United Airlines Flight 811 Ejects Nine People After Explosive Decompression | Mayday | On The Move

[Music] we are in an emergency modern airliners are among the most complex and reliable machines in common use but occasionally delays in fixing a known defect have led to disaster this is the story of one of the most terrifying and avoidable accidents in recent history when a 747 suffered a devastating explosion at high altitude the crew and passengers faced an unprecedented crisis it is also a story of how one family's grief led to a relentless investigation to uncover the full disturbing truth lee can't have died for nothing you know you've got to find out why he died and you've just got to make sure that it never happens again and it reveals how other known problems in aircraft design have continued to go uncorrected causing further avoidable accidents so would i be surprised if it happened again i would be surprised if it didn't happen again it is a matter of time [Music] one of the most shocking cases of a known design floor being ignored for years would finally take its toll on a united airlines 747 bound from honolulu to auckland new zealand as flight 811 prepared for takeoff the crew were concerned with another kind of threat that had recently led to tragedy we were in the aftermath of lockerbie and i had instructed the crew to be particularly aware because it was a through flight from los angeles going through to new zealand so in my pre-flight briefing i'd asked them to make sure that they checked any baggage that looked suspicious or anything because we wanted to be extra cautious flight 811 was heavily loaded 337 passengers packed cargo holds and a full fuel load the doors closed on time and the plane left the gate just before two o'clock in the morning for a routine eight-hour flight when we were going to new zealand on vacation someplace that we had really thought it was interesting and somebody had told us how beautiful it was so this was kind of a dream come true i was seated in what's called the upper deck i hadn't had a vacation in five years and i took all my mileage plus points from united airlines and i purchased a business class ticket to auckland new zealand and sydney australia i was going to finally make that dream vacation i'd always wanted to get to australia and lay on a beach somewhere and forget about airplanes forget about accidents and and get this out of my mind for a while on the flight deck captain dave cronin was hugely experienced just two months short of retirement i flew uh almost 35 years with united i've got over 30 000 hours of flight time and just about everything military as well as civilian my co-pilot our first officer was uh al slater and i i've known al at that time for probably 20 years and the second officer mark thomas was the first time i had flown with him but uh we got along real well tell him we can handle 33 if it's available okay the pilots wanted to climb to 33 000 feet above the pacific ocean to avoid turbulence from bad weather we did notice that there were thunderstorms so 100 miles south right on course which was rather unusual for that time of night so i left the seat belt sign [Music] on captain cronin's decision to keep people fastened in their seats would save the lives of many we were still climbing out and the seatbelt sign was still on and um just basically getting ready to serve beverages and then to tuck everyone in for the evening because it was going to be a long flight down to new zealand okay tell them we're going to detour over to the left center united 811 heavy we're going to be detouring some weather here uh it'll be to the left of course 100 miles from honolulu as flight 811 climbed through 23 000 feet a critical malfunction was about to occur there was now a huge air pressure difference between the inside and outside of the aircraft suddenly passengers sitting just above and behind the cargo door heard a noise then there was kind of a grinding noise [Music] i heard a like a thud the hell in the next nanosecond it was pure unadulterated pandemonium we lost number three going down it looks like we've lost number three engine and we're descending rapidly coming back the next thing i knew i found myself on the stairwell hanging on to the rungs and i immediately knew it was an explosive decompression the cargo door had torn off and ripped a huge section of the plane with it the pressurized air inside blasted out with explosive force i immediately thought of lockerbie we actually thought it was a bomb that went off it was hell on earth everything on the airplane that wasn't fastened down tied down or secured what became airborne um the noise was incredible everything in front of us was gone where we were sitting we were about six inches from the hole so there was nothing in front of us or to the side of us the whole side of the plane was going actually our feet were dangling on the hole and i first thought we weren't going to make it you know i just didn't think there was any hope with the pressurized air blown out the lack of oxygen at 23 000 feet was now suffocating the passengers and crew it felt like someone had kicked me in the stomach knocked the wind out of me and i remember trying to catch my breath and couldn't you're supposed to grab those oxygen masks and put them on except the oxygen masks in that cabin they were ripped off the ceiling and they weren't they weren't there and i remember thinking to myself this is what it feels like to suffocate we're doing an emergency descent the pilots could tell from their instruments that the number three engine was failing but they couldn't tell the full extent of the damage their priority was to get the plane down to a level where they could breathe normally put your mask on dave but the pilots didn't know that the explosion had destroyed the entire oxygen supply i can't get any iceland we're not getting any oxygen you getting any i can't get any either with the plane heading steeply down and no word from the cockpit the cabin crew feared the worst i remember thinking that the cockpit which is up in the upper deck had probably blown off the airplane too because as far up as we could see there was nothing there now we're doing this nose dive my my next thought was oh my god we're just going straight down we're going to crash into the sea with its airframe ruptured severe damage to the right wing and engines and the crew forcing it down in an emergency descent the problems on flight 811 had only just begun [Music] two minutes after suffering a devastating explosive decompression flight 811 was still in a steep emergency descent passing rapidly through 15 000 feet to reach breathable air united 811 heavy we're out of 15.5 11 roger i think we blew a door or something tell a flight attendant to get prepared for an evacuation the crew finally began to level out at a safer altitude but they now faced a barrage of problems the most immediate was the disintegration of the number three engine nearest to the explosion we don't have any fire indications i don't have anything okay we lost number three let's shut it down there's no m1 yeah okay ready for number three shut down checklist number three before you shut down number three the generator went off looks all right to try it now [Music] well let's stop the vibration anyway fuel jettison procedure main boost pumps on center united 811 we need the equipment standing by company notified please start dumping the fuel i am dumping one stewardess had been seriously injured by falling debris as laura brendlinger helped her the full gravity of their situation suddenly became clear as i'm holding her in my arms i looked up and as i looked up that was the first time i saw this tremendous hole on the side of the aircraft that was just a void and seats were missing and i immediately knew that we had lost passengers five rows of seats have been blown out in the decompression killing nine passengers on the flight deck the crew had turned the stricken plane back to honolulu but with 80 miles still to go the crisis now got far worse we got a hell of a control problem here i got almost full right around this thing are you dumping as fast as you can i'm dumping everything we got a problem with number four engine yeah debris from the explosion had also damaged the number four engine if it failed completely the implications were severe if you're on two engines and you weigh seven hundred thousand pounds that is a big deal simply because with that kind of weight two engines are not going to keep you in the air you're gonna come down can you maintain 240 yeah just barely or losing altitude [Music] center united 811 heavy you have a fix on us i have you on radar okay uh we've lost engine number three and we don't have full power on engine number four uh we can't hold altitude right now uh we're dumping fuel so heavy roger i show you six zero miles south of honolulu at this time roger i haven't talked to anybody yet i i can't get to them uh you want me to go downstairs and take a look yeah let's see what's happening down there i think i uh we lost a compressor but can't hold altitude yeah i told him that we're getting some ax on there i got take off power on this thing whatever you need captain although the number four engine was failing the pilots pushed it along with the remaining engines to full power a setting they should not be run up for more than four minutes but the nearest land was 15 minutes away i look out the window on the right hand side and i see flames big flames and i know what flames an engine means it's not good the pilots were unaware that the number four engine was now on fire you got 250 knots now that's good seven thousand uh oh we're getting more rumble watch you're heading watch your heading you wanna go direct honolulu okay i'm gonna go downstairs and see what the hell is going on yeah go ahead and run down and see what's happening i saw the flight engineer descend down the stairwell when i saw him my my relief was oh my god they're they're alive and there was a huge sense of relief for me he saw the hole turned as white as a sheet and i screamed to him dear god please get us down i've got a fire out there oh yeah we gotta fire in number four go through the procedure shut down the engine he's not gonna be able to hold his altitude on two we got a fire on the right side two engines now the whole right side it's just gone from about the one right back to a it's just open you're just looking outside what do you mean it looks like a bomb yeah the fuselage it's just it's just open okay it looks like we got a bomb that went off on the right side the whole right side is gone yeah from about the one right back to uh anybody some people are probably gone i don't know i knew that we had lost people i didn't know how many uh in fact i didn't know until the next day how many were lost but uh you know it's it's a terrible thing when you're captain of an airplane and you lose passengers lee campbell flying home to new zealand was sitting in row 10 just in front of the cargo door i woke up with such a start because i seen late standing by the bed just with this with a grey jacket over his arm and a small smile on his face and of course as i woke up that faded wasn't there and then we woke up in the morning we discussed this i said you know that was strange in the night but it's such a vivid dream lee was standing there and then the radio came on and the first item of news is that there'd been problem with a united aircraft and i said that was lee that's lee's and my blood just ran cold i knew he was dead from that moment senator do you read we evidently had a bomb or something a big section of the right side of the airplane is missing 9811 heavy roger i wouldn't go any faster than i had to because that hole i mean i i wouldn't get it over 250 knots because that's it okay what's our stall speed i wouldn't go below 240. yeah i don't know if we're gonna make this we didn't know that we were going to make it back so we were actually preparing to ditch that airplane at night in the pacific ocean which has never been done before in the cabin the crew prepared for the worst my training kicked in and got up for my jump seat and started instructing the crew um we have to prepare the cabin we have to you know prepare for a ditching which i thought was inevitable running around getting life vests on and i do remember thinking i'm not sure this is going to matter um because when we hit the water you know um i just imagine the plane's getting split apart i knew that if we hit the water it'd be a tantamount to hit in the ground and there would be very few of any survivors so my mind went to the things that that meant something to me and at that point in my life it was my son believing they were going to die one passenger took these photographs in the hope they'd be found in the wreckage and give clues to the cause of the crash for fifteen minutes the plane steadily lost altitude then at four thousand feet the first glimmer of hope after an imponderable time i remember one of the passengers began to point out one of the windows on the right side and everybody looked and we looked through this little window from wherever we were and we could see a point of light and another point of light and another point pretty soon you could make out a coastline okay i got lights over here okay okay we're at four uh we're 21 miles out we're in good shape at honolulu airport an emergency was declared all other aircraft were diverted and the rescue services prepared for the crash landing of a fully loaded airliner hey you want to give me some speeds yeah uh 150 is gonna be your two engine uh use that 160 souls on board if you have it okay souls on board 60 is the minimum uh standby united 11 heavy i don't know how many is on board uh 200 and uh i don't have the paperwork in front of me here uh we're too busy right now uh 200 and something six minutes from the airport the crew now had to slow the overweight plane for landing but the effect of this was unknown what's going to happen when i start coming out with flaps and landing gear uh we're either going to land on the airport in the water or downtown honolulu okay we'll try 10. okay inboards are coming to 10. how do the controls feel all right so far but the flaps were damaged and could not fully extend this meant the flight 811 would have to land dangerously fast heavy do you have the airport in sight it's over here to the right captain okay okay we have the airport united 811 heavy 811 is clear to land eight left equipment standing by wind zero five zero one two clear to land eight left united 811 heavy as the unstable 747 lined up for landing the pilots knew they would only have one attempt but even if they got it on the runway the nagging question remained would the stress of impact cause the damaged and overweight aircraft to disintegrate [Applause] severely damaged with an unstable airframe and losing altitude on just two engines flight 811 now began its final approach to honolulu airport two engine approach two engine approach we still had no idea how far off the ground we were if we were going to make it to honolulu or not but that seemed like an appropriate time if we're somewhere around land that we're probably going to try and land somewhere to get the passengers in their brace positions so that's when we started yelling for him to get down to brace positions every molecule in my body combined to express get this damn airplane on the ground well how are we doing on the hydraulics hydraulics are good you got brakes normal hydraulics so we got brakes but uh you're only going to have reversing on one and two though i thought maybe there was a chance that we were going to actually be able to attempt to land the thought came to my mind what happens now do we on impact do we explode do we fall out this huge hole despite dumping fuel the aircraft was still critically overweight but without full flaps to keep it in the air it had to approach fast a thousand down the danger was that the undercarriage could shear off and the plane break up a dot and a half high 190 185 a little slow little slow dave let's blow what we want coming up on the glideslope [Music] okay well let's try the gear no one knew if the explosion had damaged the landing gear i remember laura saying to me that she didn't hear the landing gear go down and it was loud you know it was still loud and i didn't hear the landing gear go down so that's another thought maybe they can't get the landing gear down maybe it's not down you're down we're clear to land and everything's taken care of as far as we know 200 195. [Music] half a dot high looking looking good 192. 195 coming off on the power 100 feet 50 feet center the trim center the trim [Music] 30. ten zero we're on gears holden we landed it felt fast and that was my next concern is that we weren't going to stop at the end of the runway that we were just going to keep going and all of a sudden we were slowing down slowing down and i i said oh my god we've landed we're on ground and the people started applauding probably the best landing i've ever made when we finally stopped on the runway we deployed all 10 shoots and the flight attendants evacuated all of passengers it's amazing how fast everyone went my understanding is like less than 45 seconds 330 people were off the airplane [Music] we were probably 20 feet off the ground and i would have stepped out of the airplane without a slide i wanted to get off so bad fortunately there was a slide i stepped into the abyss fell into the slide swoosh down to the to the bottom of the thing and then you you hit feet running [Music] the slide kind of kicked me up and flew me up into the air and i my thought was oh my god i'm going to survive this whole thing and i'm going to get wiped out here on the evacuation because it just really threw me and i landed and scraped up my legs pretty badly and landed on my feet and it wasn't until that moment that i had the sense of i'm here i'm okay i'm on the ground when we got all our switches off i ran through the airplane made sure there was no one else on the airplane came up to the door one left and went down the slide and i came around the front and i saw that humongous hole in the side and i just couldn't believe it [Music] [Applause] by the grace of god we made it and it was an awesome experience i i would never want to go through that again [Music] it was crazy it was wild it was scary all at the same time um i just thought that that was the end that we were going to die i mean if that was my first thought that this is the end but for the families of the nine people who were killed the ordeal was only beginning [Music] kevin and susan campbell's son lee had been flying home about three o'clock in the afternoon i think they said that there was no new zealanders involved but we just knew that that it was lee and then about i suppose a quarter of an hour later we got a phone call from chicago and they just said that they regret to inform us that our son was missing presumed dead and i guess about another hour after that a policeman arrived at the door and he took one look at us and he says i can see that you've had the news so it was just just an awful awful day and it certainly didn't get much better for a long long time [Music] although lee's body had not been recovered the campbells flew straight to the wrecked aircraft in honolulu your initial feeling is that you want to be as close to the spot where your relative died and that was the aircraft so we had to immediately go in and see the aircraft the damage inside was horrific just a total mess and the hole in the side of the aircraft was much bigger than i had thought it would be even though we had seen television news reel reports and it was so sad to get in and actually see where lee's seat had been the legs of the seat were still there there was a good bit of fuselage beside him and still a window but the campbell's desire to find the cause of lee's death inevitably brought them face to face with dreadful details they took us to the medical examiner's office as well um because they had found body parts and and that sort of thing so um they didn't actually show us the body parts but they showed us bits and pieces they had recovered from the engines and um we got the medical examiner's report on what they had recovered so you know we really would have preferred that it was lee that went through the engine because it would have been an immediate death whereas it was a four-minute fall down to the ocean and we know that the people could have been alive as they were falling and when you think about that that's just horrific as it became clear that their son's body would never be found the campbell's need to find the cause of the accident that killed him grew stronger lee kind have died for nothing you know you've got to find out why he died and you've just got to make sure that it never happens again the campbell's embarked on a relentless personal investigation that would last nearly two years the loss of their son meant they would stop at nothing to uncover the truth [Music] the engine's number three and four two months after the accident on flight 811 when the national transportation safety board held preliminary hearings the campbells made sure they were there but they soon grew frustrated the ntsb would not complete its report for months so the campbells took matters into their own hands we certainly weren't going to leave it to the the ntsb to come up with the findings we were going to follow through and when the hearings ended they had said that we could take whatever we wanted off the press table and susan walked up to the top table and yelled out there's a really good set up here so grabbed a box and loaded in all of the documents that we could find up there kevin's most honest of people i know but here he was taking something that we hadn't specifically been told we could take we're heading out the door just as the ntsb were arriving back in with the trolley to pick up all their documents so we were out the door and into a taxi and gone [Music] so we quickly realised we'd got a really good set of papers with a lot of things that hadn't been released to the public we were able to really start our investigation on earnest at that stage the unpublished documents revealed a disturbing catalogue of problems with the forward cargo door going right back to its original design instead of a plug door that gets jammed into its frame as the aircraft pressurizes boeing opted for an outward opening door this allowed for more cargo space but was not fail safe like the plug design so boeing built what they believed was a foolproof locking mechanism what they do is they build in multiple redundancies to make sure the door is properly latched and does not open and you you build it into a point of that it's extremely improbable that the door would ever open so what went wrong on flight 811 the campbell soon discovered that the problem lay in the design of the locking mechanism to lock the cargo door on the 747 electric motors rotate c-shaped latches around pins in the door frame a handle then moves arms known as locking sectors over the top of the sea latches to prevent them from reopening but as early as 1975 problems were found with the locking sectors kevin campbell an engineer by training built a model to show the weakness in the boeing design initially the locking sectors were made in aluminium and in 1975 boeing realized that they weren't strong enough and they actually doubled up the aluminium to make it double thickness but it still wasn't strong enough and a lot of the airlines didn't even put the doublers on anyway the weakness of the aluminium drastically increased the risk of the door accidentally opening with the aluminium locking sectors if the sea locks tried to back wind open electrically it would just push the locking sector out of the way it just simply wasn't up to the job that it was designed for [Music] for 20 years 747s have been flying with this crucial weakness [Music] the campbells wonder what else remain to be revealed they re-doubled their efforts to uncover the full truth behind the accident that had killed their son we bought a car and set off in the united states to see as many people who were involved with the accident as possible we started at seattle down to denver across to chicago through to washington dc down to kentucky onto miami and back across to san diego back up through san francisco back to seattle and that was just one trip the campbell soon found that a shockingly similar incident to flight 811 had given clear warnings of the dangers in the cargo door in 1987 two years before flight 811 a pan am 747 had been climbing out of heathrow when it failed to pressurize at 20 000 feet the pilots had to turn back when they got back to heathrow they found that the door was hanging open an inch and a half at the bottom and all of the locks were open when it got to the maintenance base they found that all of the the locking sectors were either bent or broken why have the sea latches turned and bent back the locking sectors boeing claimed that the ground crew must have mishandled the mechanism the door had been closed manually and what they said happened was that the guy wound the sea locks close 98 turns of a speed wrench he closed the outer handle and then wound it open again and if to be in the position they were found and when the aircraft got back he would have had to wind them open 98 turns and that's just absolutely ridiculous but the campbell's investigation uncovered another vital clue to why the sea latches had turned a report by panam engineers highlighted problems with the door's electrical system it had a fault in the s2 master latch lock switch that should have turned off the power to the the door when the outer handle was closed this was an alarming finding when the outer handle was closed the s2 master lock switch was meant to disconnect the power supply and stop the sealatch motors from turning so could this have failed allowing the motors to open the door to find out boeing asked the airlines to do a simple test close the outer handle then press the switch to open the door and see what happens when they hit the switch it actually worked the boeing thought you know this is not going to work but it actually worked there was power to the the door locks with the with the outer handle closed and the lock started to move and it started to force the locking sectors out of the way and a few days later the airline started ringing in and saying it was damaging their planes so boeing stopped the test but it meant that on those aircraft the s2 switch had failed which is a silent failure and all of those aircraft were likely to have the same problem as a11 they were just waiting for a short circuit to open the doors the campbells now became convinced that the accident on flight 811 began with the failure of the s2 switch power remained on to the sea latch motors all it took was a short circuit in the 20 year old wiring which had been found to be frayed on other aircraft to start the motors up the aluminium locking sectors were too weak to stop the latches turning and the cargo door burst open the national transportation safety board determines that the probable cause of this accident was this after waiting a year for the ntsb report kevin and susan campbell expected it to match their theory of what had led to the accident on flight 811. i'd assume that we would have a report come out that this was an electrical malfunction and were staggered when they came out and said that the door had been mishandled their report focused entirely on the fact that the door lock must have been mishandled by the ramp attendant that was disappointing and we felt that they must have been at a different hearing from the one we were at so how had the ntsb come to their conclusion there was other evidence that we had found during our investigation of improper procedures by the united mechanics and ramp people so we were convinced that there was we could use the word abuse being done on the doors the doors were sort of abused and weren't maintained very well we concluded that the probable cause was mechanical for the campbells the ntsb's failure to mention the electrical problems just wasn't good enough what they said happened was the door was closed the locks didn't fully close it just partially closed just hanging on the the pins and then they close the outer handle but it just simply can't happen because that part of the locking sector is still intact just simply can't happen you can't close the outer handle unless these are in the fully locked position it's the only way that the outer handle will close and just closing this manually you can't exert enough force to actually damage this part of the locking sector all it does is just butts up against there if the locks aren't fully closed it just simply butts up against them and goes no further they went back to investigating the accident on flight 811. and soon found disturbing evidence of how it could and should have been prevented after the pan am incident in 1987 it turned out that boeing had issued a directive to the airlines on how to correct the weak aluminium locking sectors their worthiness directive that came out was to replace the aluminum sectors with steel sectors that could not be bent and there were some additionally in some interim requirements for inspections to be performed uh until the what they call terminating action the steel sectors were installed the fix was cheap and simple but getting it done was not the actual cost of the modification changing these locking sectors to steel was 2 000 us dollars per aircraft but it took 10 hours to do it and that's where the money was taking the aircraft out of service for 10 hours that's millions of dollars the campbells found that back in 1987 the federal aviation administration who were meant to enforce improvements had given the airlines 18 months to comply with the modification within a year lee campbell and eight others would die in an avoidable accident so why weren't the airlines forced to fix the problem sooner if these airplanes these large commercial airplanes are grounded it's an economic disaster so what they do is they lobby in the regulatory agency in the united states it's the faa to allow them to do the fixes over time when the airplanes are in for normal maintenance and that way they're not taken out of service but when they do that when they allow the airlines the air carriers and the manufacturers to fix these over time in essence what the faa is doing is they're gambling with the lives of the passengers and the crew that are flying the airplanes during the time they're not fixed after the deaths on flight 811 the faa instantly shortened the deadline for fixing the cargo door from 18 months to just 30 days it was only when united had gone from one of the airlines of first resort to one of the airlines of last resort in new zealand that they just totally out of the blue we got a letter inviting us over to see them and when we got there they were just going to do a pr exercise on us but we just laid into them pointed out where they all got it wrong and you could see them changing during it to realizing that we did know what we were talking about and that we put a lot of serious effort into it one of them actually broke down because they'd never had to meet next of kin before and it ended up with the vice president of united taking us round the maintenance facility and he had people running off in all directions just to get the information that we wanted questions answered we could go anywhere that we wanted and we just everything was was laid on for us because they at that stage they realized that we really didn't know what we were talking about the pressure of the campbell's campaign eventually began to pay off the vital piece of evidence that could prove them right the cargo door still laid two miles down in the pacific ocean but as articles appeared in the american press the ntsb commissioned the u.s navy to search for it a hundred miles south of honolulu a deep submersible began to trawl the seabed we went to honolulu and waited there while they had their attempts and they finally recovered the door from 14 000 feet of water which was the deepest recovery ever at that time and we were phoned within an hour of it coming out of the water before the campbells could see it the door was swiftly removed to boeing's plant in seattle the campbells went in hot pursuit we went over to boeing and they wouldn't show it to us so they they reckon that the crucial pieces had gone to the ntsb so again we got in the car and drove across to washington dc [Music] we arrived at ranch leads office and ron looks at his watch and he says i can give you five minutes so about three hours later we had the the pieces that they recovered in our hand and they acknowledged that we were definitely correct it was an electrical malfunction and that they said they would fix the planes they would make sure it never happens again but just don't hold your breath the report will ever be changed even with the evidence of an electrical malfunction in their hands the ntsb refused to change their report then in june 1991 fate intervened a four-year-old united 747 was sitting on the apron in new york when the sea latch motors started up and the door opened itself there was no way that they could hide it any longer they simply couldn't deny that it was an electrical malfunction that was covering it [Music] finally the ntsb publicly issued a revised report that concurred with the campbell's version there was an inadvertent failure of either the switch or the wiring that caused an uncommanded opening of the door it's nice that other people know that you're right and had been all along and the support that they had given you was you know was vindicated the campbells spent thousands of dollars of their own money on their campaign they were never interested in a financial settlement for lee's death but they did persuade united and boeing to set up a university scholarship in his name i couldn't have lived with myself if we had done no investigating ourselves it was just something we both felt we needed to do we didn't even discuss it we just knew that's what we would do but despite long and public campaigns like that of the campbells critics fear that the airline industry has not learnt the lessons from flight 811 the regulatory agencies they have a dual charge one is to encourage aviation and another is aviation safety and when they get in a position where you have economics up against air safety they tend to air on the side of economics rather than safety serious accidents caused by known defects have continued to occur in the 1990s known problems with icing on aircraft wings caused a series of crashes at least three planes have had fatal fires due to known dangers from flammable insulation material and in 1996 a fully laden 747 blew itself up when known faults in the wiring are thought to have ignited flammable vapors in the fuel tanks inevitably experts are skeptical about the aviation industry's record of balancing profit against prevention we've seen the wiring problem both in the united 811 which was eventually turned out to be the cause of that accident and also in twa 800 where we had an explosion the centerline fuel tank this the the industry answer to 20 and 30 year old wiring and when the wiring can fray break crack cause a short which can either ignite fuel like in tw 800 or open a cargo door like in united 11 and what the industry says don't touch it don't go in there don't inspect it don't try to fix it don't try to remove it because it's so brittle that if you go in there to try to fix it you're going to do more damage than you can do good and that's what i call the ostrich approach to maintenance and safety you know we've decided that you can have a spark of ignition in the centerline fuel tank of a large air carrier but so far we've been lucky we've only had one every 10 years we've only blown up three or four airplanes you know to go in and replace this wiring would ground all these airplanes to be astronomically expensive you know one airplane every ten years one airplane every five years to 300 people cost of doing business cost of doing business and that's a great economic analysis and unless your mother or your child is on board one of these airplanes that happens to pay the price for their economic [Music] satisfaction for some of the survivors of flight 811 the cost has been heavy each crew member handled it differently i know there are still two crew members that have never set foot on an aircraft again it was very difficult for me i was diagnosed with severe post-traumatic stress disorder you can't reason you can't think making the slightest decision is this very difficult you just stood a total loss so it was very difficult to cope with [Music] [Music] you

Channel: On The Move

Views: 64,313

Keywords: on the move, cars, planes, trains, documentary, documentaries, full length documentaries, plane documentary, mayday series, mayday, plane disasters, airport, runway, plane pilot, pilot, hd documentary, 2021 documentary, united airlines, plane crash, air accident, air crash, air disaster, plane accident, air emergency, plane disaster, plane emergency

Id: lsRZkm7k09k

Length: 52min 3sec (3123 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 07 2021