Plane Crash Diaries

Welcome back to Plane Crash Diaries with me, your host and pilot, Des Latham. Episode 44 and we’re exploring more bizarre stories of pilot suicide with the tragedy of A10 Captain Craig Button and the Kamikaze Pink Porn Pilot, Mitsuyatsu Maeno. A listener called Clifford who’s a SouthWest Airlines pilot suggested the topic for this episode and it’s taken me a year to get around to it – the curious case of Captain Craig Button. The incident has been called one of the most puzzling in US Air Force history. We’ll also hear about an off the wall weird example of pilot suicide in the second half, Japanese porn actor and pilot Mitsuyasu Maeno who dressed up in Kamikazi gear than tried to kill a Yakuza crime boss with a loaded Piper Cherokee. I decided to look at these two in particular because of how cosmology, religion, and extremism can hide in plain sight in someone who may be sitting next to you on the flight deck. Neither were examples of commercial aviation-linked suicides, but they are a warning to all of us to keep an eye out for folks who may harbour dark secrets. Let’s start It on April 2nd, 1997. Captain Craig Button was leading a three plane A-10 Thunderbolt Warthog formation conducting a live-weapons training mission from Davis-Monthan Air Force Base in Arizona. Button inexplicably broke formation. He flew 800 miles off course, and zigzagged across Arizona and Colorado the plane obviously being handled in a controlled fashion, maneuvering through bad weather, and in places, changing altitude. Button was tracked by radar, until he flew into Gold Dust Peak near Vail in Colorado, hitting the mountain just 100 feet below the summit. Apart from the mystery of what caused the accident, there was also a small matter of four 500 pound MK82 bombs which were never found despite extensive searches. It appeared he dropped them over the desert somewhere, like trees falling in a forest, unseen but as you’ll hear in a minute, not unheard. What caused this highly respected and skilled instructor to apparently commit suicide, which is what the Air Force concluded had happened. Unrequited love perhaps? Confusion over his role as a fighter pilot? The missing motive and missing ordnance were equally baffling. A search and rescue began immediately. The wreckage was finally spotted on 20 April 1997 by a Colorado Army National Guard helicopter crew, 18 days after Button went missing,on the northwest face of Gold Dust Peak at about 13,200 feet. Because the crash took place at such a high elevation during spring, most of the bits were buried under deep snow. Like the mysterious flight MH370, the pilot here had picked a spot on earth that was extremely difficult to access. Let’s move onto the second example of the pilot suicide took place On March 23, 1976. This involved love of a very different kind. Japanese porn actor and pilot Mitsuyasu Maeno staged a kamikaze-style attack, crashing a Piper PA-28 Cherokee into the Tokyo home of right-wing figure Yoshio Kodama. Maeno was dressed in a World War II Kamikazi pilot uniform and died on impact. He was the only fatality. The attack was motivated by rage over what was called the Lockheed bribery scandal. Yoshio Kodama was a notorious political fixer, Yakuza-connected gangster, and key figure in corrupt business practices..

This is episode 43, and I thought instead of taking a closer look at the plethora of pilot suicides, another topic is heating up fast. The dangers of lithium-based batteries, lithium polymers, now playing probably on your wrist theatre, or perhaps in your hand, or gauging your heartbeat, monitoring the baby, inside your laptop, powering your GPS and your vaping device. They’re everywhere. Lithium has revolutionised our lives – and simultaneously poses a risk to aviation. The number of incidents of recharging battery packs and phones overheating is growing by the week. I am certain that the next major airline fire is going to be caused by a battery burn. And I’m not alone in this concern, IATA has just published data which revealed that 83% of pax carry a phone, 60% a laptop and 44% a power bank. So what you say. It’s what they found about what pax know about that dangers that’s of concern. While 93% of travelers consider themselves knowledgeable on the rules for carrying lithium-powered devices, half of those surveyed or 50% incorrectly believe it’s OK to pack small lithium-powered devices in checked luggage, 45% incorrectly believe it’s OK to pack power banks in checked luggage and 33% incorrectly believe that there are no power limits on power banks or spare batteries. Most spare lithium-ion batteries and power banks are limited to 100 Wh without special approval. This covers standard phones, tablets, and most consumer power banks while batteries between 101 Wh and 160 Wh - such as larger laptop batteries, professional camera/video batteries, or massive power banks are liimited to two spare batteries per person and require airline approval. Batteries over 160 Wh are banned in either carry-on or checked baggage, with limited exceptions only for certain mobility aids like wheelchairs. Airlines are collecting data through the Thermal Runaway Incident Program and we now know that across the world, an average of two flights a week have reported thermal runaways and one in five of these events led to a diverted landing. Crucially, we also discovered that two out of five passengers are packing rechargeable batteries in checked luggage. That is tantamount to playing Russian roulette. Back during these days, authorities underestimated the dangers – that was until the terrible UPS Airlines Flight 6 disaster of 2010. UPS Flight six was a scheduled international cargo flight operated by the parcel service which departed Dubai on September 3, 2010 heading to Cologne in Germany.

This is episode 42, and we’re diving into a particular category of aviation accidents — those that happen right at the beginning of a pilot’s journey. We’re talking about ab initio training mishaps. Ab initio, Latin for “from the beginning,” refers to a training path designed for aspiring pilots who start with zero flight time. Nothing. Not a minute logged, not a system diagram understood. These courses take students from ground zero to the right-hand seat of a commercial flight deck — through a tightly structured mix of theory, simulator time, and real-world flying. They’re intense and sometimes quite fast. And they aim to do two things: produce skilled, airline-ready pilots and identify those who should probably find another career. Many of these programmes are tied directly to airlines, which means you’re taught from the outset to fly their way — their SOPs, their ethos, their cockpit culture. That brings clear advantages. The pathway is laid out: from the classroom to the cockpit, without the detours of fragmented, school-hopping training. For many, there’s financial backing too — covering tuition, even living costs — opening doors for those who’d otherwise never afford to fly. There’s also the camaraderie. Like a military intake, you form close bonds under pressure, guided by seasoned instructors and surrounded by peers. And at the end, a job may be waiting — conditional on success. But it’s not all lift and no drag. Freedom? Limited. You’re often bonded to the airline for years — and leaving early can come with steep penalties. Career flexibility? Not much. Your training is airline-specific, and if you decide to fly charter or head bush, you may be back at square one. Contrary to the doomsaying of many veteran aviators, the accident rate during ab initio flight training in the United States has fallen by close to 50% — measured per flight hour - it shows between 2000 and 2019, the number of fatal training accidents almost halved. The Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association’s Air Safety Institute has the data to back it up. In the early 2000s, the accident rate hovered around 0.49 per 100,000 flying hours. By 2009, that fell to 0.39. By 2019, the rate dipped to 0.26 per 100,000 hours — a substantial decline. The top three causes of fatal training accidents haven’t changed much over time. They are, in order: 1. Loss of control in flight 2. Midair collisions 3. Controlled Flight Into Terrain — CFIT — the old nemesis flight into the granite cloud.

Episode 41 is about substance abuse, technocrats behaving badly, sub-standard crew training and fatal attractions to nicotine and C H 3 C H 2 OH — methylethyl alcohol, otherwise known as hootch, or in South Africa, dop. This is an episode that’s longer than usual, with quite a lot of ATC sound thrown in later. I hope you find it useful - remember this series is all about aviation safety which ironically is one of the positive results of a catastrophe. But only if we institute the improvements — and take note as aviators and administrators. Our first example of a legal drug causing a commercial airliner to crash is EgyptAir Flight 804 which took off from Paris’ De Gaulle Airport heading to Cairo International on 19th May 2016. As is the case in many of these accidents, cutting corners when it came to snag reporting caught up with everyone involved. And the geopolitical high jinks and obscurantism caught up with Bureaucrats too. This was no idle fiddle, an Airbus A320 plunged into the Mediterranean north of Alexandria killing all 56 pax, 7 crew and 3 security staff aboard on that day. B In our second example, cutting the corners on training, more unresolved snags and alcohol caused the Aeroflot flight 821 disaster - a Boeing that crashed while the confused pilots were trying to land at Perm Airport in Russia, killing all 88 on board. Let’s kick off with the EgyptAir flight 804, an Airbus A320 registration SU-GCC serial number 2088 which had picked up mechanical snafus on four previous flights before the accident, according to automated messages analysed after the crash. EgyptAir pilots and the airline’s technical center in Cairo had ignored those errors. The Airbus was 13 years old, logging 48052 flight hours in 20773 flight cycles since its manufacture in 2003. This is one of the cases of a one error after another — and then one too many. The Airbus took off from de Gaule Airport at 23:09 local on the night of 19th May 2016 - bound for Cairo. It never made it. At 2h30 UTC the plane disappeared from radar while flying at 37,000 feet in clear weather 280 kilometers north of Alexandria. Finally, the world learned the Egyptian pilots had indeed been battling a fire in the cockpit. It was this that had caused the plane to spiral and break up, not a bomb, and the Egyptians knew it all along. The French BEA had been brazenly colluding with the Egyptians and hiding the truth.Now for our second example, and its a dangerous dalliance with alcohol that tipped the balance from incident to accident. Aeroflot 821 Boeing crashed on 14 September 2008, on approach to Perm International Airport in Russia, at 5:10 local time - it was dark and cloudy. All 82 passengers and six crew members were killed. Among the passengers was Russian Colonel General Gennady Troshev, Vladimir Putin’s advisor and commander of the North Caucasus Military District during the Second Chechen War. But for once, Putin was not fingered in the suspicious death of a comrade which comes as a surprise. The Air Crash investigation unveiled a litany of bad habits.

Episode 40 is about maintenance blunders. Aviation is littered with a long list of these, sometimes it the failure of unofficial parts, sometimes its poor management, sometimes engineers who cut corners - and believe it or not, all three. Because the topic is vast, I’m going to return to this subject in future podcasts. In this episode we’re going to focus on ground crews replacing important components with non-certified parts and what happens to aeroplanes when you do that. Our first nomination - the 1949 Strato-Freight Curtiss C-46A crash into the ocean 10 kilometers west of San Juan-Isla Grande airport in Puerto Rico which killed 53 of the 81 people aboard. The plane was en route to Miami and what happened was not just a story of bad maintenance. Three days prior to the accident, on 4 June 1949 the Strato Freight C-46 arrived in San Juan from Newark, New Jersey for regular maintenance. Mechanics installed a new flap follow cable, then checked both engines and they noted the right engine was misfiring. Thirteen new spark plugs were installed, the engines cleared and the Curtiss C-46 D registration NC92857 was sent back to its routes. We’ll come back to the problem with the plugs in a moment. On 7 June the Curtiss was cleared for a flight to Miami, taxying to the runway at 00:10 a midnight flight. Cheaper flight and strike two was the crew overloaded the plane. There were 75 passengers aboard, including five infants, babes in arms, and 14 other children aged between 2 and 12. Captain Lee Howard Wakefield was in charge, also on board were Captain Alfred Cockrill — the company chief pilot and vice president of Strato-Freight. Copilots were John Connell and George Cary. Stewardess as they called them back in the day, was Judith Hale.Moving along to example two of flouting maintenance rules A Transat Flight 236 from Toronto to Lisbon scheduled August 24th 2001. Everyone survived this accident as you’ll hear. The Airbus A330 lost all engine power while flying over the Atlantic Ocean- all because of improper maintenance. This incident became known as the Azores Glider - it was the longest passenger aircraft glide without engines at that point, gliding for nearly 75 miles or 121 km As you’re going to hear, the flight crew made the situation worse although they apparently appeared to get a bad rap. Experienced pilot 48 year-old Captain Robert Piché was in command, first officer was 28 year-old Dirk DeJager. Piche had 16 800 hours with 796 on an Airbus, while DeJager had logged 4800 hours - 386 on an Airbus. The aircraft was registered as C-GITS configured with 362 seats and placed in service by Air Transat on April 28, 1999. It was powered by two Rolls-Royce Trent 772B-60 engines. Leaving the gate in Toronto, the aircraft had 46.9 tonnes of fuel on board, 4.5 tonnes more than required by regulations. So how did it run out of fuel?The third example of poor maintenance involved the British Airways Flight 5390 1990 event which is very well known, when an improperly installed windscreen blew out, causing the Captain Timothy Lancaster to be sucked partially out of the flight deck. Again, this was a matter of millimetres. First the events of 10th June 1990. The County of South Glamorgan was a BAC One-Eleven Series 528FL jet airliner, registered as G-BJRT, captained by 42-year-old Timothy Lancaster. He had 11,050 flight hours, including 1,075 hours on the BAC One-Eleven, while the first officer was 39-year-old Alastair Atchison who had logged 7,500 flight hours — 1,100 of them on the BAC One-Eleven. The aircraft carried four cabin crew and 81 passengers. Atchison flew what was called a routine take-off at 08:20 local time, then handed control to Lancaster as the BAC One-Eleven Series climbed. As was the habit at the time, both pilots released their shoulder harnesses and Lancaster went further, loosening his lap belt.

This is episode 39 and we’re looking at a horrendous accident, Saudia Airlines Flight 163, a Lockheed TriStar which was gutted in a blaze on the ground on 19th August 1980 - all 301 aboard died. The plane was registered in Saudi Arabia as HZ-AHK, and made its first first flight on 13 July 1979, and was delivered brand new to Saudia on 21 August 1979. Some say this is a classic case of cockpit resource management gone haywire, with the combination of an autocratic captain, a young and apparently undercooked first officer, and a flight engineer who had his own list of mysteries as you’re going to hear.Saudia Flight 163 was a scheduled passenger flight departing from Karachi, Pakistan, bound for Kandara Airport in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia with a stop planned at Riyadh International Airport. The majority of the passengers were Saudi and Pakistani religious pilgrims on their way to Mecca for a traditional Ramadan holiday, joined by 32 religious pilgrims from Iran. A small number of pax worked in diplomatic missions for various countries. The question was why the captain had not shut down all engines immediately.He may have prevented the flight attendants from initiating the evacuation by continuing to operate the engines after stopping the aircraft.

This episode we’re going to take a look at commercial airliners that have hit obstacles near runways and how three accidents in the small town of Elizabeth New Jersey in 1951 and 1952 led to rules about clear ways and re-zoning. It’s important though to stress how the rules have changed improving safety particularly with regard to clear ways. Take one of the the earliest which was the 1933 Imperial Airways Ruysselede incident on 30 December 1933 when an Avro Ten collided with a radio mast at the town of Ruysselede, West Flanders, Belgium and crashed killing all ten people on board. The Avro Ten's registration was G-ABLU, nickname Apollo, and had entered service with Imperial Airways in May 1931. Apollo the Avro Ten departed Cologne at 12:20 local time - 20 minutes later than scheduled. A thick fog hampered the flight, and the pilots headed out on a track to the north of the normal route. They appeared to be blissfully unaware of the threat that awaited. Less than an hour later at 13h15 the aircraft was cruising at 250 feet when it hit a guy wire of the 870 foot tall Ruysselede radio mast. The force of the strike demolished the top section of the mast and the Avro Ten lost a wing and crashed. Four workers at the radio station rushed to help those on board the aircraft, joined by local villagers from Ruysselede. At least one passenger survived the crash, but in a horrible moment, before they could save him, then there was an explosion and the aircraft burnt up despite valiant attempts by the rescuers to get to those on board all perished. Thirteen of the rescuers suffered serious burns they were so committed. It’s time now to take a closer look at three accidents in a small town called Elizabeth located close to New Jersey’s Newark International Airport that were going to change aviation regulations regarding zoning and clear ways amongst other rules. The first crash took place on December 16 1951, when a Miami Airlines flight from Newark to Tampa hit a warehouse in an industrial stretch of the Elizabeth River. All 56 passengers and crew died. Witnesses described seeing the Curtiss C-46 Commando plane belching smoke after take off. The plane lost altitude, swept low over Elizabeth CBD, stalled, and crashing into the warehouse — parts of the plane skidded through the building into the river Elizabeth. This second crash led Elizabeth Mayor James T. Kirk to demand that Newark Airport be closed, a move opposed by the Port Authority because of those two terminal illnesses called stupid politics and greed. But there was a third crash that was imminent - and strike three would change everyone's minds.

This is episode 37 and we’re dealing with bird strikes. The most famous of these was US Airways flight 1549 from New York City's LaGuardia Airport to Charlotte. Pilot Sully Sullenberger and first officer Jeffrey Skiles ditched the Airbus A320 in the Hudson River off Midtown Manhattan after a bird strike led to both engines failing - All 155 on board were rescued. This was known as the Miracle on the Hudson — but this episode is not going to focus on that miracle. What we’re going to do is cover some of the history of bird strikes and how there’s been a consistent attempt to deal with this challenge. Bird Strikes on aircraft go back to the earliest recorded heavy than air flights, as noted by Orville Wright in his diary in 1905 after a day on board the Wright Flyer over a cornfield in Ohio — " flew 4,751 meters in 4 minutes 45 seconds, four complete circles. Twice passed over the fence into Beard's cornfield. Chased flock of birds for two rounds and killed one which fell on top of the upper surface and after a time fell off when swinging a sharp curve.” Interesting to see that the earliest aviators were chasing birds instead of trying to avoid them, not a bird strike so much as a strike on the bird. In 1911 French Pilot Eugene Gilbert was flying his open-cockpit Bleriot XI in the Paris to Madrid Air Race over the Pyrenees when he was attacked by an angry mother eagle. I’m not sure about Standard Operating Procedure, but Gilbert was armed and opened fire on the eagle with his trusty pistol, but missed.The greatest loss of life directly linked to a bird strike took place on October 4, 1960, when an Eastern Air Lines Flight 375, Lockheed L-188 Electra, flying from Boston hit a flock of starlings during take-off, damaging all four engines. The aircraft crashed into Boston harbour killing 62 out of 72 passengers. This focused authorities on the dangers of bird strikes. This crash wasn’t only about avians, but poor maintenance because a pilots seat that slid backwards was cited as part of the litany of events that caused the plane to stall.Another bird-strike incident that was critical in the development of improved standards was the United Air Lines Flight 297 crash. It was a scheduled flight from Newark International Airport to Atlanta which plunged to the ground 10 miles southwest of Baltimore on November 23, 1962, killing all 17 people on board. Most accidents occur when a bird collides with the windscreen or is sucked into the engine of jet aircraft, annual damage estimated to be $400 million within the United States alone and up to $1.2 billion to commercial aircraft worldwide.

This is episode 36 and its icy cold out there - it’s time to check out the incidents involving icing - starting with a short list and general description of the causes, then focusing on the two Aeroflot Atonovs accidents in 1971 and a design fault in the ATR-72. There’s an unfortunately long list of commercial airliners lost due to icing, more than 540 accidents and events caused by aircraft icing by the late 1980s in the United States alone and most of these were fatal. Anti-icing and de-icing research can be traced back to the early 1930s and in 1948, two scientists, AG Preston and Calvin Blackman conducted the first successful iced flight experiment in which the drag coefficient increased by 81% when the wing was covered and the pilot reported the plane was almost beyond control. I’m not sure of what aircraft they used but the results were extraordinary. Other research by NASA on the DHC-6 Twin Otter aircraft measured various conditions and ice shapes and their effect on aircraft thrust, landing flaps, and angle of attack. It’s thought that the first recorded case of a commercial airplane accident caused by icing occurred on December 15, 1920 when a de Havilland DH.4 mail plane operated by the United States Post Office Department crashed near Belleville, Pennsylvania, in the USA due to ice accumulation on the wings and control surfaces.There was a happier end to another on 19th December 1946 where a Railway Air Service Douglas Dakota 3 stalled on take-off 1 km north-east of Northolt Airport in London. This was the case of the scheduled service to Glasgow Airport from London. Four crew and one passenger were on board .. Yes, you heard correctly, one passenger.So to matters more terminal if you excuse the extremely cheesy aviation pun. That be the highly unusual twin crashes of the Antonovs in 1971 both caused by ice accretion. ot Antonov An-12s crashed on approach to Surgut International Airport, just nine days apart. The crashes occurred under near-identical circumstances due to the aircraft type’s lack of preparedness for flying in severe icing conditions. It’s the formation of an ice ridge by water droplets beyond the ice protection system and one side anti-icing system that is likely to cause rolling and overturn according to research documents. A case in point of the ridge cause was an ATR-72 crash in 1994. At that time, the airplane was at a severe level of icing condition, and the co-effect of the electric heating de-icing system at the wing leading edge and the natural conditions formed an ice ridge on the second half of the wing, resulting in a negative pressure zone on the one side's aileron.

Episode 35 - The 1986 Aeromexico collision over L.A. that changed aviation by Desmond Latham

The British government was focused on making dirigibles the transport of choice in the 1930s - competing with the Germans to produce the largest, most luxurious and most convenient way to travel across its empire. In the summer of 1930 two variants were created, one designed by a government team known ironically as "the socialist" airship as it was a labour government, the other "the capitalist" because it was the brainchild of the Vickers company. But there were issues - It was already known that both the R100 and R101 were lacking in the enough lift originally planned at the outset of the Imperial Airship Scheme in 1925. So the engineers decided to stretch the airship and plonk in another airbag. This was to lead to a critical failure and the R101 crash in France as you'll hear.

We’re going to look at a few examples of trigger happy pilots and missile operators, starting with the 5th April 1948 Gatow Air Disaster over Berlin as the Cold War ramped up after the Second World War.   A British European Airways  Vickers VC.1B Viking airliner crashed near RAF Gatow air base, after a Soviet Air Force Yakovlev Yak-3 fighter aircraft flew into it from below.   All ten passengers and four crew on board the Viking were killed, as was the Soviet pilot. This incident is a warning to aviators in the contemporary world, witness the tension between Chinese and Taiwan, North and South Korea, near-misses above the Baltic, and less reported but as dangerous, incidents across the middle East.   First, 1948.   The Gatow Air Disaster was a mid-air collision that sparked an international incident between the USA, Britain and Russia – leading to heightened tensions and which escalated into what we know as the Berlin Blockade. That was a rather clumsy attempt by Joseph Stalin to force Europe to back down about the Marshall plan. So let’s take a look at some other examples of the military behaving badly.   On July 27, 1955, an El Al flight from Vienna Austria to Tel Aviv Israel blundered into Bulgarian airspace and was shot down by two MiG fighters.   All 58 people on board were killed. After initially denying involvement, Bulgaria admitted to having downed the aircraft. Despite occurring during a low point in relations between the Soviet bloc and the US and its allies, international fallout was minimal. Moving east, on July 23, 1954, mainland China's People's Liberation Army fighters shot down a Cathay Pacific Airways CA 54 Skymaster.   The plane was flying from Bangkok to Hong Kong when it was hit - 10 out of the 19 passengers and crew died. In apologizing for the attack to Britain days later, the Chinese government claimed they had thought the plane was a military aircraft from Taiwan which they presumed was on an  attack mission against Hainan Island.   Trouble spots include the Qatar and its neighbours, Turkey, North Korea, parts of East Africa, Yemen, China and Taiwan. That's quite a list.

A listener asked me to take a closer look at the crash of a Lear jet in 1999 that was carrying golfer Payne Stewart so here we are. Of all the crashes we’ve looked at this has to be one of the more frustrating and needs quite a bit of sleuthing. The main reason is the NTSB still has not published a final report and probably never will. The basic facts are not in dispute – it was a case of a plane decompression at high altitude. But how it happened is another matter. So let’s try and dig deep and discover what led to the death of one of the best known sportsmen in the United States. The basic story goes like this. On October 25, 1999 a Learjet 35 registration N47BA, operated by Sunjet Aviation based in Sanford, Florida departed Orlando, Florida, for Dallas, Texas, at around 0920 eastern daylight time (EDT). Radio contact with the flight was lost north of Gainesville, after air traffic control (ATC) cleared the airplane to flight level (FL) 390. The learjet was then intercepted by several U.S. Air Force and Air National Guard aircraft as it headed in a north west direction. The military pilots flew close enough to see that the windshields of the Learjet were frosted or covered with condensation. Later the airplane engines began spooling down, controlled flight was not possible, and the learjet stalled and spiralled to the ground, impacting an open field between the towns of Mila and Aberdeen in South Dakota just before 12h15 central daylight time on October 25th 1999. The NTSB scrutinised the maintenance logs and found a snag reported in February 1998 that the cabin occasionally would not hold pressure at low altitudes. Maintenance checked this on the ground but could not replicate the problem, so it wasn’t fixed. IN May 1999 Sunjet maintenance personnel were checked out as part of the Phase A1-6 inspection, which included pressurization system checks. All seemed fine once more. But it wasn’t. A Sunjet Aviation pilot reported to Safety Board investigators that a month later, July 22, 1999 during a flight in the very same Learjet, the pressurization system would not maintain a full pressure differential and that later the cabin altitude “started climbing well past 2,000 feet per minute” he said. When confronted by the NTSB, the Sunjet Aviation Chief pilot denied this, saying that he hadn’t noticed any differential. However, a July 23, 1999, Work Order discrepancy sheet 5895 noted the following: “Discrepancy: Pressurization check and operation of system.”

We’re focusing on Air Canada Flight 797 that developed and in-flight fire that turned into a conflagration after it landed and the doors were opened. 23 passengers burned to death of were asphyxiated in that terrible incident. The response to this was crucial to global aviation safety as it led to rules such as airline manufacturers having to ensure that planes could be evacuated inside 90 seconds, visible lights on the floor, smoke detectors on all flights, firefighting training for crew and the briefing passengers sitting in exit rows. Air Canada Flight 797 was an international passenger flight operating from Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport to Montréal–Dorval International Airport, with one stop at Toronto Pearson International Airport. It took off from Dallas Forth Worth international Airport at 16h25 local time on 2 June 1983, the plane was a McDonnell Douglas DC-9-32, registration C-FTLU. There was a single scheduled stop at Toronto International Airport, en route to Montreal's Dorval Airport. 51 year-old Donald Cameron was the Captain in charge, and had 13 000 hours flight time, 4 4939 in the DC-9 and had been flying with Air Canada since March 1966. First Officer Claude Ouimet was 34 and had flown for Air Canada since November 1973. He had 5,650 hours of flight time, including 2,499 hours in the DC-9, and had qualified as a DC-9 first officer in February 1979.

This is episode 30 and I am delighted to have special guest Jim Spaeth join us for this episode to talk about his experiences at TWA. His life intersected with a number of accidents and he had a unique view of events he’s going to describe working as a salesman, ticketing agent and senior manager at TWA. He’s written a book called Up, Up and Astray, Memoir of an airline bachelor during the golden age of Air Travel. Jim is a great story teller, and his eye for detail captures the background to some of the accidents I’ve already covered, particularly in the 1960s and 70s. We start with Jim arriving in Kansas City in 1964 where he has just found out he’d got his schedule wrong in his attempt at joining the police force and he’s wondering what to do next. Little did he know what aviation had in store for him.

We’re going to cover an example of what happens at low altitude when pilots activate the Take Off/Go Around or TOGA switch by mistake. When there’s turbulence and a lack of situational awareness, this can be deadly as you’ll hear. A number of aircraft recently have crashed because of pilots inadvertently activating this switch and I’m going to explain how this can happen if you’re not paying attention – and if the crew are prone to panic. One of the incidents involved a cargo flight – and Herman who’s an avid listener suggested I do a few cargo plane crashes for a number of reasons. While there are no passengers involved, or very few, sometimes the cargo itself is the danger, and in the case we’ll hear this episode, it is believed that was a failure to check the stated credentials of a commercial pilot could have exacerbated the situation that led to the crash involving a Boeing 767 flown by Amazon’s Prime Air. It never made it in on February 23rd 2019, the Boeing 767-375ER crashed on approach into Trinity Bay near Houston, killing two crew members and a pilot hitching a lift in the jump seat. It’s also the first crash involving a 767-375ER Cargo plane. As you’re going to hear, flight crew training issues at Atlas Air and across the U.S. commercial aviation industry have been implicated in this accident.

It was some trepidation that I’ve decided to eventually cover the Pan Am Flight 103 disaster over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988 which killed 259 passengers and crew as well as 11 people on the ground. Very few aviators or people interested in aviation are not aware of what happened to the Boeing 747 when a bomb loaded on board with other luggage blew up over Scotland. The shocking truths that were unearthed afterwards changed aviation forever. But Pan Am’s lax security also created the hole that the terrorists exploited. Two listeners in particular have prompted this episode, including Alison who was an 8 year-old living in Lockerbie when the plane came down. She has told me how the small community banded together despite their own loss and then extended their arms to help families of the victims. There is a great deal to cover so let’s dive straight in starting with the latest developments first. In December 2020, the United States announced charges against a Libyan suspected of making the bomb that blew up the Boeing over Lockerbie. Masud apparently allegedly carried out the attack on the orders of late Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi directly – although Gaddafi always denied that. Of course Gaddafi’s own luck ran out in 2011 during the Arab Spring uprisings when he was deposed, bayoneted and then shot. Live by the sword .. die by the sword they say – unfortunately he took his many secrets to the grave with him. The bombing led to many improvements in airline security, particularly how baggage was handled. A special session of the International Civil Aviation Organisation or ICAO council was held in February 1989 with improving airport security number one on the list. ICAO organization and powers were strengthened after this conference, and training rehashed. ICAO also implemented what’s known as the Convention on Marking Plastic Explosives. This lays out the rules for countries manufacturing explosives to mark them chemically in order for a bomb to be detected by sniffer dogs – and chemical analysis devices. There were many other improvements.

We’re focusing on the US-Bangla Airlines Flight 211 that came in too high and fast at Kathmandu Airport on 12th March 2018 then slid off the runway and burst into flames. 51 of the 71 on board died including both aircrew. Of all the accidents I’ve covered so far – this has to be one of the worst examples of cockpit resource management – it verges on a suicide flight particularly the last two minutes as you’re going to hear. There was an unusual and intense psychological undercurrent that caused this accident. We have all been in situations of stress while flying, but the emotional trauma on the flight deck was beyond reasonable. You’ll also feel some sympathy not just for the passengers killed by crew erratic emotional behaviour – but also First Officer 25-year-old Prithula Rashid the First women airline pilot hired by the Bangladeshi Airline. Her senior partner let her and the passengers down. This is another of those terrible stories of what ifs. It’s also an example of when a highly experienced pilot and an inexperienced pilot work together, coupled with cultural quirks.

This is episode 26 and we’re focusing on one of the most conspiracy-theory speckled accidents in history, the October 1986 crash of a Tupolev TU-134 jetliner that was carrying Mozamibican president Samora Machel. 37 of the 43 aboard died. To say that the accident is shrouded in controversy is a bit like asking if Vladimir Putin thinks he’s Catherine the Great. Affirm. This is one of those incidents where correlation does not prove causation unless of course you’re prone to conspiracy theories. A lot that could go wrong during a flight did on the Tupolev that day and it led to the death of a man who was a symbol of post-colonial rebellion. This amplified the conspiracy theory avalanche of course and has driven folks into paroxysms of perpetual pontification. The plane deployed to transport Mozambique’s president that October day was a Tupolev manufactured in 1980 – registration C9-CAA. It had flown about 1,100 flying hours since it rolled off the production line and had undergone its last major inspection in August 1984 in the Soviet Union. The number of flight crew on the deck was substantial and they were all Russian. The Tupolev operated with a crew of five, which on the night of 19th October 1986 included 48 year old Captain Yuri Viktorovich Novodran, co-pilot 29 year-old Igor Petrovish Kartamyshev, flight engineer 37 year-old Vladimir Novolesov, navigator 48 year-old Nikolaevich Kudryashov and 39 year-old radio operator Anatoly Shulipov. The crew was experienced in Africa aviation as had logged many landings at Maputo Airport both day and night. Judge Cecil Margo chaired the six member body and the hearings were public between January 20th and 26th 1987. He’d soon chair another investigation into the crash of South Afrcan Airways flight 295 in 1988 – the Heidelberg accident we heard about in an earlier episode. The Machel inquiry rapidly threw out any suggestion of a bomb causing the crash and found that the 37 degree turn was initiated by the navigator using the autopilot’s Doppler navigation mode. That’s crucial. He did so because he saw a VOR signal indicating that the aircraft had intercepted Maputo’s VOR 45 degrees radial which is its compass direction from Maputo which the crew needed to intercept in order to approach to land on runway 23.

This is episode 25 – and I’m going to take a closer look at the Pakistan international Airlines Crash in Katmandu in 1992 along with a Thai Airlines accident there a few week earlier. The Pakistan crash comes via a suggestion by a listener called Herman. Thanks for the chat the other evening and also a big thank you for your great suggestion Herman. But before then we’ll probe two other accidents in the Alps involving Air India planes – and they’re full of mystery and surprises – and a box full of gemstones. It’s unique that two aircraft from the same airline hit the same place – particularly in a completely different continent to their place of origin but that is what happened to Air India 101 a Boeing 707-437 nicknamed Kanchenjunga registration VT-DMN which hit the 15700 foot high Mont Blanc in 1966. The other was Air India Flight 245 which crashed roughly in the same place but years before in 1950. Then the Pakistan International Airlines Flight 268 - an Airbus A300, registration AP-BCP, which crashed while approaching Kathmandu's Tribhuvan International Airport on 28 September 1992. The final accident in this end of year bumper edition was the Thai Airways International Flight 311 which crashed north of Kathmandu and to be quite blunt this one was categorically one of pilot error.

This is episode 24 and comes courtesy of a suggestion by one of my listeners called Russell – surname withheld as he’s an operating commercial pilot. Don’t want to upset the corporation you know. First of all, a big thank you to Russell for the research documents and information provided. This has helped a great deal preparing for this episode. We’re looking at Terrain Awareness Warning Systems or TAWS and Ground Proximity Warnings Systems, GPWS – now with the added advantage of an E – Enhanced Ground Proximity Warning Systems. In 2006 the International Civil Aviation Organisation published a report which included this line “EGPWS / TAWS technology has entered airline and corporate operations during the last five years; to date no aircraft fitted with such a system has been involved in a CFIT accident. These systems are now mandated for all turbine engine aircraft of six or more seats.” That gives you some idea of how important these two bits of technology have been to aviators. Unfortunately there have been a few CFIT accidents despite this technology since then as you’ll hear later, but the point is safety overall has improved. So let’s go over a few examples which Russell has provided and some which ICAO analysed. As usual folks, this series is about how aviation safety improvements after accidents have led inexorably to flying being one of the safest ways to head from A to B and even C, D and E. Throughout the history of aviation, Controlled Flight into Terrain or CFIT has been a major cause of fatal accidents, particularly at night, poor visibility or when the crew become fixated by technical issues and forget to fly. One of the accidents that drove engineer Don Bateman to seek a solution was the Alaskan Airlines Flight 1866 accident of 1971. The other was American Airlines Flight 965 – a Boeing 757-223 from Miami International Airport to Cali in Columbia that crashed in mountains outside its destination in December 1995.

This is episode 23 and we’re dealing with flying boat accidents. You may be surprised to hear but one accident in particular involving an Imperial Airways flying boat in 1939 set in motion the use of specialised carb heaters for all aircraft. The safety inspector also recommended that all passengers should be instructed in the fastening of lifebelts and location of emergency exits as well as other lifesaving equipment like rafts become mandatory in aircraft flying over the ocean. So all those trips you’ve taken where the cabin crew point out the emergency exits and spend time showing you how to use a lifejacket can be directly linked to this one accident in 1939. Remember this series is really about aviation safety more than just a story about a crash. Discovering the cause of an accident usually implies a technical or human error which must not be repeated and much of what we’ve heard so far in the previous 22 episodes seeks to identify those moments. First a quick word about flying boats and amphibious aircraft. Frenchman Alphonse Pénaud filed the first patent for a flying machine with a boat hull and retractable landing gear in 1876, but Austrian Wilhelm Kress is credited with building the first seaplane Drachenflieger in 1898, although its two 30 hp Daimler engines were inadequate for take-off and it later sank when one of the two floats collapsed. A flying boat is not amphibious, just by the way. It’s an aircraft that has to land and take off using water with no fixed landing gear. It’s also different from a floatplane which has two or more slender floats mounted under the fuselage for buoyancy. A flying boat uses its fuselage as part of the buoyancy like a boat – thus flying boat.

This is episode 22 and we’re going to hear more about an accident in the skies over India that was the final push in the drive to deploy traffic collision avoidance systems known as TCAS. Initially we need to go back to the days days of commercial aviation in 1922. Unfortunately the first collision between aircraft took place almost immediately as commercial aviation launched in the same year as earlier aviators were ignorant about each other’s plans, altitude and track. They also spoke many different languages which also didn’t help. It took another 70 years before a system was introduced to ensure separation that was automated and computerised. Before then systems were developed that relied on accurate flying using the semi-circular rules. The basic tenet is that when flying a track between 0° and 179° or generally speaking, easterly, your flight level or altitude must be odd such as 030 or 050 and so on, but when you are on a track between 180° and 359° generally speaking .. westerly, your flight level or altitude must be even – for example 18000, 16000 feet and so on. There are other rules associated with this and whether you’re flying IVR or on Instruments. That is supposed to reduce the chances of planes colliding but it only works if the pilots are flying their planes at those levels. Sometimes pilots do break the levels – and at other times their instruments are faulty. On 12 November 1996 a Saudi Arabian Airlines Boeing 747 which had just taken off from Delhi in India en route to Dhahran collided with a Kazakhstan Airlines Ilyushin Il-76 en route from Chimkent to Delhi. The crash killed all 349 people on board both planes, making it the world's deadliest mid-air collision of all time and the deadliest aviation accident to take place in India. This was an example of a system that was used in a confusing way.

This is episode 21 and we’re taking a close look at the Mount Erebus disaster where an Air New Zealand McDonald Douglas DC-10 crashed on 28th November 1979, killing all 257 passengers and crew. At first it looked like straight pilot error - a CFIT or controlled Flight Into Terrain accident. But that would change as inquiries led to court cases. Of all the accidents I’ve described, this one has some of the most unfortunate set of circumstances and one of the most difficult recoveries afterwards of any aviation accident in history. Mount Erebus is on Ross Island part of the Antarctic archipelago and as you’ll hear, a juddge eventually called some evidence presented by Air New Zealand as "an orchestrated litany of lies" and which took 30 years before anyone at the airline formally apologised for that deceit. To say the court processes which took place were riven by bitterness and a distinct failure of leadership is pretty much an understatement. In fact, the phrase ‘an orchestrated litany of lies’ entered the Kiwi lexicon for some time and by the end of this episode I hope you’ll see why. The first aviation inquiry found pilot error caused the accident but then a Judge in a follow up investigation ruled the cause was incorrect data which had been knowingly left in a flight computer despite this error being reported. When a judge uses a phrase like conspiracy by senior management, then something has gone seriously wrong in terms of governance. But the legal wrangling didn’t end with the judge – there was an appeal then intervention by the privy council in London as New Zealand is a commonwealth state. So let’s go over the facts that are not in dispute. Flight 901 was marketed as a unique sightseeing experience where the passengers paid around $360 US Dollars each to be flown over Antarctica with an experienced guide who pointed out features and landmarks using the plane’s PA system. Some big names had been involved for example Sir Edmund Hillary had acted as a guide on flights and was actually supposed to be on board 901 that day in November 1979, but cancelled because he had other bookings. Unfortunately for long-time friend and climbing companion, Peter Mulgrew, he was available and stood in for the hero of Mount Everest. Mulgrew would never return from the Antarctic. The flight plan was complex compared to a normal commercial route. After the 5,360 miles from Auckland to the frozen south, the pilots would put the DC-10 into a series of low-flying sweeps out to the sea of McMurdo Sound or over the Ross Ice Shelf or both depending on time and the weather, then return home. There had been 13 previous flights which went off without serious incident and the whole concept had started two years earlier in 1977. It had become a great money-spinner for Air New Zealand, not to mention an excellent marketing tool. Come fly with Air New Zealand and see the world’s least visited Continent for a cool $359 New Zealand Dollars – which now set you back around $1300 US dollars. The flight left Auckland International Airport 8am on the morning of the 28th November and was due back at 7 that night. Usually flights would not be filled to capacity so that there would be space allowing passengers to walk about and get a better view of the incredible frozen continent from different places in the cabin. Cocktails would be served for the travellers as they clicked away on their cameras, many of whom would be puffing away on cigars and cigarettes. The aircraft that day was Air New Zealand’s McDonnell Douglas DC-10-30 trijet and the plane was registered ZK-NZP. It had logged more than 20,700 flight hours prior to the crash.

This is episode 20 and it’s all about helicopters. Thanks first of all to Martin Darlington who hosts History by Hollywood podcast and is a highly experienced helicopter pilot and instructor. He has agreed to help with the more technical aspects of helicopters as we probe two specific accidents and the improved safety that they helped bring about. It sounds counter intuitive to talk in positive terms about accidents but it is also true to say that most commercial crashes that have been properly investigated have led to improvements in safety. This episode will focus on two helicopter crashes. The first took place on 6 November 1986 when Chinook returning workers from the Brent oilfield crashed on approach to land at Sumburgh Airport in the Shetland Islands. Forty-three passengers and two crew members were killed in the crash; one passenger and one crew member survived with injuries – the captain. The second was the Chinook crash in June 1994 that was carrying 25 senior intelligence experts which went down on the Mull of Kintyre on the west coast of Scotland. Leading security personnel from the Royal Ulster Constabulary, MI5 and the Army died, alongside the crew. They had been travelling to a security conference in Inverness, just two months ahead of the 1994 IRA ceasefire. The fact that high level intelligence officers were involved including members who were involved in Ireland has intrigued investigators and conspiracy-mongers since then. Our expert Martin has some good ideas about what happened there and we’ll tap his immense knowledge about helicopters to get more information in the second half of the podcast.

It was Australia that initiated the mandatory installation of cockpit voice recorders after an accident in 1960, while we’ll also probe a mid-air collision involving United Airlines and Trans World Airlines aircraft over New York in the same year. That led investigators to call for more information when accidents were being analysed. So let’s find out more about how these two crucial bits of tech ended up in all commercial aeroplanes and helicopters. The flight data recorder or (FDR) preserves the recent history of the flight through the recording of dozens of parameters collected several times per second; the cockpit voice recorder (CVR) preserves the recent history of the sounds in the cockpit, including the conversation of the pilots. The two devices may be combined in a single unit. Together, the FDR and CVR objectively document the aircraft's flight history, which may assist in any later investigation if there is an accident. They are built tough – capable of withstanding in impact of 3400 Gs and temperatures of over 1000 degrees centigrade. As I explained in the episode analysing the disappearance of MH370 there are now moves to have live streaming of data to the ground and an agreement to increase the battery life when a plane ends up lost over the ocean. The first example of a Flight Data Recorder is actually pretty old, dating back to 1939 when Frenchman Franscois Hussenot built something called the TYPE HB flight recorder. IN his machine, photographic film was used which scrolled along recording the main flight information such as speed, altitude and position. Another form of Flight Data Recorder was developed in the UK during the Second World War when Len Harrison and Vic Husband built a sturdy device that could withstand a crash and a fire and keep the data intact. In this case, they used copper foil as a recording system – a bit like the early phonographic recordings. But it took a Finnish engineer by the name of Veijo Hietala to introduce his black box called Mata Hari in 1942. She was a famous spy during the first world war, naturally his machine collected intel in a way. This box was used in Fighter aircraft test production. Voice recorders were first tried by the United States also during the Second World War. In August 1943 the United States Airforce use magnetic wire to capture the inter-phone conversations on board a B-17 bomber crew flying a mission over Nazi-occupied France. The broadcast was then fed back to the US by radio two days later. So the idea was nothing new and yet aviation authorities did not move on the concept for another two decades after the Second World war. That’s despite a number of commercial aircraft going missing. Indulge me as I go through a list.

This episode we’ll probe the Tenerife disaster on 27 March 1977 which remains the most deadly aviation accident in history. 583 people died when two Boeing 747s collided on the Canary Island of Tenerife - one operated by KLM and the other by Pan Am. This led to a major aviation safety initiative the known as Cockpit Resource Management or CRM which is now part of pilot training where combined crew input is encouraged and the captain can be questioned. It also led to other changes in communication methodology between planes waiting to take off and the tower as well as setting English as the language of aviation. The problem with CRM is that it comes up against different cultures in the world, where the decisions by the strong man in charge are generally not contradicted. This is thought to be behind the accident in Pakistan during Covid-19 lockdown in May 2020 where authorities say not only was CRM ignored by the senior pilot, he also apparently tried to land an Airbus at 240 knots – well over its recommended landing speed. Back to Tenerife 1977 – an incident which still shocks those who hear the details for the first time. There were no survivors from the KLM aircraft and only 61 of the 396 passengers and crew on the Pan Am aircraft survived. Pilot error was the primary cause, as the KLM captain began his take-off run without obtaining air traffic control clearance in extremely dense fog. But as you’ll hear, there is more to this story. The conversation between PanAm, KLM and the ATC was peppered with confusing messages. Other contributing factors were a terrorist incident at Gran Canaria Airport on a separate island that had caused many flights to be diverted to Los Rodeos, a small airport on the island of Tenerife not well equipped to handle aircraft of such size arriving together. This increased the stress on the Air Traffic Controller and mistakes were bound to be made. The Canary Islands are infamous among pilots for the extreme wind and weather conditions that spring up on this archipelago off the coast of Africa in the Atlantic Ocean. The weather was to play a major role in this catastrophe.

This episode explores an accident at a time of Covid-19 – which may be too recent to have a direct effect on civil aviation safety and yet the causes appear to be directly linked to poor Cockpit Resource Management otherwise known as crew resource management. It has caused many an incident and accident, unfortunately. The Pakistan crash which took place in May in Karachi is also a warning about how airlines go about restarting their services after a lengthy shutdown. Flying is not like riding a bicycle. It has also led to immediate suspension of Pakistan International Airlines landing rights in the EU after shocking details emerged about systematic Airline Transport Pilot License exam cheating along with other cases of corruption. So the main point is an Airbus A320 crashed into heavily populated suburban area of Karachi in Pakistan on May 22nd 2020. Flight 8303 was a scheduled domestic flight from Allama Iqbal International Airport in Lahore to Jinnah International Airport in Karachi. The plane went down in a residential area near the Airport a few days after Pakistan lifted restrictions imposed over the coronavirus pandemic and resumed domestic flights ahead of the major Muslim holiday of Eid al-Fitr. Amazingly, two on board survived – both in Business class while at least one person on the ground died - a 13 year-old girl. As I said, Crew Resource Management failures appear to be behind this crash at least from the initial reports published in Pakistan. Crew Resource Management is also known as cockpit resource management. One of my instructors used to chatter to me during important phases of flight and I had to say “sorry Russell, I need to report our position” or reset instruments and he would smile in a knowing way. Cockpit resource management includes knowing when its time to shut up or shut you fellow pilot up and concentrate extra 100 percent on the job at hand. Landing an aircraft is one of those crucial moments. But when did Crew Resource Management start as a thing? The first person to talk about human interaction on the flight deck was a BOAC captain David Beaty who was a former Royal Air Force pilot. He wrote a book - The Human Factor in Aircraft Accidents in the late 1950s. It became part of the United Airlines pilot training handbook following the crash of a DC-8 in 1978 and eventually was recommended for all pilots by the National Transportation Safety Board. That was after a United Airlines Flight 173 crashed in Portland Oregon on December 28th 1978.

This episode is fraught because we just don’t know what happened to Malaysian Flight MH370 and many pilots would say any sort of scientific conclusion is going to be a jump to a conclusion. However, I am going to take you through this event again and describe what the likely scenario was on that terrible morning back in 2014. Part of what we do as aviators is to know the truth about risk, then act accordingly. In this case, we have some truths and then, we have deception. Unfortunately I am going to explain how the deception involved aviation officials in Malaysia who treated both the Chinese and their own citizens shoddily after flight MH370 disappeared. This compounded an already difficult situation. As I have previously outlined, Malaysia’s aviation sector is a seething mass of government interference, full of patriarchs who appear to worry more about losing face than losing passengers. Malaysia suffers from what we call cadre deployment, those ruling party-linked relatives of someone in power who is dropped into a scientific endeavour with not the first clue about how aeroplanes work, nor how they should apply themselves within the sector. Then when things go wrong they think shutting down the truth makes sense – which is the direct opposite of how to fix a broken system. This is not aimed at citizens of the beautiful country of Malaysia, rather its aimed directly at ramshackle nature of how aviation has been managed in the country. I will show you how in the case of MH370 a distinct lack of understanding about crucial issues like prompt action, search and rescue, technical descriptions about how aeroplanes work, was worsened by a fraternity of yes-men who basically preferred deliberate obfuscation when they were confronted by bereaved relatives .

This is episode 15 and its all about unusual accidents including one that most likely involved a crocodile. But let’s start with what was called the first ever jetliner crash in 1953.That was an incident involving a de Havilland DH-106 Comet 1A registration CF-CUN operated by Canadian Pacific Airlines at Karachi-Mauripur RAF Station (OPMR) in Pakistan. The plane was a scant two months old when it crashed on take-off carrying eleven people, five crew and 6 passengers. The Comet aircraft was named "Empress of Hawaii" and was being delivered to Canadian Pacific Air Lines. The operator planned to use Comet to start a service between Sydney in Australia and Honolulu in Hawaii. ON April 28th 1953 it was being flown to Sydney after the flight crew had completed Comet Jet conversion training in the United Kingdom. It’s next phase of the long haul was supposed to be a hop from Karachi to Singapore. Another example of pilot error that has led to thousands of pages of legal documents changing hands was an accident on 27 August 2006 involving a CRJ-100ER jet operating as a Delta Connection Comair Flight 5191 scheduled to fly between Lexington in Kentucky and Atlanta in Georgia. The issue here was two runways side by side – but they are not parallel. Runway 22 and Runway 26. What that means is that they face 220 degrees, which is South West, and 260 degrees – which is west south west. This had confused pilots before, and was particularly confusing at night. The signage was also not satisfactory. Finally one of the more bizarre accidents in 2010 at Bandundu in the Democratic Republic of the Congo which involved a crocodile. The aircraft was a 1991-built Let L-410 Turbolet, registration 9Q-CCN. On 25 August 2010, the jet Filair crashed on approach to Bandundu Airport in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, killing all but one of the 21 people on board. The aircraft had been operated as a round-robin domestic flight from Kinshasa the DRC capital, and doing a milk run stopping at Kiri, Bokoro, Semendwa and finally Bandundu. At 13:00 local time while on final approach to Bandundu Airport, the aircraft crashed into a house 1 kilometre short of the runway.

This is episode 14 and I was expecting to continue with the planned series but I’m afraid the world has changed in the last few weeks. Needless to say, if anything has to be done right now, it’s to understand what may happen to commercial aviation in the future. Some airlines are close to bankruptcy, others are being bailed out. Most have cut back on operations and are considering their next moves. There is a lot of politics, a lot of economics and not a lot of physics happening other than gravity dragging the revenue curve sharply downwards. Let’s see if we can make sense of what is going on internationally and in the next few minutes in this podcast, I’m going to make an effort not to inflate an already disastrous situation by too many adverbs or pronouns. Words like catastrophe, apocalyptic or disastrous. As aviation is all about numbers, we need to take a close look at the sector and understand just who may survive and who may not. Because commercial aviation is literally the lifeblood of modern business, flying globally is going to continue after this virus has been defeated. However things are not going to be business as usual after the pandemic passes. I’ve been attending webinars where IATA – the International Air Travel Association – has been briefing us about the latest in the Corona-virus affected aviation sector. I’ve been reading the professional pilots rumour network and receiving daily updates from various aviation sources, along with the Official Aviation Guide or OAG. My own flying has been cut. I’m grounded as here in South Africa we are on a strictly enforced lockdown and most domestic flights have stopped, while all international flights in and out have been shut down entirely.

Unfortunately this week we have an example of where safety was improved over the decades – but the growing tension in the world appears to have reversed some of the gains made. This is largely because of trigger-happy military personnel. Most passengers are blissfully unaware of just how close many commercial airliners have come to being shot down in the recent past, let alone during World Wars. This week we deal with the relatively recent shooting down of Ukraine Airlines SR 752 by the Iranian military. First a few examples of commercial airliners being shot out of the sky. As I mentioned briefly in an earlier podcast, the first known example was on 24 August 1938 during the Second Sino-Japanese War when a DC-2 known as the Kweilin operated by China National Aviation Corporation (CNAC) was forced down by Japanese Aircraft inside Chinese territory just north of Hong Kong. The DC-2 was carrying 18 passengers and crew. Apparently all survived the emergency water landing, but not the follow up strafing run by the Japanese pilots. Fifteen died. The next reported commercial airliner shot down was the Kaleva OH-ALL incident on 14th June 1940- a civilian transport and passenger Junkers Ju 52-3/mge) operated by the Finnish carrier Aero O/Y. This time is was shot down by two Soviet Ilyushin DB-3 bombers while en route from Tallinn, Estonia, to Helsinki, Finland. The Soviet Soviet DB-3s bombers opened fire with machine guns and badly damaged Kaleva, causing it to ditch in water a few kilometers northeast of Keri lighthouse. All seven passengers and two crew members on board died. In episode three of this series, I explained how Malaysian Airlines Flight MH17 was brought down by a Soviet-made Buk surface to air missile. All 283 passengers and 15 crew on board the Boeing 777-200 ER died when the missile hit the plane near Donetsk in the Eastern Ukraine. It was fired by separatist rebels who’d been using an older model Buk missile which was promptly wheeled back into Russia after the case of mistaken identity. And that brings us directly to the 8th January 2020 Ukraine International Airlines flight 752 Boeing 737-800 that was shot down by Iran’s armed forces shortly after take-off from Tehran’s Imam Khomeini International Airport, killing all 176 people on board. Initially, Iran denied responsibility suggesting an engine had blown up. Eventually on 11 January, three days after the incident, Iran said it unintentionally shot down the commercial airliner mistaking it for a hostile target. For a start, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard was extremely jittery because they had fired dozens of missiles at American bases in Iraq only a few hours before. That was in response to General Qassim Suleimani being killed by an American Drone in Iraq in late 2019.

We are deviating from our flight plan – last episode I said we would be covering Ukraine Air flight 752 shot out of the air by Iranian missiles killing all 176 on board. However, there is now a major crisis that has thrown most aviation companies into chaos and its called the Coronavirus. The logic behind this series is to reflect on how crashes improve safety – in this case I will explain how the 2003 SARS virus has led to some improvements in how aviation authorities deal with an epidemic and a pandemic. There is now also growing concern about the role of aviation in facilitating the spread of the coronavirus which goes by the name of 2019-nCoV particularly since the World Health Organisation listed it as a global emergency in the last week of January 2020. I’ve decided to dedicate this episode to covering this story as it develops, as it is going to cause massive losses for airlines and may even change how we travel. By the end of January 43 airlines had cancelled some or all flights into China in response to the spread of the coronavirus. The United States State Department issued a warning to citizens not to travel to China, as consumers were already avoiding travel there even when flights were available. A study by the University of Florida in January 2020 found that 19 percent of Americans have already changed bookings on travel plans in the next three months because of the virus, and another 52 percent said they are now worried about international travel. By February 2020 most of the world’s main airlines have pulled the plug on direct flights to and from China. While the Beijing government desperately tries to cope with an outbreak of a highly infectious disease thought to be linked to one of it’s cities Wildlife market – the rest of the world is preparing for what could make the outbreak of the SARS virus in 2002/3 and the Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) look like a walk in the park in comparison. There are two main reasons for this analysis. First, the coronavirus can remain hidden and yet carriers are infectious for up to two weeks when symptoms develop. That means no symptoms of the virus, which include high temperature, bronchial infections and other flu-like symptoms can be observed by airport temperature scanners while passengers are actually infecting other travelers. The second and extremely serious phenomenon which makes this different, is that there is now proof of human to human transmission.

This episode covers the terrifying examples of fire on board commercial airliners. One of the first was the Imperial Airways Armstrong Argosy II incident in Dixmude Belgium in 1933 where a fire thought to have been started by a passenger attempting to commit suicide caused the plane to crash killing all 15 on board. It was the deadliest accident at that point in the history of British civil aviation. It is also thought to be one of the first airliner ever lost due to sabotage. When you hear the story, perhaps you’ll agree with the findings at the time during the investigation. Everything centred around one passenger, by the name of Albert Voss, who was seen to jump from the aircraft as it came down over the Belgian countryside. Imperial's London–Brussels–Cologne route had been flown since 1928. But on the 28th March 1933 the plane was travelling from Brussels to London taking it over the northern Flanders region before crossing the coast for the 50 mile flight across the English Channel. It was delayed and eventually took off at 12.30 in the afternoon. While flying over Flanders, onlookers saw flames burst from the fuselage, before the aircraft lost altitude and plunged to the ground. As the Armstrong Argosy biplane slipped from the sky, a passenger was seen falling from the rear – someone had jumped. Another example of an accident that was caused by crew actions combined with a design fault was the United Airlines Flight 608 Douglas DC-6 on 24 October 1947. The four engine plane, registration NC37510, was on a scheduled passenger flight from Los Angeles to Chicago when it crashed just before 12.30 in the afternoon southeast of Bryce Canyon Airport, Utah, United States. 5 crew and 47 passengers died – all on board. It was also the deadliest air crash in the United States aviation history at the time and caused by a fire on board. Sometimes lateral thinking by pilots can be fatal if operating procedure is flouted. One of these lateral thinkers was the pilot of Swissair Flight SR306, a Sud Aviation SE-210 Caravelle III, which was a scheduled international flight from Zürich to Rome, via Geneva. His decisions which flew in the face of standard operating procedure doomed his passengers and crew unfortunately. The Sud-Aviation SE 210 crashed near Dürrenäsch, Aargau, on September 4, 1963, shortly after take-off, killing all 80 people on board. Another example of crew error which led to a fire took place near Toronto, Canada, on the 7th May 1970 where an Air Canada McDonnell Douglas DC-8 exploded after leaking fuel ignited – 109 on board died. This was an example of pilot error, but also a confused use of spoilers which are designed to slow an aircraft down rapidly. It was the misuse that led directly to a fire and explosions as you’ll hear. Had the crew followed the check list this accident would not have happened, as is the case with so many disasters. Captain Peter Hamilton and First Officer Donald Rowland had flown together before this terrible incident – but they seemed out of kilter when it came to exactly when to arm the spoilers. The check list indicated the spoilers should have been armed at the beginning of the final approach. Yet hoth agreed they’d arm the spoilers in the middle of the landing flare when the engines were throttled back and the plane was close to the runway. The final example in this episode is of South African Airways flight 295 probably one of the more mysterious in-flight fires where the cause has never been identified. It is known as the Helderberg disaster in South Africa.

In this episode we’ll look at in-air breakups of aeroplanes – caused by poor flying, poor design, or poor maintenance and bad weather. In some cases all four of these together. However as with all things aviation, every accident leads to an equal and opposite reaction .. to misquote the great Sir Isaac Newton. That reaction luckily for us, is called Aviation safety standards. The terrible truth is that people die and then safety improves. So let’s start with the 32 year-old Charles Rolls. He was one half of the great Rolls-Royce engine company but his end was rather unfortunate. Probably the most famous of all in-air break ups involved the notorious de Havilland Comet. It took three catastrophic failures all within a year before the airliner was grounded. Launched by BOAC in 1952, the Comet was the world’s first jet airliner and was an attractive plane too. Aviation buffs swooned over its swept back look, the modern jet liner was born and it could fly right across the Atlantic without a stop. However, it had a serious flaw. The windows and doors. One of the most incredible in-air failures ended with almost everyone surviving. In April 1988, part of the fuselage of an Aloha 737 flying from Hilo to Honolulu shredded at 24,000ft. A flight attendant was swept overboard – everyone else survived. Imagine sitting in the open air with nothing between them and the ocean except for a safety belt. That may be so, but it took a 1991 accident to kick start a proper global culture of aviation safety. The mid-air break up of the Continental Express Flight 2574 – an Embraer 120 Brasilia, was a scheduled domestic passenger airline flight operated by Britt Airways from Laredo International Airport in Laredo, Texas, to Houston Intercontinental Airport or IAH in Houston, Texas. A break-up of a plane over Peru deserves special mention at this point. As you’ll hear in this series, there are many examples of a single person surviving a plane crash. And this is one of them. Today we hear about the extraordinary story of Juliane Koepcke. She was 17 years old and sitting in the window seat next to her mother on board a Lansa Aircraft flight 508 from Lima in Peru to Pucallpa in the middle of the Amazon Rain Forest. There’s another I have to mention and it involved something known as Clean Air Turbulence which led to an in-air breakup of a commercial airliner. In the case of BOAC flight 911 callsign Speedbird 911, clean air turbulence produced an estimated 7.5Gs that caused the Boeing to disintegrate over Mount Fuji in Japan on 5th March 1966. Clean Air turbulence will be covered in a future podcast, but needless to say there’s no warning. All 113 passengers and 11 crew perished.

This week it’s the terrible crashes involving the Boeing 737 MAX 8 – one in October 2018 and the other in March 2019. In both cases an automated trim called the Movement Characteristics Augmentation System is believed to have been behind the accidents. The story is also a shocking failure by the Federal Aviation Authority in managing a crisis, as well as serious questions of governance at Boeing. While the accident reports are awaited, there is enough information from both FAA and Boeing itself to cover this as an example of poor design, poor safety management, and poor oversight – particularly when it comes to risk analysis. Since the accidents Boeing has announced a slew of changes to its quality control process, including the announcement in September that a new Safety Committee was being created led by Boeing veteran Beth Pasztor. Too little too late for 346 people. Boeing has also split the role of CEO and chairman of the Board which is a bit like closing the barn door after the horse has bolted but at least its beginning to take action internally. Boeing has built a name around allowing pilots to fly their planes, whereas competitor Airbus designs their planes around full fly-by-wire automation, but back in the mid 2000s something radical happened at the American plane manufacturer. This podcast looks at a story that has saddened many in the aviation sector. The oldest aircraft manufacturer is now under pressure legally and ethically.

This episode features an air crash in 1985 is the deadliest single-aircraft plane crash in history where 520 of the 524 passengers and crew died. Remarkably, 4 survived - all women. But this is also a story where the number of survivors could have been higher had the Japanese rescuers hit the ground earlier. As you’ll hear, authorities were alerted about the whereabouts of the crashed plane early by American military search and rescue, but then presumed all on board had died and delayed a rescue attempt until the next day. Japan Airlines Flight 123 servided an unusual route, although using a Boeing 747SR – which means Short Range. It was a domestic Japan Airlines passenger flight from Tokyo's Haneda Airport to Osaka International Airport, Japan. On August 12, 1985. During the flight, the Boeing suffered a sudden decompression twelve minutes into the flight and then crashed later into the area near Mount Tagamagahara, around 100 kilometers from Tokyo. A faulty repair by Being technicians was blamed and as we’ll see, a number of recommendations were made by the United States Federal Aviation Authority afterwards concerning Boeing’s maintenance and repairs.

Strap in this week, because its all about lightning. We’re looking at one crash in particular, the Lovettsville Air Disaster which took place on August 31 1940 near the town of Lovettsville in Virginia, the United States. There were 21 passengers and 4 crew on board and all 25 died in the accident, including U.S. Senator Ernest Lundeen from Minnesota. As you’ll hear, his death was regarded as extremely sinister because he was under FBI investigation at the time. But we’ll get to that in a while. The plane was a brand new Douglas DC-3A operated by Pennsylvania Central Airlines. It was flying through an intense thunderstorm at 6,000 feet en route from Washington to Detroit. The journey for the doomed passengers and crew had started in Washington and there was a planned stopover in Pittsburgh but the plane took off late due to thunderstorm activity around Washington. Numerous witnesses reported seeing a large flash of lightning shortly before it nosed over and plunged to earth in an alfalfa field. With limited accident investigation tools at the time, it was at first believed that the most likely cause was the plane flying into windshear, but the Civil Aeronautics Board report concluded that the probable cause was a lightning strike. "Trip 19", as it was designated, was under the command of Captain Lowell V. Scroggins with First Officer J. Paul Moore. The pilot and copilot had over eleven thousand and six thousand hours experience respectively, although only a few hundred of those hours were on DC-3s. A new airline employee was flying in the third seat between the two pilots called the jump seat. He’d only just been hired on August 26th.

It’s time for that terrible acronym – CFIT – which means Controlled Flight into Terrain. That’s where the pilot is unable to see the terrain for whatever reason, and believes that he or she is higher than they are, or somewhere else, or the equipment on board has failed and altitude readings are wrong. This often happens unfortunately when a let down is being flown – which is a technique that allows a pilot to pass hills and other obstructions before they are let down to a low altitude. There are few other reasons for controlled flight into terrain, including suicide which was the case with the infamous German wings accident of 2015 where mentally unhinged First Officer locked the captain out of the cockpit and proceded to fly a packed Airbus A320-211 into a Swiss mountainside. All 144 passengers and crew were killed in what was not pilot error – it was pilot suicide. One of the earliest examples that led to changes in training took place on 7th August 1946 on the Mistberget Mountain in Norway. It involved British European Airways Flight 530, which was a Douglas C-47 Skytrain. Three of the five crew on board died, but 10 passengers survived. It’s known as the Mistberget Accident. A few months later another CFIT accident took place in Switzerland involving a C-53 Skytrooper passenger variant of the Douglas DC-3 on the 18h November 1946. This is an important event and had multinational repercussions and also led to the turning point in alpine rescue.

I’m your host and pilot, Desmond Latham. Every week we tackle a different area of aviation and this week it’s the history of hijackings. The first ever hijacking of a commercial plane took place on the 16th July 1948. It involved a Catalina Seaplane owned by Cathay Pacific and operated by subsidiary Macau Air Transport Company registered in Hong Kong. At that time Hong Kong was still a British Territory. And ironically the plane that took off from the sea was going to be affected by what was called piracy originally. The struggle between the Nationalists and the Communists was in full flow – the civil war reverberated around the region and law and order had collapsed in many parts of China. The Miss Macao, as the seaplane was called, was on a routine flight from Macau to Hong Kong. In 1948 Macao was a Portuguese territory. But it never made it to the rapidly growing metropolis of Hong Kong. The plane was hijacked a few minutes after take-off by four men, three armed with guns, one of whom demanded that the pilot surrender the controls. Just to add to the crazy scenario – he was from Mexico but was not Mexican. The pilot, an American by the name of Dale Warren Cramer, refused to hand over control to the hijackers and at that moment his co-pilot attacked one of the intruders with a flag-post rod. In the confusion, Cramer was shot dead, and collapsed onto the flight controls. The plane went into an uncontrolled dive and crashed into the sea. Miraculously one person survived by jumping out of the emergency exit as the plane hit the ocean. Unfortunately it was one of the hijackers although in a sense some would say its fortunate that at least someone survived to tell the story. Twenty-five of the twenty-six people aboard died in the crash. Through this series you’re going to hear how often one person survives – and its more often than you think.

This week we’ll feature two accidents from the early 1920s that changed rules. The first is a mid-air collision that took place in April 1922 over Picardie in France, and the second was the response to an investigation into a crash of a passenger plane flying between London and Manchester in England. As we’ll hear, both led to new air regulations and rules that we still use today including a rule of keeping to the right, the introduction of air routes and the other allowing for transparency in reporting of accidents. In the section at the end of this podcast The History of... I’ll cover the concepts of keep to the right, how air routes work, and transparency in aviation. But first, let’s head back to 1922 and France. Flying was in its infancy after the first world war, and 1922 was an exciting time to be alive. Pilots were the astronauts of their age and were idolised and the rich and famous began to use these wonders of modern invention, the aeroplane. Folks had survived the first world war and then the massive influenza epidemic afterwards that killed 17 million people so the second decade of the 20th century became known as the Roaring Twenties. The music was effervescent and the parties were wild. Jazz and ragtime music was in the dance halls and the advent of radio and ready availability of phonograph records meant even those in remote locations were listening to the latest music, very much as they do today. But in 1922 it was considered a unique time, openness, freedom, growth and technical developments like heavier than air machines. Aviators were trying to break new records every month and no one had flown across the Atlantic Ocean – yet. Public dance halls, clubs, and tea rooms opened in the cities. Strangely named black dances inspired by African style dance moves, like the shimmy, turkey trot, buzzard lope, chicken scratch, monkey glide, and the bunny hug were adopted by the general public. The cake walk, developed by slaves as a send-up of their masters' formal dress balls, became the rage. White audiences saw these dances first in vaudeville shows, then performed by exhibition dancers in the clubs. And of course, in France these gained traction quickly. That’s what drew two of the passengers on board the French biplane involved in this terrible accident. American couple, Christopher Bruce Yule and the new Mrs. Mary Yule, were on their honeymoon and had travelled to France for a romantic holiday. They boarded the French aeroplane known as the Farman F.60 Goliath registration F-GEAD piloted by M Mire at Le Bourget and were looking forward to landing in Croydon airport near London. Little did they know their special honeymoon flight would end in tragedy.

Every week we delve into the causes and repercussions of plane crashes across the world and how these have led to improved aviation safety over time. This week its the shooting down of Malaysian Airlines MH17 which was hit by a Russian Buk missile (SA-11) while flying at 33 000 feet over the eastern Ukraine in July 2014. While Moscow has denied its air-to-ground missile systems were involved, an investigation by Dutch and independent journalists has found otherwise as I'll explain. I have also used phone recordings made at the time where separatists discussed the fact they had mistaken the MH17 Boeing for an Antonov military aircraft. The killing of 298 passengers and crew remains the most deadly crash of its type in history. But it also led to airlines taking a more active approach to the diversion of air routes. At the end of this week's podcast in our History Of section I'll track some of the incidents starting in 1938 where commercial planes were targeted.

This is the series that tracks air disasters through history and how each has led directly to the safety we almost take for granted every time we climb aboard an airliner. Last week it was the story of the first recognized commercial air crash involving a dirigible over Chicago in July 1919 that killed 13 people, three on board and 10 on the ground. That led to new no-fly rules over city central business districts. This week we have jumped forward to the crash of Air France 447 which took place in June 2009. Two hundred and twenty eight crew and passengers were on board. None made it out alive. A crucial piece of equipment malfunctioned leading to incorrect decisions being made by the air crew. The piece of equipment is called the Pitot tube. At the end of this episode I’ll update the Short History of section with more details about the background to the PITOT tube. Pitot tubes are amazingly simple yet vital hardware and you can find these on all aircraft, big or small. It’s linked to pressure-sensitive instruments and used to determine airspeed, altitude, and rate of climb or how fast a plane is climbing or sinking. Modern airliners have more than one, but that didn’t make any difference in the early morning hours of June 1st 2009. Air Airbus A330-203 registration F-GZCP took off from Rio de Janeiro at on May 31st 2009 routing to Paris. Because the duration of the flight was more than 10 hours, there were 3 crew which meant each could take a break. The flight's captain was Marc Dubois, while the co-pilots were Pierre-Cédric Bonin and David Robert.[12] There were 9 cabin crew onboard and 216 passengers. Unfortunately for all on board, the first sign of poor aviating that night a severe chain of thunderstorms appeared in the inter tropical convergence zone, the area north and south of the equator which registers cumulo nimbus based storms that can rise to nearly 50 000 feet which is higher than any airliner flies. No large commercial airliner can fly that high.

This series called Plane Crash Diaries is really about how safe aviation has become. This sounds like a contradiction, but its through the experience of more than a century of commercial aviation that experts have been able to build an extremely safe sector in the 21st Century. Decades of improving safety and regulations as well as operating procedures have led to a form of transport that is now regarded as crucial to the development of the world economy. There are more than 2,000 airlines operating more than 23,000 aircraft at 3,700 airports around the world. These airlines serve a total of more than 3.5 billion passengers a year or about 96,000 passengers a day. The commercial aircraft industry has been growing at 5% per year over the past 30 years and is expected to double over the next decade. This is success in anyone’s book. With all those planes flying about, safety is paramount and has been since the early days of aviation. Consider how many aircraft are flying compared to the number of incidents and you’ll agree that aviation is surely one of the safest methods of getting around in the modern world. But it wasn’t always like that. Each accident that has taken place since the first heavier than aircraft commercial aviation began after the First World War has led to improved standards. So in this series we’ll track these accidents from across the one hundred years since the first was logged. That was on July 21st 1919 when a GoodYear blimp the Wingfoot Express, crashed into the Illinois Trust and Savings Building in Chicago. Thirteen people died – three of the five on board the dirigible and ten others on the ground. The accident led to new regulations eventually about how high aircraft should fly above congested city centres. As a pilot I have to follow these to this day even here in South Africa where Air Law states that no Central Business District may be overflown without consent from the Civil Aviation Authority.