Speaker 1: So picture this. You're flying at maybe thirty seven thousand
Speaker 1: feet and it is just pitch black outside. You're out
Speaker 1: over the open ocean. Maybe you're dozing off in your seat,
Speaker 1: when suddenly you notice something well entirely unnatural outside the window.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, like these eerie sheets of brilliant, dancing white
Speaker 1: light just covering the windshield right, clinging tightly to the wings.
Speaker 1: And then it hits you this accrid, unmistakable smell of
Speaker 1: sulfur filtering into the pressurized cabin.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that'd smell like striking a thousand matches all at once, exactly.
Speaker 1: And then then comes a sound that just completely defies belief,
Speaker 1: or I.
Speaker 2: Mean, rather the complete lack of sound, right yeah, the sickening,
Speaker 2: impossible silence of all four engines on a massive seven
Speaker 2: four to seven shutting down, completely gone right at the
Speaker 2: exact same time, leaving you suspended in this this three
Speaker 2: hundred and fifty ton metal tube, just quietly gliding toward
Speaker 2: the dark ocean below.
Speaker 1: It is absolute nightmare fuel and well. Today, our mission
Speaker 1: in this deep dives to open up decades of declassified
Speaker 1: flight data, cockpit voice transcripts, and these meticulous accident reports.
Speaker 2: Right the real greedy details.
Speaker 1: Yeah, to explore four harrowing true stories of commercial flights
Speaker 1: going head to head with extreme weather. We're going to
Speaker 1: unpack the hidden meteorological forces that can just boom swat
Speaker 1: massive jets from the sky without any warning.
Speaker 2: And we're also going to look really closely at how investigators,
Speaker 2: the people who actually sift through the scorch wreckage, uncovered
Speaker 2: the invisible forces of play here, because I mean, mother
Speaker 2: Nature is this overwhelming, completely indifferent force.
Speaker 1: Yeah, she don't care, she.
Speaker 2: Doesn't And for decades, aviation safety rules, while they haven't
Speaker 2: been drafted in a vacuum, they've been written in the
Speaker 2: aftermath of these terrifying.
Speaker 1: Encounters, paid for in blood.
Speaker 2: Really exactly, every single system protecting you in the air
Speaker 2: today was built directly on the lessons of flights that
Speaker 2: met the ultimate test.
Speaker 1: Right, So, we just saw how terrifying it is to
Speaker 1: lose all engines in the dark. But let's start with
Speaker 1: a threat that happens in broad daylight, just hiding in
Speaker 1: plane sight. Okay, Yeah, Our first case takes us to
Speaker 1: a sweltering one hundred and one degree Texas afternoon, August second,
Speaker 1: nineteen eighty five. We're looking at Delta flight one ninety one,
Speaker 1: which is an L ten eleven TriStar on what should
Speaker 1: be just a completely routine approach into Dallas Fort Worth.
Speaker 2: Right, but the atmosphere of that day is heavily loaded.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, I mean it's hot, it's humid, and you've
Speaker 2: got these scattered summer thunderstorms just popping up violently near
Speaker 2: the airport. Now, the crew on the flight deck, they
Speaker 2: are highly experienced.
Speaker 1: They know what they're doing.
Speaker 2: They do. They're threading the needle, actively steering around the
Speaker 2: worst of the weather cells, just bringing this heavy jet
Speaker 2: into alignment for the runway.
Speaker 1: But then at just about one hundred and fifty meters
Speaker 1: off the ground, so they are very low, the suspense
Speaker 1: on the flight recorder just builds rapidly. First, the plane
Speaker 1: experience is this sudden, completely inexplicable surge and air speed.
Speaker 2: Right, They speed up out of nowhere.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and the pilot does exactly what he has done
Speaker 1: I don't know, ten thousand times before. He pulls back
Speaker 1: on the throttles to bleed off that extra speed and
Speaker 1: keep their descent rate in.
Speaker 2: Check, which makes perfect sense it does.
Speaker 1: But mere seconds later the bottom completely falls out.
Speaker 2: The plane is just slammed downward by this massive invisible force.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and the pilot shoves the throttles to the absolute maximum.
Speaker 1: You can actually hear the desperation on the voice recorder.
Speaker 1: He's yelling, push it up, way up, terrifying, and inside
Speaker 1: the cabin passengers just fall dead, silent. The engines are
Speaker 1: screaming at maximum power, but the plane simply cannot climb.
Speaker 1: It is violently swatted out of the air. It banks
Speaker 1: wildly to the right, and it slams into a highway.
Speaker 2: One fourteenth instantly killed a driver on the ground.
Speaker 1: Too, Yeah, before just tearing into pieces across the airfield.
Speaker 1: One hundred and thirty six lives on board were lost
Speaker 1: in a matter of seconds.
Speaker 2: It was a catastrophic event that utterly baffled the aviation
Speaker 2: world at the time. I mean, on the surface, there
Speaker 2: was zero evidence of mechanical.
Speaker 1: Failure, no lightning strike either.
Speaker 2: No lightning strike nothing. What investigats is eventually discovered by
Speaker 2: painstakingly analyzing the flight data recorder was the distinct signature
Speaker 2: of a terrifying, unseeing killer a microburst.
Speaker 1: Wait, so this massive invisible column of air can just
Speaker 1: squash a modern jet and the highly trained pilots with
Speaker 1: their state of the art weather radar, they just couldn't
Speaker 1: see it coming.
Speaker 2: They couldn't. They were totally blind to it because they
Speaker 2: were looking for the wrong physical element. What do you mean, Well,
Speaker 2: conventional aviation radar at the time only bounced off of
Speaker 2: water meeting precipitation. You could see the rain, sure, but
Speaker 2: it was completely incapable of seeing wind.
Speaker 1: Oh wow.
Speaker 2: Yeah. To understand the sheer violence of a microburst, imagine
Speaker 2: standing at your kitchen sink and turning the faucet on
Speaker 2: full blast. Okay, the water drops straight down in a tight,
Speaker 2: concentrated column, strikes the ceramic basin, and then violently splashes
Speaker 2: outward in every possible direction.
Speaker 1: So if we replace that water with cold, dense air
Speaker 1: plummeting out of a hot summer thunderstorm, that tight column
Speaker 1: of sinking air hits the tarmac and just explodes outward
Speaker 1: at hurricane force.
Speaker 2: Exactly, and that creates this deadly forty seven second sequence
Speaker 2: of doom for any aircraft caught in its path.
Speaker 1: Forty seven seconds, that's nothing, it's nothing.
Speaker 2: So as Flight one ninety one approached the microburst, it
Speaker 2: first hit the outflowing air, rushing directly toward the nose
Speaker 2: the plane.
Speaker 1: Wait, wait, if that air is rushing toward them first,
Speaker 1: they're getting a massive sudden headwind. Aerodynamically, that's gonna artificially
Speaker 1: boost their lift. Right. It tricks them into thinking may
Speaker 1: have too much air speed.
Speaker 2: Precisely, Yeah, it was a trap. The pilot instinctively pulled
Speaker 2: the throttles back to compensate for that false lift. He
Speaker 2: was tricked by the physics of the storm, oh man.
Speaker 2: And then seconds later the plane flew into the exact
Speaker 2: center of the microburst, the violent downdraft. It's like a
Speaker 2: giant invisible hand pushing the fuselage straight down toward the concrete.
Speaker 1: So the pilot immediately maxes out the throttles, desperately trying
Speaker 1: to fight the sinking motion.
Speaker 2: Right, But heavy jet engines take time to school up.
Speaker 2: You don't just get instant power. And before they could
Speaker 2: generate full thrust, they crossed into the far side.
Speaker 1: Of the microburst, where they hit the tailwind. Yes, because
Speaker 1: the air is now exploding away from the center, moving
Speaker 1: in the exact same direction the plane is flying, and
Speaker 1: a wing needs air rushing over it from front to
Speaker 1: back to generate lyft. So when a massive wind suddenly
Speaker 1: hits you from behind. It just subtracts your air speed.
Speaker 1: Your lift is instantly destroyed.
Speaker 2: And at one hundred and fifty meters off the ground,
Speaker 2: they had zero altitude to dive and regain that speed.
Speaker 1: They were aerodynamically trapped, completely trapped.
Speaker 2: But you know, the legacy of Delta one ninety one
Speaker 2: triggered one of the most incredible responses in aviation history.
Speaker 1: Yeah, the industry realized they urgently needed a way to
Speaker 1: see the wind itself, not just the rain hiding it.
Speaker 2: Right, So NASA embarked on this incredibly daring mission. It
Speaker 2: took a Boeing seven thirty seven, packed the back cabin
Speaker 2: with scientists and all these experimental computers, and intentionally hunted
Speaker 2: down and flew into the most violent microbursts they could
Speaker 2: find across the I.
Speaker 1: Mean, purposefully hunting the invisible sledgehammer that just brought down
Speaker 1: a tri star is a staggering level of bravery.
Speaker 2: It's wild. But they had to gather data to test
Speaker 2: a brand new technology, forward looking Doppler radar. Unlike conventional radar,
Speaker 2: Doppler measures the frequency shift of returning radio waves. So
Speaker 2: if a radio wave bounces off a microscopic dust particle
Speaker 2: or a rain droplet moving towards you, the frequency compresses.
Speaker 1: And if it's moving away from you, the frequency stretches out.
Speaker 2: Exactly. By rapidly calculating those tiny frequency shifts, the computer
Speaker 2: maps the exact velocity and direction of the wind inside
Speaker 2: a storm. It takes the invisible microburst and just paints
Speaker 2: it in bright red on the pilot screen.
Speaker 1: Giving modern pilots the magic number twenty seconds. Yes, if
Speaker 1: you can see the wind shear twenty seconds before you
Speaker 1: hit it, you don't pull back the throttles, You throttle up,
Speaker 1: build kinetic energy, and you escape the trap before its spring.
Speaker 2: That one tragic crash, and the fearless research that followed
Speaker 2: practically eliminated microburst accidents in commercial aviation overnight.
Speaker 1: It's incredible, But we just saw how terrifying it is
Speaker 1: when a radar is blind to a threat. But a
Speaker 1: blind radar is arguably less dangerous than a radar that
Speaker 1: actively lies to you. Oh, absolutely, which brings us to
Speaker 1: nineteen seventy seven and Southern Airways Flight two.
Speaker 2: Forty two, Right, a completely different type of storm, but
Speaker 2: an equally devastating deception.
Speaker 1: Yeah. So We're in a DC nine navigating through a massive,
Speaker 1: churning thunderstorm system over the American South. The pilots are
Speaker 1: staring at their weather radar, hunting for a safe path
Speaker 1: through the dark clouds, looking for a way out right,
Speaker 1: and they spot it, this dark patch on the screen,
Speaker 1: a distinct hole in the storm cell. They seared directly
Speaker 1: for it, believing it to be a clear, safe passageway.
Speaker 1: But as they fly into the hole, the sky just
Speaker 1: unloads on them.
Speaker 2: They flew into one of the most violent hailstorms ever
Speaker 2: recorded in aviation history.
Speaker 1: The cocktit voice recorder captures this deafening sustain roar. Survivors
Speaker 1: described the experience as being trapped inside it tin barrel
Speaker 1: while someone hurled massive rocks at it from the outside.
Speaker 1: I can't even imagine the noise, and the hail was
Speaker 1: the size of baseballs. It was so intense and heavy
Speaker 1: that it shattered the thick, multi layered glass of the
Speaker 1: cockpit windshield, completely blinding the pilots, and then both engines
Speaker 1: sputtered and died. The crew was forced to glide a massive,
Speaker 1: unpowered jet onto a rural highway in New Hope, Georgia,
Speaker 1: and the resulting crash and fire killed seventy two people.
Speaker 2: It's horrific, and the investigation immediately focused on a totally
Speaker 2: baffling question. Why did their weather radar explicitly show a
Speaker 2: clear hole right where the absolute worst, most violent core
Speaker 2: of the storm actually was right?
Speaker 1: How does the machine designed entirely to see bad weather
Speaker 1: point a crew right into the deadliest part of it.
Speaker 2: It comes down to a physical limitation of radio waves
Speaker 2: called signal attenuation.
Speaker 1: Okay, break that down for us.
Speaker 2: So the outer edge of this particular storm celf was
Speaker 2: so incredibly dense with heavy sheets of rain and hail
Speaker 2: that it acted like a solid brick wall. Wow. When
Speaker 2: the plane's radar sent out its radio waves, that outer
Speaker 2: wall of water completely absorbed and scattered them. No ways
Speaker 2: penetrated deep enough into the core of the storm to
Speaker 2: bounce back to the receiver, So.
Speaker 1: The radar screen simply drew a blank space the machine
Speaker 1: lied to them by omission, because its signal was essentially
Speaker 1: swallowed by the edge of the storm. They thought they
Speaker 1: were threading the needle, but they were aiming at the
Speaker 1: bulls eye.
Speaker 2: And once they were inside that core, the mechanical nightmare
Speaker 2: really began.
Speaker 1: Right, Because the hail battered the front of the engine cowlings,
Speaker 1: it physically dented the metal rims around the intakes. I mean,
Speaker 1: if we think about how an engine breathes, it's like
Speaker 1: it's like pressing the gas pedal on a car whose
Speaker 1: exhaust pipe is entirely plugged with thick mud.
Speaker 2: Right, That is a perfect way to describe it.
Speaker 1: The engine can't expel the air, so it's going to
Speaker 1: choke and literally tear itself apart from the inside out.
Speaker 2: Exactly when you plug that exhaust the high pressure has
Speaker 2: nowhere to go but backward. Inside a jet engine, you
Speaker 2: have spinning compressor blades at the front that violently packed
Speaker 2: the incoming air in tightly before it gets mixed with
Speaker 2: fuel and ignited. Right when the hail dented those cowlings
Speaker 2: and blocked the bleed valves, which are designed to vent
Speaker 2: excess pressure, the airflow fundamentally.
Speaker 1: Reversed, creating a violent compressor stall.
Speaker 2: A devastating one. The high pressure from the combustion chamber
Speaker 2: blasted forward against the incoming air every single time it surged.
Speaker 2: It violently bent the metal compressor.
Speaker 1: Blades, and to make matters worse, air traffic control who
Speaker 1: was completely unaware of the apocalyptic severity of what the
Speaker 1: plane was enduring, ordered the pilots to climb to a
Speaker 1: higher altitude to clear another flight.
Speaker 2: Path, which is the absolute worst possible action during a
Speaker 2: compressor stall.
Speaker 1: Right because to climb a heavy jet needs more thrust.
Speaker 2: Exactly, the pilots had to push the throttles forward, demanding
Speaker 2: vastly more air and fuel from engines that couldn't even
Speaker 2: process the disrupted airflow they already had.
Speaker 1: So they were unknowingly accelerating their own engines destruction.
Speaker 2: There were the repetitive, violent surging finally snapped those bend
Speaker 2: compressor blades clean off. When investigators later hoisted the ruined
Speaker 2: engines up in a hangar in Atlanta, the shattered pieces
Speaker 2: of steel blading literally tinkled out onto the concrete floor,
Speaker 2: just fell right out. Yeah, the engines had physically consumed themselves.
Speaker 1: Hail battered Flight two forty two from the outside, destroying
Speaker 1: it with brute force and water. But what happens when
Speaker 1: the killer is completely dry, invisible to even modern radar,
Speaker 1: and destroys a plane by melting inside it.
Speaker 2: Now that brings us directly back to the terrifying scenario.
Speaker 1: From our introduction Yes June nineteen eighty two British Airways
Speaker 1: flight nine cruising smoothly at thirty seven thousand feet high
Speaker 1: above the Indian Ocean, just south of Jakarta.
Speaker 2: The flight deck is totally relaxed, passengers are.
Speaker 1: Sleeping, and then the saint almost fire begins. The windshield
Speaker 1: is suddenly covered in the shimmering, brilliant white light. The
Speaker 1: cabin fills with that sulfur smell which some of the
Speaker 1: crew actually noted smelled strongly of Perkish cigarettes. Such a
Speaker 1: specific detail I know. And passengers look up the windows
Speaker 1: into the pitch black night, and they see jets of
Speaker 1: sheer luminescent flame forty feet long shooting out the back
Speaker 1: of all four engines, and.
Speaker 2: The crew flawlessly executes their shut down procedures. Within a
Speaker 2: minute and a half, all four massive rolls Royce engines
Speaker 2: spool down to a halt, total silence, total silence. They
Speaker 2: are now flying a three hundred and fifty ton glider
Speaker 2: descending in total eerie silence toward the jagged, unforgiving peaks
Speaker 2: of the Java Mountains, and.
Speaker 1: The captain makes us agonizing calculation, right if they cannot
Speaker 1: get the engines restarted, he will ditch the plane in
Speaker 1: the pitch black ocean rather than risks smashing into the mountains.
Speaker 2: Yeah. And the craziest part the weather radar showed absolutely nothing.
Speaker 2: The sky appeared completely clear because they.
Speaker 1: Had flown straight into the plume of Mount Gollongung, a
Speaker 1: volcano one hundred miles away, had violently erupted, blasting a
Speaker 1: massive cloud of ash fifteen thousand meters into the night sky.
Speaker 2: PILs Dude winds carried it directly into the flight path
Speaker 2: of flight nine.
Speaker 1: Right, And volcanic ash isn't smoke, and it isn't wet.
Speaker 2: No, it is incredibly fine pulverized dry rock and mineral
Speaker 2: microscopic shards of glass and stone. Because there is no moisture,
Speaker 2: weather radar simply looks right through it.
Speaker 1: So they were flying at five hundred miles an hour
Speaker 1: through a microscopic sand blaster exactly. That explains the sane
Speaker 1: Elmo's fire. The intense friction of trillions of dry rock
Speaker 1: particles hitting the metal fuselage generated massive static electricity. It
Speaker 1: literally sand blasted the paint off the nose and frosted
Speaker 1: the windshield so badly it became totally opaque.
Speaker 2: But the true danger was happening deep inside those Rolls
Speaker 2: Royce engines.
Speaker 1: Right, Because the combustion chamber of a jet engine operates
Speaker 1: at an inferno of around two thousand degrees celsius.
Speaker 2: And volcanic rock melts at roughly thirteen hundred degrees. Oh boy, Yeah,
Speaker 2: as the engine sucked in millions at cubic feet of
Speaker 2: this abrasive rock, it instantly melted. It turned into this
Speaker 2: sticky to two two thousand degree molten goo that coated
Speaker 2: the turbine blades, the combustion chambers, and the guide vanes,
Speaker 2: basically suffocating the airflow.
Speaker 1: And those forty foot flames shooting out the back.
Speaker 2: Those were massive backfires, the engines violently rejecting the jet
Speaker 2: fuel they could no longer burn because they were choked
Speaker 2: by liquid rock.
Speaker 1: Wait, okay, if the engines ingested molten volcanic goo that
Speaker 1: plastered the turbines and physically choked them to death, how
Speaker 1: in the world did they manage to restart them just
Speaker 1: minutes before they hit the ocean? Because I know the
Speaker 1: crew kept trying the restart sequence over and over as
Speaker 1: they fell.
Speaker 2: It's honestly an incredible stroke of thermodynamics. Really yeah, When
Speaker 2: the engines shut down, the fire went out without the
Speaker 2: continuous two thousand degree heat of combustion. The frigid, high
Speaker 2: altitude air rushing through the dead engine rapidly dropped the
Speaker 2: internal temperature.
Speaker 1: Oh so the molten volcanic goo must have solidified again, exactly.
Speaker 2: It rapidly cooled and hardened back into a brittle glass
Speaker 2: like crust coating the metal blades, and as the engines
Speaker 2: continued to mill and the oncoming air during their glide,
Speaker 2: the mechanical vibration caused that brittle glass crust to shatter
Speaker 2: and flake off.
Speaker 1: Are you kidding? The engine literally shed its own cast
Speaker 1: it did. The cold air that shut down the combustion
Speaker 1: is exactly what caused the glass to shatter and save them.
Speaker 2: The airflow cleared just enough so when the crew frantically
Speaker 2: ran the restart drill for what felt like the fiftieth time,
Speaker 2: the fuel could finally ignite cleanly. Wow. The engines roared
Speaker 2: back to life, and they managed to climb out of danger,
Speaker 2: landing safely despite having a completely frosted, opaque windshield.
Speaker 1: That is just unbelievable. So we've seen how aviation adapted
Speaker 1: to the invisible wind shear of microbursts, the radar deception
Speaker 1: of massive hail, and the molten rock of volcanic ash.
Speaker 1: But let's bring it into the modern era. Okay, Yeah,
Speaker 1: what happens today when a highly engineered fly by wire
Speaker 1: modern jet still falls victim to extreme weather combined with
Speaker 1: the slightest fraction of human error.
Speaker 2: We traveled to August two thousand and five air France
Speaker 2: flour Light three fifty eight.
Speaker 1: Right. The scene is Toronto, and the atmosphere on the
Speaker 1: ground is incredibly tense. A brutal summer storm is parked
Speaker 1: right over.
Speaker 2: The airport, and lightning is striking so frequently that authorities
Speaker 2: have declared a red alert. Ground crews aren't even a
Speaker 2: lot outside on the tarmac.
Speaker 1: And the plane is an Airbus A three forty. We're
Speaker 1: talking about modern fly by wire jets now, where computers
Speaker 1: constantly translate the pilot's inputs to the control surfaces to
Speaker 1: maintain stability. It's big, it's heavy, and it's packed with
Speaker 1: two hundred and ninety seven passengers, and.
Speaker 2: They're coming in to land on runway two four left,
Speaker 2: which happens to be the shortest runway at the airport.
Speaker 1: Just a terrible combination. They are fighting a massive shifting
Speaker 1: thirty three not crosswind, the rain is absolutely blinding.
Speaker 2: And they touch down hard. They land nearly halfway down
Speaker 2: this already incredibly short runway, and.
Speaker 1: The tires hydroplane basically skimming on top of a microscopic
Speaker 1: layer of standing water instead of actually gripping the tarmac right.
Speaker 2: Which turns this two hundred ton jet into a helpless
Speaker 2: high speed sled.
Speaker 1: Yeah, they run entirely out of real estate, plunge off
Speaker 1: the end of the runway, and nose dive into a
Speaker 1: fifty foot deep mud ravine bordering one of the busiest
Speaker 1: highways in North America, and the.
Speaker 2: Plane is shattered by the impact. Aviation fuel immediately begins
Speaker 2: pouring out of the ruptured wing tanks.
Speaker 1: Passengers describe this terrifying orange aura glowing outside the windows
Speaker 1: as the spilled fuel ignites in the rain. Panic just
Speaker 1: erupts in the cabin, and.
Speaker 2: The investigation into this overrun revealed a perfect storm of
Speaker 2: compounding factors. The brutal weather set the trap sure, but
Speaker 2: critical seconds were lost during the landing role. How so well,
Speaker 2: when the plane finally touched down the reverse thrusters, the
Speaker 2: critical systems that redirect the engine blast forward to act
Speaker 2: as brakes weren't deployed for a full seventeen second.
Speaker 1: Seventeen seconds that is an absolute eternity when you're traveling
Speaker 1: at one hundred and forty miles an hour toward a cliff.
Speaker 2: It is the exact difference between stopping safely on the
Speaker 2: pavement and plunging into the ravine. Why the delay, The
Speaker 2: strong crosswind was forcing the plane laterally off the runway
Speaker 2: center line. The co pilot was at the controls, and
Speaker 2: he was struggling so violently to keep the plane straight
Speaker 2: on the wet runway that his hand was clamped down
Speaker 2: with an unbreakable death grip on the throttle lever.
Speaker 1: Oh wow. So he was fighting the fly by wire
Speaker 1: system and the wind so hard that the captain literally
Speaker 1: couldn't pry his handoff to engage those reversers Exactly.
Speaker 2: By the time they finally deployed the reversers, they were
Speaker 2: already running out of pavement.
Speaker 1: But the absolute miracle of this story is what happens next.
Speaker 1: You know, the next time you're sitting on a plane
Speaker 1: and you hear a flight attendant tell you to locate
Speaker 1: your nearest exit. Remember Air France three of E eight.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, every single person survived. All two hundred and
Speaker 1: ninety seven people made it out of that burning wreckage, and.
Speaker 2: That survival rate is a testament to the rigid ninety
Speaker 2: second rule. Aviation safety engineers know that in a severe
Speaker 2: postcrash fire, the real killer isn't always.
Speaker 1: The flames, it's the smoke.
Speaker 2: It's the chemistry of the smoke. Burning modern plastics, seat
Speaker 2: phones polyurethane, they produce highly toxic gases like hydrogen, cyanide
Speaker 2: and carbon monoxide. After about ninety seconds to two minutes,
Speaker 2: the air inside the cabin becomes completely unbreathable lethal.
Speaker 1: So the crew and passengers of three P fifty eight
Speaker 1: scrambled through that darkening, toxic smoke. They slid down the
Speaker 1: emergency choots, some of which didn't even deploy properly because
Speaker 1: of the steep angle of the ravine, and clawed their
Speaker 1: way up the muddy banks just seconds before the entire
Speaker 1: fuselage became an absolute inferno.
Speaker 2: It really is a miracle. And you know, it is
Speaker 2: also worth noting a piece of runway technology that could
Speaker 2: have prevented the plunge into.
Speaker 1: The ravine entirely right emass.
Speaker 2: Yeah engineered material arresting system.
Speaker 1: It's basically a massive bed of crushable concrete blocks placed
Speaker 1: at the end of a runway. If a plane rolls
Speaker 1: off the carmack, it sinks into these blocks, right. It's
Speaker 1: like riding a bicycle into a deep gravel.
Speaker 2: Pity.
Speaker 1: It just arrests your forward momentum smoothly and safely without
Speaker 1: destroying the aircraft.
Speaker 2: But Toronto did not have it installed at the end
Speaker 2: of runway twenty four left at the time. Following the
Speaker 2: investigation into Flight three Fight, the calls to install such
Speaker 2: systems grew exponentially louder across the global aviation community.
Speaker 1: We have covered an incredible amount of ground today, from
Speaker 1: the invisible, crushing aerodynamic trap of a microburst over Texas,
Speaker 1: to deceptive radar holes hiding baseball sized hail over Georgia,
Speaker 1: to liquid rock physically suffocating jet engines over the Indian
Speaker 1: Ocean in a high speed overrun into a Canadian ravine.
Speaker 2: We really have.
Speaker 1: We've seen how Mother Nature's absolute fury has tested the
Speaker 1: very limits of human engineering, pilot skill, and survival instincts.
Speaker 2: And while these stories are undeniably terrifying. They are the
Speaker 2: exact reason that commercial flying is so incredibly safe today.
Speaker 2: Every tragedy, every terrifying near miss we dissected today was
Speaker 2: meticulously pulled apart to find the root cause. The aviation
Speaker 2: industry doesn't hide from these events. It learns from them.
Speaker 1: They rebuilt radar systems to see wind yes.
Speaker 2: They redefined engine tolerances. They can calculated the exact chemistry
Speaker 2: of tab and smoke, and they engineered new runway materials
Speaker 2: to give pilots the tools to keep you safe in
Speaker 2: the sky.
Speaker 1: It is an evolving science built on the bleeding edge
Speaker 1: of the envelope. But as we leave this deep dives,
Speaker 1: consider this final thought. We've seen how aviation conquered the
Speaker 1: extreme weather hazards of the nineteen seventies and eighties, But
Speaker 1: as climate change continues to rapidly increase the frequency and
Speaker 1: the extreme violence of weather events worldwide, the atmosphere itself
Speaker 1: is fundamentally changing. It really is warmer air holds exponentially
Speaker 1: more moisture. That means denser microbursts, more violent updrafts breeding
Speaker 1: massive hail, and just far more thermal energy pumping into
Speaker 1: these storm systems. Will the aviation safety rules written by
Speaker 1: the storms of the twentieth century be enough to protect
Speaker 1: us from the highly volatile superstorms of tomorrow.
Speaker 2: That is the exact question aerospace engineers are grappling with
Speaker 2: right now as they design the next generation of aircraft.
Speaker 1: So next time you are buckled into your seat and
Speaker 1: hear the deep rumble of the engines spooling up, just
Speaker 1: remember the immense, invisible architecture of safety you are writing inside.
Speaker 1: Thank you for joining us on this intense exploration, Stay curious,
Speaker 1: and we'll see you on the next deep dive.