One Of The Strangest Crashes In Recent History | Vertigo | Mayday: Air Disaster

flight 604 was to land at charles de gaulle airport in paris in the morning as family and friends wait officials list the plane as delayed and then slowly break the news of the accident [Music] they asked me are you waiting for someone from sharma sheikh you say yes then they say could you come with us we are going to take you to a hotel at the hotel we'll explain it all to you it was very strange since we were greeted in a hotel and we passed people who were leaving happy because they were looking for the same information as us but their families were not on the list they came with the paper in hand here yes we apologize that you have to learn it this way but she's dead later on his voicemail mohamed hijaji hears fatima's message sent during the flight i heard the scream a noise under that i didn't hear anything captain kedar's wife hears about the crash from her son my son called me from abroad and told me that he had heard there was an accident in flash airlines [Music] it was a very big shock for me in resort hotels workers check the empty rooms of those who are on flight 604. but one of the rooms is occupied mr mercy this guy from the hotel the hotel staff began to cry he was really shocked happily shocked to see us he thought we were in the flight with everybody else they're here in my hotel 82 people were on that flight 82 people it was it really is really strange really really heavy but we were really lucky [Music] there had been no mayday call from the plane no warning to air traffic control that something was wrong with the plane crashing just minutes after it left the airport there are immediate concerns that a bomb had brought the jet down the plane had just taken off and it looked very strange why this accident happened so quickly after takeoff when investigators examine the plane's flight path they discover it would have gone directly over the town where egyptian leader hosni mubarak kept a vacation home it's also close to the house where british prime minister tony blair and his family were staying blair and his family were supposed to leave from the same airport that day security around the prime minister is immediately heightened two days after the crash authorities receive a phone call terrorists from yemen claim responsibility for the crash they say it's a protest against a french law banning the muslim headscarf the hijab in public schools but in spite of the phone call and the rumors swirling around egypt investigators quickly rule out terrorism if you have a wreckage distributed a very large area that means the plane was disintegrating in the air and due to an explosion it would be disintegrating on a wide area in this case there was very very few pieces and all located in a very small area so this indicated that the plane was intact and went into the water intact if it wasn't terrorism what had ripped the plane from the sky so quickly investigators face an enormous challenge the plane has sunk below the surface of the red sea divers have to fight off sharks that are drawn to the carnage the rescue teams find few bodies intact the aircraft and most of the 148 passengers and crew have sunk over one thousand meters to the bottom of the red sea the first task of investigators is to find the aircraft's flight data and cockpit voice recorders the black boxes if they survived the crash they will now be on the seabed but this part of the red sea has never been charted with so many french tourists involved the french government offers to help in any way it can the french immediately responded by sending a boat specially equipped with robots to search the bottom of the of the sea but the wreckage is too deep the sub that the french boat has can't survive the enormous pressure at the bottom of the sea the investigators desperately need another submarine but they're running out of time the black box transmits a radio signal but the battery only lasts for 30 days if investigators can't find it within a month the mystery of flight 604 may never be solved getting to the black boxes before the time the fingers stopped transmitting was always a very worrisome aspect to all the investigation team everybody was working 24 hours around the clock to try to salvage these and try to locate them first while the recovery effort continues family and friends of the victims begin to mourn those who died they pressure investigators to solve the mystery it's the biggest air disaster involving french nationals the biggest in the history of civil aviation american french and egyptian experts join forces while waiting for the plane's black boxes to be recovered they also begin focusing on flash airlines itself flying just two planes it was one of a number of low-cost charter companies that had been competing for customers in europe in the last 10 years there had been a rapid expansion of budget airlines throughout this part of the world offering inexpensive no frills service they fought for a piece of the holiday market seaside resorts like charmel sheikh were one of the many destinations they serve now one of the ways in which they provide this extremely cheap travel is by operating their airplanes 24 hours a day operating on such tight schedules means the planes are flown constantly former flash passengers step forward to complain about other flights there are a lot of stories i was flying home after a vacation a year before the crash while flying from charmel shake to bologna one passenger recalls seeing flames pouring from a flash airlines jet hey hey the engine's on fire the flaming aircraft is forced to make an emergency landing investigators learn that in 2002 the swiss aviation authority performed a surprise inspection on the same plane that would later crash the pilot's oxygen masks are missing there aren't enough oxygen tanks some of the cockpit instruments aren't working it's enough for the swiss to ground the flight for eight hours until the company repairs the plane a few days later flash airlines was banned from flying in switzerland another ban occurred in poland in norway tour operators stopped contracting with flash it's a rare event for an airline to be banned from operating into a country they had to have done something dramatically wrong especially when it comes to safety with mounting concerns about the safety record of flash airlines investigators comb through the company's paperwork they discover that the most recent maintenance records for the plane that crashed were never duplicated they've gone missing with the aircraft the lack of having copies of the technical log and all of them being on board of course this is a violation and the civil aviation here issued very clear instructions that this should not happen the french authorities agree that there are serious questions about flash they now banned the company from flying in france while there are concerns about the state of the company's planes there are no such issues when it comes to the crew of flight 604 captain kedar was considered not only a flying ace but a national war hero for his performance at the yom kippur war during his career he not only flew sophisticated fighter jets but also a variety of large cargo aircraft he had over seven thousand hours of flying experience as well as two thousand hours as a flight instructor all the evidence shows that captain cader was a model pilot with the aircraft and its black box data recorders still hidden deep under the red sea investigators wonder was this a case of a superb pilot fighting to save a decrepit plane see what the aircraft did [Music] on a moonless january night a flash airline 737 spiraled wildly into the red sea all 148 people on board were killed investigators trying to find out why the plane went down have uncovered a history of safety problems with the airline but trying to prove that there was anything wrong with the plane that crashed is difficult much of the wreckage has sunk deep beneath the waves investigators have been unable to find the flight's black boxes whenever an airplane crashes into the water there's always a fear by investigators that the cockpit voice recorder and the flight data recorder may not be recovered those two boxes in and of themselves give the investigator a very good picture and without him could make the investigation process very very difficult finally after several days of searching a breakthrough a french research ship hears the locator signals given off by the black boxes a remotely operated sub drops down over 1 000 meters the violence of the crash has spread the wreckage over a wide area two weeks after the crash both the cockpit voice recorder and the flight data recorder are recovered from the bottom of the sea investigators finally have some hard evidence [Music] the egyptian french and american team examines the critical devices in cairo after the two black boxes are found the salvage effort wraps up [Music] other than a select number of small pieces the rest of the plane is too deep to recover the cost to continue would be too great without the wreckage itself investigators concentrate on what they do have they hope the black boxes will recreate the final minutes of the doomed plane one of the things we did to depict the path of the aircraft was we created an animation based on the data we got from the flight data recorder and from radar the flight data recorder paints a devastating picture shortly after takeoff the plane began heading left just as it was supposed to but then it quickly started banking in the other direction the cockpit voice recorder shows that the turn caught the captain off guard turning right sir what how turning right analyzing the cockpit voice recorder showed that the pilots were experiencing definitely some kind of an abnormality a problem that they could not understand the investigators sift through the flight data to find some explanation for the jet's bizarre movement perhaps some mechanical fault was forcing the plane off course and there is an indication that something was wrong with the flash jet before it took off on the runway the captain and the ground engineer discussed an electrical malfunction but it's impossible to tell from the cockpit voice recorder exactly what the problem was especially electrical certitude we can't be sure which equipment was being referred to by the aircraft captain and the engineer when they were discussing faulty equipment not enough parts were brought up from the bottom of the sea to be able to determine that and tragically the ground engineer was also on the flight [Music] we believe from the data we are looking at in the flight data recorder that there is a very high possibility that the plane was tending to turn to the right by itself but what exactly had gone wrong a thorough accident investigation can take years but in the case of flash flight 604 there are unique challenges the problem with accident investigation is that it's very time consuming and resource intensive especially when we don't have an airplane to physically look at you want to be absolutely sure the facts conditions and circumstances before you publish that information family and friends of the victims are becoming more and more frustrated as the months pass they demand answers [Music] we were led to protest outside the egyptian embassy because we had no news 11 months after the disaster we had no message no information shortly after the protest egyptian investigators release a factual report it contains all of the information from the black boxes but the report does not reach any conclusions about why the jet crashed ladies and gentlemen good evening with a situation as complicated as this one the investigators don't yet have any answers the only thing they can do is to keep looking investigators discuss several possible scenarios that could have been responsible for the plane's erratic course you look into every hypothetical scenario that would create a similar profile and then you see if this profile fit the data that you have put together 50 different theories are examined in my newt detail in the process of looking into all the possible hypothetical scenarios we proceeded by eliminating those that did not fit the data investigators travel to the united states to test the most likely ideas in a sophisticated simulator if they can force the simulator to repeat the movements of the flash jet they might be able to figure out why the plane crashed the results are brought back to cairo there are only four mechanical faults that could have produced the flight path of the doomed jet investigators believe the key to the crash is to find out why the plane began turning off course these four scenarios were all related to what would cause an uncommanded bank so we were left with these as causes that we could not rule out two of the scenarios involved the spoilers on the plane's right wing [Music] spoilers lift up from the top surface of the wings slowing it down by producing drag or spoiling the airflow they help turn the aircraft if the pilot's control wheel or the cables that connect it to the spoiler jammed it could have forced the plane off course problems with the spoilers are one explanation but there's no physical proof and while there were maintenance problems with flash planes none of them had to do with the jet spoilers the team searches for another explanation another potential cause of the crash is the plane's ailerons this part of a plane's wing controls the angle of a plane's turn a malfunctioning aileron could have caused the plane to roll to the right again if the crew couldn't fix the problem the plane would have begun to spiral into the sea while so-called aileron trim runaway would create a flight path like the one seen during the crash once again there's no physical proof to support the theory and typically aileron trim runaway can be physically overcome by pilots all he would have had to do was overpower using more force to move the control wheel in an opposite direction when they listen to the cockpit voice recorder the investigators are puzzled by the constant discussion of the plane's autopilot the captain asked for the autopilot to be turned on but it had no effect and the plane began to plummet to the sea and earlier in the cockpit recording investigators uncover another curious exchange captain keda began the initial turn over the red sea manually but decided to let the autopilot take over the flight data recorder shows that the autopilot was indeed turned on as the plane climbed but then the captain appears to change his mind [Music] the plane's flight data recorder shows that the autopilot was only activated for three seconds but investigators wonder if the autopilot had malfunctioned and stayed in command of the jet the automated system could have continued to control the plane flying it to the right even after the pilots thought it had been disengaged the malfunction of the autopilot of course took a lot of work from us because it was nearly impossible to show that it did not happen and quite impossible to show that it did happen so but it was always a very prominent possibility because it would give a very very close scenario to what was happening perhaps most puzzling of all though is that no matter what happened to the plane it appeared to be under control just before it crashed moments before impact the captain was seemingly back in command of his airplane if there had been some crippling mechanical problem why did it seem to disappear some members of the team want to consider something besides mechanical fault the pilots themselves i think the major concern for the united states was that the human factors elements of this accident weren't thoroughly explored perhaps the highest steam given to egyptian pilots was getting in the way [Music] in egypt pilots are very respected and in particular air force pilots are very highly regarded for the past 26 years the country's president has been a highly decorated air force officer in an environment like this the pilot is somewhat immune to suspicion when something goes wrong the natural tendency is to blame the equipment and on this flight the pilot was a war hero with thousands of hours of experience studying the flight data recorders again the investigators discover something peculiar even before the plane's bizarre turn to the right three things all seem to happen at the same time instead of a smooth left turn the plane begins to come out of its turn early the nose starts to rise and the plane's air speed decreases noticeably but during this time the pilot says nothing it seems that he's unaware of the changes to his flight path i've flown out of charlemagne at night time and in the same type of aircraft and in no way should the pilot allow the airspeed to drop by as much as dirty knots or the bank angle to change beyond five degrees without clearly stating the reasons for the change in the flight path some investigators consider a provocative theory that might explain this seemingly bizarre behavior perhaps captain keda had been affected by vertigo vertigo is a physiological condition that would exist with any person not just pilots and it's based on the inner ear over a dark ocean without a defined visual horizon no ground lights the pilot may not be able to perceive visually whether he was flying up down left or right and if the fluid in his inner ear was moving where he tilted his head that may induce a sensation a physiological sensation that may cause the pilot to believe the airplane is flying straight level when it's actually turning the plane's flight path is ideal for creating a sense of vertigo the flash airline jet took off into a moonless night captain keda was flying manually and began to turn as he was climbing heading out over dark water it would be very difficult using just his senses for captain keda to know exactly where he was roger when ready inshallah left turn to establish 306 charm vor it is actually a very high workload situation and when there are no visual cues outside because it's a moonless night and you're over featureless territory with no lights in it you really as a professional pilot should be totally aware of the fact that this is a situation in which you could get disorientated it's a classic it's happened so many times it's killed so many people in the last 10 years when the plane was supposed to be turning slowly left the control wheel began inching towards the right perhaps the captain was making the turn without even being aware of it when you study the movement of the aircraft control surfaces it appears that something was guiding captain cutter to the right now that could have been a false horizon or something he's seen outside of his window see what the aircraft just did or perhaps he believed he was actually correcting a problem with the plane itself he thinks he's gained his flight path again and all of a sudden at this moment he receives contradictory information turning right sir what aircraft is turning right the contradictory information adds to the pilot's confusion he believes he's fixing a problem when he's told his problems have just started in this particular instance not only are you trying to fly the airplane and understand situationally what's happening but you're going through the mental gymnastics because your expectations are one way meanwhile you have a first officer who's telling him something that's totally different aircraft is turning right egyptian investigators agree that captain kader may have suffered some form of disorientation during the flight but they don't believe it was the only problem the crew was dealing with i don't really have a very clear indication that there was this orientation but it's possible there was a recovery from this orientation the time to find out the problem and take the corrective action needed was more than the time left before impact no matter what role disorientation played in the crash investigators are about to learn that the crew wasn't properly trained to deal with it flash airlines never provided the pilots with basic information that could have saved their lives it's been two years since an egyptian charter plane smashed into the red sea 148 people were killed investigators trying to figure out why flash airlines flight 604 crashed face immense challenges most of the wreck is still deep underwater by carefully examining the plane's black boxes the investigators believe the disorientation may have played a role in the accident the pitch black knight and the featureless sea caused the pilot to become confused about what was happening but mechanical problems may also have plagued the plane [Music] as they continue to try to solve the mystery investigators make a startling discovery officials at flash airlines revealed that they hadn't provided the pilots with crew resource management training although it was a requirement for the company it might have helped the crew deal with their horrifying situation career resource management is a program where pilots are trained to work together rather than as individuals had the pilots of flash air 604 received a formal crm training program the outcome of this flight may have been substantially different american investigators believe the very junior first officer may have felt the plane was in trouble before the captain did but failed to offer suggestions to his much more experienced co-worker aircraft nor did he attempt to take control of the plane formal crm training would have empowered the first officer who had the best situational awareness and the most information about the position of the airplane to take command of the airplane when he saw that the captain wasn't taking the appropriate corrective action an earlier conversation in the cockpit before takeoff may reveal why the young first officer would have been reluctant to challenge the captain yesterday we were coming in at dusk and the sun was tutu but i felt i could hardly see the runway he's already saying in sight what in sight hey sir it may not have meant to be insulting but it may have reinforced the first officer's feeling that he was the student and the captain was the teacher i am unable to raise my eyes and he says in sight where in sight it is going to serve as negative feedback the young first officer is bound to hesitate he doesn't want to be wrong again he doesn't want to lose the respect of a nerf general [Music] in a crew an effort must be made to bring together people who are able to co-pilot not a crew in which one person pilots and the other person looks on without saying a word but the captain and the co-pilot weren't alone in the cockpit a third crew member with more experience than the first officer was also there he too never said anything until the final seconds of the flight otherwise how will we know when we clear the cloud we hear him speak very clearly and very openly all during the time before the engine startup he was in conversation with the first officer and to the captain so this experienced person being very quiet all through we believe that if he saw any of the crew members doing something that he should not be doing or not doing something that he should be doing would have said something the only word he said was [ __ ] the throttles at the later stage of the event shows that that's the only thing he saw that should be done even if the co-pilot had taken control sooner there's no way to know if he could have saved the jet whatever took place on flight 604 happened quickly and since the plane had just taken off the crew had little time to react before they crashed into the sea the final report on the flash airlines crash was released in march 2006. there are no clear answers egyptian officials say that any of four mechanical problems could have caused the crash they say disorientation may have played a role but it's not the reason behind the accident american investigators refused to blame the plane instead they say the problem lies with the airline which didn't sufficiently train their crews the pilots are responding based on skills abilities knowledge and what they got out of training if the training was deficient that's a company responsibility two months after the crash flash airlines went out of business and as a result of the flash 604 tragedy new rules came into place to ensure that in the future aircraft safety violations will be judged more harshly the flash airlines crash gave the final political impetus to a move to create a european blacklist where if one state banned an airline then all the other your european union states would automatically ban that airline also the egyptian investigation concluded with an important recommendation we have recommended that some kind of training or awareness program should be made to be able to have a pilot observe another being disoriented early and what he should do to first maintain safe flight second to pull pull the pilot from his disorientation back to orientation was there a mechanical problem at the heart of the crash investigators will likely never know with so much of the plane still at the bottom of the red sea questions will always remain for investigators and everyone else who was affected by the crash i lost my nephews and my niece they were just kids what future would they have had how can you put a price on that what a waste the families will never be able to fully mourn me included because we'll never know what's really happened you

Channel: Mayday: Air Disaster

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Id: gGlY7Xz7mcc

Length: 37min 19sec (2239 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 16 2021