Speaker 1: Picture this. You are dropping ten kilometers through the clouds
Speaker 1: over the Pacific Ocean. The g forces are so intense
Speaker 1: they're physically pinning you to the floor of the cabin.
Speaker 1: Right all around you, rivets are just popping off the fuselage.
Speaker 1: It literally sounds like machine gun fire hitting the outside.
Speaker 2: Of the plane. Oh. Absolutely terrifying.
Speaker 1: Yeah, luggage teapots, people who weren't buckled in. They're just
Speaker 1: flying through the cabin and up in the cockpit, the
Speaker 1: pilots are desperately fighting to regain control of a tumbling
Speaker 1: seven forty seven that is essentially falling right out of
Speaker 1: the sky.
Speaker 2: It's a really visceral scene to reconstruct. Honestly, when you
Speaker 2: look at the flight data recorder for that exact moment,
Speaker 2: you're seeing an aircraft being pushed far, far beyond its
Speaker 2: aerodynamic limits. I mean, the metal is groaning, the engines.
Speaker 1: Are screaming, welcome to the deep dive. And that terrifying
Speaker 1: scene we just described that wasn't from a movie. That
Speaker 1: was a real flight. Today we're exploring the actual cockpit
Speaker 1: transcripts and the investigative records from five historic commercial aviation
Speaker 1: to disasters.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and it's important to Note this isn't just a
Speaker 2: list of tragedies. We are really on a mission to
Speaker 2: figure out how these million dollar, highly engineered machines are
Speaker 2: brought down by the absolute smallest human errors.
Speaker 1: Exactly. We're dissecting this incredibly fragile intersection of human psychology,
Speaker 1: advanced technology, and survival because, as you know from investigating
Speaker 1: these crashes, you rarely find a massive structural failure out
Speaker 1: of nowhere, right.
Speaker 2: You rarely just lose a wing. You usually find a
Speaker 2: tiny mundane anomaly like a single burnt out light bulb
Speaker 2: or a misplaced switch, or just a really tired pilot,
Speaker 2: and you watch how human nature allows that tiny spark
Speaker 2: to cascade into an absolute catastrophe.
Speaker 1: And how those terrifying moments fundamentally change the way we
Speaker 1: all fly today. Yeah, so let's jump straight into December
Speaker 1: nineteen seventy two Eastern Airlines flight four oh one. They're
Speaker 1: flying an L ten eleven TriStar, which I mean I
Speaker 1: understand was basically a spaceship for its time.
Speaker 2: Oh, it really was the dawn of the jumbo jet era.
Speaker 2: The Tristra was the most advanced passenger jet in the
Speaker 2: world at the time, equipped with these state of the
Speaker 2: art autopilot systems. So they're approaching Miami on a pitch
Speaker 2: black night, and as they lower the landing gear, the
Speaker 2: crew notices a discrepancy the little green indicator light on
Speaker 2: the dashboard, the one that confirms the nose landing gear
Speaker 2: is locked in place. It just hasn't lit.
Speaker 1: Up, So presumably they just abort the landing to figure
Speaker 1: it out, right.
Speaker 2: They do. They put the plane on autopilot to circle
Speaker 2: over the Florida Everglades while they troubleshoot. And this is
Speaker 2: where we witness a classic fatal case of human fixation.
Speaker 2: The captain, the first officer, and the flight engineer, they
Speaker 2: all become entirely consumed by this single indicator light. Wow,
Speaker 2: a light bulb that, by the way, cost exactly twelve cents.
Speaker 1: Wait, twelve cents. How does a whole passenger plane go
Speaker 1: down over a twelve cent light bulb? I mean, don't
Speaker 1: they have other ways to check if the wheels are
Speaker 1: actually down?
Speaker 2: They do? Yeah, the flight engineer actually climbs down into
Speaker 2: this cramped avion X bay beneath the cockpit floor. They
Speaker 2: literally called it the hellhole. The hell hole, all right, Yeah,
Speaker 2: he goes down there to look through a tiny window
Speaker 2: and manually check the gear. But here's the critical failure point.
Speaker 2: Up in the cockpit. The captain is trying to pry
Speaker 2: the light bulb out of the console. It's stuck. He's
Speaker 2: twisting it, he's getting frustrated with it, right, He's distracted completely,
Speaker 2: and as he reaches across, he accidentally bumps the control
Speaker 2: wheel the yoke just a slight, totally unintentional nudge.
Speaker 1: And what does a slight nudge actually do?
Speaker 2: Well? That tiny bump applies just enough force to the
Speaker 2: control column to disengage the altitude hold on their autopilot.
Speaker 2: Because the computer is designed to yield to the human pilot,
Speaker 2: it basically assumes the captain wants to fly manually.
Speaker 1: Now, oh wow, So it just hands over control exactly.
Speaker 2: It quietly switches modes.
Speaker 1: But surely they have an alarm for that, right or
Speaker 1: wouldn't they physically feel the plane starting to dive?
Speaker 2: You would think so. But the descent was incredibly gradual.
Speaker 2: And because they're flying over the Everglades on a moonless night,
Speaker 2: the environment outside is just avoid There are no city lights,
Speaker 2: there's no visual horizon to reference.
Speaker 1: So it's like if you've ever been driving on a dark,
Speaker 1: straight highway at night and your check engine light comes on.
Speaker 1: You start staring at the dashboard, maybe tapping the gauge,
Speaker 1: getting so distracted that you slowly, imperceptibly drift onto the shoulder.
Speaker 2: That is the exact psychology.
Speaker 1: Yes, only in the sky, there are no rumble strips
Speaker 1: to wake you up.
Speaker 2: That captures it perfectly. All three highly trained men in
Speaker 2: that cockpit were focused on the twelve cent bulb. Nobody
Speaker 2: was watching the altimeter. They had a perfectly functional airplane,
Speaker 2: but literally no one was flying.
Speaker 1: It, and so they crashed right into the swamp. And
Speaker 1: reading through the aftermath, I mean it is just horrifying.
Speaker 1: The plane breaks apart and twenty thousand kilograms of jet
Speaker 1: fuel leaks into the swamp water.
Speaker 2: Yeah, highly flammable.
Speaker 1: People are sitting there covered in fuel, terrified that a
Speaker 1: single spark is going to ignite the whole swamp. There's
Speaker 1: this incredible detail in the source about a local guy,
Speaker 1: an airboat driver named Bob Marcus, who was just out
Speaker 1: hunting frogs.
Speaker 2: Right he was one of the first on the scene.
Speaker 1: He rushes in, burning his own legs from the jet
Speaker 1: fuel in the water. Just pulling people up so they
Speaker 1: don't drown in the mud.
Speaker 2: And forensic pathology later revealed that the mud itself actually
Speaker 2: posed a secondary, completely unexpected threat to the survivors.
Speaker 1: I saw this in the note something about gas gangreen.
Speaker 1: How does swamp mud cause gas gangreen?
Speaker 2: Well, the evergladze mud is extremely rich in certain anaerobic bacteria.
Speaker 2: When passengers suffer deep crush injuries from the impact, those
Speaker 2: wounds were packed with this contaminated mud. And because the
Speaker 2: bacteria thrive in environments without oxygen like deep crush tissue,
Speaker 2: they rapidly multiply.
Speaker 1: Oh that sounds awful.
Speaker 2: It is, They produce toxins and gas. It causes gas gangreen,
Speaker 2: which can destroy a limb or even become fatal in
Speaker 2: a matter of days. Doctors had to scramble to find
Speaker 2: hyperbaric oxygen chambers all across Florida.
Speaker 1: Just to treat the survivors.
Speaker 2: Yes, placing survivors inside the high pressure oxygen tanks just
Speaker 2: to force oxygen deep into their tissues to kill the bacteria.
Speaker 1: And as if this story isn't intense enough, there's this
Speaker 1: bizarre PostScript. The airline actually salvaged intact parts from this
Speaker 1: crashed plane and put them into other jets.
Speaker 3: Yes, a very controversial decision, and crew started reporting ghost
Speaker 3: sightings like apparitions of the dead Flight four oh one
Speaker 3: crew haunting the planes that had the cannibalized parts.
Speaker 2: Yeah, the psychological trauma across the airline was so severe
Speaker 2: that management eventually just quietly removed all those salvage parts.
Speaker 2: But you know, if we pull back to the true
Speaker 2: legacy of Flight four oh one, it fundamentally altered aviation
Speaker 2: safety by birthing CRM or crew resource management.
Speaker 1: So how did this crash actually change things in the cockpit.
Speaker 2: Well, before nineteen seventy two, cockpit culture was essentially a
Speaker 2: military dictatorship. The captain's word was absolute law. So if
Speaker 2: the captain was fixated in a light bulb, everybody else
Speaker 2: focused on the light bulb.
Speaker 1: Cowbody questions the boss exactly.
Speaker 2: But Flight four oh one proved that hierarchy can be fatal.
Speaker 2: CRM mandated a collaborative model. Today, tasks must be explicitly delegated.
Speaker 2: If a captain wants to troubleshoot an issue, he has
Speaker 2: to verbally declare to the copilot you have the aircraft.
Speaker 1: So someone is always assigned to monitor the horizon and
Speaker 1: actually fly.
Speaker 2: The plane precisely. Someone is always flying, okay.
Speaker 1: So flight four oh one was a crew that was
Speaker 1: physically totally fine but mentally distracted. What happens when the
Speaker 1: crew's brains are physically compromised, Which brings us to Helios
Speaker 1: Airways flight five twenty two in August two thousand and five.
Speaker 2: Oh, this is one of the most chilling investigations in
Speaker 2: modern aviation. It became known as the ghost plane. It
Speaker 2: circled over Athens Grease in total radia silence for over
Speaker 2: an hour.
Speaker 1: Over an hour.
Speaker 2: Yes, the Greek military actually scrambled two F sixteen finer
Speaker 2: jets to intercept it because they feared it was a hijacking.
Speaker 1: How does a modern jet just become a ghost ship
Speaker 1: with everybody on board.
Speaker 2: It all traces back to a very mundane maintenance check.
Speaker 2: A ground engineer had run a routine test on the
Speaker 2: aircraft's pressurization system earlier that morning, and to do that,
Speaker 2: he flipped the pressurization dial to manual. But when he finished,
Speaker 2: he just forgot to flip it back to auto.
Speaker 1: And the flight crew just didn't touch it.
Speaker 2: They missed it during their pre flight checks. So as
Speaker 2: the plane climbed into the sky, the system did exactly
Speaker 2: what it was told nothing. The cabin did not pressurize.
Speaker 2: The air inside simply got thinner and thinner as they
Speaker 2: went higher.
Speaker 1: Now Here is where I really have to push back
Speaker 1: on the design of this plane. As they're climbing, an
Speaker 1: alarm starts blaring, right, But the alarm warning them that
Speaker 1: the cabin isn't pressurizing. He sounds exactly the same as
Speaker 1: the takeoff configuration warning. That's right, which is an alarm
Speaker 1: that tells you your flaps are wrong when you're still
Speaker 1: on the ground. Why on earth what an alarm telling
Speaker 1: you you're suffocating sound identical to an alarm telling you
Speaker 1: you're not ready to drive down the runway. That is
Speaker 1: just terrible design.
Speaker 2: You're touching on a fundamental flaw in human machine interface
Speaker 2: design of that era. From a purely logical engineering standpoint,
Speaker 2: it made perfect sense. A takeoff warning only physically triggers
Speaker 2: on the ground, a cabin pressure warning only physically triggers
Speaker 2: in the air. Okay, Sure, so the machine's computer knows
Speaker 2: the context, it knows where.
Speaker 1: It is, but the human doesn't.
Speaker 2: Exactly to a human brain an alarm is just a loud,
Speaker 2: blaring horn, and when you were certainly being starved of oxygen,
Speaker 2: your brain completely loses the ability to parse that context.
Speaker 1: But if you're running out of air, wouldn't you feel
Speaker 1: yourself choking. Wouldn't you gasp for breath and realize, oh wait,
Speaker 1: we need oxygen.
Speaker 2: You would think so. But that's the insidious nature of hypoxia.
Speaker 2: It's not like holding your breath under water. You are
Speaker 2: still breathing in gas, but because of the high altitude,
Speaker 2: there just isn't enough atmospheric pressure to force the oxygen
Speaker 2: into your bloodstream.
Speaker 1: So you don't feel suffocated, not at all.
Speaker 2: Instead, hypoxia acts like a subtle intoxican. You might feel
Speaker 2: little giddy, your ears pop, and then your cognitive functions
Speaker 2: just rapidly and silently degrade, so you just get confused,
Speaker 2: severely confused. Hypoxia destroys your ability to reason or think. Laterally,
Speaker 2: when the master caution light illuminated on that flight, the
Speaker 2: captain assumed it was an equipment cooling issue. We actually
Speaker 2: have transcripts of him on the radio, slurring his words,
Speaker 2: asking ground control about circuit breakers located behind his seat.
Speaker 2: Oh my god, he is hyperfixating on a non existent
Speaker 2: electrical problem while he is actively running out of air.
Speaker 2: Within minutes, the pilots simply passed out at.
Speaker 1: The controls, but the passenger oxygen masks drop right. I
Speaker 1: read those only supply chemical oxygen for about twelve minutes.
Speaker 2: Right. Twelve minutes which is just long enough for a
Speaker 2: conscious pilot to dive the plane to a breathable altitude.
Speaker 2: But there was no pilot flying, so the plane just
Speaker 2: kept cruising on autopilot until those F sixteens pulled alongside it.
Speaker 1: And when the fighter pilots look into the windows of
Speaker 1: this silent, frozen jet, they see one conscious person moving
Speaker 1: in the cockpit. Who was that?
Speaker 2: That was Andreas Perdromo. He was a twenty five year
Speaker 2: old flight attendant.
Speaker 1: How is he the only one awake?
Speaker 2: The investigation suggests his background played a role. He was
Speaker 2: a scuba diver and had some military experience, so his
Speaker 2: body may have been slightly more resilient to the physiological stress.
Speaker 2: But more importantly, he used portable oxygen bottles from the
Speaker 2: cabin to stay conscious. Wow. He fought his way to
Speaker 2: the cockpit, punched in the emergency code, and tried to
Speaker 2: take the controls.
Speaker 1: That is heroic, but he couldn't save it.
Speaker 2: It's agonizing to study. Really. Prodroma actually held a commercial
Speaker 2: pilot's license, but by the time he got into the
Speaker 2: captain's seat he was severely hypoxic himself, struggling to comprehend
Speaker 2: a massive jet he wasn't rated to fly right.
Speaker 1: A seven point thirty seven is a lot different than
Speaker 1: a small.
Speaker 2: Sestinat exactly and worse, the plane's left engine had already
Speaker 2: flamed out from fuel starvation. He called Mayda over the radio,
Speaker 2: but the dial was still tuned to the departure airport
Speaker 2: in Cyprus, completely out of range. The second engine died
Speaker 2: and the plane crashed.
Speaker 1: It's devastating. Hypoxias starves the brain of oxygen and ruins
Speaker 1: its ability to reason. But it turns out you don't
Speaker 1: even you need to starve the brain of bear to
Speaker 1: make it fail. You just need to starve it of sleep,
Speaker 1: which brings us to the terrifying phenomenon of trusting computers
Speaker 1: when we are exhausted.
Speaker 2: This leads us directly back to the falling seven four
Speaker 2: to seven from the introduction China Airlines Flight zero zero
Speaker 2: six in nineteen eighty five.
Speaker 1: Okay, so they're cruising over the Pacific and engine number
Speaker 1: four flames out. It just dies. What actually starts that
Speaker 1: incredible dive.
Speaker 2: The captain's response. When you lose an engine on one
Speaker 2: side of an aircraft, you develop what's called asymmetrical thrust.
Speaker 2: The working engines are pushing hard and the dead engine
Speaker 2: is just dragging right, So the plane naturally wants to
Speaker 2: yaw or twist toward the dead engine. To counter this,
Speaker 2: a pilot must manually press the rudder pedals to keep
Speaker 2: the nose straight. But this captain didn't. He left the
Speaker 2: autopilot engaged.
Speaker 1: Why is that a problem? Though? Isn't the autopilot designed
Speaker 1: to fly the plane.
Speaker 2: It is, but the autopilot on that specific generation of
Speaker 2: seven forty seven could only control the aile. Those are
Speaker 2: the flaps on the wings that roll the plane left
Speaker 2: and right. It had no physical connection to the rudder.
Speaker 2: It simply wasn't built to compensate for asymmetrical thrust on
Speaker 2: its own.
Speaker 1: So it's like trying to row a canoe in a
Speaker 1: perfectly straight line using only one paddle while a massive
Speaker 1: current pushes you from the other side. Eventually, no matter
Speaker 1: how hard, you paddle, You're gonna spin.
Speaker 2: Precisely, the autopilot was fighting a losing battle. Eventually it
Speaker 2: ran out of aerodynamic authority and the mass of seven
Speaker 2: forty seven slowly gradually rolled over onto his back.
Speaker 1: I have to stop you there. How do three train
Speaker 1: pilots sit in a cockpit and not feel gravity flipping
Speaker 1: them upside down? Doesn't your inner ear scream at you
Speaker 1: that you were falling.
Speaker 2: You are describing the exact trap of spatial disorientation. Your
Speaker 2: inner ear detects acceleration and gravity using fluid in small canals.
Speaker 2: But if an aircraft rolls very very slowly, that fluid
Speaker 2: stabilizes and your body doesn't register the rotation. That is wild.
Speaker 2: And once they were upside down and dropping, the massive
Speaker 2: g forces pined them firmly down into their seats. To
Speaker 2: their inner ears, that pressure felt exactly like normal upright gravity.
Speaker 1: So when they looked at the attitude indicator, the digital
Speaker 1: screen telling them they were inverted, what did they think?
Speaker 2: They assumed the screen was broken. Their physical sensations were
Speaker 2: lying to them so convincingly that their brains rejected the
Speaker 2: instrument readings entirely.
Speaker 1: And they fall thirty thousand feet g forces pinning the
Speaker 1: flight engineer so hard he literally can't lift his head
Speaker 1: to check the dials. They are tearing the landing gear
Speaker 1: doors off just from the sheer speed of the dive,
Speaker 1: and they only survive because they break through the bottom
Speaker 1: of the clouds at ninety five hundred feet, see the
Speaker 1: physical ocean and realize, oh, the instrument's were right.
Speaker 2: Yeah, they managed a miraculous recovery and landed safely. But
Speaker 2: the investigative question remains, why were they so reliant on
Speaker 2: the autopilot and so slow to process the instrument failure
Speaker 2: in the first place. Fatigue, severe desynchronosis or jet lag.
Speaker 2: The captain had crossed eighteen time zones in six days.
Speaker 2: His biological clock was screaming that it was two point
Speaker 2: zero z. When your brain is that fatigued, your reaction
Speaker 2: time plummets and your reliance on automation skyrockets.
Speaker 1: Which brings up the other fatigue case. We looked at
Speaker 1: Korean Air flight eight h one in Guam in nineteen
Speaker 1: ninety seven, another exhausted pilot on a rainy night, and
Speaker 1: here the airport's glide slope beacon, the electronic beam that
Speaker 1: guides planes down to the runway was broken.
Speaker 2: Yes, so the crew had to fly a non precision approach,
Speaker 2: relying on a distance measuring beacon that was actually located
Speaker 2: five kilometers away from the runway rather than at the
Speaker 2: runway threshold itself.
Speaker 1: So they're flying tired, trusting instruments. You rid the phrase
Speaker 1: backside of the clock flying.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it refers to flying during the deep hours of
Speaker 2: the night when the human circadian rhythm just demands sleep.
Speaker 2: In that state, your visual processing and situational awareness heavily.
Speaker 1: Degrade, and the pilot fixates on his glide slope indicator
Speaker 1: inside the cockpit. The transmitter on the ground is turned off,
Speaker 1: but his needle is flickering, probably picking up stray radio
Speaker 1: interference or something likely. Yes, he fixates on that phantom needle,
Speaker 1: completely zones out, and flies the plane straight into Nimt's
Speaker 1: hill miles short of the runway. Good wait. Air traffic
Speaker 1: control has radar. Why didn't someone on the ground yell
Speaker 1: over the radio? Pull up?
Speaker 2: Because of a chilling administrative failure, the FAA had a
Speaker 2: system called Minimum Safe Altitude Warning or MSAW. It acts
Speaker 2: as an electronic safety net, tracking radar returns and blaring
Speaker 2: an alarm to the controller if an aircraft drops dangerously low,
Speaker 2: but the FAA had intentionally disabled it for approaching planes in.
Speaker 1: Guam, disabled it by who why?
Speaker 2: Well, if the software was generating occasional false alarms and
Speaker 2: the air traffic controllers found the alerts annoying, annoy yes, annoying,
Speaker 2: So management reconfigured the software to only monitor aircraft that
Speaker 2: were eighty kilometers out over the open ocean, essentially rendering
Speaker 2: it totally useless for planes actually trying to land. If
Speaker 2: that software hadn't been modified just for convenience, an alarm
Speaker 2: would have sounded, the controller would have intervened in flight
Speaker 2: eight oh one would have been saved.
Speaker 1: That is just maddening turning off a life saving safety
Speaker 1: system because it's a nuisance. Okay, we've explored how human
Speaker 1: exhaustion and mechanical misunderstanding cause crashes, But what about when
Speaker 1: a crash is totally unavoidable due to weather. How do
Speaker 1: we engineer survivability so people actually walk away?
Speaker 2: That brings us to an absolute master class in survival engineering.
Speaker 2: Air France Flight three point fifty eight in Toronto, August
Speaker 2: two thousand and five.
Speaker 1: The scene here is apocalyptic. They are landing during a
Speaker 1: top hat thunderstorm. What exactly makes that so dangerous?
Speaker 2: A top hat thunderstorm is a massive, rapidly developing storm
Speaker 2: cell with a flat, anvil like top. They are incredibly
Speaker 2: violent and produce severe microbursts. Those are sudden, localized columns
Speaker 2: of sinking air that hit the ground and spread out,
Speaker 2: creating massive, unpredictable wind cheer.
Speaker 1: And right as they're landing, lightning strikes the airport, destroying
Speaker 1: the ground wind sensors, so the pilots are flying blind
Speaker 1: into a massive thirty three not crosswind. They touch down
Speaker 1: way too fast, almost half way down the shortest runway
Speaker 1: at the airport.
Speaker 2: And critically, because they were fighting to keep the plane straight,
Speaker 2: the pilots didn't engage the thrust reversers, the engine flaps
Speaker 2: that help break the plane for seventeen crucial seconds at
Speaker 2: landing speeds. Seventeen seconds eats up thousands of feet of pavement,
Speaker 2: So they.
Speaker 1: Just slide right off the end of the runway and
Speaker 1: plunge into a fifty foot ravine. The fuselage breaks open,
Speaker 1: the plane catches fire. But here's the incredible part. Two
Speaker 1: hundred and ninety seven passengers and crew are inside a burning,
Speaker 1: smoke filled tube, and they all get out, everyone survives.
Speaker 2: It's remarkable. Now.
Speaker 1: You hear about this ninety second rule in aviation all
Speaker 1: the time, But in a burning cabin with toxic fumes,
Speaker 1: people panicking, scrambling over seats, how is that physically possible?
Speaker 2: It is possible because of decades of frankly, blood soaked
Speaker 2: interior engineering. The ninety second threshold isn't just an arbitrary goal.
Speaker 2: It is the physical limit dictated by a phenomenon called flashover.
Speaker 1: How does flashover work?
Speaker 2: When a fire, which is a cabin, the materials start
Speaker 2: to heat up, the seat foams, the plastics, the overhead bins,
Speaker 2: they all begin off gassing highly toxic combustible smoke. That
Speaker 2: smoke pools at the ceiling right.
Speaker 1: Heat rises exactly as.
Speaker 2: The radiant heat builds. It eventually reaches into ignition temperature,
Speaker 2: where every single combustible gas in the cabin ignites simultaneously.
Speaker 2: That is flash over. After that moment, the environment is
Speaker 2: completely unsurvivable. Every fire retardant fabric, every floor track light,
Speaker 2: every specialized door hingte you see on a plane is
Speaker 2: mathematically engineered to delay flashover, and by you exactly those
Speaker 2: ninety seconds.
Speaker 1: That is incredible engineering, but dropping a plane into a
Speaker 1: fifty foot ravine is still insane. I was reading the
Speaker 1: case files and there is a technology that exists specifically
Speaker 1: to stop planes from sliding off runways like this.
Speaker 2: Yes, emas engineered material arresting systems.
Speaker 1: How does that work?
Speaker 2: Imagine a runaway truck ramp on a steep mountain highway.
Speaker 2: E May is basically a massive bed of crushable aerated
Speaker 2: concrete blocks play at the end of a runway. If
Speaker 2: a heavy jet overshoots the pavement, it rolls into this material.
Speaker 1: So it just sinks in.
Speaker 2: Yes, the tires immediately sink in and the concrete crushes,
Speaker 2: absorbing the aircraft's forward kinetic energy. It can stop a
Speaker 2: massive jet safely in a very short distance without tearing
Speaker 2: the landing gear off.
Speaker 1: But the airport in Toronto didn't have it.
Speaker 2: No, because of space limitations and high costs, many international
Speaker 2: airports push back against installing it. Safety is a constant,
Speaker 2: frustrating battle between what is technologically possible and what bureaucracies
Speaker 2: are willing to fund.
Speaker 1: So bringing all these incredible investigations together, commercial aviation today
Speaker 1: is statistically the safest way to travel, but that safety
Speaker 1: is quite literally written in blood. We fly safer today
Speaker 1: because a crew once fixated on a twelve cent light bulb.
Speaker 2: Absolutely because a.
Speaker 1: Manual pressurization switch was left in the wrong position, because
Speaker 1: a bureaucratic decision turned off an annoying safety alarm.
Speaker 2: Every procedure, every checklist, and every redundant computer system in
Speaker 2: a modern cockpit exists because an ax an investigator trace
Speaker 2: a tragedy back to human frailty. The entire aviation system
Speaker 2: is now designed to catch the inevitable human error before
Speaker 2: it cascades into a disaster, which brings.
Speaker 1: Up a thought I want to leave with anyone listening,
Speaker 1: think about your own daily life. We spend this whole
Speaker 1: time talking about highly trained pilots falling victim to automation complacency,
Speaker 1: trusting the computers so much that they forget how to
Speaker 1: fly the plane. But look at the tech we rely
Speaker 1: on every day.
Speaker 2: It's everywhere.
Speaker 1: We drive cars with autopilot and line assist. We rely
Speaker 1: on AI to write our emails, analyze our data, and
Speaker 1: manage our schedules.
Speaker 2: We are rapidly outsourcing our cognitive load to machines, and
Speaker 2: as we've seen, technology is brittle. It works flawlessly until
Speaker 2: it encounters a variable it just wasn't programmed for exactly.
Speaker 1: We are all becoming passengers in our own highly automated lives.
Speaker 1: So when the tech in your life suddenly disengages and
Speaker 1: the metaphorical alarms start blaring, will you still know how
Speaker 1: to fly the plane? Thank you for joining us on
Speaker 1: this deep dive. Stay curious, and we'll catch toue next time.