Speaker 1: So I want you to picture this. Yeah, it is
Speaker 1: December twenty seventh, nineteen ninety one. You're sitting at the
Speaker 1: cockpit of a state of the art sixty ton McDonald
Speaker 1: Douglas DC.
Speaker 2: Nine oh man, a total classic aircraft, right.
Speaker 1: And you're at an altitude of about three two hundred feet.
Speaker 1: Just seconds ago, you know, you're climbing into this really
Speaker 1: bitter winter sky over Sweden. But right now your reality
Speaker 1: is defined by this violent, just deafening roar.
Speaker 2: Because the engines are just violently shaking the entire airframe
Speaker 2: at this point exactly.
Speaker 1: And you can smell it too, that sharp, acrid scent
Speaker 1: of electrical smoke. It's just bleeding through the air vents.
Speaker 1: And then suddenly you hear the most terrifying sound in all.
Speaker 2: Of aviation, total absolute silence.
Speaker 1: Yeah, the engines are completely dead. That roaring vibration is
Speaker 1: just instantly replaced by this eerie, hollow, rushing sound of
Speaker 1: the wind.
Speaker 2: I mean, in a fraction of a second, this massive
Speaker 2: passenger jet has just become a powerless glider. It is
Speaker 2: dropping out of the sky at twenty feet per second.
Speaker 1: It's truly a nightmare scenario. And when you sent over
Speaker 1: this stack of raw flight data, you know, the transcripts
Speaker 1: and the forensic field notes regarding Scandinavian Airlines flight seven
Speaker 1: fifty one, our mission for today became really clear.
Speaker 2: Oh absolutely, we are pulling up a chair and acting
Speaker 2: as real life aviation accident investigators for this one.
Speaker 1: We really are. We're going to reconstruct a moment in
Speaker 1: history that completely defied the laws of logic. So pull
Speaker 1: up a chair, sit across the desk with us, and
Speaker 1: let's look at the facts. Because there is no journalistic
Speaker 1: dryness here today.
Speaker 2: No, definitely not. This is a very visceral story of survival,
Speaker 2: the terrifying laws of physics, and well quite literally a
Speaker 2: ghost in the machine.
Speaker 1: Yeah, here's where it gets really interesting. We're looking at
Speaker 1: a flight crew that did absolutely everything right. I mean,
Speaker 1: they followed their training to the letter, they executed every
Speaker 1: checklist flawlessly, and yet the plane's own hidden systems fundamentally
Speaker 1: betrayed them.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's incredibly unsettling. But to understand the mechanics of
Speaker 2: how a pristine aircraft just falls out of the sky
Speaker 2: like that, we really need to examine the environment on
Speaker 2: the ground that morning.
Speaker 1: Right, because the weather was a huge factor huge factor.
Speaker 2: The conditions at Stockholm Orlanda Airport were to put it
Speaker 2: mildly miserable. You've got sleet, snow and slush just coming
Speaker 2: down in this freezing mix.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's two days after Christmas, right, the temperature's hovering
Speaker 1: right around freezing. Yeah. But based on the cabin logs
Speaker 1: you provided in the source material inside this brand new
Speaker 1: DC nine, it is a completely different extreme.
Speaker 2: Oh, it's basically a sauna in there.
Speaker 1: Exactly the overnight ground crews had left the cabin heaters
Speaker 1: running full blast. So when these passengers step out of
Speaker 1: the freezing Swedish winter and start boarding, they are walking
Speaker 1: into a wall of heat.
Speaker 2: It is sweltering. I mean, you have passengers who are
Speaker 2: dressed for a heavy winter, thick coats, heavy boots, layers
Speaker 2: of scarves, and they are instantly sweating.
Speaker 1: Right, They're probably miserable, they are.
Speaker 2: People are immediately stripping off their winter jackets, throwing them
Speaker 2: into the overhead bins and just settling into the seats,
Speaker 2: wearing t shirts and light clothing just to escape the heat.
Speaker 1: Which you know, seems like a minor detail now, but
Speaker 1: that is going to become a literal matter of life
Speaker 1: and death later.
Speaker 2: On, it really is. Now. Meanwhile, up in the cockpit
Speaker 2: you have Captain Sten Rasmussen. He is a thirty four
Speaker 2: year veteran of the Skies, started in the Air Force
Speaker 2: before moving to commercial aviation.
Speaker 1: A very experienced guy.
Speaker 2: Fairy, and he genuinely loves his job. He even has
Speaker 2: this quirk where he insists on flying with the cockpit
Speaker 2: door open just so the passengers can see the crew.
Speaker 2: He really wants that human connection.
Speaker 1: That's actually really nice.
Speaker 2: Yeah, But above all else he is incredibly meticulous about safety.
Speaker 2: Seeing the miserable weather outside, he orders the ground crew
Speaker 2: to de ice the wings not just once, but twice.
Speaker 1: Okay, Wait, I gotta stop you right there and just
Speaker 1: push back on this a little bit, okay, because I
Speaker 1: was looking at these ground logs and the materials you
Speaker 1: sent over and I'm genuinely lost here. How so, Well,
Speaker 1: if he ordered a double the icing and they blasted
Speaker 1: the plane with what over eight hundred and fifty liters
Speaker 1: of chemical fluid and a trained technician physically looked at
Speaker 1: the wing and signed the release saying it was clean,
Speaker 1: how on earth did ice bring this plane down?
Speaker 2: It's a great question. And what's fascinating Here is the
Speaker 2: fatal physics of how the aircraft spent the previous night.
Speaker 2: The plane had arrived from Zurich the evening before, and
Speaker 2: it arrived with its wing tanks more than half full
Speaker 2: of reserve fuel.
Speaker 1: Okay, so he had a lot of fuel left.
Speaker 2: Over, right, And because they had been cruising at high
Speaker 2: altitude for hours, that aviation fuel was cold soaked. It
Speaker 2: was sitting at a core temperature of negative twenty degrees celsius.
Speaker 1: Wow. So those fuel tanks, which are structurally built right
Speaker 1: into the wings, they're basically acting like massive negative twenty
Speaker 1: degree ice packs pushed right up against the aluminum.
Speaker 2: Skin exactly that. The superchilled fuel cooled the upper metal
Speaker 2: skin of the wings to well below freezing through conductive cooling.
Speaker 2: So as the plane sat parked on the tarmac overnight,
Speaker 2: this weather.
Speaker 1: Front moved in the rain and the sleep.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it rained, it sleated, and then it snowed, and
Speaker 2: this created a deadly layer cake effect on the top
Speaker 2: of the wings at the very bottom right against the
Speaker 2: freezing aluminum. The moisture froze from the bottom up. It
Speaker 2: formed this thick layer of solid, clear.
Speaker 1: Ice Okay, And then on top of that clear ice
Speaker 1: sat the slush and the visible.
Speaker 2: Snow precisely so when the d icing trucks came around
Speaker 2: in the morning, the hot fluid melted all the visible
Speaker 2: snow and slush on that top layer. The fluid sheared off,
Speaker 2: so the wing looked wet and perfectly.
Speaker 1: Clean, but that bottom layer of clear ice remained completely
Speaker 1: bonded to the freezing metal.
Speaker 2: Yes, it was perfectly transparent, completely invisible to the naked
Speaker 2: eye under the wet fluid, and because the airline didn't
Speaker 2: require the mechanics to use a ladder to climb up
Speaker 2: and physically touch the top of the wing, that clear
Speaker 2: ice was just completely miss man.
Speaker 1: That is chilling, literally, So they are cleared for takeoff
Speaker 1: with a hidden solid sheet of ice clinging to the
Speaker 1: wing roots.
Speaker 2: That's right. As they taxed out, the first officer ULF
Speaker 2: seater runs through the final checklists. Everything is green. The
Speaker 2: engines spool up and the plane accelerates down the runway,
Speaker 2: and the.
Speaker 1: Takeoff roll is completely routine. But the moment the aircraft
Speaker 1: lifts off the ground, the aerodynamics change dramatically, don't they
Speaker 1: They do.
Speaker 2: As the massive plane leaves the runway, the wings naturally
Speaker 2: flex and bend upward to take the sixty ton weight
Speaker 2: of the aircraft.
Speaker 1: Right, they have to support all that.
Speaker 2: Weight exactly, And the dihedral flex of the DC nine
Speaker 2: wing acts exactly like twisting a plastic ice tray. That
Speaker 2: invisible sheet of clear ice on the wing roots just
Speaker 2: shatters under the structural tension.
Speaker 1: Oh man, like an ice tray. That's such a perfect
Speaker 1: way to picture it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And so these chunks of solid ice break loose
Speaker 2: and slides straight back off the aerodynamic surface of the wings. Now,
Speaker 2: on most commercial jets, where the engines are mounted beneath
Speaker 2: the wings, this wouldn't be a catastrophe, right, they just
Speaker 2: fall away exactly. But the DC nine features two engines
Speaker 2: mounted at the rear of the fuselage.
Speaker 1: Right in the firing line. So the shattered ice slides
Speaker 1: off the trailing edge of the wings and is inhaled
Speaker 1: directly into both rear engine collings.
Speaker 2: It's a worst case scenario, and.
Speaker 1: At exactly twenty five seconds into the flight, the passengers
Speaker 1: and the crew hear it a massive, violent boom, you know.
Speaker 1: One survivor in the nose described the sheer concussive force
Speaker 1: as sounding like a bomb detonating inside the cabin.
Speaker 2: I can't even imagine how terrifying that must have been.
Speaker 1: The aircraft starts violently shaking, and then another bang follows.
Speaker 2: Right. Because the fan blades at the very front of
Speaker 2: the jet engines are spinning at thousands of revolutions per minute.
Speaker 2: When solid ice impacts them at those speeds, the titanium
Speaker 2: blades become dented, They warp, and they physically.
Speaker 1: Deform, so they can't do their job anymore.
Speaker 2: Exactly. They can no longer cleanly slice through the air
Speaker 2: to push it backward into the compressor stages. This creates
Speaker 2: a catastrophic disruption in the high pressure airflow, which leads
Speaker 2: to a compressor surge.
Speaker 1: Okay, the impact this for a second, because a compressor search.
Speaker 1: It makes sense if you think about it like an
Speaker 1: Olympic sprinter running it all out dash.
Speaker 2: Okay, I like that analogy.
Speaker 1: Yeah, So the runner is gasping for air, right, breathing heavily.
Speaker 1: If someone suddenly clamps a hand over their mouth, the
Speaker 1: whole system.
Speaker 2: Just jokes, right, They can't get the oxygen they need exactly.
Speaker 1: Jet engines work by continuously sucking in air, compressing it,
Speaker 1: mixing it with fuel and igniting it to shoot out
Speaker 1: the back. But when those front blades are warped, it's
Speaker 1: like clanning a hand over the intake. The continuous airflow
Speaker 1: breaks down.
Speaker 2: And that's when things get really violent.
Speaker 1: Right, because the incredibly high pressure air and ignited fuel
Speaker 1: from the combustion chamber in the back, it violently backfires
Speaker 1: and shoots forward out the front of the engine.
Speaker 2: It is an incredibly destructive event. And Captain Rasmussen recognizes
Speaker 2: the acoustic signature immediately. He knows his engines are surging.
Speaker 2: So he does exactly what decades of aviation training and
Speaker 2: simulator drills have hardwired.
Speaker 1: Him to do, which is to pull back on the
Speaker 1: throttle right exactly.
Speaker 2: The buy the book procedure for a compressor surge is
Speaker 2: to pull back on the throttle. You have to reduce
Speaker 2: the fuel flow to allow the engine to catch its breath,
Speaker 2: match the disrupted airflow, and stabilize.
Speaker 1: But looking at the flight data recorder trace you provided,
Speaker 1: this is where it gets absolutely crazy. Rasmusen pulls the
Speaker 1: right throttle back, but the engine doesn't slow down, No,
Speaker 1: it doesn't. Instead, the engine's rpm starts accelerating on its own.
Speaker 1: He is pulling the throttle lever physically back toward him,
Speaker 1: and the engines are just whining louder and louder. He
Speaker 1: reduces the throttle again, and the engine pumps even more power.
Speaker 2: It's an unexplainable phenomenon in the moment. I mean, he
Speaker 2: is pulling back, but the engine is acting as if
Speaker 2: the throttle is being shoved all the way to the firewall.
Speaker 1: It's doing the exact opposite of what he's telling it
Speaker 1: to do.
Speaker 2: Exactly. The engine is choking, it's starving for oxygen, and
Speaker 2: yet it is being flooded with maximum fuel. It literally
Speaker 2: begins tearing itself apart from the inside out under the
Speaker 2: thermal and mechanical stress.
Speaker 1: And just ninety seconds into the flight, first officer Seater
Speaker 1: sees the exhaust gas temperature gauge for the left engine
Speaker 1: skyrockets past eight hundred degrees celsius. Smoke is pouring into
Speaker 1: the passenger cabin.
Speaker 2: It's a full blown emergency.
Speaker 1: Now, yeah, the left engine is officially on fire. Seat
Speaker 1: makes a split second, just agonizing decision. He reaches up
Speaker 1: and pulls the fire extinguisher handle for the left engine.
Speaker 2: Which you know is the absolute right call to save
Speaker 2: the wing structure from melting off. But it's a permanent action.
Speaker 2: Once you pull that fire handle, you sever all fuel
Speaker 2: lines and hydraulics at the firewall. That engine is dead
Speaker 2: and cannot be restarted in the air.
Speaker 1: Right, it's a one way street. So the left engine dies,
Speaker 1: and then two seconds later, the severely overstressed right engine
Speaker 1: violently gives up and dies too. Total structural failure.
Speaker 2: And that brings us to that terrifying silence we talked about.
Speaker 1: Yeah, they are three two hundred feet in the air,
Speaker 1: just dropping like a stone.
Speaker 2: And the cockpit is instantly plunged into a cascading secondary crisis.
Speaker 2: Losing both engines means they instantly lose the main engine
Speaker 2: driven generators, So this is power total electrical failure. The
Speaker 2: electrical buses die, the primary flight instruments freeze in place,
Speaker 2: the radios to air traffic control go completely dark. They're
Speaker 2: essentially flying blind, deaf, and powerless.
Speaker 1: And First Officer Sedter is frantically running through emergency checklists,
Speaker 1: you know, trying to force the engines to restart, but
Speaker 1: it's utterly futile. The engines are basically chewed to pieces.
Speaker 1: Yeah they're gone, but at this exact moment. Captain Perl Holmberg,
Speaker 1: another pilot who just happened to be commuting as a
Speaker 1: passenger on this flight. He rushes into the cockpit right.
Speaker 2: He's sitting in the cabin here's the explosions, feels the
Speaker 2: negative G force of the drop and immediately unbuckles. He
Speaker 2: bursts through that open cockpit door, looks at the dark
Speaker 2: instrument panels, reaches right over Rasmussen's shoulder without saying a word,
Speaker 2: and blindly hits the switch to start the APU.
Speaker 1: The auxiliary power unit and the tail exactly.
Speaker 2: And it takes vital agonizing seconds to spool up. But
Speaker 2: when it does, it restores justin off electrical power to
Speaker 2: bring the primary flight displays and the radios back online.
Speaker 1: So air traffic Control finally reconnects with them. And I
Speaker 1: was reading the ATC transcripts here, and the controller immediately
Speaker 1: instructs them to make a one hundred and eighty degree turn.
Speaker 1: They head back to the runway at ORLANDA, but Rasmussen
Speaker 1: completely ignores the order.
Speaker 2: And if we connect this to the bigger picture of aerodynamics,
Speaker 2: Rasmusen's refusal to turn is the single decision that saves
Speaker 2: their lives really how so well, when you are flying
Speaker 2: a heavy, unpowered aircraft, your altitude is your only currency.
Speaker 2: If you bank a sixty ton glider into a sharp turn,
Speaker 2: you increase the load factor on the wings and create
Speaker 2: massive aerodynamic drag.
Speaker 1: Oh I see, you lose your speed right.
Speaker 2: You bleed away that precious kinetic energy exponentially. If he
Speaker 2: had tried to turn that plane around at low altitude,
Speaker 2: the wings would have lost their lift, aircraft would have stalled,
Speaker 2: and they would have dropped straight down like a rock.
Speaker 2: He knew he had to keep the wings perfectly level
Speaker 2: and manage his glide path straight ahead, So.
Speaker 1: He is aiming for what he thinks is a clearing
Speaker 1: on the horizon, which he thinks is the frozen Baltic Sea,
Speaker 1: because ditching on a flatshet of ice is obviously a
Speaker 1: much better option than what's immediately below them, much better.
Speaker 1: But as they drop below one thousand feet, the cloud
Speaker 1: layer breaks the visual clears, and his heart just sinks.
Speaker 1: It's not the sea. It's a dense, unforgiving Swedish pine forest.
Speaker 2: And there is nowhere else to go. Captain Holmberg is
Speaker 2: standing right behind the pilots, screaming at them to look
Speaker 2: straight ahead, focusing their visual field entirely on the flight
Speaker 2: path so they don't fixate on the ground.
Speaker 1: And meanwhile in the back, the cabin crew has the
Speaker 1: passengers braced heads between their knees, just waiting for the impact.
Speaker 2: At just five hundred feet above the ground, Rasmussen makes
Speaker 2: his final brilliant move. He hauls back on the yoke
Speaker 2: to flare the nose of the aircraft up.
Speaker 1: He's intentionally trying to bleed off as much airspeed as.
Speaker 2: Possible yeah exrectly increasing the angle of attack and essentially
Speaker 2: using the dense canopy of pine trees as a giant
Speaker 2: kinetic energy dissipator like a forest pillow.
Speaker 1: And the impact is brutal. The plane rips through the
Speaker 1: tree tops, shearing the right wing completely off. It smashes
Speaker 1: into the forest floor, plowing through one hundred and twenty
Speaker 1: five meters of snow, dirt and timber.
Speaker 2: The sheer violent force snaps the fuselage into three separate,
Speaker 2: jagged pieces before grinding to a halt.
Speaker 1: And inside the wreckage it is just pure chaos. The
Speaker 1: smell of highly flammable jet fuel is overpowering. People are terrified.
Speaker 1: The plane is going to explode. And remember those passengers,
Speaker 1: the ones who stripped down to their t shirts because
Speaker 1: the cabin was a sauna.
Speaker 2: Yeah, they're not dressed for this, not at all.
Speaker 1: They are now scrambling out of the cracked fuselage directly
Speaker 1: into the freezing Swedish snow.
Speaker 2: First responders arrive within minutes, and they are expecting a
Speaker 2: total loss of life. Yeah, I mean, looking at the wreckage,
Speaker 2: how could anyone survive?
Speaker 1: Right? It looks completely unsurvivable.
Speaker 2: But as they start pulling people from the wreckage and
Speaker 2: the crew conducts a frantic headcount, they are met with
Speaker 2: a completely impossible reality. Out of of the one hundred
Speaker 2: and twenty nine people who boarded flight seven fifty one,
Speaker 2: there are zero fatalities. Wow, every single person survived the impact.
Speaker 1: It's genuinely miraculous. The media, of course, immediately dubs Rasmusen
Speaker 1: the hero who landed a powerless jet in a forest.
Speaker 1: But for the crash investigators arriving on the scene, there's
Speaker 1: no time for celebration.
Speaker 2: Now.
Speaker 1: They've a lot of work to do because they have
Speaker 1: a glaring, terrifying question to answer. How did a perfectly
Speaker 1: maintain modern airliner lose both engines simultaneously on a routine climb.
Speaker 2: Right, and the forensic investigation on the ground is incredibly painstaking.
Speaker 2: They map the entire fifteen kilometer flight path and send
Speaker 2: search teams into the snowy fields beneath the approach.
Speaker 1: And they find a lot of debris.
Speaker 2: Right they do. They recover over five hundred fragmented pieces
Speaker 2: of engine debris that had rained down from the sky
Speaker 2: before the crash, and what they find on the metallurgical
Speaker 2: analysis of those pieces is alarming because.
Speaker 1: Some of the titanium fan blades show clear evidence of
Speaker 1: having been on fire.
Speaker 2: Which is huge. A titanium fire is an incredibly rare,
Speaker 2: extraordinarily violent event. Titanium doesn't just catch fire easily. It
Speaker 2: requires immense sustained pressure and astronomical heat in an oxygen
Speaker 2: rich environment.
Speaker 1: So it's not a normal engine fire.
Speaker 2: Not at all. The fact that these blades were burning
Speaker 2: proved that the engines weren't just failing, they were combusting
Speaker 2: under massive, abnormal stress.
Speaker 1: But the real bombshell drops when the investigators pulled the
Speaker 1: flight data recorder, they are expecting the data to show
Speaker 1: that Captain Rasmussen recognized the compressor surge and pulled the
Speaker 1: throttles back, just like he claimed he did in his interviews, and.
Speaker 2: The FDR data does show that Rasmussen did pull the
Speaker 2: throttles back to idle.
Speaker 1: But then something else happens.
Speaker 2: Yeah, less than a second later, the flight data recorder
Speaker 2: shows the throttles being mechanically driven forward, not just a
Speaker 2: little bit either, shoved forward to one hundred and ten
Speaker 2: percent maximum.
Speaker 1: Power, pumping maximum fuel into engines that were already suffocated. Exactly,
Speaker 1: So what does this all mean. It's basically as if
Speaker 1: you're driving on a treacherous icy road, your car starts
Speaker 1: skidding out of control, you do the right thing and
Speaker 1: take your foot off the gas to regain traction, and
Speaker 1: your car's internal computer decides to just floor the accelerator instead.
Speaker 2: That's exactly what happened, and it makes absolutely no sense
Speaker 2: to the investigators. The only thing that should move those
Speaker 2: throttles is the pilot's physical hand. Ras Mussen swore he
Speaker 2: didn't push them forward. He said he felt them physically
Speaker 2: pulling away from him. So for two frustrating months, the
Speaker 2: investigation just hits a brick wall. They cannot figure out
Speaker 2: what commanded those engines to destroy themselves.
Speaker 1: Until the plane's manufacturer finally provides the missing puzzle piece.
Speaker 1: The culprit was a piece of software hidden deep within
Speaker 1: the plane's flight computers. It was a brand new feature
Speaker 1: called the Automatic Thrust Restoration System or ATR.
Speaker 2: Which raises a really important question. Why did this software
Speaker 2: even exist in the first place?
Speaker 1: Yeah, what was this purpose?
Speaker 2: Well, the manufacturer had recently designed the ATR system in
Speaker 2: response to strict noise abatement regulations from the Federal Aviation Administration.
Speaker 2: The FAA had noticed that some pilots were manually throttling
Speaker 2: back too much during takeoff to reduce engine noise over
Speaker 2: residential neighborhoods.
Speaker 1: Oh to be quiet, but that compromises the climb gradient exactly.
Speaker 2: To prevent this, the manufacturer coded the flight computer to
Speaker 2: monitor the RPM of the engines. If it detected the
Speaker 2: power dropping below a certain threshold during the climb phase,
Speaker 2: a servo motor would mechanically actuate the throttle cables and
Speaker 2: push them forward to ensure the plane kept climbing safely.
Speaker 1: And this is the ultimate betrayal of this entire story.
Speaker 1: Scandinavian Airlines didn't even buy this system.
Speaker 2: No, they didn't.
Speaker 1: They didn't escort it was secretly bundled into a larger,
Speaker 1: unrelated avionic software update for the aircraft.
Speaker 2: No one at the airline knew it existed. The maintenance
Speaker 2: crews didn't know, the flight instructors didn't know, and most tragically,
Speaker 2: Taptain Rasmussen had no idea.
Speaker 1: He was totally in the dark, totally.
Speaker 2: When his engines ingested the ice and began to surge,
Speaker 2: he did exactly what his lifetime of training taught him.
Speaker 2: He reduced power to save the engines, but the hidden
Speaker 2: lines of code in the computer simply registered low rpm
Speaker 2: during climb.
Speaker 1: It assumed he was throttling back for noise abatement.
Speaker 2: Exactly the ATR overrode his physical inputs, took control of
Speaker 2: the servos and pumped maximum fuel into the choking engines,
Speaker 2: ultimately causing those titanium fires and the total self destruction
Speaker 2: of the power plants.
Speaker 1: And the craziest part is if Rasmussen had just known
Speaker 1: that the system was there, if there had been a
Speaker 1: single line in a manual, he could have reached over
Speaker 1: and flicked a single switch on the overhead panel to
Speaker 1: turn it off.
Speaker 2: But he didn't know.
Speaker 1: He was fighting a ghost in the machine. A strip
Speaker 1: of zeros in ones completely undermined his physical attempts to
Speaker 1: save the plane.
Speaker 2: It's tragic. When the final accident report was released, the
Speaker 2: pilots were completely exonerated. They were officially praised for their
Speaker 2: phenomenal airmanship, maintaining the glide path and flying the doomed
Speaker 2: aircraft all the way to the ground without giving up
Speaker 2: an inch.
Speaker 1: They really were heroes, they were.
Speaker 2: The blame fell squarely on the airline's inadequate de icing
Speaker 2: procedures and the manufacturer's catastrophic failure to document the critical
Speaker 2: software intervention.
Speaker 1: And Scandinavian Airlines immediately overhauled their rules. From that day on,
Speaker 1: mechanics couldn't just look at a wing from a distance
Speaker 1: or rely on fluid shear. They were required to perform
Speaker 1: a tacked inspection.
Speaker 2: Ry climbing up on a ladder and physically running their
Speaker 2: bare hands over the cold metal to guarantee there was
Speaker 2: no clear ice.
Speaker 1: But the human toll of the crash, however, lingered far
Speaker 1: longer than the physical scars or the procedural changes. First
Speaker 1: officer of Cedar did return to the cockpit. He was
Speaker 1: able to compartmentalize the trauma and continued his flying career.
Speaker 2: But for Captain Stan Rasmussen, the psychological outcome was profoundly different.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Rasmussen underwent extensive psychological therapy. He spent hours in
Speaker 1: flight simulators trying to regain his confidence, but something fundamental
Speaker 1: had broken inside.
Speaker 2: It wasn't the fear of crashing that stopped him.
Speaker 1: Was it. No, it was the betrayal. He had loved
Speaker 1: that aircraft. He had trusted it with his life and
Speaker 1: the lives of his passengers, and the machine had a
Speaker 1: secret that almost killed them all.
Speaker 2: He later described his early retirement from aviation as having
Speaker 2: to kill his highest love. He simply could no longer
Speaker 2: trust the machine. The bond between the pilot and the
Speaker 2: aircraft was permanently, irreversibly severed.
Speaker 1: It's a really heavy, heartbreaking way to end a career
Speaker 1: that was defined by such passion.
Speaker 2: It really is.
Speaker 1: And as we wrap up this deep dive into the muddy,
Speaker 1: terrifying reality of flight seven five to one, I want
Speaker 1: to leave you with a chilling question to ponder on
Speaker 1: your own. We live in an era of fly by wire.
Speaker 1: Our cars, our phones, and the planes we fly in
Speaker 1: are increasingly controlled by hidden lines of code, algorithmic overrides
Speaker 1: and automated systems that we don't fully comprehend.
Speaker 2: We really are surrounded by them.
Speaker 1: So when the ultimate crisis hits and the alarms start blaring,
Speaker 1: who is really in the pilot seat,