Explosive Evidence | FULL EPISODE | Mayday: Air Disaster

a crowded 747 has disappeared over the atlantic their enemies pieces are found scattered on the ocean's surface but the vital clues are deeper than any air crash investigation has ever gone in this accident we had nothing it was just mind-boggling an international recovery effort goes to the very bottom of the sea to rebuild the shattered plane what they discover will send shockwaves around the world early morning june the 23rd 1985 a 747 flies across the atlantic ocean nine and a half kilometers above the water the jumbo jet is nicknamed kaneshka after an indian emperor and air india promises passengers it will be a palace in the sky indian hospitality is something that the culture prides itself on and you do experience that when you fly here india the colors are rich and warm inside it's your gateway to india on its way from canada the plane is heading to london england before continuing on to new delhi it's been in the air for four and a half hours captain hanse narendra is a veteran air india pilot satwinder binder is a captain too who's serving as first officer on the flight as the plane nears land binder talks with the flight's purser [Music] yes sir do me a small favor at the back of the plane seat 54 a boy is sitting there he just wanted to have a look in the cockpit can i send him now after about 15 to 20 minutes there are 329 people on board including passengers and crew many of them are flying to india to visit family or friends [Music] vishnu pada is traveling to india with his two daughters their mother lata is already waiting for them there we had decided that it would be the ideal year to take an extended vacation in india as a family six minutes after eight in the morning co-pilot binder makes radio contact with air traffic control in ireland shan rick here in india 182. good morning [Music] stash and calling shannon go ahead again please lane and michael quinn are working at the shannon control center [Music] air india 182 is five one north one five west at level three one zero fire at 0.735 air india 182 shannon roger cleared for london flight level 3-1-0 here india 182 is clear to london maintain 310. you want to come up front now yeah okay let's go it's a light morning at shannon control they're dealing with just three planes but something peculiar has happened the signals are always enveloped the signals on radar merged saw that it was totally impossible to read the call signs and flight levels of any of the three aircraft the air india 747 is flying at 31 000 feet a twa jet is several thousand feet above it and a cp flight is two thousand feet higher all are traveling east because the planes are stacked on top of each other the signals have merged on the controller's two-dimensional screen tom moved the tracker ball on radar and separated the signals [Music] two of the planes reappear on the radar but the air india flight has vanished variant is not showing up hold on a minute air india 182 do you read air india 1a2 this is shannon do you read over it's 8 14 in the morning i had a good feeling to this day i don't know why i picked up the phone yes it's michael quinn at shannon we have a plane off radar normally a distress call to search and rescue isn't made until a plane has been out of contact for more than 20 minutes the air india flight has been missing less than 60 seconds several ships in the area begin searching for signs of the plane its last known position is some 290 kilometers southwest of cork just two hours after the plane disappears a canadian-owned cargo ship in the area confirms the worst the first pieces of wreckage are discovered uninflated life rafts are spotted bobbing in the cold atlantic then bodies are seen [Music] it's quickly clear that no one has survived in india lata pada is waiting for her husband and two children to arrive when she hears the news from her brother he sat me down and told me that you know something terrible had happened i was just in total shock and you know part of me was trying to digest the information and part of me was trying to imagine if indeed the worst had happened how i was going to continue my life without them dozens of bodies arrive in cork many more will follow now investigators are faced with the enormous task of finding out how they died and what had caused the crash of air india flight 182 [Music] 130 000 people live in the city of cork tucked into the southern coast of ireland it's long been a vital seaport [Music] on june the 23rd 1985 a gruesome cargo begins arriving at the city's docks just hours after air india flight 182 crashes into the sea bodies and wreckage are brought in by boat dr cumin doyle is a pathologist at the cork regional hospital the first bodies arrived at 4 45 pm on that sunday afternoon and at 12 midnight we had 130 bodies doyle and his team will examine the bodies to see if they can find any signs of what caused the crash it's an enormous undertaking for everybody involved the hospital personnel the the police the navy the army and pathologists like ourselves but we just had to get on and do the job there are so many autopsies to perform the doyle moves the work into the building's gym we had three police people working on each body photographer a ballistics expert and a forensic odontologist that is a person who examines the teeth the face for identification purposes in just four days autopsies are performed on 132 victims all parts of the body were examined externally in detail and every every detail was noted down we were looking of course for the causes of the fatalities doyle makes a telling discovery almost all the victims died in the air only two of the bodies showed signs of drowning which indicated that the others were were not breathing when they hit the water there's something else that's common to many of the victims a large number have had their clothes torn off [Music] now that was important because if they had no clothes or little clothes has indicated that they had fallen from 31 000 feet or so where this accident occurred some of the bodies also have signs of so-called flail injuries these are breaks specific to bones in the hips shoulders and other joints hs kohler is the lead investigator into the air india disaster the flail injuries tell him the passengers weren't in the plane when it hit the ocean they are caused by tumbling violent motion of the body in air and that is the pattern of the injuries when a passenger is thrown out of the aircraft at high altitude the autopsies show that somehow the plane had been ripped apart high above the water passengers were thrown into the sky long before the plane crashed based on the injuries we could only say that the plane had broken up at 31 000 feet we couldn't say what the cause of the breakup was the biggest challenge in this accident was that we had no physical evidence available to us in this accident in terms of wreckage in terms of passengers crew or in terms of eyewitnesses in this accident we had nothing the most important job of the investigators is to try to find the plane's black boxes the two devices record cockpit conversation and other technical information about the flight of the plane the recorders have radio beacons which send out a signal at a designated frequency but it's still a huge task the boxes are more than 6 500 feet below the surface and the radio signals last just 30 days saleem jiwa is a journalist who has investigated the air india disaster the search for the black boxes was urgent and and three countries participated in it england ireland and india but even with such a massive response early efforts are frustrated 42 kilohertz it's too high it can't be there investigators are picking up radio signals but they're at the wrong frequency [Music] as the search continues hs kohler and his team study the maintenance history of the plane they want to know if an undetected floor had caused the jet to come apart in flight they uncover a potentially important piece of information the air india jet was flying with five [Music] engines a 747 normally has four engines but it can carry more the plane was designed so that it could transport a malfunctioning engine beneath its wings ground crews can mount the engine to a bracket on the plane it's exactly what happened to the air india jet there was an extra engine that a previous flight had left behind that was mounted on on the wing of the aircraft the extra engine creates substantial drag on the left side of the plane if the pilots don't properly compensate the plane will start turning in that direction and these hypotheses continued that there is possibility that this fifth engine might have caused the breakup of the wing in fact investigators discover that before the plane took off for london the flight engineer noticed problems with the way the engine was attached there's a small problem in the fifth engine i've asked them to fix it all right investigators also learned that some internal parts of the extra engine were taken out and stored in flight 182's cargo bay they are so enormous that pieces of the cargo door were removed to make the job easier some of the other parts of the engine went into the rear of the aircraft aircraft such as the 747 can handle this quite easily is routinely done but if the cargo door wasn't reassembled properly it could have led to an explosive decompression in 1974 a cargo door blew off a turkish airlines flight shortly after it took off from paris the sudden decompression crippled the plane it crashed moments later killing everyone on board cola must consider two theories either problems with the door or with the extra engine itself brought down the plane if either one had taken place there should be evidence on the plane's black boxes finding the recorders has become increasingly important almost two weeks after the search begins investigators get news that helps them pinpoint the location of the black boxes the signal will be higher so this 42 kilohertz could be it tell the boats to look again the piece of the black box which broadcasts the locator signal is made of ceramic if it's damaged the frequency of the signal can change it means the strange frequency ships detected earlier could be the right one both the cockpit voice recorder and the flight data recorder are finally located but they're so deep it's difficult to bring them up the aircraft was at six thousand feet below the sea and it was the depth that was sort of defeating a deep sea submersible is brought in but even with this specialized vehicle and with the location of the black boxes known it takes four attempts to bring the recorders to the surface lead investigator has what he hopes are two vital pieces of the puzzle if there's any problem in that aircraft the crew will be talking about the problem they will not be silent about the problem but when he listens to the cockpit voice recorder kola hears nothing unusual after the last contact with air traffic control in shannon the voice recorder picks up the crew talking about customs seals it's paperwork that has to be completed before landing they want about 30 custom seats customs yeah custom seals to seal the bar before its arrival the conversation ends in mid-sentence that was it and then everything was of course silent the cockpit voice recorder indicated that there was no abnormality in the cockpit no no emergency every conversation was normal the plane's flight data recorder tells a similar story kohler pours through details about air india's speed altitude and dozens of other pieces of information [Music] the extra engine did cause the plane to bang slightly and the jets rudder was turned 11 degrees to the right but this was exactly what the crew needed to do to offset the drag created by the fifth engine we found that all parameters of the aircraft aircraft altitude aircraft heading aircraft bank attitude row latitude autopilot engaged everything was not working normally till the last point after analyzing both black boxes kola can't find any evidence that the plane was in trouble before it suddenly disappeared from radar but the very lack of evidence does suggest something [Music] both recorders get their power from the plane's engines both stopped at exactly 14 minutes and one second after eight in the morning since the recorders stopped working at the same time the problem on the plane had to be catastrophic enough to sever the jets electronic system before the crew could react yeah customs used to seal the bar before its arrival [Music] investigators are becoming convinced that there are only two possible explanations for the crash a devastating decompression or a bomb [Music] they study the wreckage that's been found floating on the surface of the ocean but it's just a small percentage of the entire plane and none of it is helpful to investigators it offers no clues to explain why the plane crashed we knew there was no fire we knew the aircraft was performing well everything was normal there was no cockpit emergency no warning we got elimination of all the things but we did not got the answer is what happened [Music] we to go to the cause of the accident we had to go to the wreckage which was lying at the bottom of the sea but what parts of the plane should investigators focus on the black boxes were equipped with radio transmitters which made them easier to find but the debris field is deep underwater and enormous some 16 kilometers long and six kilometers across how do investigators identify the one clue that will help them unlock the mystery roy truman is an underwater salvage expert he's brought in to do something that's never been done before retrieve the ruined pieces of a jumbo jet from the bottom of the ocean in hundreds of thousands of pieces he needs to find the ones that will explain why the plane crashed up until that time we had only been used with recovering small aircraft here we're talking about a 747 which was huge and we had no idea of the size of the pieces and what we were going to find investigators know they can't bring the entire wreck to the surface it's so deep it takes hours to recover a single piece the submersible takes underwater video and still photos investigators use those to decide which pieces to bring to the surface it was a narrow corridor and at each end of the corridor it was very light wreckage uh all of the heavy stuff engines main aircraft structure was was in the middle of the wreckage field like searching for a needle in an underwater haystack investigators hope to discover the cause of the crash in a tangle of ruined metal but autumn is coming soon the weather will turn bad and they'll have to abandon their search the key to unlocking the disaster still lies somewhere at the bottom of the ocean investigators from india are scouring the ocean floor trying to find out why air india flight 182 fell from the sky as the work continues in ireland there's growing suspicion in canada that the air india crash was no accident as police and investigators sift through the list of passengers on the plane they find something peculiar many of the passengers who were on air india flight 182 began their day in vancouver they were using another plane to connect to flight 182 one of the passengers who bought a ticket for that plane never got on well the passenger um we have never identified him per se but the ticket identified him as m singh it simply had an initial but not full name uh we believe that name to be was fictitious and that the person never intended to travel while he never boarded the plane m singh did check in next please anyway to toronto and i want my bag checked through to delhi sir i can't do that your reservation is only confirmed to toronto oh i am confirmed this is my ticket jeannie adams is a ticket agent working for canadian pacific mr sing you are on standby to deli i can't but then i have to pick up my bag i can't check your bags through to india if you are not confirmed but i am indeed confirmed wait i'll get my brother he'll tell you there are as many as 30 people waiting to check in adams doesn't have time to wait for the man's brother oh okay okay i'll check it through but you have to check with air india when you get to toronto even though singh doesn't have a ticket taking him to india his bag is checked straight through his luggage is loaded but no one notices that singh never boards the plane that leaves vancouver she broke the rules as they were she should not have allowed that to go through for new delhi interline but she was so bullied and so brow beaten by mr singh in front of everybody else that i think to her eternal sadness and and heartbreak um she gave in singh's maroon bag didn't raise any concerns when it was loaded in vancouver since the air india flight was international when the bag arrived in toronto it faced a more strict series of inspections this is what it will sound like [Music] john desouza is a security officer for air india the day of the flight he demonstrated a portable explosives detector for baggage handlers in toronto chemicals in a match triggered the device as would chemicals used in some explosives the portable device was put to use because the x-ray machine which normally scans every piece of luggage had broken down the technology especially the x-ray technology were very uh very weak very in their infancy at that time and they it didn't work reliably and in in the case of the air india episode the technology went quite badly wrong which was one of the tragedies of this situation as security workers used the portable explosives wand on the bags everything seemed normal until they got to the maroon bag [Music] the bag did trigger the device but the sound it made was very different from the one workers heard during the demonstration the bag was passed and allowed on board the plane eventually flying towards england as air india flight 182 flies over the atlantic ocean carrying m singh's bag an explosion rips through tokyo's narita airport two baggage handlers are killed four people are injured a bomb has been hidden inside another piece of luggage that came from vancouver luggage that was bound for another air india jet and it was headed for the cargo hold when it exploded on the ground once it was put on the back was probably just thumped a little bit and it exploded as the two japanese baggage handlers were putting it on a conveyor belt just as on flight 182 one of the bags being moved in tokyo was checked in by a passenger who never boarded the flight there was no x-ray machines in use at vancouver airport there was nothing to stop the bag from flying to to tokyo there's a disturbing connection between the tokyo bombing and the air india flight the tickets for the men who checked both bags were bought on the same day by the same customer the single crash of air india flight 182 has suddenly become part of a much larger story with the apparent connection between the two incidents investigators in ireland are extremely interested in what police find in tokyo soon after the bombing forensic experts descend on japan's narita airport there are traces of evidence everywhere the narita bombing was was within a confined space so unlike the air india flight 182 situation where we had debris scattered over nine miles of under the ocean and pretty hard to retrieve we had the in a sense the good fortune of of a contained area where an explosive device went off pieces of metal and circuit boards are embedded in the walls explosive residue clings to parts of the container that housed the bomb amazingly japanese forensic experts were able to pick out tiny parts and fragments and all the analysis finally led japanese police to identify the vehicle that was used to carry the bomb experts even find serial numbers on pieces of the wreckage clues that show the bomb was hidden inside a specific stereo tuner made by sanyo all 2000 tuners that were ever made were shipped to a warehouse near vancouver british columbia from there they were sent to stores across the region one of those tuners carried the bomb that exploded at narita police have a difficult task trying to trace the sale of 2 000 tuners they could have been sold to anyone most of the stores that had received the tuna had been sold out for years but police get a break when they asked about the tuna at a store in duncan a tiny town on vancouver island the last unit had been sold just a few weeks ago they were able to figure out who bought the the stereo tuner which contained the bomb police obtain the same sort of tuner that was used to house the bomb on air india they conduct tests to see how big the bomb would have to be to create the sort of damage that was found in tokyo there was a progressive experimentation using using dynamite to find out the the extent of damage particular strands of dynamite would cause they match the size of the tuna fragments made after each explosion with the fragments that were found at narita they discover that just a few sticks of dynamite were likely used in the tokyo bomb but could just four sticks of dynamite really bring down a jet once they discover just how powerful the narita bomb was police place it into a fully loaded luggage container the devastation is enormous any decompression caused by an event or an explosive device in the luggage hole would be sufficient to cause catastrophic results for that aircraft you don't need much force sticks or dynamite can do the job the cramped quarters of a cargo hold amplify the power of a bomb tests conducted at penn state university show that the shock waves created from a bomb blast don't travel in just one direction but reverberate inside a luggage container building on each other vastly increasing the initial force of the explosion if a bomb had indeed exploded in the cargo hold of air india it would have caused enormous amounts of destruction it's the sort of damage that should have left its mark on the remains of flight 182 investigators have a growing suspicion that this plane was brought down by a bomb but they still have no proof so the investigators were not only looking for uh something that was broke and that might have caused the failure but they were looking for signs of what caused the explosion such as burning or solvent stains or possibly shrapnel in seats it meant a lot tighter scrutiny of every piece of wreckage we kept on analyzing each photograph is it giving any indication of an explosion is it giving an impact damage knowing his time is running out kola selects a few key pieces of the plane to bring to the surface bad weather forces him to leave the rest behind kola hopes the bits he does have can prove there was a bomb on board each piece that's brought up is carefully mapped to its original position on the jet one of the most promising sections brought up from the bottom is the floor of the front cargo bay when we recovered that item we found that it had holes which are of a very special nature penetration from inside to our side at a very high speed curling of the edges of that one and that was indicative of that perhaps this is the place where the explosion had occurred as many as 20 holes are found in each the metal is bent outward like the petals of a flower these are classic signs of something being blown out from the cargo bay on the side wall of the cargo bay investigators find more clues additional holes are discovered like the ones on the floor these also appear to have been blown out from the cargo hold a closer study of the ceiling of the cargo bay also indicates that the ribs connecting it to the fuselage were broken by being forced up [Music] investigators are convinced that the wreckage shows that a bomb had exploded in the forward cargo hold if the bomb had gone off in the front of the plane it would explain why the flight data recorder and cockpit voice recorder cut off so quickly like other 747s the electronics bay on the air india flight is located below the cockpit many of the important electrical systems on the plane run through here the forward luggage compartment is right beside it and so when the bomb went off the explosion would have taken out the computers completely and there would have been absolutely dead silence and that's precisely what happened investigators are convinced that air india flight 182 has been destroyed by a bomb [Music] this was no accident the crash of the passenger jet was a crime nobody nobody thought that such an evil plot of blowing two aircraft simultaneously would occur from vancouver exhaustive detective work creates a clear picture of what likely happened on board the air india jet in toronto m singh's bag is taken off the vancouver flight and moved onto the air india jet it's put into a luggage container that's eventually placed at the front of the jet right behind the plane's electronics bay as the plane sailed over the atlantic ocean the crew had no warning that a bomb was ticking down to disaster they want about 30 custom seats customs yeah custom seals to seal the bar before its arrival when the force of the blast hit the floor of the jet it pushed it violently upwards the thin fuselage would have been blown apart the air pressure inside the plane would have rushed out tearing passengers from the cabin and fatally crippling the jet the debris scattered over nine miles is an indication of how how rapidly and how uh how fearsome this this whole decompression was but in this instance the aircraft completely didn't stand a chance of flight there was no way of continuing flight in this case as the jet fell towards the sea the forces put on the fuselage tore it apart it would have a tail torn off and the wings would start breaking and there's no way of sustaining flight after that it goes into gyrations once it goes into generations there was just massive structural failure after months of painstaking work investigators believe they have unraveled the cause of the air india crash they've proven a bomb brought the plane down it's now up to police to find the bombers but with so many deaths and so many more possible if the narita bomb had exploded in midair there's immediate interest in making passenger jets safer this was one of the biggest disaster in the indian aviation history and it could have been avoided if the procedures were in place as the hunt for the killers continues extraordinary steps are taken to tighten security and to see if jets can be made to withstand the force of a bomb it's may 1997 more than 10 years after a terrorist bomb destroyed air india flight 182 an out of service 747 is about to take part in a remarkable test two bombs are placed in the front cargo bay two more are put in the back well the burning throat test was actually intended to prove five years worth of research that we can protect an airplane using hardened luggage containers or hardened liners in the cargo hole plane is also pressurized to simulate the conditions a jet would encounter at cruising altitude pressurization is the key to that kind of experiment the added energy that you have from the pressurization inside the airplane adds to the damage you can think of it as a balloon if you take a pin and you put it in a balloon that's uninflated you get just a simple hole size of the pin however if you blow that balloon up and you hit it with a pin it pops catastrophically when the bombs are detonated the result is devastating the force of the blast plus the pressure inside the jet to store the plane apart and that's the closest we can come to seeing what would have happened to a jet in flight the destructive power of bombs on jets is well known but what the tests at bruntingthorpe showed was that relatively simple measures can substantially minimize the damage caused by an explosion one of the bombs in the rear cargo hold was placed in a normal luggage container but the bombs in the front cargo hold were different one was placed in a specialized container strengthened with a material similar to that found in bulletproof vests the other was put in a normal container but placed beside walls that had been reinforced with a blast absorbing liner when the bombs explode the front of the plane is virtually untouched we had no breach of the airplane skin with the liner or with the hardened luggage containers but towards the rarity airplane or the tail where we didn't have any of the hardened materials it was a catastrophic failure for the airport the standard luggage container did nothing to minimize the blast both the protective lining in the front cargo bay and the hardened luggage container were able to absorb the force of the explosion it's only speculation would steps like these have saved air india very likely would they make the industry safer today absolutely despite the dramatic results of the tests in britain hardened luggage containers are not used by world's airlines while effective at stopping bombs they're extremely expensive the hardened containers are not in use now because it's just not economically feasible the containers cost the tens of thousands of dollars just to purchase and they're very fragile they're composite materials so if you run into this automotive forklift they're pretty much useless from that point forward there have been significant improvements made to the way that passenger luggage is screened at most international airports more sophisticated color x-ray systems using multiple scanning beams are now used but i am indeed confirmed wait i'll get my brother he'll tell you oh okay okay i'll check it through but you have to check with air india when you get to toronto and there are stricter regulations about luggage getting sent forward on connecting flights in the case of air india the most important thing of all was passenger baggage reconciliation this is the key to detecting an explosive device or a terrorist no plane leaves with baggage unattached to a specific passenger inside that plane and and that must be so seed is 10b i think one of the the most difficult piece of news for the families to accept was the many ways in which this tragedy could have been prevented i mean it was absolutely unforgivable that a bag could be interlined to another destination without a passenger accompanying it the quality of training that security guards at airports get also came under scrutiny during the years after the air india crash it's still an area of concern for some security experts there's a real failure to train security personnel and that failure is because you cannot pay rent a cops subsistent wages to look after your security when you get on board an aircraft in the air india case police eventually traced the bombing to seek extremists living in canada they're fighting to have an independent sikh homeland created in india the man who confessed to assembling the bomb is sent to prison the man suspected of masterminding the plot is killed several years later while under arrest in india both men had deep ties to canada's west coast sikh community it's a connection that still bothers lata pada it was a deliberate act of terrorism and hurts even more that they were executed by canadians on canadian soil against canadians more than 20 years after the destruction of the air india flight the shock of the day is still fresh and many questions remain unanswered we still don't know who the two people were who checked in the bags apart from the basics of who made the bomb we don't know much about who else assisted them we don't know who picked up those tickets [Music] there's a vow of silence that has hindered the investigation this inquiry will be launched immediately in 2006 the canadian government launched an inquiry into the air india bombing another investigation of what happened and why the shocking death of so many is a continuing source of anger and disbelief [Music] no matter what the inquiry finds the sobering facts are the same 329 people killed in an instant there are memorials now in ireland and canada mourning the victims of the air india crash marking the day a terrorist bomb ripped through the lives of so many it's just so tragic about all our lives that we lead every day is an ordinary day in our lives but some days unexpectedly something completely totally unexpected shatters your life and that was one of those moments [Music] you

Channel: Mayday: Air Disaster

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Id: oBU_CcfP6pE

Length: 50min 0sec (3000 seconds)

Published: Sun May 23 2021