Speaker 1: I want you to transport yourself for a second back
Speaker 1: to the early morning hours of December twelfth, nineteen eighty five.
Speaker 1: Just try to paint a picture in your mind of
Speaker 1: two completely radically different places.
Speaker 2: Right, because the contrast between these two locations is really
Speaker 2: what sets the emotional stage for this whole thing exactly.
Speaker 1: So down in Fort Campbell, Kentucky, the atmosphere is just electric.
Speaker 1: Families are up way before dawn. They're stringing decorations, They've
Speaker 1: got you know, welcome home signs painted, and they're all
Speaker 1: gathering on the base.
Speaker 2: Yeah, they're waiting for their loved ones from the one
Speaker 2: hundred and first Airborne Division to finally return. I mean,
Speaker 2: this is after a really grueling six month peacekeeping deployment
Speaker 2: in the Sinai Peninsula, and.
Speaker 1: It's just in time for the holidays, right, So it's
Speaker 1: incredibly joyous. But to really grasp the tragedy of this story,
Speaker 1: you have to contrast that warm scene with where those
Speaker 1: soldiers actually are if five point thirty.
Speaker 2: In the morning, right, and where they are is Errow
Speaker 2: Airflight twelve eighty five, which is this massive Douglas DC eight.
Speaker 2: It has just touched down to refuel in Gander, Newfoundland.
Speaker 1: Which is pretty much the opposite of a warm Kentucky morning.
Speaker 2: Completely. It is pitched black outside. The temperature is just
Speaker 2: hovering right at freezing and there is this brutal, biting
Speaker 2: mix of ice and freezing rain coming down out of
Speaker 2: the dark.
Speaker 1: So inside that terminal in Gander, you have two hundred
Speaker 1: and forty eight US soldiers and eight true members seeking
Speaker 1: refuge from that cold. You know, they're stretching their legs,
Speaker 1: maybe grabbing a coffee.
Speaker 2: Just trying to wake up and get through the layover.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and the accident reports note this incredibly bittersweet detail.
Speaker 1: Some of the soldiers are actually hitting the payphones, calling
Speaker 1: home to Kentucky, telling their spouses and parents, you know,
Speaker 1: we made it a Gander. We're just a few hours away.
Speaker 2: Oh man.
Speaker 1: Some of them are even wandering through the airport gift
Speaker 1: shop buying these T shirts that say I survived Gander, Newfoundland, which.
Speaker 2: I mean that just guts you when you look at
Speaker 2: the historical record of what actually happens over the next hour.
Speaker 1: It really does. So today, our mission in this deep
Speaker 1: dive is to piece together what exactly rock Down Airflight
Speaker 1: twelve eighty five, and we have a massive stack of
Speaker 1: sources in front of us to help us do this.
Speaker 2: Yeah, we've got the official Canadian aviation accident reports, historical
Speaker 2: analyzes of the intense geopolitical climate of nineteen eighty five,
Speaker 2: and crucially, an unprecedented, highly controversial, dissenting minority report from
Speaker 2: the investigators themselves.
Speaker 1: We are going to look at how two hundred and
Speaker 1: fifty six people lost their lives, but also explore how
Speaker 1: a deeply fractured investigation ended up costing even more lives
Speaker 1: down the line.
Speaker 2: And just to set the stakes for you, the loss
Speaker 2: of life here was so profound. Military historians point out
Speaker 2: that the one hundred and first Airborne, the famed Screaming Eagles,
Speaker 2: they didn't lose this many people in such a short
Speaker 2: period of time even during the D Day invasion in
Speaker 2: World War Two.
Speaker 1: Wow, that really puts it in perspective.
Speaker 2: It does. And we're attempting a forensic look at two
Speaker 2: myometrically opposed realities of this crash. Our goal isn't to
Speaker 2: take a side, but to lay out the evidence exactly
Speaker 2: as the investigators found it.
Speaker 1: Right, We're untangling this real complicated web of aero dynamics
Speaker 1: suspicion and Cold War paranoia. So, looking at the flight
Speaker 1: logs we've pulled for this, the actual flight lasted in
Speaker 1: agonizingly short fifty three seconds.
Speaker 2: Just fifty three seconds.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's six point four to six am. The crew
Speaker 1: is cleared for takeoff on runway two to two, and
Speaker 1: according to their charts, they are aiming for a specific
Speaker 1: air speed to safely lift off right.
Speaker 2: The log show they calculated they needed to hit one
Speaker 2: hundred and forty four knots to rotate.
Speaker 1: Rotate, meaning to pull the nose up right.
Speaker 2: Exactly to pull the control column back and lift the
Speaker 2: nose off the runway. Now, Runway two and two is
Speaker 2: the longest strip at Gander, so under normal circumstances they
Speaker 2: should have this massive safety margin. So they have plenty
Speaker 2: of room, plenty of room in the cockpit. The pilots
Speaker 2: use a little physical marker on their airspeed indicator. It's
Speaker 2: called a bug. They slide that bug to one hundred
Speaker 2: and forty four knots so they have a visual target
Speaker 2: to look at while accelerating.
Speaker 1: Okay, got it.
Speaker 2: But as they push the throttles forward and begin their
Speaker 2: takeoff roll, the acceleration is just sluggish.
Speaker 1: And sluggish in a massive, heavy jetliner that's hurtling down
Speaker 1: a dark, icy runway is a terrifying concept.
Speaker 2: Oh. Absolutely.
Speaker 1: The timeline shows it takes them four seconds longer than
Speaker 1: it should have to lift off, which I mean four
Speaker 1: seconds might sound completely trivial to us sitting.
Speaker 2: Here, but at that speed, four seconds means they chewed
Speaker 2: up over a thousand feet of runway before the wheels
Speaker 2: finally left the pavement.
Speaker 1: That is a huge distance to eat up. But the
Speaker 1: real terror, according to the data, sets in immediately after liftoff.
Speaker 2: Yeah, the DC eight gets airborne and the flight data
Speaker 2: shows they reach an air speed of one hundred and
Speaker 2: sixty seven knots. But just two seconds later that speed.
Speaker 1: Drops and the aircraft is barely climbing above the tree line.
Speaker 1: At this point, the first officer is at the controls,
Speaker 1: and you can see his instinctual reaction in the data.
Speaker 1: I mean, the speed is dropping, the forest at the
Speaker 1: edge of the airport is approaching incredibly fast, so he
Speaker 1: pulls the nose up to try and force.
Speaker 2: A climb, which is human nature. Right, you're going down,
Speaker 2: you pull up. But the plane is, as one investigator
Speaker 2: bluntly put it. It's flying like a pig. It just
Speaker 2: isn't gaining altitude.
Speaker 1: A half mile past the end of the runway. The
Speaker 1: aircraft is flying so low, and it's such a radical
Speaker 1: nose up angle that the underbelly actually begins clipping the trees.
Speaker 2: Three hundred and seventy eight trees to be exact. They
Speaker 2: were mapped later by investigators to determine the plane's exact trajectory.
Speaker 1: That's horrifying.
Speaker 2: It is it was flying right wing low, nose pitched
Speaker 2: incredibly high, descending rapidly until it slammed into the frozen ground.
Speaker 1: You know, when I try to visualize what's happening to
Speaker 1: the aerodynamics when that first officer pulls the nose up,
Speaker 1: it makes you think of someone driving a speedboat trying
Speaker 1: to get it to plane on top of the water.
Speaker 2: Oh that's a good comparison, right, Like.
Speaker 1: If you don't have enough forward momentum and you pull
Speaker 1: the nose of the boat up too high, you don't
Speaker 1: glide over the water. You just turn the hall into
Speaker 1: a massive wall.
Speaker 2: Exactly, You plow the water, You create huge drag and
Speaker 2: the boat sinks heavily back down.
Speaker 1: So pulling the nose up on a stalling aircraft without
Speaker 1: enough speed essentially turns the underside of the wings into
Speaker 1: these massive air brakes against the wind.
Speaker 2: That captures the physics perfectly. You are increasing the angle
Speaker 2: of attack, hoping the wings will bite into the air
Speaker 2: and lift you. But without sufficient forward air speed, the
Speaker 2: smooth flow of air over the wing detaches. As you
Speaker 2: lose lift, you lose lift, drag spikes massively, and gravity
Speaker 2: winds you fall out of the sky.
Speaker 1: Man and the scene first responders arrived at was just horrific.
Speaker 1: They described a thirty foot high, burning mass of metal
Speaker 1: and jet fuel. It didn't even resemble a Douglas DC
Speaker 1: eight anymore.
Speaker 2: It was total devastation.
Speaker 1: So naturally, the investigators from the Canadian Aviation Safety Board
Speaker 1: to the CASB, specifically David McNair and Peter Bog, they
Speaker 1: want the black boxes. They need to know what happened.
Speaker 1: But looking at their initial reports, they hit a brutal
Speaker 1: wall almost immediately.
Speaker 2: A completely infuriating wall for an accident investigator. I mean,
Speaker 2: they retrieve the cockpit voice recorder, hoping to hear the
Speaker 2: pie It's dialogue in those final fifty three seconds, and
Speaker 2: it's completely blank, completely blank. The device had malfunction prior
Speaker 2: to the flight and recorded nothing but.
Speaker 1: Static, So they have absolutely no idea what the true
Speaker 1: was seeing or saying. It's just a dead end. And
Speaker 1: then they go to the flight data recorder expecting the
Speaker 1: kind of detailed telemetry we see in modern investigations, but
Speaker 1: they don't get that.
Speaker 2: Either, far from it. Instead of a digital recorder tracking
Speaker 2: hundreds of parameters like flap sayings, engine thrust, control column inputs,
Speaker 2: they find this outdated model that engrieves data onto a
Speaker 2: slow moving roll of stainless steel foil.
Speaker 1: I was reading about these foil recorders in our source material,
Speaker 1: and it's basically the nineteen fifties technology. It uses a
Speaker 1: literal metal stylus to scratch lines onto a piece of
Speaker 1: metal ribbon.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it is incredibly primitive, and because it relies on
Speaker 2: physically etching foil, it only records four basic metrics, just four,
Speaker 2: just four speed, altitude, heading, and vertical acceleration meaning G forces.
Speaker 2: That is it.
Speaker 1: That is wild.
Speaker 2: They have no data on engine power, nothing on the
Speaker 2: pitch angle, no record the pilot's control inputs. The investigators
Speaker 2: are practically flying blind here, but they do have.
Speaker 1: Some basic math to start with thankfully, And they start
Speaker 1: looking at the weight of the aircraft. Because Arrow Air
Speaker 1: used a standard commercial weight estimate to calculate their takeoff parameter.
Speaker 2: Right, they estimated one hundred and seventy pounds per passenger,
Speaker 2: which includes the person and their baggage, which.
Speaker 1: I guess is standard practice for a typical commercial flight. Right,
Speaker 1: carrying a mixed demographic of men, women, and.
Speaker 2: Children, exactly standard average.
Speaker 1: But looking at the passenger manifest relying on that one
Speaker 1: hundred and seventy pound number seems completely absurd. I mean,
Speaker 1: these aren't average vacationers. These are two hundred and forty
Speaker 1: eight elite, fully grown paratroopers returning from a six month
Speaker 1: military deployment.
Speaker 2: Right. They're not carrying little carry on bags.
Speaker 1: No, they are carrying massive amounts of specialized gear, heavy boots,
Speaker 1: heavy duffel bags.
Speaker 2: And investigator David McNair saw that exact same discrepancy. I mean,
Speaker 2: he was an experienced pilot who had flown military personnel,
Speaker 2: and he knew one hundred and seventy pounds was a
Speaker 2: vast underestimate.
Speaker 1: So what do they find out?
Speaker 2: His team actually pulled the medical records of the soldiers
Speaker 2: on board to get their real weights when they factored
Speaker 2: in the gear and carry ons. The realistic average was
Speaker 2: two hundred and twenty twenty pounds per passenger.
Speaker 1: Okay, so a fifty pound difference per person. Multiplying that
Speaker 1: across two hundred and forty eight people means the aircraft
Speaker 1: was carrying at least twelve thousand extra pounds that the
Speaker 1: pilots had not accounted for in their takeoff calculations.
Speaker 2: That is a huge deal. The engines had to work
Speaker 2: significantly harder than the crew realized. Right, I mean, twelve
Speaker 2: thousand pounds is a massive dangerous discrepancy. But, and this
Speaker 2: is important, if we trace the logical through line, the
Speaker 2: weight alone doesn't crack the case because.
Speaker 1: The plane had already been flying with that weight.
Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly. The DC eight is an absolute workhorse. More importantly,
Speaker 2: this specific plan had been flying with that exact same
Speaker 2: heavy load all night. It took off from Cairo, and
Speaker 2: it took off from Cologne, Germany completely fine.
Speaker 1: So if the way was the only issue, it would
Speaker 1: have crashed in Europe.
Speaker 2: Right. The causal link forces investigators to look at the
Speaker 2: environment in Gander, and.
Speaker 1: The weather logs for Ganders show that freezing rain. We
Speaker 1: talked about. Witnesses from the refueling crew noted the aircraft
Speaker 1: had picked up ice on its wings during its descent,
Speaker 1: but the crew elected not to de ice the plane
Speaker 1: before taking off again.
Speaker 2: And to understand the mechanism of why that decision was fatal,
Speaker 2: we really have to look at the wind tunnel simulator
Speaker 2: data the investigators ran.
Speaker 1: Okay, let's get into it.
Speaker 2: See, in the mid nineteen eighties, the aviation industry didn't
Speaker 2: fully appreciate how dangerous a microscopic layer of ice could be.
Speaker 2: A flight engineer might look out the window for thick,
Speaker 2: heavy chunks of ice that add physical weight to the plane.
Speaker 1: Because you think ice equals heavy exactly.
Speaker 2: But the danger isn't just the wave of the ice.
Speaker 2: It is the aerodynamic destruction.
Speaker 1: Our sources talk a lot about the boundary layer. Can
Speaker 1: you explain how ice disrupts that?
Speaker 2: Sure? So, think of a smooth rock in a fast
Speaker 2: moving stream. The water flows seamlessly over the curve of the.
Speaker 1: Rock right right.
Speaker 2: That thin smooth flow hugging the surface is like the
Speaker 2: boundary layer of air on an aircraft's wing. Now imagine
Speaker 2: wrapping that smooth rock in coarse sandpaper.
Speaker 1: Okay, so the water doesn't flow smoothly anymore, right.
Speaker 2: It trips on the rough surface, churning and bubbling up.
Speaker 1: It creates turbulence right at the surface.
Speaker 2: Precisely. Even a layer of ice as thin and rough
Speaker 2: as medium grit sandpaper on the leading edge of a
Speaker 2: wing drastically destroys its ability to generate lyft. It causes
Speaker 2: that boundary layer of air to separate from the wing
Speaker 2: far earlier than.
Speaker 1: It should, which is catastrophic on takeoff.
Speaker 2: Completely. So when you take an aircraft carrying an uncalculated
Speaker 2: twelve thousand extra pounds and you pair it with wings
Speaker 2: that have had their lifting capability destroyed by a sandpaper
Speaker 2: like layer of ice, the physics are insurmountable.
Speaker 1: Wow, so the aircraft was functionally doomed the second the
Speaker 1: wheels left the ground. It's a tragic but very clear
Speaker 1: scientific explanation. Weight plus ice equals disaster.
Speaker 2: That's what Knair's team concluded.
Speaker 1: But just as this ice theory starts to become the
Speaker 1: consensus among the lead investigators, the narrative takes this really
Speaker 1: sharp turn. The investigation plunges straight into Cold war paranoia.
Speaker 2: Yeah, we have to zoom out for a second and
Speaker 2: look at the globe. In nineteen eighty five, the geopolitical
Speaker 2: tension is at a boiling point. The US military had
Speaker 2: recently suffered catastrophic losses in the Beirut truck bombings, and
Speaker 2: literally within hours of flight twelve eighty five going down,
Speaker 2: an oversees US consulate receives a phone call from someone
Speaker 2: claiming to represent Islamic Jihad, which is a branch of Hesbelah.
Speaker 2: They claim they destroyed the aircraft.
Speaker 1: And I mean when a plane full of American soldiers
Speaker 1: goes down and a known terrorist group claims responsibility, the
Speaker 1: entire security apparatus goes into overdriveing.
Speaker 2: Oh, absolutely, everyone.
Speaker 1: Is on edge. And adding to the suspicion, the historical
Speaker 1: reports show serious anomalies with the cargo. There were large,
Speaker 1: unmanifested wooden boxes loaded onto the plane back in Cairo
Speaker 1: and we still have definitively know was in them.
Speaker 2: Plus security at the Kiro report was shockingly lax according
Speaker 2: to the reports.
Speaker 1: Right and floating in the background of all this are
Speaker 1: rumors tying the charter airline Aerowair to Colonel Oliver North's
Speaker 1: covert airon contra operations, which if you don't know was
Speaker 1: this massive shadow logistics network involving the illicit transfer of arms.
Speaker 2: So you have all this swirling around, and that environment
Speaker 2: of intense suspicion begins to fracture the Canadian Aviation Safety
Speaker 2: Board itself.
Speaker 1: It literally tears the team apart.
Speaker 2: It does. A faction of investigators emerges, led by a
Speaker 2: board member and flight data recorder specialist named less Photus.
Speaker 2: Photos looks at the scratch marks on that primitive foil recorder,
Speaker 2: specifically the deceleration rates, and says, ice doesn't explain this.
Speaker 1: Wait, so what was Photos seeing in the deceleration data
Speaker 1: that made him break ranks with McNair.
Speaker 2: Well, he calculated that for the massive DC eight to
Speaker 2: slow down as rapidly as the foil data suggested, it
Speaker 2: couldn't just be a loss of lift from ice, he argued.
Speaker 2: It would require WHI are a massive abrupt loss of.
Speaker 1: Forward thrust, like the engines just quit.
Speaker 2: Yeah. He believed all four jet engines would have had
Speaker 2: to suddenly spool down, meaning rapidly lose their rotational speed
Speaker 2: and power simultaneously, and ice on the wing simply does
Speaker 2: not cause four independent jet engines to suddenly stop producing thrust.
Speaker 1: So Photus and his dissenting colleagues start compiling evidence pointing
Speaker 1: to a catastrophic event inside.
Speaker 2: The plane, and honestly, looking at their specific points, you
Speaker 2: can kind of see why they built such a compelling
Speaker 2: alternative theory.
Speaker 1: It wasn't just a wild guess. They had tangible things
Speaker 1: they were pointing to. Right. First, they had eyewitness testimony.
Speaker 1: Two truckers driving on the Trans Canada Highway directly under
Speaker 1: the flight path testified that they saw a bright glow
Speaker 1: or flames coming from the bottom of the plane before
Speaker 1: it ever hit the trees.
Speaker 2: And they believe that indicated a mid air fire or explosion.
Speaker 1: Then my immediate thought reading the autopsy reports was if
Speaker 1: the medical examiners found extremely high levels of carbon monoxide
Speaker 1: in the blood of some victims, they had to be
Speaker 1: breeding smoke while they were still alive in the air, right.
Speaker 2: The rebel investigators argued this proved there was a fire
Speaker 2: in the cabin before the crash, And.
Speaker 1: Then they also pointed to specific physical debris. They found
Speaker 1: a piece of the fuselage with a hole in it
Speaker 1: where the metal was curled outward.
Speaker 2: Yeah, think about if you push your finger from the
Speaker 2: inside of a sheet of aluminum foil to the outside.
Speaker 2: The edges curl out right away from you to them.
Speaker 2: That indicated an internal explosive force pushing outward, not an
Speaker 2: impact force from hitting the ground pushing inward.
Speaker 1: And then there's the engine debris. An independent investigator hired
Speaker 1: by the airline looked at the internal guide veanes of
Speaker 1: the number three engine, and if you picture the very
Speaker 1: front of a jet engine, right behind those big spinning
Speaker 1: fan blades you see from the terminal, there are stationary
Speaker 1: metal fins that guide the air inward.
Speaker 2: Those are the guide vanes exactly.
Speaker 1: They found dense on the leading edges of these veins,
Speaker 1: and one of them had a smear of bright red paint,
Speaker 1: so they theorized this was debris from a midair explosion
Speaker 1: painted red, being sucked through the turbine.
Speaker 2: So now you have a board completely torn into The
Speaker 2: lead investigators McNair and Bogue are watching their team fracture,
Speaker 2: but they maintain that every single piece of the bomb theory,
Speaker 2: the flames, the carbon monoxide, the paint can be explained
Speaker 2: by science and the brutal realities of the crash sequence itself.
Speaker 1: So let's work through McNair's scientific rebuttals because this is fascinating.
Speaker 1: They are looking at the exact same evidence and drawing
Speaker 1: entirely different conclusions.
Speaker 2: It really is a study and perspective.
Speaker 1: Let's start with the truckers. I hear them saying they
Speaker 1: saw flames in the sky. How does McNair's team explain
Speaker 1: fire coming from the plane if there wasn't a bomb.
Speaker 2: They explain it through an aerodynamic phenomenon called a compressor stall.
Speaker 1: A compressor stall what is that?
Speaker 2: When an aircraft is pitched up at a radical angle,
Speaker 2: starving for forward air speed, Remember it's flying like a pig,
Speaker 2: The airflow entering the jet engines is severely disrupted. The
Speaker 2: engines literally choke on the turbulent air.
Speaker 1: Oh wow. Yeah.
Speaker 2: And when that happens, unburned jet fuel can ignite and
Speaker 2: shoot out the front or back of the engine as
Speaker 2: a massive tongue of flame.
Speaker 1: So does someone driving on the highway below. It looks
Speaker 1: like the planes on fire.
Speaker 2: Exactly In reality, the engines are just violently struggling for
Speaker 2: air because of the extreme noseup angle.
Speaker 1: That makes incredible sense aerodynamically, But what about the carbon monoxide?
Speaker 1: If the victims inhaled smoke doesn't that require a fire
Speaker 1: in the cabin before they hit the ground.
Speaker 2: Not necessarily. And this is where it gets grim. McNair
Speaker 2: attributed the carbon monoxide to the sheer intensity of the
Speaker 2: post crash infernout.
Speaker 1: Because it was a huge fireball on the ground.
Speaker 2: Right. The destruction was so total and the fuel fed
Speaker 2: fire so massive that victims who survived the initial impact
Speaker 2: for even a few chaotic seconds could have absorbed carbon
Speaker 2: monoxide during the crash sequence on the ground, not in
Speaker 2: the air.
Speaker 1: Okay, I see, And what about that mysterious red paint
Speaker 1: on the internal guide vanes the supposed bomb debris.
Speaker 2: So the Royal Canadian Mound Police actually traced that specific
Speaker 2: red paint to a front end loader.
Speaker 1: Wait really, yeah a tractor.
Speaker 2: Yeah, emergency crews use heavy machinery to bulldoze and move
Speaker 2: wreckage at the crash site during the recovery effort. The
Speaker 2: dent and the red paint happened while the engine was
Speaker 2: being shoved around on the frozen ground, not at a
Speaker 2: thousand feet in the air.
Speaker 1: That is just it forces you to look at how
Speaker 1: powerful human psychology is in high stake situations. Yeah, I mean,
Speaker 1: why did these brilliant dedicated experts split so completely well.
Speaker 2: The investigators were under immense pressure. The American military and
Speaker 2: international media were scrutinizing their every move right.
Speaker 1: Everyone wanted an answer yesterday. Yeah, and it seems like
Speaker 1: it is almost easier for the human mind to process that,
Speaker 1: you know, evil men planted a bomb to destroy a plane.
Speaker 1: Rather than accepting that a mundane, microscopic layer of ice
Speaker 1: and a simple math error could wipe out two hundred
Speaker 1: and fifty six soldiers.
Speaker 2: They needed a villain, and the geopolitical tension provided.
Speaker 1: One exactly, and that psychological pressure and institutional friction is
Speaker 1: what allultimately tore the Canadian Aviation Safety Board apart.
Speaker 2: It really did. When it came time to publish the
Speaker 2: final accident report, four of the nine board members refused
Speaker 2: to sign it.
Speaker 1: Four out of nine, that's almost half.
Speaker 2: Yeah. They took the unprecedented step of releasing a minority report.
Speaker 2: They included photographs of the inward curling fuselage. They openly
Speaker 2: alleged an in flight explosion, and even suggested a potential
Speaker 2: cover up by authorities who were trying to rush the
Speaker 2: investigation and avoid an international incident.
Speaker 1: Which brings us to the most tragic consequence of this
Speaker 1: entire story. Because of the massive media circus surrounding the
Speaker 1: minority report, you know, the dueling press conferences, the Iran
Speaker 1: kanfer rumors, the Hesbola claims, the actual vital safety message
Speaker 1: that McNair and his team were trying to screen to
Speaker 1: the aviation world was completely drowned out.
Speaker 2: It was completely lost. The message that a tiny amount
Speaker 2: of ice could destroy the lifting capability of a massive
Speaker 2: commercial jet was lost in the noise of the sabotage theory,
Speaker 2: and the aviation industry paid the price for that distraction.
Speaker 1: We know it was ignored because of what happened just
Speaker 1: a few years later. March nineteen eighty nine in Dryden, Ontario,
Speaker 1: another freezing winter day. Another flight crew, this time operating
Speaker 1: a Fokker F twenty eight passenger chet.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and they're sitting on the runway while snowfalls, relying
Speaker 2: on a previous de icing treatment.
Speaker 1: Right, and they elect not to de ice their wings
Speaker 1: again before taking off.
Speaker 2: The sequence of events is practically identical to Gander.
Speaker 1: It is seconds after takeoff the Fokker F twenty eight
Speaker 1: cannot achieve sufficient lift due to the contamination on the wings.
Speaker 1: It stalls, it crashes into the tree canopy just past
Speaker 1: the runway, and twenty four people are killed. It is
Speaker 1: the exact same aerodynamic mechanism of disaster.
Speaker 2: If the industry had unified around the Gander findings, if
Speaker 2: the regulations regarding microscopic ice accumulation had been forcefully updated
Speaker 2: and drilled into pilots worldwide, without the distraction of a
Speaker 2: divided investigative board, the tragedy in Dryden might never have occurred.
Speaker 1: It's incredibly frustrating, and the aftermath of the Gander investigation
Speaker 1: was just institutional scorched earth. The CASB was so compromised
Speaker 1: by this internal war, and their public credibility was so
Speaker 1: shattered that the Canadian government disbanded the agency entirely.
Speaker 2: They had to scrap it and build a brand new
Speaker 2: investigative body from the ground up.
Speaker 1: But the most profound loss here, beyond the institutional failure
Speaker 1: in the preventable crash and Dryden, is for the families
Speaker 1: of the hundred and first airborne I mean I speak
Speaker 1: directly to you listening. Imagine being one of those families
Speaker 1: decorating a house in Fort Campbell. You lose your son,
Speaker 1: your daughter, your spouse, and because of the bureaucratic infighting,
Speaker 1: you are never handed a single, definitive, unanimously agreed upon
Speaker 1: answer for why they didn't come home.
Speaker 2: It's awful, the agony of living with two competing truths.
Speaker 2: Was it a tragic, avoidable oversight regarding ice or was
Speaker 2: it a targeted act of terror? Yeah, is a burden
Speaker 2: those families have had to carry for.
Speaker 1: Decades, decades without closure.
Speaker 2: The real safety message, as one of the dissenting investigators
Speaker 2: ironically pointed out years later, is that you have to
Speaker 2: get at the truth. But when the facts become a battleground,
Speaker 2: the truth becomes a casualty itself.
Speaker 1: Man leaves us with a lingering question for you to
Speaker 1: mull over. We crave clean, visible answers, especially when tragedy strikes.
Speaker 1: But in an era where geopolitical tensions are constantly high,
Speaker 1: where multiple actors might claim responsibility for a single event,
Speaker 1: and conspiracy theories can spread instantly across the globe, how
Speaker 1: can modern investigators ensure that the truth isn't drowned out
Speaker 1: by the noise?
Speaker 2: Right? How do you focus on the science exactly?
Speaker 1: How do we make sure the crucial, sometimes boring scientific
Speaker 1: lessons are actually learned before human psychology forces history to
Speaker 1: repeat itself.