The Nevada Triangle

the Sierra Nevadas one of the most beautiful and dramatic places in America a land of extremes from snow-covered mountain peaks to scorching deserts if these mountains hold a terrible secret it's almost like our hand is pushing on you and stealing away your air speed but this mysterious force have taken countless lives over the last 60 years if we marked all of the crash sites this map could not hold all the bins it took the disappearance of billionaire Steve Fossett in 2007 before the extent of the mystery became clear while we were searching for Steve Fossett we found several other aircraft that had crashed in the areas that were reported missing but the planes had never been found there are literally hundreds of plane crashes in the surrounding area it's an intriguing mystery instruments failed compasses go haywire and in the worst case scenario the ignitions of jet engines fail so why had so many pilots lost their lives and others vanished without a trace and what is the missing evidence which could explain the disappearances we explore the phenomenon on the ground in the air and in the world's most sophisticated wind chamber to discover the deadly truth behind the area that has been dubbed the Nevada triangle the Sierra Nevada mountain range stretches 400 miles across the state line between California and Nevada it houses three of America's most famous parks yosemite Sequoia and Kings Canyon people from all over the world flock to enjoy the stunning scenery emerald green waters of Lake Tahoe to the rugged forest but for thrill-seekers the most compelling aspect of the Sierra Nevada the skies above them I started flying in the cr2 that is about 1970 a couple of things make it very special around here number one is challenging and I think that pilots need to be challenged the other thing I like about flying here is just the beauty of the area you know you get up in the early morning and come out here when it's nice and cool clear visibility totally unlimited you take a turn to the right take a turn to the left and what do you have just beautiful mountains but on the 3rd of September 2007 the reputation of these mountains was changed forever when the disappearance of a national hero through a spotlight on the mountains terrible secret aviation officials are looking for adventure pilot and world record holder Steve Fossett billionaire adventurer Steve Fossett had taken off from a private airstrip about 30 miles south of Carson City Nevada in a single-engine aeroplane he never returned we are not going to rest until we bring this to what we feel is successful conclusion a longtime friend of fellow adventurer Richard Branson Fossett was an experienced aviator who lived to break records in 2002 he became the first person to fly solo across the world in a hot-air balloon and a few years later he did the same in a single-engine aircraft this is a prime record I wanted it for a long time how could a man with more than a hundred world flying records to his name have disappeared on a routine flight in his own backyard a mystery captured the attention of the world's media I think it became a big story because of the fact of this reputation reputation as an aviator as an adventurer that suddenly just disappeared and I think that's what kind of shocked the world Fawcett's disappearance triggered the biggest and most expensive search ever undertaken for a civilian in peacetime America aircraft are continuing to criss cross over an area of about seventeen thousand square miles of Northwest Nevada aviation safety expert bill Schroeder was one of the lead coordinators on the search he recalls how the terrain made their job incredibly tough it was very difficult to find aircraft that go into canyons so go in between the trees from the air it's really hard to search when Fossett say goodbye to his wife that morning he referred to his flight as a Sunday Drive he took off from a private Airport 60 miles south of Reno the sunday drive was so routine that Fossett didn't even bother to call in a flight plan an era that would seriously hamper the search teams a person of his stature in aviation I don't know why he didn't tell somebody exactly where he was gonna be going I really don't know with no idea of the direction Fossett had taken the teams were forced to search over 30,000 square miles an area five times the size of Yorkshire we had our Air National Guard involved in the search as well to see if if they could find anything on the dry Lakes we had other pilots believe it or not that decided they were going to help and no one could find him for more than a month they combed the mountains by air and on foot and although they found no sign of Steve Fossett they found plenty of evidence that the skies above the Sierra Nevadas be treacherous why we were searching for Steve Fossett we found several other aircraft that had crashed in the areas that were reported missing but the planes that never been found families had gone for years and years without knowing what happened to their their relatives William Ogle's story was typical his father Charles had disappeared 43 years early the year was 1964 Charles ogle a businessman an ex-military pilot from California so a single-engine plane out of Oakland headed Reno for decades William and his family had no idea why his father had disappeared without explanation 43 years on and the search for Fossett's plane raised the possibility that he too had been a victim of the Sierra Nevadas could this have been Charles Ogle's plane it would be nice to sort of have the closure so that you know that he didn't just run I mean an accident something happened unfortunately it was bad news the planes registration number didn't match but at least the findings gave hope that a girl's disappearance was more likely accidental the number of crashed planes unearthed by Fossett's manhunt continued to grow and the press dubbed the area the Nevada triangle the need was no surprise to aviation archaeologist Pat maka a Nevada triangle the name came from the Steve Fossett search suddenly this element of mystery why can't we find him oh there's so many other wrecks in this area Pat maka has spent 50 years studying the Sierra Nevada phenomenon and he was not surprised by the comparison the Bermuda Triangle is infamous yet within it there have only been around 30 unsolved cases of aircraft or marine disappearances since the late 1800s in the so-called Nevada triangle over the last 60 years there have been far more there weren't dozens but hundreds and hundreds of aircraft over the years in the mountains if we marked all of the crash sites this map could not hold all the bins it would be so loaded you wouldn't believe it the so-called Nevada triangle falls within an area between three cities Reno Las Vegas and Fresno Pat has documented more than 2,000 wrecks in the area the last 50 years that's close to three crashes every month yet it was only rarely that these crashes attracted the headlines one of the exceptions was the 1969 Hawthorne Nevada airlines flight 708 the so called gamblers special well the story of the gamblers special is a very interesting case there was a the Hawthorne Nevada airlines and they had two dc-3 aircraft and they would fly routinely from Long Beach to Burbank to Hawthorne Nevada people could fly up there they could party and Gamble and then fly back home late that night and they were early the next morning but on the 18th of February 1969 the commercial airliner carrying 32 passengers and three crew members disappeared radio contact was lost the aircraft did not arrive in at Burbank as scheduled so a search was immediately launched but the tragedy turned into a disaster when five of the search aircraft crashed into the mountains the country was shaken by the rising death toll the press really latched on to that story because it was so interesting and compelling the search in the first place and then to lose so many searchers in the process this is not uncommon however what is uncommon is that there were five lost in the search for one it would be the following summer before the wreckage of the gamblers special was discovered near Mount Whitney when the receding snow revealed the scale of the tragedy the nature of this impact was terrible and the aircraft disintegrated the wreck was found on the east facing cliff on Mount Whitney there were no signs of mechanical or electrical malfunction the official investigation concluded that the cause of the crash must have been bad Lee's ability like Steve Fossett the pilot was vastly experienced and was familiar with the terrain but a month after had started the search for faucets playing was called off it was abandoned because of the fact that we just had searched so long so many areas covered these areas not just one twice three or four times and we weren't getting anything it seemed that Steve Fossett's disappearance would have to join the growing list of mysteries within the Nevada triangle the hunt was on to explain the staggering number of accidents and just like its marine namesake the Nevada triangle has given rise to some extreme theories UFO enthusiast bill burns believes that the high number of crashed aircraft in the area is due to the fact that the triangles footprint includes the secret base known as area 51 so right over those mountains over there famous the historic the mysterious area 51 the legend is that all the way back from the 1950s at least through the middle 1990s you could be shot on sight if you cross the border the high level of secrecy surrounding the base attracts plenty of controversy controversy that can be traced back to the so-called Roswell incident in July 1947 some people say that human history changed because a flying saucer or a flying wedge shape object crashed outside of Roswell initially when the army saw the material they didn't know what they had all they knew was it wasn't from this world then they decided if we can figure out what it is ourselves let's get some of the top engineers the top scientists the top metallurgist let's bring them to area 51 in complete secrecy although the Roswell incident is now thought to be no more than a downed weather balloon bill still believes that the testing of alien technology is behind many of the aircraft disappearances and crashes in the area why are there so many plane crashes in this area the Nevada triangle one theory is this that because UFOs either the ones we're testing or the ones that don't come from here fly around in this electromagnetic envelope instruments fail compasses go haywire and in the worst case scenario the ignitions of jet engines fail the mysterious reputation of area 51 has its roots in the 1950s when the CIA partnered with the lockheed aviation corporation to build and test high-altitude aircraft for reconnaissance missions they needed to keep this new program top-secret so they chose this remote location in the Nevada desert named simply by its map coordinate area 51 has since sparked the imaginations of many conspiracy theorists in the United States and around the world Peter Merlin is a well-known aeronautical historian who's been studying area 51 for 30 years he also thinks that the heavily guarded base is responsible for many of the crashed planes littering the area well we're being watched right now by area 51 security they detected us coming in using Road sensors that are magnetic to detect any metal object coming by like a truck she'll be watching us the whole time now as long as we're out here because we're very close to the border of area 51 but Merlin has no time for talk of alien technology I think the idea of aliens being involved with any plane crashes Listeria is just rubbish Merlin is drawn to this part of the Nevada triangle for evidence that points to a far less exotic explanation this is definitely wreckage from an f4 phantom 2 we're looking at apart from the side of the aircraft it's the air intake from one of the engines and there's a piece up here it's got a part number that's very definitely an f4 part numbers Peter Merlin has been hunting downed aircraft here for decades we're very close to the crash site of an f4 d there's an f4 e in Temple Mount across the valley there's an f16 down in Reichle a British Harrier crashed over the mountains there and Railroad Valley you've got two f-15s collided in midair all of this took place during routine testing and training and these are just the crashes I can think of off the top of my head there are dozens more just in the local area and hundreds in the surrounding desert by piecing together the information he learns about each wreck the reason for the high number of military crashes is obvious this is a place for high-tech airplanes are tested where combat airplanes are used in mark exercises like air air combat or air-to-ground how about all of these are exceedingly hazardous it's not at all surprising to have lots of crashes one of the earliest crashes was of a lockheed u-2 spy plane in 1957 it was the first airplane ever tested in area 51 and very likely the cause of the initial rumors that linked the area to captured alien technology the u-2 spy plane program was partially Declassified in 1998 by the CIA although not mentioning area 51 the file contained details of an incident in the 1950s when the prototype flew at altitudes no one believed possible the sightings of the unusual winged aircraft prompted many reports of unidentified flying objects in the area what the locals were actually seeing wasn't alien but a marvel of human ingenuity I've been researching the history of area 51 for more than 30 years I've never seen any evidence whatsoever to suggest there was anything to do with extraterrestrials it's all advanced technology built right here on earth in 2013 after decades of being called the most famous military institution that doesn't exist the CIA finally released hundreds of declassified papers confirming the existence of area 51 the dossier detailed testing of technologically advanced aircraft but of course make no mention of any UFO related research I think sometimes people prefer to believe the mystery I've had people literally tell me that the more they learned about what was actually going on at area 51 the less interest that they were military accidents account for a lot of the crashed aircraft found within the Nevada triangle but only a small amount most of the crashes and disappearances in the Nevada triangle a civilian aircraft Jim Nolan's story is typical on a sunny spring day in May 2013 Jim Nolan took his friends out for a ride in his aeroplane my friend has set it up many weeks in advance as a birthday present for his girlfriend to do a tour around Lake Tahoe which I've done many many of those I've been flying over the Sierra most of my life so I didn't really think there was gonna be any issues well when we took off it was bumpy nothing that I considered it all unsafe I had been in some pretty good turbulence over the years Jim flew out of the turbulence and back into calm weather conditions but seconds later he suddenly started to lose airspeed the ground rose quickly below him it's almost like you know our hand is pushing on you and stealing away your airspeed in aviation there are two things that are replaceable that's airspeed and altitude you have the right combination of the two then you can handle most anything if you have one of the other taken away from you then you're in trouble you know it slowed me up so much the airplane is no longer capable of flying last thing I really remember was there's some tall trees back behind us over there I still had enough airspeed where I could maneuver the airplane to some degree and I was bound and determined I was gonna stay out of those trees luckily for Jim he and his passengers all survived without serious injuries and they were rescued within hours of the crash but could his experienced cast light on the fate of Steve Fossett in October 2008 over a year after the search for Fossett's plane had been called off a hiker made a discovery so my gosh was that tonight at the command post officials are waiting for day breaks so that ground crews can try to confirm the sightings from the air a possible wreckage of an airplane probably the long-lost missing plane of pilot Steve Fossett a few days later investigators reached a mangled wreckage of Fossett's plane outside of Mammoth Lakes California just 65 miles south of his takeoff point the initial investigation reveals that at the time of his crash his plane was in perfect working order what we have learned thus far is indicative of a high crash which appears to be consistent with a non survivable accident and a detailed analysis of the wreckage would only deepen mystery of the Nevada triangle whatever brought him down it wasn't alien technology or mechanical failure experienced pilot Fossett had driven his plane into the mountainside 300 feet below the crest of the ridge would this wreckage reveal the reason why so many pilots had crashed here the crash investigators found no sign of mechanical failure Fossett's plane was functioning perfectly when it crashed and with no sign of mechanical failure crash investigators turn away from the mountain and look into the sky for their answers but could the Nevada triangles unpredictable weather be to blame the Sierra Nevada czar 400 miles of granite that vary in elevation there are hundreds of Peaks higher than 12,000 feet and at those heights weather can change very rapidly least issued a severe thunderstorm warning its central Washoe County Zach tolby a meteorologist at the National Weather Service in Reno Nevada believes that the unpredictable weather conditions over the mountains are the key to unraveling the Nevada mystery the Sierra Nevada is unique because it's very close to an ocean and we get strong storms out of the eastern Pacific during the wintertime and when those storms hit the unique geography of the Sierra Nevada the huge fluctuations in altitude and temperature can massively intensify the storm the thunderstorms formed when there's instability in the atmosphere and a lot of times for us that's daytime heating which creates that instability in the cooler air up in the atmosphere and so as that warm air rises and then condenses that accelerates up with its peak soaring to fourteen thousand five hundred and five feet Mount Whitney is the highest point in the USA outside of Alaska yet at the foot of the mountain lays Death Valley 282 feet below sea level as the cool stormy air from the ocean flows over the high mountain peaks it is met by the hot humid air rising from Death Valley the combination causes sudden and intense storms but predicting where and when they occur is far from easy some weather is more predictable than others we knew today that there was going to be thunderstorms in the area where exactly those are going to be at any one point that's really challenging could these unpredictable storms be behind some of the hundreds of plane crashes in the Nevada triangle at the Nevada desert Research Institute climatologist dr. Kelly Redmond has access to sixty years of historical weather data for the United States we store weather and climate data from the past because it turns out it has tremendous value of the pastures it's a guide for the future the archive is also a critical tool for air crash investigators it can reveal local weather conditions at the precise time of some of the most famous disappearances Kelly locates the weather data for the 18th of February 1969 the day the gamblers special crashed he discovers that it's highly likely that the weather did indeed play a critical role in that disaster so these dark colors here are 70 80 90 % humidity so this means that the clouds were probably pretty prevalent at the time and once they got into him be pretty hard to get to get back out of them you know you sort of feel like you're going in the twilight zone you're gone from relatively benign conditions to unexpectedly not so benign conditions and this is in the dark so could Steve Fossett have been caught up in similarly disastrous conditions what I'm looking at here is a may half of what the conditions were on September 3rd of 2007 September is not a month of very strong strong storms typically and they show that that flow over the Sierra Nevada was moderate winds out of the Southwest to the to the Northeast but this doesn't stand out to me as being particularly strikingly strong as like you see in the winter months the weather data shows that Steve Fossett taxi down the runway on a clear day other pilots flying that day also reported that it was a beautiful day to fly but even on clear days small potentially dangerous meteorological anomalies can occur Kelly has now found new significant evidence in the weather data for that day there was a little hitch in the wind direction is which sort of indicates that a little impulse might have been moving through in the atmosphere kind of thing you normally wouldn't catch or wouldn't pay much attention to this seems to me a kind of a typical thing that happens in mountains where weather can change very dramatically very suddenly especially in the Lee of a large range like the Sierra Nevada where there was a a wind system coming through at the time such localized changes in wind direction are invisible to the naked eye but they can be lethal meteorologist Zach tolby knows all too well about erratic localized wind conditions in the Sierra Nevada for a blue march okay thanks we send up a balloon twice a day once that for em and once at 4 p.m. we do this along with about 800 other sites worldwide and about 90 sites around the United States and North America these regular readings help to calculate the weather forecast key to their accuracy is the behavior of wind in the upper atmosphere the measurements from the balloon tell us a lot about when they actually physically measure the wind with a GPS as it moves through the atmosphere it's measuring how far at what levels how fast so this gives us the wind direction and speed at each different level as it goes up through the atmosphere the balloon data reveals that wind speed and direction can vary considerably at different altitudes at the boundaries between these different layers the wind can interact in very unexpected ways when the really strong winds come over the Sierra and they create a wave cloud beneath that the winds can get really turbulent and those kind of winds are really really challenging to predict most of us have experienced turbulence during air flight most aircraft navigate through these winds without any serious problems but in 1977 a meteorologist dr. Theodore Fujita proposed a previously unknown weather phenomenon that he thought might transform bad weather into deadly Vegeta was known as mr. tornado for his work on the detailed behavior of twisters try to pinpoint which particular thunderstorm might produce tornado Fujita's work with tornadoes revealed that when hot and cold air are mixed in a rainstorm intense downdrafts can be caused by the rapid cooling of air a what Theodore Fujita found from flying small planes and areas that had been hit by tornadoes and severe storms he found patterns in blown down trees that were not appropriate for a tornado so he coined the term microburst like worse Telegraph Fujita proposed that when cold rain cooled the air it sinks suddenly and with unexpected force Fujita suggested that these down drafts were potentially to blame for a series of aeroplane crashes a downdraft is basically air flowing downward and it can also be the microburst which was the killer type of downdraft for transport aircraft for many years which is induced by precipitation Fujita's theory was hotly disputed for the best part of a decade until on the 2nd of august 1985 tragedy struck in the midst of a thunderstorm Delta flight 191 descended toward dallas-fort Worth International Airport less than a mile from the runway the jet inexplicably plummets into two water tanks setting off a deafening explosion 137 people died 20 more sustained serious injuries the crash turned out to be one of the most significant in aviation history Delta 191 was a very important we've done a very tragic event and it occurred just as the Federal Aviation Administration National Aeronautics and Space Administration the airline industry was beginning a program to solve tackle and solve this problem but Delta Airlines flight 191 finally provided the missing evidence to support Fujita's theory the aircraft got caught in just such a downdraft or microburst and instantly lost airspeed and crashed traditionally pilots were alerted to these situations because they can see the rain column ahead of them but sometimes the cool air columns can be invisible one of the very dangerous aspects of microburst particularly in the high plains region of the country is that it's possible for all this precipitation to evaporate before it reaches the surface that's particularly dangerous because there was no visible rain the pilot may see clear skies a clear path there could be a very dangerous microburst in front of the aircraft the fatal crash of Delta Airlines flight 191 forced the aviation community to push immediately for research into new technology that could warn pilots of microbursts in the area now radar detects wind shear installed in the nose of every commercial aircraft it gives the cockpit crew 10 seconds warning before entering a microburst so this is a radar system the transmitter that generates the essentially the microwave energy that's going to exit the aircraft is sending it through a waveguide down through this system and back out to the radome which is then steered left right up or down to project the radar beam where we would like it to go then a reflected beam is picked up by the same antenna so they transmit listen transmit listen it's fall system picked up again by the signal by the radome through the waveguide back in to a receiver but many in the aviation community didn't think these radar systems were possible Delta 191 as it was led to a tremendous urgency to develop the solutions to the problem at the time of that accident this system or when sheer detection was simply not available there were people who thought it might not be feasible to put in a small radio all the processing and the quality of the beam required to extract the wind shear this program developed these radars they're now installed so the problem has been solved because of the urgency with which the fa nasa the airlines and others put into developing the solution but even with this new technology installed pilots still have to remain vigilant one can not be certain about the currents will run out the pilot of an aircraft doesn't have perfect information that's simply not available as to what the wind is doing at that moment in that location on the day Steve Fossett disappeared there were no storms could there still be something unique about the mountainous region of Sierra Nevada that creates a similar effect the microburst that brought down the Delta Airlines flight happened in the middle of a storm and on perfectly flat terrain but Steve Fossett crashed in the high mountains of the Sierra Nevada under clear skies question was could microbursts occur without rain the first clue indicating that they might came in 1933 when two German glider pilots made an extraordinary discovery when Hans Deutsch mannan wolf hearth were gliding next to a mountain range in Germany they discovered that when a mountain drops away to a hot plane there was a surprising phenomenon when wind blows into a mountain the air is pushed up and over the peak the cool air dropping quickly towards the ground in the punishing heat of the plane surrounding the Sierra Nevada the air is rapidly heated and rises back up as the warm air cools at high altitude the process is repeated creating waves of hot and cold air as a glider pilot Russell Holtz regularly seeks out this strange phenomenon in the Sierra Nevada known as Mountain waves this area is some of the best weather best conditions for soaring we can get really high we can go really far some gliders like Russell's have no engines so they need a tow plane to reach the right altitude then they are released once set free they rely purely on rising wind currents to keep them up almost always the airs in motion some of its moving up and down seas if a glider stays in the up part and air that's moving up and we can stay up indefinitely same thing you see birds doing in kea skies currents are invisible so glider pilots have to be keenly aware of their surroundings and all the data you're gathering by a clouds your wind drift what you're feeling what the instruments are saying so all that you try to put into a mental model of what the the air is doing the more you know about it the safer it is to be able to use it for your dad there's that line of clouds parallel to the mountains we're gonna get about a quarter of the distance between the top of the mountain and the middle of the cloud that'll be the best lift we'll be we catch mountain wave lift the area underneath these clouds there can be a rotor it can be really turbulent getting up into it and then if we get up above those clouds and get into the actual way that'll be very smooth very smooth conditions just no turbulence at all feels like you're not moving for a slider Mountain waves offer the thrill of extreme sport but for conventional aeroplanes they can be treacherous power pilot may not fly in these conditions just because they have not experienced them they're not used to flying in this much wind and the wind's closest to the mountains can be the most lethal to better understand the mountain waves climatologists kelly redmond explains that we first need to understand the Sierra Nevadas unique topography one factor about the Sierra is they they come up gradually on the west side and they drop very steeply on the east side and so when the air is climbing the slope on the west side it's kind of climbing it at a fairly gentle slope and then it has an abrupt break it's shaped like this it has an abrupt break where it can go downhill and this can cause lots of different wave phenomena in the atmosphere studying the flow of water in a riverbed can help visualize just how turbulent these downhill winds can become but on the downstream side is where most of the action is occurring we see different types of flow coming over and some of it comes over and it comes down and it jumps up and it gets very turbulent the rivers downstream is the mountain equivalent of a downdraft they occur below the crest of the mountain the winds accelerate as they come over the ridge clean to the surface as they race down the slope but in the riverbed the water is always flowing in the same direction this isn't the case for wind which can frequently change at the wind engineering energy and environment Institute in London Ontario researchers can produce every single type of wind flow possible and it's here that the motion of the wind can be made visible to the human eye so we can produce all sorts of wind flows we're actually going to try and replicate the wind formations that would be experienced in the Sierra Nevada mountains we're actually going to create a scale model very simple showing a gradual rise from the west side or the Pacific side and then a essentially a cliff on the east side dropping off into the desert this may be a very simple plywood structure but at least it has some of the character same characteristics as the mountain range so we have a gradual slope on one side and a cliff on the other side these tubes are actually where we inject the helium bubbles those allow us to actually see the flow looking back at the slow-motion video we can see the bubbles quite clearly each one of those dots is a bubble we can see the edge the bubbles have forward momentum from the the airflow but actually a low-pressure region is formed on the side of the mountain here that draws the bubbles downwards we actually see the bubbles come downwards and recirculate so this is the same type of flow as what you would get in the mountain range this is only caused by the geometry of the mountains themselves the wind formation no temperature effects are considered here which could actually increase the Denver velocity of the air any sort of downward velocity of the air is is going to affect flying in that region it's certainly a factor the more down wear philosophy is gonna be the more dangerous so could these powerful downdrafts unique to the Sierra Nevadas be responsible for Steve Fossett's crash and the hundreds of others in the Nevada triangle the scientists here at the Windy dome world's first hexagonal wind tunnel facility usually study the effects of wind on fixed structures like buildings and bridges but today we're doing something a little unique we're using facility in a way that we never envisioned before Andrew Mathers and his team have rigged up a replica of Steve Fossett's plane inside the wind tunnel it's a remote-controlled aircraft it's actually 1/8 scale has almost the same physical properties as the super decathlon that Steve Fossett was flying at the time it has very similar scale model wingspan lengths it's a high wing design so the fuselage is hung underneath so that gives a similar center of gravity similar flying properties as well as a single prop aircraft with the almost identical power-to-weight ratio Mathers and his team have studied the meteorological records to recreate the precise wind speed and direction in the region where Steve Fossett lost his life with a hundred and six fans each individually controlled the team are hoping to reproduce the effects of the invisible and unpredictable downdraft that researchers now think make the Nevada triangle so deadly we're configuring our fans to achieve the flow that we wanted which was a combination of forward flow as well as down wash so we're using different combinations of fans to achieve what we want to we're gonna try today to use smoke within the airflow to actually visualize what's happening flying into the same headwinds experienced by Steve Fossett on the morning of his crash causes the remote pilot no problems but when the plane is hit by an unexpected downdraft the inevitable happens we can certainly see in this particular experiment that the plane was not able to overcome downward velocity so even though we had a pilot operating the controls and trying to keep the plane aloft using as much climb rate as possible it was still not able to overcome and is still dropping in altitude by slowing down the footage we see how an equivalent downdraft causes the plane's engines to struggle forcing it towards the ground the force is recreated here are no greater than those likely to have been faced by Steve Fossett after a five-month investigation the National Transportation Safety Board concluded that exactly one of these downdrafts was responsible for Steve Fossett's otherwise inexplicable loss of control flight instructor bill Schroeder agrees with their conclusion he crashed because of a downdraft and he could not escape and in the Sierra Nevada these winds rush down at over 400 feet per minute and then bounce back up again even faster he was in a four or 500 foot per minute possibly more his aircraft was only capable at that density altitude where his flying of climate at 300 feet per minute though he didn't have the power he could not get out of the downdraft then Bill's plane is suddenly hit by an invisible downdraft see we're starting to get a look Oh probably a 2 300 foot prevented downdraft yes Bret this location here today bill is high enough to ride out the risk but at lower altitudes closer to the mountain ridge even the most experienced pilots would struggle with the rapid loss of speed I'm gonna climb up here just a little bit into it and getting myself into a position where if I should have to turn I'm gonna be turning to the left toward lower terrain these invisible downdrafts that come out of the blue and now believed to be the mysterious force that so nearly killed Nevada pilot Jim Nolan and his passengers in 2013 it's almost like our hand is pushing on you and stealing away your airspeed in spite of all the hours I spent flying over and around the Sierra I had never encountered that kind of a downdraft probably used up 99% of my luck and that one time the head of the Civil Air Patrol came and sought me out and he's been involved in search-and-rescue for I think he said 45 years and he said he wanted to shake my hand because it was the first chance he ever got to do that to shake the hand of someone who had gone down in the Sierra like that the only traces that anything ever happened and I haven't touched it till now but it's I would say this probably came off one of the wingtip moldings and you know this is the only sign that anything ever happened here no sense leaving it here but there are many families who still wait to find their loved ones like William ogle whose father disappeared over the Sierra Nevada Ridge in 1964 I've been dealing with it for 40 years and a sauce and they they may not find his wreck and I'll I'll continue to deal with it but that's that's just something that I've accepted the Nevada triangle has been home to thousands of lost aeroplanes over the last 60 years new missing evidence concludes that just some of the aeroplane crashes can be attributed to the secret testing of military airplanes but for Steve Fossett and hundreds of other pilots who have crashed in the Sierra Nevada the culprit emerges is Mother Nature herself you really have to treat the winds and the mountains with respect the deadly sierra nevada downdrafts can deceive even the most experienced pilots and lead to unexpected tragedy the lesson to be learned is regardless of how professional how much training how much experience the pilot has you can still get in trouble yeah so we have to be very vigilant when we're flying especially here in the mountains you

Channel: Crazy Weird Cool Shows

Views: 1,913,266

Rating: 4.6184893 out of 5

Keywords: Triangle (Literature Subject), Nevada (US State), Nevada Triangle

Id: bMwojk220uI

Length: 47min 59sec (2879 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 18 2015

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