Speaker 1: So it's it's a freezing cold January day in two
Speaker 1: thousand and eight, very cold, and we are on the
Speaker 1: flight deck of British Airways flight thirty eight. They're descending
Speaker 1: over all those you know, tightly packed houses in London,
Speaker 1: just coming into Heathrow.
Speaker 2: Which is incredibly dense airspace.
Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly, and in just seconds, the state of the
Speaker 1: art Boeing seven seven seven, which by the way is
Speaker 1: a plane with a flawless two million flight safety record,
Speaker 1: is going to inexplicably just fall right out of the sky.
Speaker 2: It's terrifying, it really is.
Speaker 1: So today for our deep dive we are exploring this
Speaker 1: crazy true story. It's a catastrophe that totally baffled the
Speaker 1: greatest aviation mines on the planet. I mean we're talking
Speaker 1: about an exhaustive hunt for a culprit that vanished without
Speaker 1: a single trace.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And to really understand the sheer scale of the
Speaker 2: shock that ripped through the aviation world that day, you
Speaker 2: really have to put yourself in that cockpit. Oh, absolutely,
Speaker 2: because the Boeing seven to seven seven it was and
Speaker 2: still is really the undisputed gold standard of commercial aviation, right.
Speaker 1: I mean, it's like the Titanic of the skies, but
Speaker 1: you know one that actually worked perfectly ten years, millions
Speaker 1: of flights, zero major accidents.
Speaker 2: Exactly, completely trusted by pilots and passengers. So picture the scene.
Speaker 2: It's the very end of a completely routine ten and
Speaker 2: a half hour flight from Beijing to London.
Speaker 1: It's a normal day, right.
Speaker 2: There are one hundred and fifty two people on board.
Speaker 2: You've got a passenger, Nick Harris, for example, just looking
Speaker 2: out the window, listening to the hum of the engines,
Speaker 2: totally looking forward to getting home.
Speaker 1: I mean they're descending over Helmslow, which is basically just
Speaker 1: rows and rows of rooftops.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and let's walk through the exact chronology of this descent,
Speaker 2: because the margins here between a routine landing and absolute
Speaker 2: disaster are razor thin.
Speaker 1: So at twelve hundred feet everything is completely normal.
Speaker 2: Totally normal. The autopilot is smoothly handling some you know,
Speaker 2: twenty to thirty nine wind gusts. It's a bit turbulent,
Speaker 2: the airframe is shuttering a little bit, but nothing unusual
Speaker 2: for London in the winter, right. So First Officer John
Speaker 2: Coward takes manual control for the landing. Exactly is planned
Speaker 2: hands on the yoke, feed on the rudder.
Speaker 1: Pedals, ready to bring it in.
Speaker 2: Yeah, but then at five hundred feet everything just falls apart.
Speaker 1: Five hundred feet is what mere seconds from the runway.
Speaker 2: Mere seconds and first docs, a coward utters a phrase
Speaker 2: that no pilot ever wants to say. He looks over
Speaker 2: and says, Pete, I can't get power on the engines.
Speaker 1: Wait, like the auto throttle is demanding full thrust, right
Speaker 1: because they're getting buffeted.
Speaker 2: By the wind exactly. The computer is screaming for speed
Speaker 2: to maintain the glide path. But those massive rolls Royce
Speaker 2: engines are just completely dead.
Speaker 1: So they're literally just dead weight at this point.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and they are falling toward the hat and cross area,
Speaker 2: directly over a petrol station and a bunch of residential buildings.
Speaker 1: That is a nightmare fuel. And you've got Captain peterbrook
Speaker 1: Hill sitting there feeling the massive weight of those four
Speaker 1: strikes on his uniform.
Speaker 2: Right, Yeah, I mean he realizes in that split second
Speaker 2: that the lives of one hundred and fifty two people
Speaker 2: rest entirely on what he does in the next.
Speaker 1: Thirty seve sec thirty seconds. Wow.
Speaker 2: And the psychology of what happens next in that cockpit
Speaker 2: is well, it's a masterclass in crisis.
Speaker 1: Management because of the overload, right.
Speaker 2: Right, There's a concept called task saturation. When a catastrophic
Speaker 2: failure happens, the sheer volume of sensory input you know,
Speaker 2: blaring alarms, flashing lights, the physical stomach dropping sensation of
Speaker 2: the plane falling, it can completely overwhelm your brained processing capacity.
Speaker 1: You just get tunnel vision. Your brain screams at you
Speaker 1: to panic exactly.
Speaker 2: The amygdala takes over. But Burke Hill manages this saturation brilliantly.
Speaker 2: He makes three split second life saving choices.
Speaker 1: Okay, what's the first one.
Speaker 2: First he leaves the landing gear down. He knows they
Speaker 2: are going to make the runway, but he needs that massive,
Speaker 2: heavy gear to act as a crumple zone to absorb
Speaker 2: the impact.
Speaker 1: Like a calculated sacrifice for the cabin above exactly.
Speaker 2: And he compounds that with a second aerodynamic choice. He
Speaker 2: actually raises the flaps from thirty degrees to twenty five.
Speaker 1: Degrees, which I mean that feels totally counter cupitive, right do.
Speaker 1: But the physics are wild because when you lose engines,
Speaker 1: gravity takes over and your flaps basically act like giant.
Speaker 2: Parachute, right, they create drag.
Speaker 1: So by pulling them up just that little bit, burke
Speaker 1: Hill traded a little bit of upward lift to shed
Speaker 1: a massive amount of drag. Like he essentially turned a
Speaker 1: falling rock back into a glider.
Speaker 2: Yeah, he bought them just enough forward distance to stretch
Speaker 2: that glide path and clear the antenna rays at the
Speaker 2: edge of the airport. Wow. But his third decision, this
Speaker 2: is the one that truly saved everyone on board. He
Speaker 2: explicitly decides not to take the controls from First Officer Coward.
Speaker 1: Okay, See, I have to push back on that because
Speaker 1: as a driver, you know, if I'm in a car
Speaker 1: and it hits a patch of ice and starts skidding,
Speaker 1: my absolute first instinct is to grab the wheel.
Speaker 2: I want control, naturally.
Speaker 1: Yeah, So burke Hill explicitly doing nothing. Why is that
Speaker 1: actually the brilliant move here?
Speaker 2: It all comes down to crew resource management. Yeah, burke
Speaker 2: Hill glanced over and saw that Coward was flying the
Speaker 2: plane perfectly. Yeah, he was maintaining the app salute optimal
Speaker 2: glide slope given they had zero thrust.
Speaker 1: Okay, so if it ain't broke, don't fix it right.
Speaker 2: And if burk Kill had taken control the precious seconds
Speaker 2: lost in that transfer, you know, taking his hands off
Speaker 2: the instruments, getting a physical feel for the dead weight
Speaker 2: of this massive, unpowered aircraft, that delay would have doomed them, right.
Speaker 1: Because they only had thirty seconds total exactly.
Speaker 2: Trusting his first officer, overriding his own ego and just
Speaker 2: focusing on managing the failing systems instead of flying the
Speaker 2: plane is what kept them in the air just long enough.
Speaker 1: But the crash itself is still just brutal. They slam
Speaker 1: into the mud and grass. What a thousand feet short
Speaker 1: of runway twenty seven zlos one.
Speaker 2: Thousand feet short. The force is immense. The landing gears
Speaker 2: pushed right up through.
Speaker 1: The wings and didn't one of the massive wheels get
Speaker 1: totally ripped off.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I just went tumbling across the grass. The engines
Speaker 2: were half buried in the dirt. But the thing is
Speaker 2: they missed the petrol station, they missed the A thirty motorway.
Speaker 1: And miraculously no fire, zero fatalities, just.
Speaker 2: Forty seven injuries among the one hundred and fifty two
Speaker 2: people on board. The soft winter mud of that field
Speaker 2: was basically their final stroke of.
Speaker 1: Luck because it absorbed the energy.
Speaker 2: Exactly. If they had hit concrete or asphalt, the friction
Speaker 2: sparks almost certainly would have ignited the tens of thousands
Speaker 2: of pounds of highly combustible jet fuel still sitting right
Speaker 2: there in the wings.
Speaker 1: And that brings us to the most baffling part of
Speaker 1: this whole investigation. I mean, for you listening, imagine this.
Speaker 1: The passengers are safe, They're sliding down the shoots into
Speaker 1: the freezing air. The Prime Minister Gordon Brown at the
Speaker 1: time is issuing statements praising the crew rightfully. So yeah.
Speaker 1: But then the Air Accident's Investigation Branch, the AaB, led
Speaker 1: by this engineer Phil Slight, they arrive on the scene
Speaker 1: to figure out what just happened, because if it wasn't
Speaker 1: pilot error and the flight data confirmed the crew did
Speaker 1: everything perfectly, what brought down the safest plane in the world.
Speaker 2: Right, And when investigators walk up to a wreckage with
Speaker 2: a dual engine failure, they immediately look for a common denominator,
Speaker 2: something that connects both independent.
Speaker 1: Engines, which this usually means fuel, right.
Speaker 2: Exactly, the very first thought was fuel exhaustion. This is
Speaker 2: super reminiscent of the famous Gillley glider incident from nineteen
Speaker 2: eighty three.
Speaker 1: Oh right, the Boeing seven sixty seven that ran out
Speaker 1: of fuel mid air because of a metric conversion error.
Speaker 2: Yeah, but that theory evaporated immediately on flight thirty eight,
Speaker 2: first responders noted the overwhelming choking stench of jet fuel
Speaker 2: spilling all over the crash site.
Speaker 1: Plus, didn't they literally just check the physical dipsticks in
Speaker 1: the wing tanks.
Speaker 2: They did, and it proved there was plenty of fuel
Speaker 2: left to finish the flight. So the AAIB meticulously traces
Speaker 2: the fuel's entire journey. They tracked the exact batches loaded
Speaker 2: into the plane, tracing it all the way back through
Speaker 2: a pipeline in China to a shipping tanker from South Korea.
Speaker 1: Talk about thorough Yeah.
Speaker 2: They compared chemical samples against twelve hundred other batches of
Speaker 2: fuel sitting in tanks across the UK, and the chemical
Speaker 2: analysis came back spotless. It was perfectly good fuel, completely
Speaker 2: free of any chemical contaminous.
Speaker 1: So, okay, if the fuel was there and it was queen,
Speaker 1: they had to look inside the tanks themselves right to
Speaker 1: see if something was physical blocking the lines.
Speaker 2: Exactly, so they drained the massive wing tanks, sifting through
Speaker 2: thousands of gallons of kerosene, and they actually did find
Speaker 2: a few things, A few small pieces of tape and incredibly,
Speaker 2: a red plastic scraper.
Speaker 1: Wait, a literal hand tool, a literal hand tour, just
Speaker 1: floating around the pitch black fuel tank of a commercial
Speaker 1: jet that is mildly terrified.
Speaker 2: It was left sealed inside the tank seven years prior
Speaker 2: by a worker in Seattle.
Speaker 1: Wow, I mean it pints a slightly unsettling picture of
Speaker 1: quality control. Sure, but applying basic fluid dynamics tells us
Speaker 1: that a tiny plastic scraper and a few strips of
Speaker 1: tape are way too small to choke the mass of
Speaker 1: fuel pumps of a seven seven seven right right.
Speaker 2: The pumps would just push past them, or the mesh
Speaker 2: screens would catch them without actually stopping the flow.
Speaker 1: So if the fuel is there and the pipes are
Speaker 1: physically clear, the AAIB is forced to look at the
Speaker 1: plane's digital brain.
Speaker 2: Which makes sense because the seven seven seven as a
Speaker 2: fly by.
Speaker 1: Wire aircraft, meaning there's no physical cables.
Speaker 2: Right The pilots don't mechanically pull steel cables to open
Speaker 2: the valves. They move levers that tell a computer what
Speaker 2: they want. The computer sends electrical signals to the engines.
Speaker 2: So investigators pull the quick Access recorder, the QAR, which
Speaker 2: is basically the diagnostic brain.
Speaker 1: And they find something really weird, didn't they?
Speaker 2: Yeah, they discovered that it abruptly stopped recording data exactly
Speaker 2: forty five seconds before the crash, which.
Speaker 1: Is terrifying because less than three years prior, a Malaysian
Speaker 1: Airlines seven seventy seven climbing out of Perth had a
Speaker 1: massive computer glitch that aggressively pitched the plane's nose up right.
Speaker 2: It took immense manual effort by the pilots to fight
Speaker 2: the computer and save the plane.
Speaker 1: So seeing a forty five second data blackout on this
Speaker 1: flight basically paralyze the industry, like is the electronic brain
Speaker 1: fatally flawed? Are all seven seven sevens ticking time bombs?
Speaker 2: But then analysts at Farnbro dig deep into the QAR
Speaker 2: architecture and they figure out the forty five second gap
Speaker 2: isn't a glitch at all?
Speaker 1: Oh really what it?
Speaker 2: It's just how the recorder buffer's data in its temporary
Speaker 2: memory before writing it to the solid state drive.
Speaker 1: Ah, so the power was cut upon impact before that
Speaker 1: buffer could physically right the final second exactly.
Speaker 2: The computer was actually perfectly fine, and the recovered data
Speaker 2: showed that when First Officer Coward asked for power, the
Speaker 2: computer immediately demanded fuel. The fuel metering valves were one
Speaker 2: hundred percent fully.
Speaker 1: Open, So it's literally exactly like flooring the gas pedal
Speaker 1: in your car. Your foot is to the floor. The
Speaker 1: computer is telling the engine to go. The valves are
Speaker 1: completely open, but the engine is just choking to death.
Speaker 2: Right, The electronic brain was entirely innocent.
Speaker 1: Which means something physical, something tangible, was standing in the
Speaker 1: way of that fuel.
Speaker 2: But what While that realization forced the AAIB into a corner,
Speaker 2: Lead engineer Phil Slighte started repeating that famous mantra from
Speaker 2: Sherlock Holmes. Whatever is left, however improbable, must be the cause,
Speaker 2: because the physical evidence on the plane showed absolutely zero
Speaker 2: mechanical faults, the fuel was clean, the computers worked right.
Speaker 2: So the prime suspect became the only thing in the
Speaker 2: natural world that could strangle two engines simultaneously and then
Speaker 2: just vanish without a trace before investigators even arrived.
Speaker 1: Ice, the invisible assassin Ye ice, which basically takes this
Speaker 1: whole investigation all the way from the mud of London
Speaker 1: to Boeing's highly secure laboratories in Seattle.
Speaker 2: Right. Yeah, Investigator Brian McDermott travels to Seattle to test
Speaker 2: a very specific, highly complex component of the seven to
Speaker 2: seven seven's plumbing, the fuel oil heat exchanger or the FOCH.
Speaker 1: Okay, so, the fuel oil heat exchanger, I imagine it
Speaker 1: does exactly what it says on the tin, right. It
Speaker 1: uses the scorching hot engine oil to warm up the
Speaker 1: freezing cold fuel coming in from the.
Speaker 2: Wings exactly, and simultaneously it uses that cold fuel to
Speaker 2: cool down the hot oil.
Speaker 1: That sounds like a full proof, beautifully elegant piece of engineering.
Speaker 2: It really is. It's designed specifically to prevent ice from
Speaker 2: ever reaching the engine. The cold fuel runs through a
Speaker 2: series of tiny honeycomb tubes, and those tubes are completely
Speaker 2: surrounded by a solid block of hot oil.
Speaker 1: But they needed to test if this system could somehow
Speaker 1: be defeated.
Speaker 2: Right because they knew Flight thirty eight flew over Siberia
Speaker 2: where the outside air temperature was a lethal minus seventy four.
Speaker 1: Degrees celsius et lanus seventy four unbelievable.
Speaker 2: So they put an identical FOHI on a massive test
Speaker 2: rig inst Seattle, and they pump freezing cold fuel minus
Speaker 2: thirty degrees celsius through the pipes. They watched the data,
Speaker 2: waiting for the pipes to choke on the ice. Nothing happens.
Speaker 2: The ice won't steak, It just flows right through the
Speaker 2: tiny tubes and on the other side.
Speaker 1: See the paradox here is maddening. I mean, if the
Speaker 1: air of a Russia was a deadly minus seventy four
Speaker 1: degrees celsius, how did the fuel and the wings not
Speaker 1: just freeze into a solid block of ice right then
Speaker 1: and there? And if it's that incredibly cold, why wouldn't
Speaker 1: the ice stick to the pipes during their lab tests
Speaker 1: in Seattle?
Speaker 2: Okay, so let's break down why the fuel didn't freeze
Speaker 2: solid over Siberia. First, Yeah, please, While the outside air
Speaker 2: was minus seven four degrees, jet fuel is heavily chemically
Speaker 2: treated to lower its freezing point. Plus the friction of
Speaker 2: the air over the wings and the residual heat from
Speaker 2: the plane itself meant the fuel actually never dropped below
Speaker 2: minus thirty four degrees celsius.
Speaker 1: Which is still cold but well above its freezing point.
Speaker 2: Exactly, the kerosene itself remained entirely liquid.
Speaker 1: Right, But the kerosene isn't just kerosene. There's always some
Speaker 1: water inside it, right.
Speaker 2: Precisely because of condensation forming in those massive hollow wing tanks.
Speaker 2: As the plane descends into humid air and then climbs
Speaker 2: back up into the freezing stratosphere, there is always a
Speaker 2: tiny microscopic amount of dissolved water suspended inside the jet fuel.
Speaker 1: Okay, that makes sense.
Speaker 2: And when the temperature drops during a long flight, that
Speaker 2: dissolved water separates from the kerosene and turns into microscopic
Speaker 2: ice crystals.
Speaker 1: Now there is ice in the fuel.
Speaker 2: Yes, But and here is the massive breakthrough that took
Speaker 2: investigators months of grueling, frustrating lab tests to discover ice
Speaker 2: actually does not stick to metal when it is ultra cold,
Speaker 2: really really, when it's below minus twenty degrees celsius, those
Speaker 2: ice crystals are so deeply solidly frozen that they act
Speaker 2: like dry grains of sand.
Speaker 1: Oh, they lack any surface moisture exactly.
Speaker 2: So they just bounce off the metal walls of the
Speaker 2: pipes and flow harmlessly into the hot engine where they
Speaker 2: are incinerated.
Speaker 1: Wow, so they aren't sticky at all.
Speaker 2: No, but investigators eventually discovered what they call the sticky range.
Speaker 1: The sticky range.
Speaker 2: Yeah, between minus twenty degrees celsius and minus eight degrees celsius,
Speaker 2: those hard, dry little crystals start to thaw just slightly,
Speaker 2: their surfaces melt into a sticky, slushy paste.
Speaker 1: Oh no, and that slush will absolutely cling to the
Speaker 1: freezing walls of the fuel pipes.
Speaker 2: Exactly.
Speaker 1: So, if we map this scientific revelation onto the exact
Speaker 1: timeline of flight thirty eight Man, it reveals the most
Speaker 1: perfect insidious trap in aviation history. It really does, because
Speaker 1: for ten hours this flight was incredibly smooth. The autopilot
Speaker 1: was keeping the fuel flow very low and very steady,
Speaker 1: no massive demands for power, And as the plane left
Speaker 1: the deep frieze of Siberian airspace and neared the milder
Speaker 1: climate of London, the fuel slowly started to warm up.
Speaker 2: It crept directly into that sticky.
Speaker 1: Range, and as it did, that slushy ice just peacefully,
Speaker 1: silently started coating the inside of the fuel lines. It
Speaker 1: wasn't blocking the flow of fuel at all, It was
Speaker 1: just building up on the walls layer by microscopic layer,
Speaker 1: like plaques silently building in a human artery.
Speaker 2: That's a great way to put it. And it would
Speaker 2: have stayed there completely harmlessly. The plane would have landed,
Speaker 2: the ambient temperature on the tarmac would warm the pipes,
Speaker 2: and the slush would have melted away.
Speaker 1: Entirely, leaving zero evidence it was ever.
Speaker 2: There exactly, if it wasn't for the trigger.
Speaker 1: The turbulent descent into Heathrow.
Speaker 2: Right at five hundred feet they hit that choppy, turbulent air,
Speaker 2: the auto throttle suddenly demanded a massive, violent surge of
Speaker 2: power to keep the plane stable on the glide path.
Speaker 1: Because they were getting knocked around by the wind.
Speaker 2: Yeah, we are talking about a demand that went from
Speaker 2: a gentle, steady cruise to pushing twe twelve to thirteen
Speaker 2: thousand pounds of fuel per hour through those pipes in
Speaker 2: an instant.
Speaker 1: So it's literally like triggering an avalanche just by yelling
Speaker 1: in a snowy canyon. The snow was sitting there harmlessly,
Speaker 1: but that sudden pressure change, that massive demand for power,
Speaker 1: strips the entire coating of slush off the pipe walls.
Speaker 2: All at once, Yes, sending a massive concentrated slug of
Speaker 2: ice straight down the plumbing toward the engines.
Speaker 1: A catastrophic avalanche of slush. But wait, even then, the
Speaker 1: fuel oil heat exchanger is supposed to melt it, right,
Speaker 1: The honeycomb tubes are surrounded by boiling hot oil. Why
Speaker 1: didn't it melt this slug of ice?
Speaker 2: And this brings us to the ultimate Achilles heel of
Speaker 2: the Boeing seven seventy seven investigators closely examined the physical
Speaker 2: architecture of that FOHI block. They found that the face
Speaker 2: of those tiny honeycomb tubes jutted out just a few
Speaker 2: millimeters above the hot oil block itself.
Speaker 1: A few millimeters.
Speaker 2: It was a microscopic physical protrusion, but that tiny unheated
Speaker 2: lip of metal was just enough to act as a dam.
Speaker 2: It caught the avalanche of slush before the ice could
Speaker 2: reach the hot surface to melt.
Speaker 1: So the ice just backed up instantly against this unheated lip,
Speaker 1: creating a solid plug that choked off the fuel supply
Speaker 1: to both engines simultaneously. Exact, a multimillion dollar marvel of
Speaker 1: aviation brought down by a few millimeters of metal, a
Speaker 1: few degrees of temperature and a perfectly timed gust of wind.
Speaker 2: It is the absolute definition of a black Swan event.
Speaker 2: The sequence of meteorological and mechanical variables required to make
Speaker 2: this happen was so intensely specific that investigators calculated that
Speaker 2: out of one hundred and forty four thousand similar seven
Speaker 2: hundred and seventy seven flights, less than one percent ever
Speaker 2: experienced conditions even remotely close to this.
Speaker 1: That is staggering, so they figure out the physics. The
Speaker 1: lab tests in Seattle finally replicated the exact conditions, But
Speaker 1: in the world of aviation safety, a lab test isn't
Speaker 1: always enough to instantly ground a global fleet or force
Speaker 1: a massive mechanical redesign. You need absolute, undeniable proof in
Speaker 1: the real world.
Speaker 2: And ten months later, in November two thousd the ghost
Speaker 2: strikes again.
Speaker 1: Which is just chilling. What makes this second incident so
Speaker 1: unsettling is that it was an exact copycat. Y A
Speaker 1: Delta Airlines seven to seven seven is flying from Shanghai
Speaker 1: to Atlanta, same exact engine type, same exact flight profile,
Speaker 1: over deeply cooled airspace, and at thirty nine thousand feet
Speaker 1: over Montana, the hit a patch where the auto throttle
Speaker 1: suddenly demands a surge of power, and immediately one of
Speaker 1: the engines completely rolls back. It just stops producing thrust.
Speaker 2: The exact same sticky range, the exact same sudden power demand,
Speaker 2: pulling the slush off the walls, the exact same avalanche
Speaker 2: of ice hitting that unheated lip of the heat exchanger.
Speaker 1: But this time it is not a crash. The Delta
Speaker 1: flight lands safely in Atlanta, which, honestly, the sheer luck
Speaker 1: involved in this is staggering. If that Delta flight hadn't
Speaker 1: experienced the exact same anomaly at an altitude where it
Speaker 1: was survivable and recordable, investigators might have spent years chasing ghosts, wondering.
Speaker 2: If their lab tests were just theoretical.
Speaker 1: Yeah, we only know for sure because the elusive culprit
Speaker 1: struck again. But tell me this, Why did Delta survive
Speaker 1: so easily while British Airways thirty eight crashed into the mud.
Speaker 2: It all comes down to a single critical variable altitude.
Speaker 2: The Delta crew was at thirty nine thousand feet when
Speaker 2: the engine lost power. They had time and space, they
Speaker 2: were able to run their troubleshooting checklist, and crucially, they
Speaker 2: pulled the throttle back to.
Speaker 1: Idle, and that simple action, reducing the pressure of the
Speaker 1: fuel flow, stopped the avalanche of ice exactly.
Speaker 2: It gave the hot oil inside the heat exchanger just
Speaker 2: a few precious seconds to catch up, radiate heat to
Speaker 2: that protruding lip and melt the ice blockage. The fuel
Speaker 2: started flowing again, power was restored and they flew on.
Speaker 1: But Captain Burke Hill and First Officer Coward were at
Speaker 1: five hundred feet They had less than thirty seconds before
Speaker 1: they hit the earth. They had absolutely no altitude to
Speaker 1: trade for time, right, they.
Speaker 2: Couldn't throttle back to idle because idling meant falling out
Speaker 2: of the sky instantly.
Speaker 1: They were caught in an impossible, unwinnable physical trap. But
Speaker 1: the digital flight data from that delta flight p the absolute, undeniable,
Speaker 1: real world proof. The AAIB needed to mandate a fix,
Speaker 1: which they did. But how do you fix a flaw
Speaker 1: so microscopic and so deeply embedded in the complex physics
Speaker 1: of freezing water and fluid dynamics.
Speaker 2: The mechanical fix was actually almost shockingly elegant.
Speaker 1: Really, what did they do?
Speaker 2: Rolls ROAs just redesigned the fuel oil heat exchanger They
Speaker 2: took that face where the tubes protruded a few millimeters,
Speaker 2: and they simply milled the face of the block completely flat.
Speaker 1: Seriously, they just shaved it down.
Speaker 2: Yep, they eliminated that microscopic shelf, meaning there was nowhere
Speaker 2: for the slush to snag. Any slush that came rushing
Speaker 2: down the pipe in a sudden avalanche would hit the
Speaker 2: flush heated face, slip straight into the hot oil tubes
Speaker 2: and be melted instantly.
Speaker 1: That is wild, A massive multimillion dollar mystery solved by
Speaker 1: flattening a few millimeters of metal.
Speaker 2: It is an incredible triumph of engineering investigation and it
Speaker 2: really brings us back to the human triumph inside this
Speaker 2: mechanical failure. Captain Burkhill, first Officer Coward, and the entire
Speaker 2: cabin crew were rightfully celebrated for their actions.
Speaker 1: They received the British Airways Safety.
Speaker 2: Medal, didn't they Yeah, the company's highest honor, and it
Speaker 2: was for doing the absolute best possible job in a
Speaker 2: thirty second window against a failure no one on earth
Speaker 2: even knew existed. Prime Minister Gordon Brown's praise was entirely justified.
Speaker 2: It remains a defining testament to crew, resource management, and
Speaker 2: trusting your training when every alarm in the cockpit is
Speaker 2: screaming at.
Speaker 1: You yeah, and for you listening. This story is just
Speaker 1: a profound reminder of the microscopic margins of safety that
Speaker 1: protect us every single time we step onto an airplane.
Speaker 1: A few millimeters of a pipe, a few degrees of temperature,
Speaker 1: and the unrelenting, stubborn diligence of investigators who are willing
Speaker 1: to sift through one hundred and forty four thousand flights
Speaker 1: just to keep us safe in the sky.
Speaker 2: It highlights there was always more to learn. We can
Speaker 2: model fluid dynamics in supercomputers all day, but the physical
Speaker 2: world always has a way of throwing a variable we
Speaker 2: didn't account for.
Speaker 1: Definitely. I mean, we opened our dive today by talking
Speaker 1: about the flawless record of the Boeing seven seven seven.
Speaker 1: In an era where we are trusting our lives completely
Speaker 1: to automated systems, to fly by wire computers, and increasingly
Speaker 1: to AI. Flight thirty eight reminds us of a really
Speaker 1: humbling truth.
Speaker 2: That the real world is messy.
Speaker 1: Right, the physical analog world, as simple sticky clump of
Speaker 1: slushy ice, can still entirely blindside the most advanced digital
Speaker 1: brains on the planet, and it leaves you wondering. As
Speaker 1: our machines get smarter and smarter, will we ever reach
Speaker 1: a point where computers can actually predict the messy physical
Speaker 1: anomalies that human engineers can't even see. Or will the
Speaker 1: physical world always find a way to muddy the waters