Witness To Terror | FULL EPISODE | The New Detectives

on a stormy Halloween night a passenger plane begins a routine landing but what happens is far from routine investigators must determine what terrible chain of events brought it down nose-first killing everyone aboard in the fog a Canadian commuter plane aborts a landing maneuver seconds later it plows full-speed into the woods nearby was the accident caused by mechanical failure or a fatal lapse of judgment the answers are preserved in the indestructible black box dutifully recording a planes final manoeuvres and the clues last words black boxes help investigators make sense of the fields of destruction after a crash a black box is often the only surviving witness to terror [Music] [Music] on the evening of October 31st 1994 American Eagle flight 4184 took off in the rain from Indianapolis to Chicago less than 200 miles away as the twin-engine turboprop approached its destination air traffic controllers told the crew to expect delays a fierce storm was backing up traffic outside O'Hare International Airport the plane was put in a holding pattern over a rural section of northeast Indiana the pilots noticed some icing and activated equipment to crack it off the wings they depended on the autopilot to keep the plane steady and to maintain altitude attendants tried to reassure passengers that they would make their connections all the other flights were delayed to one of the busiest airports in the world was at a total standstill in an announcement reconstructed from transcripts the captain tried to reassure the Restless passengers folks once again listen captain I do regret to inform you that air traffic control is saying at this point another 30 minutes [Music] the plane had been holding for more than 30 minutes because of the storm some passengers have debated whether to board the flight now they grew increasingly anxious finally the transcripts indicated that controllers cleared flight 4184 to begin landing procedures hand me that pen again it was the last communication flight 4184 would have with controllers as the plane began its descent something went terribly wrong the plane continued to descend picking up speed 7,000 feet 6000 feet 5 at 4,000 people [Applause] the aircraft plunged into a muddy soybean field in rural Indiana chattering on impact fighting driving rain and freezing temperatures rescue workers searched through the night for any sign of life from the 72 passengers and crew finally they faced the truth no one survived when an airplane crashes in the United States it's up to the National Transportation Safety Board the NTSB to determine what went wrong Greg Feith was the lead investigator in the case of flight 4184 when I go out to an accident site I'm playing Dick Tracy my job is to go out and find all the evidence all the clues to tell us what happened the public demands answers and looks to the NTSB to provide them fast so agents are brought in quickly they are often among the first to witness the devastation it can be very overwhelming I mean it's an emotional thing because when you're walking through all of this wreckage you're seeing pictures you're seeing teddy bears you're seeing clothing of children and things like that so you can't help but start to become motion Liat act but as an investigator in order for me to remain objective you have to separate your emotion out of that and you got to block it out so that you can do your job and do it effectively and that's not always easy for us as the Sun rose the next morning it revealed the true horror of the accident impact craters marred the once peaceful farm transforming it to a field of death the narrow country roads of Roselawn Indiana bustle dwith truckloads of rescue equipment and the clamor of news crews a team of forensic aviation experts from the NTSB arrived their job was to create order from the growing chaos so they could focus on the difficult task of figuring out what happened immediately what our investigator and the team will do is actually what we call document the four corners we want to look for all of the wreckage we want to make sure that both wings are there the tail section is there the engines are there but the investigation was hampered by health risks fuel covered everything the site was declared a biohazard only those in safety gear went in and out rescue workers and investigators teamed up to flag evidence and remains they worked side-by-side examining every piece as soon as possible parts of bodies were transported to the morgue to begin the difficult identification process for us the investigators we're looking at physical revenant evidence of the airplane that is the wreckage itself for the coroner who has to go out there and look for the bodies or the victims they had as tough a time as we did because they didn't have whole people they had fragments of people and so for both of us to do our job we had to work hand in hand because if I found a piece of wreckage there may have been critical evidence for the coroner in in a piece of a victim and so we worked hand in hand when we were looking at all of this wreckage so that I could help him collect whatever evidence he needed to identify the people that were on that airplane as bodies were identified they were released for burial family members found solace in each other and in the chaplains and counselors who volunteered to help but in the midst of family sorrow investigators kept working they scoured the soybean field for answers to figure out how the plane broke up they viewed the wreckage from above they examined the scars in the earth created by the impact and the locations of the scattered pieces of airplane the patterns can tell them if a piece broke off on impact or if it fell off during flight causing the accident what they found in the ruins of flight 4184 was startling typically when you have an airplane that's either come straight down or made an emergency type landing you'll find the initial impact point and then wreckage you no detail or fan-shaped pattern with this particular accident site we had a very high-speed high angle of attack impact into the ground so we had a main impact crater but we found the tail section in a very oddball place in relation to the main impact crater that led to the team of the thanked how did that get there and it was an evident that it was an in-flight breakup so the tale had come off before the airplane hit the ground now investigators had a possible explanation a structural failure may have caused the tail to break off in flight but airplane tails don't just break off something must have triggered the failure more evidence needed to be examined more data gathered the weather that night provided the first clue the conditions were ideal for icing too many the freezing rain in which the plane was flying could have been a major factor but it seemed unlikely that icing on the wings could cause the tail to fracture the only way to determine what really happened would be to look inside the planes black box a black box is actually two boxes and they're not black they're orange making them easier to find one contains a record of the plane's mechanical workings it's called the flight data recorder the other is the cockpit voice recorder basically a crash group tape recorder it contains an account of everything the pilots say it also picks up alarms engine noise and perhaps the horrifying sound of impact within hours the boxes were whisked away to NTSB headquarters in Washington DC their technicians prepared them for analysis sometimes black boxes provide instant answers other times they only deepen the mystery as investigators prepared the playback equipment they also prepared themselves they'd be the first to hear what the pilot said as they face death head-on [Music] after maintaining a holding pattern near O'Hare Airport flight 4184 was cleared to descend from 10,000 feet seconds later the plane crashed into the earth killing everyone aboard now investigators would listen to the cockpit voice recorder as the plane began its fatal plunge the crews words during the terrifying last moments are taken from transcripts [Applause] okay the chilling tape made it clear the pilots were completely broadsided they didn't know they were in trouble until it was too late but it raised more questions than it answered investigators were no closer to learning what happened their last hope lay inside the second box the flight data recorder or FDR now all the plane's mechanical functions or malfunctions would be analyzed Doug brazii is a blackbox expert at NTSB he's responsible for turning the complicated bits of data from FDR's into useful information the data recorded by an FDR depends on the age and type of plane it's in the won on flight 4184 monitored about 100 mechanical functions Bracey downloaded the information to a computer using tape decks that translate the coded data the information appears as charts and graphs on the computer they represent the pilots actions and the airplanes performance in the final minutes before it plunged to earth the readouts were placed side-by-side on a time line to see their relationships as the data appeared Brazi discovered the plane had experienced an abrupt catastrophic event [Music] to get a better understanding he created an animated version of the plane's last moments it's very difficult to get a sense of time and how quickly or slowly things can unfold from looking at numbers and graphs the animation helps us see how quickly or how slowly things develop in the accident sequence the animation combines all the planes functions just before it fell into a visual model that investigators can study it began as the plane started its descent from 10,000 feet without warning the autopilot disengaged the ailerons flaps on the wings that control flight suddenly flipped the plane rolled violently to the right the pilots grab the controls and struggle to level out but the speed of the roll was too great it yanked the controls out of their hands and the nose dived toward earth as they burst through the clouds the ground filled their windshield rushing toward them at 400 miles per hour futile II the pilots pulled back on the controls to bring up the nose the resulting strain on the tail was too great it snapped off just before the plane hit the ground the animation made the sequence of events tragically clear the airplane was in flight when the airplane rolled initially rolled to approximately 77 degrees the first time and the nose started to pitch down the first officer was able to recover it slightly and as he tried to pull the nose back up the airplane then rolled again completely through 360 degrees the nose pitched down and the roll continued another approximately hundred and forty degrees until the first officer was able to get the the roll stopped but because of the very steep attitude that the airplane was in and as he tried to pull out he had a lot of aerodynamic force on the tail section of the airplane because he was pulling extreme he was actually moving these flight control surfaces to their maximum high aerodynamic loads this part of the airplane literally came off and the airplane then basically went over on its nose striking the ground and then fragmenting and is it fragmented this part of the aircraft ended up getting slingshotted to the furthest point in the wreckage area it was now evident that the crash wasn't caused by the tail breaking off in flight that left icing as the probable cause but brazii new icing would normally show up on the screen as a slow steady buildup not a sudden Cataclysm what could have overpowered the plane so quickly and sent it careening to earth knowing what makes a plane fly and provide clues to how it can fall at embry-riddle university in Prescott Arizona wind tunnels are used to demonstrate the aerodynamics of flight here the invisible forces of wind are made to blow unveiling the basic principle of flight the faster that air moves over a surface the less pressure it exerts the slower moving air underneath pushes upward causing the surface to lift aerospace engineer Richard Felton demonstrates the principle with a simple experiment let me demonstrate with a sheet of paper for mine I'm going to blow over the top of the surface of paper so I'm not going to create anything below there's no magic here at all okay and as you can see the paper actually raises wings are not flat like paper but they work the same way the air moves faster across the round top of the wing because it has more surface to cover but it's critical that the top surface be smooth and that nothing on it disrupts the flow of air if the air flow is disturbed the object loses the pressure that lifts it any foreign objects on the wings can disrupt the airflow for instance ice can build up then break off leaving jagged edges that may produce enough turbulence to bring down a plane fleck 4184 was an ATR 72 series airplane Roselawn investigators discovered that these planes had a history of icing problems but the FDR showed that its de-icing system was working properly and the readout didn't show normal icing patterns then investigators learned of a weather phenomenon called supercooled drizzle drops extra-large freezing rain a check with meteorologists told them the conditions that stormy Halloween night were right for this phenomenon to occur was whether the fatal factor [Music] to find out the manufacturer of the ATR took to the skies over the Mojave Desert in California there they tried to recreate the exact conditions of the storm in an experiment called a tanker test a modified US Air Force jet produced an icing cloud eight feet wide an ATR like the one at Roselawn flew into the cloud the freezing rain clouds were infused with yellow dye so investigators could see the ice forming on the nose and wings to make sure the tragedy was not repeated test pilots flew very high for added recovery time who were prepared to eject if necessary at first normal freezing rain was released the small water droplets froze the instant they hit the front of the wings but the de-icing boots cracked the I saw then a cloud of supercooled drizzle drops was released when the drops hit the wings they didn't freeze instantly instead they spread across the wing freezing behind and out of reach of the de-icing boots at last the final piece of the puzzle was put in place typically when the wing has no contamination on it these bands or relative wind are smooth flowing over the top and the bottom of the airfoil but with the Roselawn accident when we have the ridge of ice which is represented by this triangle we have now disrupted that airflow as the airflow then reattached or came back across the very top of the wing it got very turbulent as it came off the trailing edge which is represented by this area right here that turbulence was right over the top of the ailerons and when the turbulence created a very low pressure system this ailerons started to move from a like a neutral position up to its maximum deflection of 14 degrees in a quarter of a second now investigators concluded what happened that night and why the pilots were in the holding pattern they were chatting the autopilot was on they thought everything was fine what they didn't know was that behind the de-icing equipment a ridge of ice was building up as they started to descend the ice cracked off what remained left ragged edges on the wing causing turbulent airflow the turbulence created a powerful low pressure system that acted like a vacuum it literally sucked the ailerons up forcing the plane into a roll attempts to write the plane only snap the tail the plane then dove into the earth [Music] afterward all was silent except for the driving rain and then silence the crater in a soybean field in Roselawn Indiana is a scar that can never be healed but by solving the accident investigators have done all they could after the investigation the ATRs de-icing system was redesigned extending farther back on the wing and ATR pilots are now trained for icing conditions the work of the NTSB and others on the Roselawn case helped to reduce the chances of a similar accident happening again every airplane crash is the result of a fatal mixture of conditions the ingredients come from the plane the weather and the pilot himself in Canada investigators tried to reconstruct a commuter planes recipe for disaster the mountains of British Columbia are among the most breathtaking in North America but for pilots flying through them they can be treacherous in 1989 two young pilots at Sky link Airlines were flying five commuters in a 19 seat turboprop from Vancouver to Terrace just over 400 miles away they've made the trip dozens of times and they were familiar with the dense morning fog that often drifts through this part of Western Canada the morning of September 26th was the start of just another day shortly before flight 70 made its final approach to the runway a 300-foot fog bank engulfed the airport bringing visibility to zero the pilot expected to see the runway lights pierced the fog at any moment instead he saw only you as the plane swooped down for the landing he had second thoughts and safely aborted the manoeuvre but as he pulled away treetops suddenly loom large through the dense AIDS [Applause] the airplane plowed through the branches rolled and burst into flames the pilots and passengers were killed on impact investigators from the Transportation Safety Board of Canada were assigned the horrible task of making sense of the tangled wreckage trees had cracked and fallen onto the fuselage one of the wings had sheared off the cabin was crushed the cockpit was peeled open exposing a snarled mass of wires cables and circuitry the force had twisted and snapped off the propellers it took days to find pieces of aircraft that hurtled into the forest reading the wreckage would take even longer it's a forensic skill that requires intensive training at embry-riddle university would be investigators gain experience by studying the remains of actual crashes reconstructive on the site director of aerospace safety bill wall doc instructs his students in what to look for and how to find it well just like in a crime scene what I want the students to be able to do is to identify all of the things about this scene that are significant to be able to find all of the parts to be able to understand how those parts got where they were and what they mean and then to be able to take that and put it into the rest of the story and literally fit all the pieces of the puzzle back together and come up with a clearer picture of what happened to this aircraft and why it happened according to wall dock finding out what caused a crash is the first step to preventing another one the main purpose we do investigations is to try to figure out what happened and why it happened and once we've done that then we can go change things and try to improve the rest of the system it's an expensive way to learn but usually it's one of the most impressive ways to learn and we get the point across pretty well that way every detail of the wrecks is painstakingly duplicated right down to the flames if a crash site is on fire it's crucial to determine if the flames started in the air or on the ground a plane that burns then crashes shows a different pattern than a plane that crashes then burns a fire that ignites during flight generally burns hotter than a fire caused by impact because it's fanned by the rushing wind according to wall doc pre impact fires leave a distinctive signature one of the things that we look for in considering pre impact fire versus post-impact fire is evidence that metal was hot when it hit the ground right in this area of the engine compartment on the left side you see a little bit of feathered aluminum to get that aluminum to broom straw or feather that metal has to be up near its melting point and right here we see a little bit of evidence that that process has occurred that tells us that we had a pre impact fire in this left engine compartment less than 7% of fires occur on impact but when they do they make the investigators work much more difficult when rescue crews put out the flames the force of spraying water moves parts a considerable distance and the fire itself can destroy valuable evidence fire will tend to get rid of our physical evidence we're looking for for example fatigue in a metal structure if the airplane caught on fire when it hit the ground it'll tend to erase that evidence and to burn it away and fire is one of the worst things we can do at the crash site in Canada fire was only the first of the many challenges investigators would face burn patterns showed that the fire was the result of the impact not the cause of it lead investigator Roger Ayotte recalls the scene the aircraft had crashed to some 1500 feet away from the airport and the actual crash site itself was not particularly large the airplane that hit the ground at at fairly high speed and the destruction was was considerable and certainly wasn't evident when we went onto the accident site but what the problem had been when we did start examining the wreckage we realized that the aircraft in fact had impacted the ground inverted because the engine positions were switched on the ground hayaat and his team reasoned the fog may have played a role but only a minor one the pilots were too experienced the collision - fast and furious the devastation - complete in the charred rubble investigators located the flights black boxes still bolted to the tail their bright orange exteriors were camouflaged with soot perhaps the boxes would reveal what happened they were flown to transportation safety board headquarters in Ottawa for analysis in the lab black box expert Michael Poole and computer analyst Bob Hoyle were stunned by what they found the flight data recorder should have been an electronic device that captured most of the planes mechanical functions on magnetic tape or microchip instead it was an unauthorized and antiquated model invented in 1951 its use had been prohibited in many countries rather than electronic circuitry the Box used a stylus to etch information onto a moving roll of foil okay the flight data recorder on this aircraft was an old design it was a foil type recorder which is a metal foil which and five parameters are inscribed on the foil and of those five heading which is a key parameter was actually not functioning so we in fact only had four parameters and in contrast with today's modern aircraft which have five 600 parameters per second obviously there's a very big difference here so we had a very limited flight data recorder the data on that recorders also the resolution is very poor and it's extremely time consuming to extract the information off of these foil type recorders in its time the foil recorder was a technological advance because it could survive impact and fire now it's primitive workings threatened to [ __ ] the investigation to eke out some meaning from the foil scratchings foil scanned them into a computer perhaps modern technology would give its predecessor a helping hand Coyle was able to sharpen and focus the information from the coarse edgings enough to interpret them the FDR showed that the plane flew an unwavering course into the trees at more than 200 miles per hour but one mark indicated something strange a sudden burst of speed just before the plane struck the information was incomplete and contradictory why would a plane in the midst of an aborted landing suddenly plunge into the ground pool and his colleagues turned to the cockpit voice recorder for an explanation they found only more contradictions the pilot told the copilot they were going to abort the landing go around and try again on the tape in the background the engines roared to full power that was consistent with a climb but it wasn't consistent with the disturbing final exchange between the pilot and co-pilot transcripts indicate the copilot began to warn that the plane was losing altitude okay when we first listen to the voice recorder it was quite quite perplexing because the crew had initiated a missed approach they were starting to do a go-around we could hear engine power coming up they were asking for gear up they were asking for flaps up they were starting to climb out and for some reason the airplane transition from a climb out to a descent and crashed very quickly so this was quite puzzling and that was really where we started to focus why was this airplane which should have been able to fly out shouldn't have been a big problem transitioning from an ascent to a descent and hitting the ground the black boxes yielded only vague clues they held none of the hard data pool had come to expect from them he relayed the bad news to fellow investigators the gaps left by the primitive data recorder would have to be filled in manually a team of nearly a dozen forensic aviation specialists would have to engage in hardcore old-fashioned detective work fortunately they had an arsenal of sophisticated tools to help them the first step was to determine if the damaged engine was the cause of the crash or the result of it for that investigators depended on engineering services specialist John Garstang as part of the crash site investigation we saw that the right engine was extensively damaged and disintegrated in order to understand this damage whether it occurred in flight or incurred in the ground as a result of ground impact we had to know how the aircraft broke up that's where we use tree information together with the attitude that it hit the ground to determine the break-up sequence Garstang specializes in coaxing clues from places investigators can't go like the tops of the trees he mounted a stereoscopic camera on a helicopter and shot 3d photos of the damaged trees he used these photos to determine the angle at which the plane struck the forest this is the crash site the red dots are pieces of wreckage the aircraft initially descended through the forest starting here all the black dots are trees that have been damaged most of which had been cut by the aircraft he then created a model showing the path of the plane as it plowed through the trees it showed the plane was level as it clipped the treetops both engines must have been in place keeping the plane balanced the roll didn't occur until after it hit the trees Garstang concluded the engines were attached on impact now he had to see if they were working properly erratic moves in the final flight path of the plane might hint at an engine problem but because the FDR didn't have the data Garstang needed he had to devise a clever way to reconstruct the plane's movements he made a map showing the locations of witnesses when they heard the plane we used the location of witnesses on the ground and through triangulating from where they are to where they either saw the aircraft or heard it we were able to determine that the general flight path was in a arc like this that came approached towards the airport in this direction and then ultimately the plane crashed over here witnesses determined the flight showed no sign of trouble and they provided Garstang with other useful information initially we heard that the witnesses heard noises or sounds like a WoW engaging pitch that made us wonder whether there is possibly an engine problem or a propeller problem and at the crash site we were missing pieces and there's an extensive damage done to the right engine that initially led us to try and focus in that area to see if that was an area of concern engine trouble is often the cause of small plane crashes to see if it was behind this accident chief analyst Bill Taylor dissected the battered engines when we're doing an engine investigation and doing a teardown there are two or three things that we're looking for first of all we want to see whether there's been a mechanical failure in the engine that's most apparent most obvious and the easiest thing to do the second is to look for evidence of the power level that's very helpful in and then in an accident investigation to just discover whether the engine was producing full power it may be running but running at low level that idle as you might say it's it gives an indication again of what was available to the crew at that time if the engine was at full power when it crashed it would bear the scars of its moving parts as they struck the engine body deep markings indicated the engines were at high power the large amount of dirt and debris sucked into it on impact confirmed that finding Taylor gave the engines of clean bill of health he determined the wowing sounds heard by witnesses were normal engine sounds bouncing off the uneven terrain he'd have to look elsewhere for answers he checked the landing gear it too was working it was nearly retracted at the time of the crash consistent with the procedure for an aborted landing so far the plane seemed in perfect working order no clues had surfaced investigators were stymied but was it possible something was driving the pilot to land quickly and take risks could he have been running out of fuel John Garstang used infrared photography to find out what we have here on the left is a conventional color photograph of the forest and on the right is what's referred to as a near infrared photograph in conventional photography fuel blends into the natural shadow but shot with near infrared film the spray of fuel appears as a dark stain records like the weight and balance gave us a good indication of what the fuel quantities should be and we use the infrared imagery to confirm that there was sufficient quantity or a large quantity of fuel print at present we have the grounds car here left by the right wing and you can see a general area of discoloration where the fuel has been sprayed as well as there's been a ground fire and branches have been broken the photographs revealed the plane arrived at the airport with fuel to spare another dead end for the investigators according to all indications flight 70 should never have crashed but it did and until investigators figured out why the tragedy could recur the nagging question remained after aborting the landing why would the pilot start to climb and then dive into the earth engineer Jim foots checked the accuracy of the aircraft's instruments perhaps they were lying well we look at the instruments and which leads to looking at the dial phases and in the internal mechanisms of the instruments because again not all FDR's record all parameters so we can look at at the instruments and at times get information from the dial face such as pointer slaps gear train damage and they will tell us what that actual system was doing at impact if the impact was severe enough the pointer would slap against the dial face and leave a mark even if the pointer was lost the tell-tale mark would remain most of the instruments were destroyed beyond recognition only the altimeter survived and it showed the plane's altitude setting was right where it should have been the pilot should have known how close to the ground he was once again the solution remained elusive but foot's had his suspicions if the plane was going down a warning system should have alerted the pilot unless the warning system itself was faulty he directed his attention to the warning lights light bulb filaments can tell a great deal about conditions at the moment a plane crashes well we do light bulb analysis even if the aircraft does have an FDR or CVR if the FDR gives us an indication that there was a problem a warning then we can look at the light bulbs and and actually say yeah this light was on and that the pilot did have a warning or a caution light a bulb that's lit when it's broken reacts very differently than a bulb that's off it's easy for the trained eye to spot the difference what we're looking at here is the filaments and what we look for with the filaments is deformation as you see here total uncoiling of the filament which is indicative of a hot or illuminated filament when impacted as opposed to a a lamp that was off or cold at impact where we have just a straight brittle fracture foot's found that none of the 37 surviving warning bulbs from flight 78 been on but that didn't necessarily mean all was well with the craft still searching for clues investigators focused again on the position of the aircraft while attempting to abort the landing perhaps the plane's nose tilted too high at a steep angle air can't glide easily over the wings the plane stalls and drops from the sky in order to figure out a flight 70 stalled investigators would have to climb into the pilot seat whatever happened to Sky link flight 70k mwow thwarted now investigators had to reconstruct the tragedy the stall avoidance system on this type of aircraft was notoriously unforgiving it provided very little notice to the pilot before a stall at low altitude the difference between stall and crash and life and death is mere seconds to see if the planes pitch or angle in the air would cause a stall investigators needed to reconstruct its final moments for that they needed a flight simulator they fed in all the data they collected along with pilot commands from the voice recorder the simulator would combine these disconnected clues into a close estimate of the plane's position we knew what the altitude and airspeed of the aircraft was at the start of the missed approach we also knew when they added the power when they retracted the landing gear and when they retracted the flaps so we were able to come into the simulator and use those parameters that were available off the flight data recorder and fly the airplane in accordance with those parameters and then through that process determine what the pitch attitude of the aircraft was if the pitch was too steep the plane would have stalled then crashed but that wasn't what happened the simulator showed the plane's pitch was fine stalling and a faulty stall avoidance system were ruled out after a tireless examination of the plane nose-to-tail investigators could finally rule out mechanical failure they had only one more place to find answers with the man in the cockpit to determine if human error was at fault Roger Ayotte needed to get inside the pilots head once we had eliminated the possibility of any of mechanical malfunction of the aircraft and that was probably a couple of months I into the investigation then we were able to focus all of our efforts on the operational and human performance sides of the accident while one type of investigators searches for physical clues another looks for psychological ones blackbox expert Mike Poole created a voiceprint turning emotion into a picture and human performance investigators Ron Coleman and Beth McCullough were brought in to study it to explore what was going on in the minds of the pilots they scrutinized their final words so his first response was casual yes okay no big deal the second one's got a lot of anxiety when the copilot alerted the pilot they were descending the pilot answered calmly with a simple okay McCullough felt there was far more going on than the first playback led them to believe but if you've got someone next to you who's obviously expressing concern and and and in a rather agitated voice then you begin to wonder and that might be your first question is this captain being really calm about the situation has it fully under control or is he unaware of the gravity of the situation [Applause] first thing that we picked up was the anxiety in the copilot's voice when he uttered the second descending after that we went back listened to the entire tape many many times to try and determine the various operational issues that might have emerged or did emerge and also some of the human performance issues that were clear just from listening to the voices and the pauses and the hesitation from the voice recording Coleman and McCullough surmised that the pilot sounded unconcerned oblivious to the fact that he was speeding towards certain death they ruled out suicide psychological profiles were normal the investigation team suspected the pilot was literally lost in the clouds he didn't know which way was up and he wasn't trusting his instruments or his co-pilot to set him straight did pilot error caused the crash the team was close to figuring it out but before they could more testing was necessary was the pilot of flight 70 truly disoriented in the fog to illustrate what he might have experienced Mike Poole collated the data and produced an animated version of the fatal flight next to it he created an illusion plane it was based on what the human performance experts believed the pilot may have perceived call a missed approach he asked for the gear to come up the gears selected up he calls for the flaps to come up and the first officer has responded with flaps coming up to half shrouded by fog unable to see the runway the pilot searches for visual clues outside his window in his efforts to get his bearings he fails to notice his gauges or to heed his co-pilots concern what we know and from our operational investigators suspect that he is maybe adjusting the throttles in the cockpit he's maybe Hunt from there with his flight director he's in fog he's perhaps a little bit lost in respect to where exactly is the runways it's my writers to my left so all these factors can be distracting him from that task of watching those instruments the animation showed that the pilot did indeed confuse up with down the condition is called soma to graphic illusion it occurs when pilots are deprived of visual cues instead they rely on gut instinct basically the human body cannot distinguish the difference between a force through your stomach pushing against the back of your chair due to thrust due to being accelerated down a runway for example or the same force due to pitching you up and feeling the effects of gravity pushing you back in the chair though the pilot may have been operating under an illusion the consequences of his actions were dreadfully real investigators went back to the simulator to experience for themselves flight 70s fatal illusion a simulator is an excellent place to perform a test for illusions because it's a machine that's been built to trick the eye and mind in a simulator you're in a building and obviously it can't accelerate you down a runway so but it wants to make you feel that so to achieve that what they do is they tilt you back in your chair and you feel the force of gravity in your chair and then they fool your visual senses by taking the horizon instead of you would normally see it rise they actually keep it level so your eyes think the horizons level you're feeling this forced through your stomach into the back of the chair that is the sensation of accelerating down the runway and that essentially is the somatic graphic illusion Roger Ayotte took the mock fatal flight all the data were entered and the horizon taken away so he could feel the sensation as the pilot had but he'd fly under instrument flight rules or IFR relying totally on his gauges so he would know where the plane was relative to the ground okay this is the same approach being conducted in IFR conditions so you have to concentrate totally on your instrument so as you can see that you have no visual references outside the cockpit with his view blocked he couldn't tell if he was going up or down while accelerating but the gauges told him he was heading toward the ground the simulated flight proved that the pilot had fallen victim to the illusion you can fly by the seat of your pants to a certain extent when you're in visual flight conditions and that is done frequently however when you're in instrument flight conditions so when you're flying in fog or cloud or something like that then you don't have those visual senses that you that you do when you're flying visually the forces of motion in three dimensions can play tricks on the mind the inner ear regulates balance and lets us know where we stand but it needs a visual reference it's extremely difficult to overpower the human instinct to rely on vision when flying but through sheer willpower a pilot can stay true to the instruments until his mind overcomes his body unfortunately the pilot of flight cemani wasn't aware of the danger it takes a network of complex systems to keep a plane in the air it also takes a tangle of circumstances to send one crashing down in both Roselawn indiana and terrace british columbia a combination of factors conspired against the aircraft dooming the passengers and crew but aboard the planes were the black boxes these indestructible witnesses coupled with human ingenuity determined what went wrong by surviving a crash black boxes enable us to prevent countless others [Music] you

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Rating: 4.5908561 out of 5

Keywords: The New Detectives, New Detectives, New Detectives Full Episode, Full Episodes, New Detectives Documentary, Crime, Crime Documentary, Crime Patrol, True Crime, True Crime Daily, Unsolved, FBI, FBI Files, Crime Stories, Crime Documentaries Full Episodes, Unsolved True Crime, Mystery, Solved, Investigation, Police, Criminal, Forensics, Forensic Science, Science, plane crash, american eagle, american eagle flight, flight, american airlines, simmons airline, 4184, skylink, skylink flight 70

Id: BfSyFc-4xHM

Length: 53min 29sec (3209 seconds)

Published: Sat Jan 04 2020