaker 2: The plane is cruising comfortably, just seventy five miles from
Speaker 2: the nearest.
Speaker 1: Land, and that is the exact moment the right engine
Speaker 1: just flames out. M it dies completely.
Speaker 2: Now you have to remember commercial planes are strictly designed
Speaker 2: to fly on one engine, right, They test for that constantly.
Speaker 2: It's a declared emergency, yes, but it is a highly
Speaker 2: manageable one. Captain Garby follows standard operating procedure to the letter.
Speaker 2: He immediately requests an emergency descent to seventeen thousand feet.
Speaker 1: Which aerodynamically speaking, makes perfect sense. Dropping to seventeen thousand
Speaker 1: feet gives them denser air, right exactly, it maximizes the
Speaker 1: aerodynamic bite of that single remaining propeller to maintain their
Speaker 1: air speed.
Speaker 2: Precisely, that denser air at lower altitudes gives the aircraft
Speaker 2: far better performance on that one engine. So the crew
Speaker 2: begins running through the memory.
Speaker 1: Checklists trying to get it back online.
Speaker 2: Right, they're attempting to restart the right engine using what's
Speaker 2: called the flight idle start protocol. They're doing exactly what
Speaker 2: they're training dictates.
Speaker 1: But then less than two minutes later, the unthinkable happens. Yeah,
Speaker 1: the left engine dies too. Just total failure, total failure.
Speaker 1: Now they are sitting inside a thirty six thousand pound
Speaker 1: metal tube falling out of the sky at a terrifying
Speaker 1: eight of eight hundred feet per minute.
Speaker 2: Which is just an incredibly steep drop.
Speaker 1: It is. Imagine you are driving down the highway at
Speaker 1: seventy miles an hour and your car's engine completely dies.
Speaker 2: The steering goes heavy.
Speaker 1: Yeah, the power steering locks up, the brakes go stiff,
Speaker 1: the dashboard flickers. It's a totally helpless feeling. But now
Speaker 1: imagine that happening when you are miles up in.
Speaker 2: The sky plummeting toward the ocean swells below.
Speaker 1: It's terrifying.
Speaker 2: The psychological shock for both the passengers and the crew
Speaker 2: is immediate, and it is overwhelming. Several passengers later testified
Speaker 2: they actually thought it might be a terrorist attack or.
Speaker 1: A bomb because it was just so sudden.
Speaker 2: Right, simply because the silence was so sudden and unnatural. Meanwhile,
Speaker 2: up in the cockpit, the pilots are facing an incredibly
Speaker 2: baffling situation.
Speaker 1: Why would two independent engines fail exactly?
Speaker 2: Why would two totally independent, perfectly maintain engines simultaneously fail
Speaker 2: in mid air?
Speaker 1: And their instruments are feeding them a dangerously misleading narrative,
Speaker 1: Yes they are. The only clue they get is a
Speaker 1: single warning light indicating low feed pressure.
Speaker 2: Which basically just means fuel isn't getting to the engines
Speaker 2: with enough force.
Speaker 1: Right, But the fuel gauge sitting right in front of
Speaker 1: the captain's face clearly stays they have eighteen hundred kilograms
Speaker 1: of fuel on board.
Speaker 2: That is plenty of fuel to reach their destination.
Speaker 1: Exactly, so they think they have a mechanical glitch in
Speaker 1: the fuel pumps, meaning their immediate reaction isn't, hey, we're
Speaker 1: out of gas. We need to establish a maximum distance
Speaker 1: glide to the nearest runway. Right.
Speaker 2: They aren't treating it like a glider.
Speaker 1: No, their reaction is, we need to aggressively spend our
Speaker 1: altitude and speed fighting to force these engines to restart, and.
Speaker 2: That conflicting information dictates every single decision that follows. They
Speaker 2: are aggressively running the dual engine flame out checklists repeatedly,
Speaker 2: trying to crank the engines back to.
Speaker 1: Life, trying to force it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, But as the ocean rushes closer and the engines
Speaker 2: refuse to catch the grim reality starts to set in.
Speaker 2: They contact pul approach control, desperate for an emergency runway.
Speaker 1: But the answer they get from air traffic Control is
Speaker 1: basically a death sentence. Palermo tells them they are forty
Speaker 1: eight nautical miles away. It's too far, way too far.
Speaker 1: Even with a basic understanding of physics, an airplane without
Speaker 1: engines is essentially a very heavy, un aerodynamic glider. They
Speaker 1: are losing altitude way too fast. They simply cannot make
Speaker 1: it forty eight miles.
Speaker 2: The mathematical reality is just relentless. They aren't going to
Speaker 2: make it, and the realization sets in they're going to
Speaker 2: have to ditch the aircraft in the open sea.
Speaker 1: Wow.
Speaker 2: And the atmosphere inside that cabin is a study in
Speaker 2: horrific contrasts. How so, well, outside your window you have
Speaker 2: this eerie, almost peaceful silence of a heavy glider slipping
Speaker 2: through the air, but inside it is sheer panic. Oh go,
Speaker 2: children are crying. One passenger remembered trying to ask a
Speaker 2: flight attendant what to brace for, but the attendant was
Speaker 2: in such severe psychological shocks she couldn't even speak. She
Speaker 2: was just weeping.
Speaker 1: And you have these incredibly visceral, desperate moments happening in
Speaker 1: real time. Like the flight engineer chok Yabooby. He normally
Speaker 1: rides in the passenger cabin on the size of plane,
Speaker 1: but he rushes forward into the cockpit. He is frantically
Speaker 1: helping the pilots run through every single restart.
Speaker 2: Checklist they have, doing everything he can.
Speaker 1: Everything, and eventually a passenger watches him step out of
Speaker 1: the toppit, look at a flight attendant and just shake his.
Speaker 2: Head, just admitting defeat.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's a moment of absolute crushing defeat.
Speaker 2: He knows it's over, and in that escalating panic, a
Speaker 2: fatal mistake occurs in the cabin. Terrified passengers begin inflating
Speaker 2: their life jackets while they are still strapped into their
Speaker 2: seats bracing for the impact, which is.
Speaker 1: The one thing you are never ever supposed to do
Speaker 1: in a water landing.
Speaker 2: Never, because when a commercial plane hits the water at
Speaker 2: high speed, the fuselage is very likely to breach and flood.
Speaker 2: If you are wearing a fully inflated life jacket inside
Speaker 2: a sinking metal tube, the incoming water will violently pin
Speaker 2: you against the ceiling. You trapped, you physically won't be
Speaker 2: able to swim down against the buoyancy to reach the
Speaker 2: emergency exits. It becomes an inescapable.
Speaker 1: Death trap, like what happened with the Ethiopian Airlines.
Speaker 2: Yes, this exact tragic scenario trapped and killed dozens of
Speaker 2: people in the famous nineteen ninety six water landing of
Speaker 2: Ethiopian Airlines Flight nine sixty one. You must wait until
Speaker 2: you are physically passing through the exit door to inflate
Speaker 2: that vest.
Speaker 1: But you have to put yourself in their shoes. I
Speaker 1: mean they are terrified. They aren't thinking about buoyancy physics.
Speaker 1: They are acting on pure survival instincts.
Speaker 2: Oh absolutely, it's human nature.
Speaker 1: Meanwhile, in the cockpit, Captain Garbi is actually demonstrating some
Speaker 1: incredibly sharp situational awareness. He spots two boats down on
Speaker 1: the surface of the water, and he actively steers the
Speaker 1: gliding dead plane toward them.
Speaker 2: That's incredibly smart.
Speaker 1: Yeah, he knows that if they crash near vessels, rescue
Speaker 1: operations can commence immediately, rather than waiting hours for the
Speaker 1: coastguard to find them in the open ocean.
Speaker 2: It's not a procedure written in any manual. It's just
Speaker 2: exceptional airmanship under the most extreme dress imaginable.
Speaker 1: So it's seven hundred feet, the warning systems are blaring,
Speaker 1: they brace at a speed of one hundred and forty
Speaker 1: five miles per hour. The plane smashes into the Mediterranean Sea,
Speaker 1: and it.
Speaker 2: Hits with such immense force that the aircraft violently tears
Speaker 2: into three separate pieces.
Speaker 1: What was the I mean, ditching an aircraft is notoriously difficult, right.
Speaker 2: Oh, incredibly. What's fascinating here is just how aerodynamically and
Speaker 2: physically difficult it is to ditch an aircraft. Water isn't
Speaker 2: soft when you hit it at one hundred and forty
Speaker 2: five miles per hour. Right, took a wall exactly. A
Speaker 2: pilot has to monitor the swells, the wave direction, the wind.
Speaker 2: If you hit a wave perpendicularly, meaning you crash nose
Speaker 2: first directly into the rising face of a swell, the
Speaker 2: water acts exactly like solid concrete.
Speaker 1: The plane just shatters.
Speaker 2: The plane will instantly shatter. You have to maneuver to
Speaker 2: land a parallel to the swell, skipping along the top,
Speaker 2: keeping the plane as streamlined as possible.
Speaker 1: But even with preparation, it is a catastrophic impact. Twenty
Speaker 1: three people survive the initial crash. They wake up floating
Speaker 1: in the water, coughing up blood, surrounded by jagged debris
Speaker 1: and the overpowering smell of jet.
Speaker 2: Fuel, just clinging to pieces of the wreckage.
Speaker 1: Yeah, but sixteen people perish, including the flight engineer, Chokri
Speaker 1: and Paola, the young woman who had specifically chosen this
Speaker 1: flight to avoid danger.
Speaker 2: It's so tragic. Now, rescue teams did arrive relatively swiftly,
Speaker 2: entirely thanks to the captain aiming for those boats and
Speaker 2: his immediate distress calls to Palermo. Helicopters and Coastguard vessels
Speaker 2: were on the scene within the hour, pulling the survivors
Speaker 2: from the heavy seas.
Speaker 1: But as those survivors are brought ashore to hospitals in Sicily,
Speaker 1: the crash investigators arrive and are left staring at a massive,
Speaker 1: seemingly impossible puzzle.
Speaker 2: How does this happen?
Speaker 1: Right? Exactly? How did two independent engines fail on a
Speaker 1: modern aircraft that supposedly had plenty of clean fuel.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: To solve that mystery, the investigators had to looked very
Speaker 1: closely at the parts of the plane that actually didn't
Speaker 1: sink to the bottom of the sea.
Speaker 2: And this brings us to the core of the investigation.
Speaker 2: The team was led by Vincenzo Panetta from the Italian
Speaker 2: Flight Safety Agency, working alongside Gioseeppecirelli, a lead representative from ATR,
Speaker 2: the planes manufacturer. Okay, their first job is purely a
Speaker 2: scientific process of elimination.
Speaker 1: They have to start testing hypotheses right like was it
Speaker 1: a massive fuel leak?
Speaker 2: That's the first thought yeah.
Speaker 1: They immediately look back to the famous air trans at
Speaker 1: flight two thirty six a few years prior, where a
Speaker 1: severed fuel line drained the tanks completely dry in mid air.
Speaker 2: A very similar scenario on paper, right, But.
Speaker 1: When the recovery teams haul the engine fuel lines from
Speaker 1: flight eleven fifty three out of the water, investigators examine
Speaker 1: them closely, they are perfectly intact, no ruptures, no leaks.
Speaker 2: So then they pivot to the contamination theory. You see,
Speaker 2: jet fuel is actually quite a delicate chemical mixture.
Speaker 1: Really, I always thought it was just you know, superpowered gas.
Speaker 2: It is, but if it gets contaminated with water, sand,
Speaker 2: or even microscopic fungus growing inside the airport storage tanks
Speaker 2: can clog the aircraft's filters or completely failed to ignite,
Speaker 2: shutting down the engines in flight.
Speaker 1: So Panetta's team travels all the way back to Bari, Italy,
Speaker 1: where the plane last fueled up, to check the source exactly.
Speaker 1: They swave the interior of the airport fuel trucks, They
Speaker 1: dismantle and test the pumping hoses. They look for sticky residue, sediment,
Speaker 1: biological growth.
Speaker 2: And what do they find.
Speaker 1: They run extensive laboratory tests on the fuel reserves from
Speaker 1: that exact day nothing. The fuel was completely pristine.
Speaker 2: This raises an incredibly important question. The lines are fine,
Speaker 2: the fuel is clean, and the pilots swore their gage
Speaker 2: stated they had eighteen hundred kilograms of fuel at the
Speaker 2: moment of the crash. Right, the investigation is hitting a
Speaker 2: complete wall until Panetta notices something peculiar about the wreckage.
Speaker 2: They recovered the central fuselage in the wings were floating
Speaker 2: relatively high in the water. They were acting like a
Speaker 2: giant makeshift life raft for the survivors.
Speaker 1: Put yourself in Panetta's shoes. You're looking at these wings
Speaker 1: floating on the surface, and that the light bulb.
Speaker 2: Moment exactly because from a physics standpoint, it didn't make sense.
Speaker 2: The fuel tanks on an ATR aircraft are located entirely
Speaker 2: inside the wings. If those wings actually contained eighteen hundred
Speaker 2: kilograms of heavy liquid jet fuel, as the pilot's gauge claimed,
Speaker 2: they should not have been floating high up in the waves.
Speaker 1: It'd be way too heavy.
Speaker 2: The sheer weight should have dragged them deep underwater or
Speaker 2: sunk them entirely.
Speaker 1: The wings are floating beautifully because they are bone dry.
Speaker 1: They are empty, completely empty. But if they are empty,
Speaker 1: why on Earth did the cockpit gauge insist they had
Speaker 1: eighteen hundred kilograms?
Speaker 2: That is the big question To answer this.
Speaker 1: Investigators start digging into the maintenance logs from the night
Speaker 1: before the crash back at the hangar in Tunisia, and
Speaker 1: they uncovered that Captain Garvey had reported a broken.
Speaker 2: Fuel gauge, the fuel quantity Indicator or SQI.
Speaker 1: Right the LCD digits on his screen were glitching out
Speaker 1: and becoming unreadable.
Speaker 2: So the mechanics in Tunisia worked the night shift to
Speaker 2: replace that broken gauge. To prove what happened during that repair,
Speaker 2: investigators desperately needed the actual physical gauge from the cockpit.
Speaker 1: Which is at the bottom of the ocean exactly.
Speaker 2: The problem is the cockpit had broken off during the
Speaker 2: crash and sunk fifteen hundred meters down to the absolute
Speaker 2: bottom of the Mediterranean Sea.
Speaker 1: MMM. It takes the Italian Navy three grueling weeks using
Speaker 1: specialized ships in deep sea remotely operated vehicles to haul
Speaker 1: that crushed cockpit up from the crushing pressure.
Speaker 2: Of the deep That is a massive undertaking, but.
Speaker 1: The moment it hits the deck of the recovery ship.
Speaker 1: Panetta is waiting. He goes straight for the instrument panel
Speaker 1: and he finds the smoking gun. The mechanics in Tunisia,
Speaker 1: working in the dark, had accidentally installed a fuel gauge
Speaker 1: meant for a smaller plane, the ATR forty two, onto
Speaker 1: this much larger ATR seventy two.
Speaker 2: Just a devastating mix up.
Speaker 1: Wait, so they just popped the wrong gauge in. But
Speaker 1: wouldn't the pilot physically check the fuel or look at
Speaker 1: a receipt? I mean, how do you just take off
Speaker 1: without actually fact knowing what is inside your tanks?
Speaker 2: That is the tragic cascade of errors, what we call
Speaker 2: the Swiss Cheese model of catastrophic failure, where all the
Speaker 2: individual holes line up perfectly right. When you install an
Speaker 2: ATR forty two gauge onto the larger fuel tanks of
Speaker 2: an ATR seventy two, it doesn't just go blank or
Speaker 2: flash an error code. It actively confidently lies to you.
Speaker 1: How so well.
Speaker 2: The fuel probes inside the tank measure electrical capacitance based
Speaker 2: on the height of the fuel, but the ATR seventy
Speaker 2: two tanks are much wider, so an entirely empty ATR
Speaker 2: seventy two tank sends a baseline electrical signal that the
Speaker 2: ATR forty two gauge mathematically misinterprets. It reads that baseline
Speaker 2: signal and confidently displays roughly eighteen hundred kilograms of phantom fuel.
Speaker 1: That is insane, So let's walk through the math. The
Speaker 1: pilot was looking at the night before, the broken gauge
Speaker 1: said he had about seven hundred and ninety kilograms the
Speaker 1: fuel left right, he goes to a hotel. He comes
Speaker 1: back the next morning, steps into the cockpit, and this
Speaker 1: newly installed gauge suddenly says he he has three thy
Speaker 1: one hundred kilograms.
Speaker 2: The captain notices the massive jump. He logically assumes the
Speaker 2: ground crew came out in the middle of the night
Speaker 2: and pumped roughly two three hundred kilograms of fuel into
Speaker 2: his plane while he was sleeping. Which happens, really, it does,
Speaker 2: but aviation regulations mandate that anytime fule is added, a
Speaker 2: physical refueling slip must be handed directly to the pilot
Speaker 2: for sign off.
Speaker 1: There's a paper troll exactly.
Speaker 2: Captain Garby asks his flight dispatcher for the slip, and.
Speaker 1: The dispatcher can't find it yea, because the plane was
Speaker 1: never refueled.
Speaker 2: Nope.
Speaker 1: But instead of stopping the entire boarding process and demanding
Speaker 1: a physical dipstick check of the tanks, the dispatcher just
Speaker 1: casually says, Hey, I can't find the paperwork. I'll get
Speaker 1: it to you when you get back from Jerbi, just
Speaker 1: waving it off, and Captain Garby says, Roger, that breaks
Speaker 1: the regulations and takes off anyway. He chooses to trust
Speaker 1: the bright, confident digital screen over the missing physical paperwork.
Speaker 2: So he flies the first leg to Bari, Italy, burning
Speaker 2: about four hundred kilograms of the seven to ninety.
Speaker 1: He actually has, so he's running really low.
Speaker 2: He lands in Italy with barely three hundred and ninety
Speaker 2: kilograms in the tanks, but his gauge is still showing
Speaker 2: that phantom fuel, so he thinks he has plenty. Unbelievable,
Speaker 2: He orders the fuel truck in Bari to add just
Speaker 2: two hundred and sixty five kilograms a tiny top off,
Speaker 2: assuming he's adding to a massive reserve.
Speaker 1: Wow.
Speaker 2: In reality, he now has roughly six hundred and fifty
Speaker 2: five kilograms of fuel total. He needs at least twelve
Speaker 2: hundred to safely Reachterba. He takes off and exactly forty
Speaker 2: nine minutes later, right over the middle of the sea,
Speaker 2: those six hundred and fifty five kilograms run out.
Speaker 1: It's just devastating.
Speaker 2: The engines didn't fail due to a mechanical flaw. They
Speaker 2: function perfectly until they literally drank the last drop of gas.
Speaker 1: The investigation definitively proves the plane ran dry because of
Speaker 1: a mismatched part. But the story doesn't end there, does it.
Speaker 2: No, it doesn't, because.
Speaker 1: The investigators had one final, highly controversial question. They wanted
Speaker 1: to know, even without the engines, if the crew had
Speaker 1: known they were out of fuel, could the pilots have
Speaker 1: safely glided that seventy miles discs stance to the Palermo Airport.
Speaker 2: To find out, the investigation team travels to the ATR
Speaker 2: flight simulator facility and to lose France, they meticulously recreate
Speaker 2: the exact conditions of August six. The altitude, the weight
Speaker 2: of the aircraft, the weather, the wind.
Speaker 1: Direction, everything exactly as it was.
Speaker 2: Exactly and according to the manufacturer's aerodynamic data, an ATR
Speaker 2: can glide about three miers forward for every one thousand
Speaker 2: feet of altitude. It loses. Okay, Given the altitude they
Speaker 2: had when the engines died and a highly favorable tail
Speaker 2: in that day, the simulator math proved they actually could
Speaker 2: have glided the entire seventy miles to the runway in Palermo.
Speaker 1: Wow. But there's a massive catch.
Speaker 2: Right, a huge catch.
Speaker 1: To achieve that perfect mathematical glide ratio, the pilots have
Speaker 1: to execute two very specific procedures. First, they have to
Speaker 1: feather the propellers.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 1: That means manually rotating the dead propeller blades so their
Speaker 1: thin edges sliced directly into the wind like a knife exactly.
Speaker 1: If you don't fetter them, the flat face of the
Speaker 1: blades acts like giant air brakes, creating massive aerodynamic.
Speaker 2: Drag which pulls you down faster.
Speaker 1: Second, they have to slow the plane down to an
Speaker 1: optimal speed of one hundred and fifty eight miles per hour. Surprisingly,
Speaker 1: if you pitch the nose down and fly too fast
Speaker 1: without engines, you create exponentially more air assistance and you
Speaker 1: drop out of the sky faster.
Speaker 2: And the black box data recorder showed that the real
Speaker 2: crew never feathered the propellers, and they flew the plane
Speaker 2: up to fifty five miles per hour faster than that
Speaker 2: optimal glide.
Speaker 1: Speed, So they were just hemorrhaging altitude.
Speaker 2: Yes, those two factors created a men's drag, effectively killing
Speaker 2: their chances of reaching the land. In the simulator test,
Speaker 2: pilots who followed the exact optimal procedures, feathered the props,
Speaker 2: and hit the perfect speed were able to land safely
Speaker 2: on the runway.
Speaker 1: Here's where it gets really interesting and honestly a bit infuriating.
Speaker 1: Imagine yourself in that simulator in France. Is it actually
Speaker 1: fair for a bunch of investigators sitting in a perfectly safe,
Speaker 1: air conditioned room to point fingers at a terrified pilot
Speaker 1: for not perfectly executing an aerodynamic math equation while thirty
Speaker 1: four people are screaming for their lives behind him.
Speaker 2: If we connect this to the bigger picture, it is
Speaker 2: fundamentally unfair to perfectly compare the two scenarios. And to
Speaker 2: their credit, the investigators acknowledged this context because the simulator
Speaker 2: pilots had a massive psychological advantage. They knew they were
Speaker 2: entirely out of fuel, and they knew they had a
Speaker 2: magic reset button if they crashed into the digital ocean.
Speaker 1: Exactly. Captain Garby did not know he was out.
Speaker 2: Of gas because his gauge still boldly stated he had fuel,
Speaker 2: precisely because his instruments lied to him. He fully believed
Speaker 2: he had a reversible mechanical failure. His priority wasn't configuring
Speaker 2: the plane for a slow, maximum distance glide.
Speaker 1: No, he thought he could fix it right.
Speaker 2: His priority was spending his altitude and speed aggressively diving
Speaker 2: to try and force air through the engines to restart them.
Speaker 2: By the time he finally realized the engines were absolutely
Speaker 2: never coming back, he had through way too much altitude
Speaker 2: to make the runaway.
Speaker 1: It was too eight.
Speaker 2: His focus then shifted entirely to ditching the aircraft as
Speaker 2: safely as humanly possible.
Speaker 1: And we have to give Captain Garby credit where it
Speaker 1: is absolutely due, because the flight data recorder reveals one
Speaker 1: final incredible active airmanship.
Speaker 2: Yes it does.
Speaker 1: In the absolute last millisecond before they hit the water,
Speaker 1: Garby pulled the control column back, raising the nose of
Speaker 1: the plane up to exactly a nine degree pitch.
Speaker 2: That is the crucial life saving detail. By raising the
Speaker 2: nose to exactly nine degrees, he ensured the heavy tail
Speaker 2: of the aircraft skimmed.
Speaker 1: The water first, taking the brunt of the hit exactly.
Speaker 2: The tail absorbed a massive amount of the forward kinetic energy.
Speaker 2: If he had plowed nose deep into the swell, the
Speaker 2: fuselage would have instantly obliterated.
Speaker 1: And everyone would have died.
Speaker 2: It is highly likely, absolutely no one would have survived.
Speaker 2: That single, perfectly executed maneuver at the bitter end is
Speaker 2: the sole reason twenty three people lived to tell this story.
Speaker 1: So what does this all mean? When we stepped back
Speaker 1: when Pinetta finalized the investigative report, it was abundantly clear
Speaker 1: that it wasn't just one failure.
Speaker 2: It never is.
Speaker 1: No, it was this complex web of linked errors. A
Speaker 1: tired mechanic in the dark grabbing a gauge with a
Speaker 1: twenty two to fifty label instead of a two to
Speaker 1: fifty label. Yeah, a dispatcher failing to find a simple
Speaker 1: slip of paper, a captain making a fateful, hurried decision
Speaker 1: to trust a digital screen over missing physical documentation, and finally,
Speaker 1: an unprecedented emergency over the open sea.
Speaker 2: It forced immediate sweeping changes across the aviation industry. Had
Speaker 2: to ATR totally redesigned their fuel gauges so that a
Speaker 2: part for smaller plane physically cannot be plugged into a
Speaker 2: larger plane, a brilliant, simple physical failsafe idiot proof exactly,
Speaker 2: and airlines completely revamped how they trained pilots to handle
Speaker 2: dual engine flame outs, emphasizing establishing a maximum distance glide immediately,
Speaker 2: even when the cause of the failure is totally unknown.
Speaker 1: It is a profound story of survival of tragic loss
Speaker 1: and now tiny seemingly insignificant things like a single part
Speaker 1: number or a missing receipt can have massive life altering consequences. Absolutely,
Speaker 1: and it leaves us with something really important to think
Speaker 1: about long after this deep dive is over. We live
Speaker 1: in a world that is completely reliant on complex systems.
Speaker 1: We trust the data fed to us by our dashboards,
Speaker 1: our algorithms, and our screens to represent reality.
Speaker 2: We do it every day.
Speaker 1: But you might be looking at the right screen, making
Speaker 1: all the right decisions based on the data you have,
Speaker 1: without ever knowing what invisible lines of code or incompatible
Speaker 1: hidden parts are silently feeding you of false reality. How
Speaker 1: much of our daily lives are built on the blind
Speaker 1: assumption that the systems beneath the surface are actually telling
Speaker 1: us the truth.