"Worst Plane Crashes Of All Time" | Mega Marathon | FULL EPISODES | Mayday: Air Disaster

a brand new 767 fuel pressure why would that be [Music] how come i have no instruments a catastrophic failure at 26 thousand feet winnipeg air canada one four three go ahead just lost both engines holy cow i'm talking to a dead man uh how far away from kimley you're approximately 12 miles from ghibli right now [Music] i guess i'll just slip it the crew is out of options and running out of time they're at the controls of a 95 ton jet that's quickly falling from the sky [Music] in placid skies over central canada air canada flight 143 is just past the halfway mark of its journey from montreal to edmonton alberta good evening ladies and gentlemen this is your first officer the plane is carrying 61 passengers and eight crew members beautiful day clear temperature of 24 degrees it's july the 23rd 1983. there that's coming along huh rick dion is an air canada maintenance engineer i was going to edmonton with my wife pearl and my young son chris who was four years old and this was the beginning of a two-week vacation for us and we were all pretty excited about going on this new airplane compliment of the captain oh hey rob thanks whenever you want to come up to the flight deck this was my first flight on the modern 767 as the company had just acquired them i'll be back in a minute okay i was interested in going to the cockpit to see all this new technology fit in with the work that i did on aircraft the captain on this flight is bob pearson he's 48 years old and he spent more than 15 000 hours in the air his first officer is maurice quintel who has more than 7 000 hours of flying time come on in pardon me gentlemen rick i knew bob pearson from the small flying club that i attended in st lazar and he was actually one of the local pilots there that used to do some gliding and he also flew the ultralight lasers we had departed heading northwest a nice clear sunny day in july where flight plan at 39 000 feet there were a few airplanes that flew that high in the 1983 and we requested 41 000 feet which got us further above the jet stream out of the west the crew may have accumulated a lot of hours in the air but very few in this plane it's boeing's latest and most advanced wide-body jet the 767 an army of microprocessors in the belly of the plane automates so many functions that the flight engineers job has been eliminated this is one of four 767s that air canada has recently acquired the plane itself has only 150 hours on it quite a difference here huh oh yeah reset on and start here the cockpit is different and not all the old instrumentation that we're accustomed to mostly that was all gone it was all crt display like small tv screens it was a new high-tech airplane which involved quite a change for the crew and the maintenance personnel people handling it this is a new aircraft for both the captain and i at the time i had 75 hours on that airplane so everything was new for me pilots and maintenance crews are both still getting to know this airliner well then we get that same condition captain pearson explains to dion how he handled a small problem with the engines on an earlier flight comes back down to low stage and we just carry on you know that brings up an interesting way [Music] fuel pressure why would that be a warning alerts the crew to critically low pressure at one of the planes fuel pumps something's wrong with the fuel pump the 767 has three main fuel tanks two in the wings which are always used and one in the center only used on long distance flights electric fuel pumps draw fuel from each tank and feed it to the plane's two engines the low pressure warning could mean that one of the pumps needs maintenance but it could also be a more serious issue a lack of fuel to be pumped forward fuel pump it's just a bloody pump failing i can tell you that another low fuel pressure warning sounds this one from another fuel pump on the plane's left side pearson's flight management computer tells him he should have plenty of fuel for the remainder of the trip the 767 also has separate digital fuel gauges but on this flight those gauges are out of service the warnings don't make sense it got a little uh more interesting when the second fuel boost pump light came on for that tank which was the left tank this seemed quite abnormal that two pumps would fail in a brand new airplane we had some kind of a problem that we didn't understand your assessment of that be my own personal thoughts you might be low on the left tank i used to be involved with transferring fuel and i know that when you're trying to empty a tank it'll start flashing periodically and then the pump will re-prime and then the light will go out in this case it appeared to do exactly the same thing captain pearson knows that if the left tank is running low the right tank may be low as well let's head for winnipeg now pearson wants to land as soon as possible in case he is running out of fuel the crew is still more than 700 miles away from their original destination edmonton alberta the nearest major airport is winnipeg manitoba a mere 120 miles away we're showing lots of fuel on board our flight management computer and three normal fuel checks cross-checked with our fuel on our flight plan so we elected to divert the flight to winnipeg where air canada has a main maintenance space winnipeg center air canada 143. they're canada 143 go ahead ron hewitt has 20 years experience as a radar controller yes sir we have a problem we're going to requesting direct winnipeg air canada 143 cleared take position direct winnipeg you are cleared to maintain 6 000 descent your discretion send a 6 000 his discretion and that was it he didn't tell us what the problem was and it's none of my business give him what he wants get everybody out of his way that's about what we do okay we're out of 4-1-0 pearson now begins to descend from 41 000 feet [Music] oh man it's all going out eh the low pressure warnings are spreading to more and more of the fuel pumps [Music] kintel instructs the cabin crew to prepare for an emergency landing hello cabin we think we have problems with our fuel system we are diverting to winnipeg all flight attendants to front galley please i hope this is just false warnings rick can you think of anything we haven't done no i can't bob [Music] okay we've lost the left engine losing an engine er raises any doubt flight 143 is in fact running out of fuel okay checklist single engine landing [Music] pearson is trained to land a 767 with one engine no one has ever tried landing with none he scrambles to get his plane down so that he doesn't become the first with only one engine powering air canada flight 143 and with the possibility of the other engine shutting down the crew prepares the passengers for the worst ladies and gentlemen this is your in-charge flight attendant speaking due to mechanical problems will be preparing for an emergency landing please return to your seats and fasten your seat belts your crew is fully trained to deal with the situation and as you may have noticed some crew members have already started to prepare the aircraft i had no idea like the rest of my crew members that there was a problem with fuel i had no idea why we were going to winnipeg approach and landing blaps will be 20. right ground flap override as they're doing that drill the right hand fuel pump low pressure light was flashing as well much like it did on the left they were quite busy carrying out the first engine out not watching the pump lights which was right at my eyebrow so i kind of knew that that one there was going to shut down too what was that [Music] very shortly we will begin giving you instructions [Music] how come i have no instruments our beautiful colored engine and flight instrument displays simply went black ladies and gentlemen please remain calm please follow our instructions refrain from smoking and put your chair back in the upright position secure your seat belt tightly against your hip it's exactly what pearson had feared he's lost both engines at twenty six thousand five hundred feet still 75 miles from the nearest major airport he's out of fuel air canada 143 go ahead just lost both engines when both engines uh shut off i think you said holy i'm talking to a dead man we were trained in the simulator to handle a single engine failure we had never practiced and i don't believe most pilots ever get the chance to practice total engine failures we just lost their engines it's highly unlikely that anybody's going to survive this because i could see them trying to make a turn and spinning in an airplane's engines not only provide thrust they also generate the power needed to manipulate the plane it would be completely uncontrollable but modern airliners are like a swiss army knife with one last blade hidden away in the event of a loss of power they automatically deploy the rat or ram air turbine [Music] it's spring-loaded and the propeller that drives this small hydraulic pump is about the size of a propeller you would see like on a little cessna 150 and this arm catapults down into the slip stream this propeller starts to turn drives this hydraulic pump and it gives you basic systems [Music] i was pretty quiet uh flying in without motors pearson knows that time is running out he needs directions to the closest landing strip a 143 this is a mayday and uh we require vector on to the closest available runway uh 143. we copy that all okay but the loss of the plane's engines has had an unexpected consequence at air traffic control they're gone they were right here we've lost him he's dropped off the screen i need primary radar uh one for three uh we've lost your transponder return and are attempting to pick up your target now we work on transponders it's called secondary radar we take the pilot signal to paint the aircraft [Applause] commercial jetliners are equipped with a transponder a device that transmits coded information which air traffic controllers use to determine the plane's location but when flight 143 lost its second engine only a small number of items got backup power the transponder was not one of them so the plane disappeared from hewitt's screen flight 143 is somewhere east of winnipeg but no one knows exactly where or how far it is from the airport in spite of its enormous weight a 767 doesn't plunge from the sky when it loses its engines its aerodynamic properties keep it in the air but slowly coasting to earth and i was trying to figure how many miles we were moving ahead versus amin eve thousands of feet we were dropping but kintel doesn't have the instruments which provide the information he needs to make that calculation since he lost the plane's signal hewitt can't give kintel that information either controllers hurriedly work to rig up a way to find the plane just before landing you will hear the command brace for landing brace immediately and stay braced until the plane comes to a complete stop there are two ways to brace one bend forward raise your arms and hands against the seat back bryce bell is a businessman on his way home to edmonton as soon as they announced that we were making a non-scheduled stop in winnipeg i immediately wished i hadn't had the two drinks that i'd had because i thought you're gonna have a split second here and this plane's gonna explode in flame and the decision you make in that split second will depend on how alert you are okay please put your personal belongings in the seat back pocket the response of the passengers when we were doing the emergency briefing was basically alert they were looking at us they were paying attention to every word we were saying i couldn't have had better passengers i think that's him let's say that's him because their modern equipment can't see air canada 143 the controllers switch to old-fashioned radar which doesn't need a transponder to locate planes i got to turn up my true radar the reflective radar which is not nearly as good and we don't use it at all if we can help it okay i got it 65 from winnipeg 45 from gimli uh 143. we have you at 65 miles from winnipeg and approximately 45 miles from ghibli for the first time since losing power the pilots know their distance to winnipeg they might make winnipeg kintel however thinks that gimli is a safer bet gimli manitoba has a decommissioned air force base it's about 20 miles closer than winnipeg as luck would have it maurice kintel trained at gimli while in the armed forces he knows it well 45 miles to gimli that is a long runway uh is there emergency equipment or gambling negative emergency equipment at all just one runway available i believe and no control tower and no information on it pearson must consider the possibility of a crash landing if he has any chance of making it to winnipeg which has full emergency support he knows he must try for it okay then we would prefer winnipeg [Music] fine 143 continue your present heading we all reacted very business-like and say something specifically to uh the situation but never would we ever look at each other i think we were all afraid that we might break down parents were hugging their little kids and people were busy scribbling away which i found out afterwards where they were writing their notes to loved ones and their wills and all kinds of things like that it was pretty nerve-racking okay go ahead total number of persons on board please the actual number of people on board is 69 but kintel is over taxed he gives a lower number in error i have 33 people on board including the crew okay i have to ask if seoul's on board um i know he's busy i don't want to ask him questions but i have to this thing can go down in the lake or the field and i remember thinking great i know this airplane carries about 300 people at least it's not 300. it was about regrets it was about things i hadn't done in my life it was about ways i've treated the odd person here or there that i wish i'd treat it more gently it was about um how stupid i was at some of the things i used to make big issues out of that are so insignificant when it really comes down to what real reality is about it was pretty devastating and i remember telling a mother with a baby and i had my daughter victoria didn't tell this woman that it was going to be okay and i did it i did i was so proud of myself that i could be so straight with her and tell her that it was going to be all right and really look at her in the eyes okay and how far from the field are we now you're 35 correction make that 39 miles from winnipeg roger now that controllers can see flight 143 on radar they can provide kintel with the information he needs to figure out if he can glide as far as winnipeg roger what is your altitude now 8.5 8.5 about 8 500 feet above the ground captain pearson can see his destination winnipeg's airport is less than 35 miles away we're visual but the news from kintel is not good morris was calmly keeping track of our distance by input from winnipeg our traffic control and our altitude and calculated our profile and came to the conclusion that we might not make the runway in winnipeg we can last maybe another 20 miles we're not going to make winnipeg keentel has calculated that at the rate they're falling they would hit the ground a full 15 miles short of the runway uh how far are we from kimberly you're approximately 12 miles from ghibli right now uh where is it which way is he moving on your right turn right to a heading of uh three four five i would say you have ten miles to fly okay fine we're gonna go there i'm gonna go check on my family you guys don't need me up here right now huh no no we're okay [Music] [Music] when i went finally to sit down in my seat this is where i thought wow you know um this is it landing gear down roger first officer kintel lowers the landing gear because there's no hydraulic power kintel does what's known as a gravity drop letting the gears own weight drop and lock it into place the two main gear are heavy they fall immediately and two green lights confirm they've locked but the nose gear is lighter it doesn't lock we could hear the main gear clearly falling and locking i was not aware the nose gear was was not down and locked it was sort of the last minute and if it's something that you cannot control you don't talk about you don't mention it you know the main thing was bring the aircraft on the runway five miles to touchdown roger we have the field in sight five miles from gimli pearson and kintel finally see a runway they can land on but there's a problem we're too close though it's going to be too steep too fast yeah oh no pearson is almost at the runway but he's much too high above it if he comes down at a normal descent rate he'll miss the landing strip but if he comes down steeply his plane will gather a dangerous amount of speed he won't be able to stop before the end of the runway the normal approach we have uh leading edge and trailing edge flaps which allow us to slow the airplane down and fly at a slower speed safely we did not have those flaps as they run off the main hydraulic system so what are we going to do so we discussed we are two possibilities one of them was to do a 360 degree turn and lose the the excess of altitude on the other hand i thought it would take about three minutes and we were already descending at the rate of 2500 feet a minute only about 3000 feet above the ground the plane doesn't have enough altitude to make a full circle it would hit the ground before making it back to the landing strip pearson chooses a second option well i guess i'll just slip it pearson decides to try a maneuver called a side slip practically unheard of on commercial airliners but sometimes used by glider pilots and bob pearson has a lot of experience flying gliders i'm just going to slip it down until we're almost down at the runway and i'll strengthen it okay side slipping involves what's known as crossing the controls here we go pearson plans to force the aircraft into a sideways freefall allowing it to drop quickly without increasing its forward airspeed pearson has never actually performed a sideslip in a glider but he's attempting one now in a boeing 767. the only way that i can control our speed and our descent profile with the runway was to induce drag in the fuselage by cross controlling the rudder on the elevators on the tail and the ailerons and the wingtips and cause the aircraft into a crab configuration then i can vary that to increase or decrease our speed or increase or decrease our descent rate pearson controls the plane's descent by using his rudders and ailerons to change the angle of the plane crossing the controls involves tipping the wings in one direction but turning the aircraft in the opposite direction pushing it sideways into the oncoming air as flight 143 begins to drop towards the earth kintel is about to discover something he did not expect the runway he trained at 15 years ago is no longer a runway [Music] captain bob pearson is out of fuel out of engines out of options if he can't line up with the runway at gimli he doesn't get a second chance pearson turns the yolk left and pushes the rudders to the right the plane slips to its left we're sitting in the center which is the heart of the airplane where it starts so it's pretty solid there i thought there's a real good chance here that we'll be all right however when he put the airplane into a side slip all that went out the window because i figured out if he hits a wing or something it starts to catapult and roll that's not going to work anymore the 767 loses altitude quickly plowing sideways through the air when i looked to the left of the aircraft i was looking directly at the ground because the airplane is angled quite well like maybe 60 degrees of banks the bank angle was quite high and the nose of the aircraft was quite high and it was awkward at the moment and if it was awkward for me i can imagine for the passengers it must really uh fail the heart i saw a sand trap from this golf course and i thought we're gonna crash pearson must maintain a crucial balance he's got to slow the plane enough to be able to land safely but if he slows down too much the airliner could lose its lift and plummet to the ground when a pilot is normally landing an airplane he's maneuvering the flight controls and operating the thrust levers pretty continuously on most landings and so i was doing the same thing without the thrust levers this is where i thought my daughter victoria being alone with my husband and um and how he was going to cope with with with our daughter and how she was going to cope without having a mum as they approach pearson focuses on his target the threshold of the runway i got tunnel vision uh like i've never had it before it was just our speed and our relationship with the threshold of the runway but now only hundreds of feet from the ground can tell sees that their troubles are far from over [Music] the gimli landing strip has been converted [Music] into a drag racing strip today is saturday and it's not just a race day it's a family day on the gimli strip racing is done for the day but the airfield is filled with members of the local sports car club [Music] camping out with their families for the weekend two children have decided to pedal the length of the runway they don't hear the plane coming for them without engines it's silent and one thing the 767 doesn't have is a horn race brace for landing the nose hit with quite a bang on the runway sort of like a shotgun going off at our feet the front landing gear gives out immediately pearson breaks hard two tires blow out the bottom of the right engine scrapes the runway i was a robot there was just no emotion finally pearson sees what's in their path i looked up and i could see two boys on bicycles they must have been probably about a thousand feet down the runway from our position when i saw them and then at one point i could see he raised his head and he's surprised here's this big aircraft i can still remember the look of terror on their faces so they were close enough for me to see that with no nose gear to steer with pearson's only hope of driving the plane left or right is by varying the brake pressure on the two main landing gear that's when my heart started to pitter patter a little bit the kids panic and try to outrun a plane that's traveling about 200 miles an hour i knew i couldn't take the airplane into these boys and i was going to take it off into the grass on the right side there were campers along the west side of the runway that i didn't notice until after we'd touched down and the nose was on the ground and i can still remember at the left side people standing by their barbecues dino calvert is at the track with his friends for a weekend of racing one of the gentlemen in the pits suddenly jumped in his car and he took off and thought well you don't drive like that in the pits usually and i looked up and all i could see was smoke rising pearson does all he can to stop the plane in time holy crow the plane plows into a guard rail installed down the middle of the runway bob 17 minutes after running out of fuel air canada flight 143 comes to a final stop on the ground yeah you okay somebody yelled yahoo or something and then people started applauding and we were so grateful we made it when you believe that you're going to crash you do believe that the airplane is going to break apart you're going to have um fire evacuate evacuate evacuate all right let's go we got to get up thick smoke is quickly filling the cabin the crew doesn't take any chances they want everyone off the plane as quickly as possible there was a sense of joy and then then apparently kind of it seemed to go on waves in a panic saying we got to get out of here we got to get out of here less than two months earlier an air canada dc-9 made a successful emergency landing in cincinnati only to burst into flames on the tarmac before all the passengers could get off 23 people died the crew and passengers of this flight want to avoid a similar fate it took maybe uh just a few seconds to come up to a full halt on the runway but the cockpit was full of smoke passenger evacuation checklist passenger checklist fuel shut off off cabbage pressurized electric's off electric's off checklist complete time to get out of here come on guys get some fire extinguishers we grabbed a fire extinguisher on our way and you never go to a fire at a race track without having a fire extinguisher with you and uh we ran up towards it the doors open up and you see the the chutes come out sort of like a spider growing legs the um plane ended up eventually standing almost what appeared to me to be almost on its nose when i opened my door and i saw that the chute was so steep i thought oh my goodness how do i get these passages to go down due to the nose down angle of the plane the two rear slides don't reach the ground ten people are slightly injured during the evacuation most of them coming down the steep rear slides i heard on the west radar frequency he said one of the 767 says uh he's down okay he's in one piece and that's when our cheer went up i said okay because all of these people were going to sleep in her own bed that night [Music] there's still a lot of smoke coming from the plane's nose [Music] turned out it was about six inches of insulation between the inner and outer skins from friction that was starting to burn the flight attendants have good news all 61 passengers have made it off the plane there's not so much as a single serious injury come give you a hand yeah extinguisher [Applause] [Music] bob pearson has done what no one has done before he's safely landed a 767 with no engines gliding to safety for more than 26 000 feet [Music] here canada flight 143 the event makes international headlines immediately people are already asking how one of the most sophisticated passenger planes in the world could have run out of fuel emergency shoots [Music] by the next day the investigation has already begun bill taylor and diane rochello of canada's aviation safety bureau are among the first investigators at the scene i was a junior mechanical engineering at the time i had been working for transport canada for a year going to the field for the first time was very exciting it was uh it was new it was a major aircraft once we got into the fuel quantity indicating system i actually left diane to deal with the specifics of the computer system first bill taylor needs to confirm what everyone has been telling him that the plane is out of fuel investigators drain the tanks collecting less than 17 gallons of fuel the 767 can hold almost 24 000 gallons it's like having five tablespoons of fuel in a mid-sized car taylor next needs to examine the possibility that the fuel leaked out during the flight the other checks involved looking for any evidence of fuel having been lost they even went so far as to go into what they call the dry bay of the of the aircraft i'm a bit claustrophobic so i really wasn't uh too enthused about going up in there but i crawled up and had a look around with a flashlight and confirmed that there was no evidence of fuel having been lost in there that leaves taylor with only one conclusion flight 143 took off without enough fuel now investigators need to find out why diane rochello begins looking for the answer to that question in the plane's sophisticated electronics bay located beneath the cabin the 767 was a newer type aircraft and it did have a lot of computerized system and i guess back in 1982 these were coming onto the market at a fast rate and they were newer types of electronic system raw shiloh confirms that a computerized unit the digital fuel gauge processor had been malfunctioning on this plane there was no spare in montreal so it couldn't be replaced roshlo takes the component for testing it was decided early on that the unit the fuel processing unit would be taken to the manufacturer honeywell in indianapolis for testing and i was tasked with taking the unit so we went through all the testing procedure and then at one point we did discover that there was a malfunction with the unit during the testing we went more and more in depth and we found out that one of the circuit it's called an inductor coil it was a very very small part and it was encapsulated at manufacturer and encapsulated means it's covered with plastic you cannot visually see it because it's now covered with plastic and you can't see the the inductor coil itself but once we took over the plastic case we could see that the solder joint had not been made properly which caused the malfunction in the system [Music] the faulty processor explains why pearson didn't have fuel gauges for the flight but doesn't explain why he didn't have enough fuel the inoperative gauges were clearly flagged ground crews wouldn't have relied on them when they were fueling the plane investigators confirmed that the ground crew did perform a manual check of the fuel before takeoff we just need to know what you did next yeah we did a manual check of both tanks and then we pump enough fuel for the trip deadlift flight 143 should have taken off with enough fuel for the trip okay thanks that helps [Music] investigators now have to figure out how one of the world's most advanced jetliners took off with half the fuel necessary for its flight [Music] the investigators know that with its fuel gauges out of service flight 143's fuel tanks were checked manually then the fuel for the trip to edmonton was added to the tanks [Music] but before the plane could be given more fuel a crucial calculation had to be carried out [Music] pilots need to know the weight of the fuel on their plane [Music] but fuel trucks pump jet fuel by volume in order for pilots and fuelers to communicate a simple routine translation between volume and weight has to be made investigators check and double check that math the fueling records from the day of the accident provide the answers they've been looking for this is a typical fueling record but when investigators examine the calculations for flight 143 and this is from flight 143. they look anything but straightforward the document clearly shows the amount of fuel in the right and left tanks but investigators are troubled by two particular numbers one converts volume to kilograms the other converts it to pounds he shouldn't have been using both so did you convert to pounds or to kilograms to pound oh take tequila can i see that again further interviews with the technicians and crew reveal that the events on flight 143 now i don't know what i did were caused by human error involving poor calculations and ultimately inadequate training okay fellas we've finished the technicians refueling flight 143 got muddled in their calculations while converting the volume coming out of the fuel truck to the weight of the fuel in the plane's tanks no one who saw the calculations that day noticed the basic error [Music] in 1983 canadian ground crews were used to converting the amount of fuel leaving their trucks into pounds the 767 was the first plane in air canada's fleet to have metric fuel gauges its fuel should have been measured not in pounds but in kilograms which requires a different calculation [Music] flight 143 needed 22 300 kilograms of fuel for the trip but pilots and technicians let it leave with 22 300 pounds instead [Music] because a pound is about half a kilogram the plane only got half the fuel it required which explains why pearson's flight computer told him he had plenty of fuel he entered the wrong amount of fuel to start with in the past the flight engineer calculated the fuel loads this accident raised an important question whose job was it with the two-man crew better training is definitely an issue in an incident such as that if everyone is is trained and the lines are drawn as to who's responsible for what uh then there's no uh ambiguity on it that people know what they're responsible for in this case it was sort of open-ended they really we weren't aware who was responsible for the final say on this field stuff [Music] a subsequent inquiry found that none of those involved that day was trained in metric calculations not the ground technicians not the pilots i had not received any uh neither of us had received any uh training at all on doing these calculations the computer that had replaced the 767s flight engineer was broken and no one knew who should be doing its job air canada 143 was essentially down a man and the goal is to prevent a recurrence of this particular event and also we also find out other systems that might have been either at fault or maybe they could cause a problem in the future and you do try to prevent recurrence all right it took a string of mechanical and human failures for flight 143 to run out of fuel but another failure that day may have saved some lives if the plane's nose gear had not collapsed it would have taken pearson much longer to stop the plane could have slid into the people who were at the strip that day which would have had catastrophic results there could have been more injuries or even loss of life pearson and quintel were partly blamed for their roles in the incident a government inquiry recommended that air canada re-evaluate the training of flight crews and ground technicians in metric fuel conversions it also recommended that the airline keep more spare parts such as fuel gauge processors rick dion retired in 2003 after a long career as air canada's coordinator of maintenance control first officer maurice kintel was promoted to captain in 1989. captain bob pearson went on to fly 10 more years for air canada his experience at gimli shaping the rest of his career as a commercial pilot this experience affected me mostly by giving me making me more relaxed as a pilot giving me the feeling that as much as i've trained for all those years that there's always that question about how you're going to perform when the chips are down and i now have the feeling that no matter what as long as an aircraft stay together i would get it safely back on the ground and so it's been a relaxing experience it's the knowledge that you know under stress you can perform before that you don't know you just hope you will and you train you train for it but you never know with the things that they had to deal with was magnificent i think that got proven in the simulator in vancouver they tried out this same circumstances with several crews and they all crashed probably the most important thing that came out of it was a realization that when something new is introduced special attention and training needs to be accomplished for people to be aware what they're dealing with when we had landed and and the airplane was all in one piece i thought wow i got another chance to fly again because of a tragedy like that once you take your deck of cards and fire it in the air you're truly free and i guess from that point of view gimli could one i could i find it very difficult to say but gimli was maybe almost the best thing that ever happened to me next to meeting my wonderful wife and marrying her [Music] two days after the landing at gimli air canada's 767 was back in the air on its way to winnipeg for repairs a quarter century later that same plane is still in service and it still carries the nickname that bob pearson earned it the gimli glider a crowded 747 has disappeared over the atlantic pieces are found scattered on the ocean's surface but the vital clues are deeper than any air crash investigation has ever gone in this accident we had nothing it was just mind boggling an international recovery effort goes to the very bottom of the sea to rebuild the shattered plane what they discover will send shockwaves around the world early morning june the 23rd 1985 a 747 flies across the atlantic ocean nine and a half kilometers above the water the jumbo jet is nicknamed kaneshka after an indian emperor and air india promises passengers it will be a palace in the sky indian hospitality is something that the culture prides itself on and you do experience that when you fly here india the colors are rich and warm inside it's your gateway to india on its way from canada the plane is heading to london england before continuing on to new delhi it's been in the air for four and a half hours captain hanse narendra is a veteran air india pilot satwinder binder is a captain too who's serving as first officer on the flight as the plane nears land binder talks with the flight's purser [Music] yes sir do me a small favor at the back of the plane seat 54 a boy is sitting there he just wanted to have a look in the cockpit can i send him now after about 15 to 20 minutes [Music] there are 329 people on board including passengers and crew many of them are flying to india to visit family or friends [Music] vishnu pada is traveling to india with his two daughters their mother lata is already waiting for them there we had decided that it would be the ideal year to take an extended vacation in india as a family [Music] six minutes after eight in the morning co-pilot binder makes radio contact with air traffic control in ireland shane rick here in india 182 good morning [Music] station colin shannon go ahead again please thomas lane and michael quinn are working at the shannon control center [Music] air india 182 is 5 1 north 1 5 west at level 310 estimate fire at 0.735 air india 182 shannon roger cleared for london flight level 3-1-0 here india 182 is clear to london maintain 3-1-0 do you want to come up front now yeah okay let's go it's a light morning at shannon control they're dealing with just three planes but something peculiar has happened the signals are all jumbled up the signals on radar merged saw that it was totally impossible to read the call signs and flight levels of any of the three aircraft the air india 747 is flying at 31 000 feet a twa jet is several thousand feet above it and a cp flight is 2 000 feet higher all are traveling east because the planes are stacked on top of each other the signals have merged on the controller's two-dimensional screen tom moved the checkerboard on radar and separated the signals [Music] two of the planes reappear on the radar but the air india flight has vanished their end is not showing up hold on a minute air india 182 do you read air india 1a2 this is shannon do you read over it's 8 14 in the morning i had a good feeling to this day i don't know why i picked up the phone yes it's michael quinn at shannon we have a plane off radar normally a distress call to search and rescue isn't made until a plane has been out of contact for more than 20 minutes the air india flight has been missing less than 60 seconds several ships in the area begin searching for signs of the plane its last known position is some 290 kilometers southwest of cork just two hours after the plane disappears a canadian-owned cargo ship in the area confirms the worst the first pieces of wreckage are discovered uninflated life rafts are spotted bobbing in the cold atlantic then bodies are seen [Music] it's quickly clear that no one has survived in india lata pada is waiting for her husband and two children to arrive when she hears the news from her brother he sat me down and told me that you know something terrible had happened i was just [Music] in total shock and you know part of me was trying to digest the information and part of me was trying to imagine if indeed the worst had happened how i was going to continue my life without them dozens of bodies arrive in cork many more will follow now investigators are faced with the enormous task of finding out how they died and what had caused the crash of air india flight 182 [Music] 130 000 people live in the city of cork tucked into the southern coast of ireland it's long been a vital seaport [Music] on june the 23rd 1985 a gruesome cargo begins arriving at the city's docks just hours after air india flight 182 crashes into the sea bodies and wreckage are brought in by boat dr cumin doyle is a pathologist at the cork regional hospital the first bodies arrived at 4 45 pm on that sunday afternoon and at 12 midnight we had 130 bodies doyle and his team will examine the bodies to see if they can find any signs of what caused the crash it's an enormous undertaking for everybody involved the hospital personnel the the police the navy the army and pathologists like ourselves but we just had to get on and do the job there are so many autopsies to perform the doyle moves the work into the building's gym we had three police people working on each body photographer a ballistics expert and a forensic odontologist that is a person who examines the teeth the face for identification purposes in just four days autopsies are performed on 132 victims all parts of the body were examined externally in detail and every every detail was noted down we were looking of course for the causes of the fatalities doyle makes a telling discovery almost all the victims died in the air only two of the bodies showed signs of drowning which indicated that the others were were not breathing when they hit the water there's something else that's common to many of the victims a large number have had their clothes torn off [Music] now that was important because if they had no clothes or little closes indicated that they had fallen from 31 000 feet or so where this accident occurred some of the bodies also have signs of so-called flail injuries these are breaks specific to bones in the hips shoulders and other joints h.s kola is the lead investigator into the air india disaster the flail injuries tell him the passengers weren't in the plane when it hit the ocean they are caused by tumbling violent motion of the body in air and that is the pattern of the injuries when a passenger is thrown out of the aircraft at high altitude the autopsies show that somehow the plane had been ripped apart high above the water passengers were thrown into the sky long before the plane crashed based on the injuries we could only say that the plane had broken up at 31 000 feet we couldn't say what the cause of the breakup was the biggest challenge in this accident was that we had no physical evidence available to us in this accident in terms of wreckage in terms of passengers crew or in terms of eyewitnesses in this accident we had nothing the most important job of the investigators is to try to find the plane's black boxes the two devices record cockpit conversation and other technical information about the flight of the plane the recorders have radio beacons which send out a signal at a designated frequency but it's still a huge task the boxes are more than 6 500 feet below the surface and the radio signals last just 30 days saleem jiwa is a journalist who has investigated the air india disaster the search for the black boxes was urgent and and three countries participated in it england ireland and india but even with such a massive response early efforts are frustrated 42 kilohertz it's too high it can't be there investigators are picking up radio signals but they're at the wrong frequency [Music] as the search continues hs cola and his team study the maintenance history of the plane they want to know if an undetected floor had caused the jet to come apart in flight they uncover a potentially important piece of information the air india jet was flying with five engines [Music] a 747 normally has four engines but it can carry more the plane was designed so that it could transport a malfunctioning engine beneath its wings ground crews can mount the engine to a bracket on the plane it's exactly what happened to the air india jet there was an extra engine that a previous flight had left behind that was mounted on on the wing of the aircraft the extra engine creates substantial drag on the left side of the plane if the pilots don't properly compensate the plane will start turning in that direction and this hypothesis continued that there is possibility that this fifth engine might have caused the breakup of the wing in fact investigators discover that before the plane took off for london the flight engineer noticed problems with the way the engine was attached there's a small problem in the fifth engine i've asked them to fix it up all right investigators also learned that some internal parts of the extra engine were taken out and stored in flight 182's cargo bay they are so enormous that pieces of the cargo door were removed to make the job easier some of the other parts of the engine went into the rear of the aircraft aircraft such as the 747 can handle this quite easily is routinely done but if the cargo door wasn't reassembled properly it could have led to an explosive decompression in 1974 a cargo door blew off a turkish airlines flight shortly after it took off from paris the sudden decompression crippled the plane it crashed moments later killing everyone on board cola must consider two theories either problems with the door or with the extra engine itself brought down the plane if either one had taken place there should be evidence on the plane's black boxes finding the recorders has become increasingly important almost two weeks after the search begins investigators get news that helps them pinpoint the location of the black boxes the signal will be higher so this 42 kilohertz could be it tell the boats to look again the piece of the black box which broadcasts the locator signal is made of ceramic if it's damaged the frequency of the signal can change it means the strange frequency ships detected earlier could be the right one both the cockpit voice recorder and the flight data recorder are finally located but they're so deep it's difficult to bring them up the aircraft was at 6 000 feet below the sea and it was the depth that was sort of defeating a deep sea submersible is brought in but even with this specialized vehicle and with the location of the black box is known it takes four attempts to bring the recorders to the surface lead investigator kola now has what he hopes are two vital pieces of the puzzle if there's any problem with that aircraft the crew will be talking about the problem they will not be silent about the problem but when he listens to the cockpit voice recorder kola hears nothing unusual after the last contact with air traffic control in shannon the voice recorder picks up the crew talking about customs seals it's paperwork that has to be completed before landing they want about 30 custom seals customs yeah custom seals to seal the bar before its arrival the conversation ends in mid-sentence that was it and then everything was of course silent the cockpit voice recorder indicated that there was no abnormality in the cockpit no no emergency every conversation was normal the plane's flight data recorder tells a similar story cola pours through details about air india's speed altitude and dozens of other pieces of information [Music] the extra engine did cause the plane to bang slightly and the jets rudder was turned 11 degrees to the right but this was exactly what the crew needed to do to offset the drag created by the fifth engine we found that all parameters of the aircraft aircraft altitude aircraft heading aircraft bank attitude row latitude autopilot engage everything was not working normally till the last point after analyzing both black boxes kohler can't find any evidence that the plane was in trouble before it suddenly disappeared from radar [Music] but the very lack of evidence does suggest something [Music] both recorders get their power from the plane's engines both stopped at exactly 40 minutes and one second after eight in the morning since the recorders stopped working at the same time the problem on the plane had to be catastrophic enough to sever the jets electronic system before the crew could react customs used to seal the bar before its arrival investigators are becoming convinced that there are only two possible explanations for the crash a devastating decompression or a bomb [Music] they study the wreckage that's been found floating on the surface of the ocean but it's just a small percentage of the entire plane and none of it is helpful to investigators it offers no clues to explain why the plane crashed we knew there was no fire we knew the aircraft was performing well everything was normal there was no cockpit emergency no warning we got elimination of all the things but we did not got the answer is what happened [Music] we to go to the cause of the accident we had to go to the wreckage which was lying at the bottom of the sea but what parts of the plane should investigators focus on the black boxes were equipped with radio transmitters which made them easier to find but the debris field is deep underwater and enormous some 16 kilometers long and six kilometers across how do investigators identify the one clue that will help them unlock the mystery roy truman is an underwater salvage expert he's brought in to do something that's never been done before retrieve the ruined pieces of a jumbo jet from the bottom of the ocean in hundreds of thousands of pieces he needs to find the ones that will explain why the plane crashed up until that time we had only been used with recovering small aircraft here we're talking about a 747 which was huge and we had no idea of the size of the pieces and what we were going to find investigators know they can't bring the entire wreck to the surface it's so deep it takes hours to recover a single piece the submersible takes underwater video and still photos investigators use those to decide which pieces to bring to the surface it was a narrow corridor and at each end of the corridor it was very light wreckage all of the heavy stuff engine's main aircraft structure was was in the middle of the wreckage field like searching for a needle in an underwater haystack investigators hope to discover the cause of the crash in a tangle of ruined metal but autumn is coming soon the weather will turn bad and they'll have to abandon their search the key to unlocking the disaster still lies somewhere at the bottom of the ocean investigators from india are scouring the ocean floor trying to find out why air india flight 182 fell from the sky as the work continues in ireland there's growing suspicion in canada that the air india crash was no accident as police and investigators sift through the list of passengers on the plane they find something peculiar many of the passengers who were on air india flight 182 began their day in vancouver they were using another plane to connect to flight 182 one of the passengers who bought a ticket for that plane never got on well the passenger um we have never identified him per se but the ticket identified him as m singh it simply had an initial but not full name we believe that name to be was fictitious and that the person never intended to travel while he never boarded the plane m singh did check in on your way to toronto and i want my bag checked through the deli sir i can't do that your reservation is only confirmed to toronto oh i am confirmed this is my ticket jeannie adams is a ticket agent working for canadian pacific mr sing you're on standby to deli i can't but then i have to pick up my bag i can't check your bags through to india if you are not confirmed but i am indeed confirmed wait i'll get my brother he'll tell you there are as many as 30 people waiting to check in adams doesn't have time to wait for the man's brother oh okay okay i'll check it through but you have to check with air india when you get to toronto even though singh doesn't have a ticket taking him to india his bag is checked straight through his luggage is loaded but no one notices that singh never boards the plane that leaves vancouver she broke the rules as they were she should not have allowed that to go through for new delhi interline but she was so bullied and so brow beaten by mr singh in front of everybody else that i think to her eternal sadness and and heartbreak um she gave in singh's maroon bag didn't raise any concerns when it was loaded in vancouver since the air india flight was international when the bag arrived in toronto it faced a more strict series of inspections this is what it will sound like [Music] john de souza is a security officer for air india the day of the flight he demonstrated a portable explosives detector for baggage handlers in toronto chemicals in a match triggered the device as would chemicals used in some explosives okay the portable device was put to use because the x-ray machine which normally scans every piece of luggage had broken down the technology especially the x-ray technology were very uh very weak very in their infancy at that time and they it didn't work reliably and in in the case of the air india episode the technology went quite badly wrong which was one of the tragedies of this situation as security workers used the portable explosives wand on the bags everything seemed normal until they got to the maroon bag [Music] the bag did trigger the device but the sound it made was very different from the one workers heard during the demonstration the bag was passed and allowed on board the plane eventually flying towards england as air india flight 182 flies over the atlantic ocean carrying m singh's bag an explosion rips through tokyo's narita airport two baggage handlers are killed four people are injured a bomb has been hidden inside another piece of luggage that came from vancouver luggage that was bound for another air india jet and it was headed for the cargo hold when it exploded on the ground once it was put on the back was probably just thumped a little bit and uh it exploded as the two japanese baggage handlers were putting it on a conveyor belt just as on flight 182 one of the bags being moved in tokyo was checked in by a passenger who never boarded the flight there was no x-ray machines in use at vancouver airport there was nothing to stop that bag from flying to to tokyo there's a disturbing connection between the tokyo bombing and the air india flight the tickets for the men who checked both bags were bought on the same day by the same customer the single crash of air india flight 182 has suddenly become part of a much larger story with the apparent connection between the two incidents investigators in ireland are extremely interested in what police find in tokyo soon after the bombing forensic experts descend on japan's narita airport there are traces of evidence everywhere the narita bombing was was within a confined space so unlike the air india flight 182 situation where we had debris scattered over nine miles of under the ocean and pretty hard to retrieve we had the in a sense the good fortune of of a contained area where an explosive device went off pieces of metal and circuit boards are embedded in the walls explosive residue clings to parts of the container that housed the bomb amazingly japanese forensic experts were able to pick out tiny parts and fragments and all the analysis finally led japanese police to identify the vehicle that was used to carry the bomb experts even find serial numbers on pieces of the wreckage clues that show the bomb was hidden inside a specific stereo tuner made by sanyo all 2000 tuners that were ever made were shipped to a warehouse near vancouver british columbia from there they were sent to stores across the region one of those tuners carried the bomb that exploded at narita police have a difficult task trying to trace the sale of 2 000 tuners they could have been sold to anyone most of the stores that had received the tuna had been sold out for years but police get a break when they ask about the tuna at a store in duncan a tiny town on vancouver island the last unit had been sold just a few weeks ago they were able to figure out who bought the the stereo tuner which contained the bomb police obtained the same sort of tuner that was used to house the bomb on air india they conduct tests to see how big the bomb would have to be to create the sort of damage that was found in tokyo there was a progressive experimentation using using dynamite to find out the the extent of damage particular strands of dynamite would cause they match the size of the tuna fragments made after each explosion with the fragments that were found at narita they discover that just a few sticks of dynamite were likely used in the tokyo bomb but could just four sticks of dynamite really bring down a jet once they discovered just how powerful the narita bomb was police place it into a fully loaded luggage container the devastation is enormous any decompression caused by uh an event uh or an explosive device in the luggage hole would be sufficient to cause catastrophic results for that aircraft you don't need much for sticks or dynamite can do the job the cramped quarters of a cargo hold amplify the power of a bomb tests conducted at penn state university show that the shock waves created from a bomb blast don't travel in just one direction but reverberate inside a luggage container building on each other vastly increasing the initial force of the explosion if a bomb had indeed exploded in the cargo hold of air india it would have caused enormous amounts of destruction it's the sort of damage that should have left its mark on the remains of flight 182 investigators have a growing suspicion that this plane was brought down by a bomb but they still have no proof so the investigators were not only looking for uh something that was broke and that might have caused the failure but they were looking for signs of what caused the explosion such as burning or solvent stains or possibly shrapnel in seats it meant a lot tighter scrutiny of every piece of wreckage we kept on analyzing each photograph is it giving any indication of an explosion is it giving an impact damage knowing his time is running out kola selects a few key pieces of the plane to bring to the surface bad weather forces him to leave the rest behind kola hopes the bits he does have can prove there was a bomb on board each piece that's brought up is carefully mapped to its original position on the jet one of the most promising sections brought up from the bottom is the floor of the front cargo bay when we recovered that item we found that it had holes which are of a very special nature penetration from inside to our side at a very high speed curling of the edges of that one and that was indicative of that perhaps this is the place where the explosion had occurred as many as 20 holes are found in each the metal is bent outward like the petals of a flower these are classic signs of something being blown out from the cargo bay on the side wall of the cargo bay investigators find more clues additional holes are discovered like the ones on the floor these also appear to have been blown out from the cargo hold a closer study of the ceiling of the cargo bay also indicates that the ribs connecting it to the fuselage were broken by being forced up [Music] investigators are convinced that the wreckage shows that a bomb had exploded in the forward cargo hold if the bomb had gone off in the front of the plane it would explain why the flight data recorder and cockpit voice recorder cut off so quickly like other 747s the electronics bay on the air india flight is located below the cockpit many of the important electrical systems on the plane run through here the forward luggage compartment is right beside it and so when the bomb went off the explosion would have taken out the computers completely and there would have been absolutely dead silence and that's precisely what happened investigators are convinced that air india flight 182 has been destroyed by a bomb this was no accident the crash of the passenger jet was a crime nobody nobody thought that such an evil plot of blowing two aircraft simultaneously would occur from vancouver exhaustive detective work creates a clear picture of what likely happened on board the air india jet in toronto m singh's bag is taken off the vancouver flight and moved onto the air india jet it's put into a luggage container that's eventually placed at the front of the jet right behind the plane's electronics bay as the plane sailed over the atlantic ocean the crew had no warning that a bomb was ticking down to disaster they want about 30 custom seals customs yeah custom seals to seal the bar before its arrival when the force of the blast hit the floor of the jet it pushed it violently upwards the thin fuselage would have been blown apart the air pressure inside the plane would have rushed out tearing passengers from the cabin and fatally crippling the jet the debris scattered over nine miles is an indication of how how rapidly and how uh how fearsome this this whole decompression was but in this instance the aircraft completely didn't stand a chance of flight there was no way of continuing flight in this case as the jet fell towards the sea the forces put on the fuselage tore it apart it would have a tail torn off and the wings would start breaking and there's no way of sustaining flight after that it goes into gyrations once it goes into generations there was just massive structural failure after months of painstaking work investigators believe they have unraveled the cause of the air india crash they've proven a bomb brought the plane down it's now up to police to find the bombers but with so many deaths and so many more possible if the narita bomb had exploded in midair there's immediate interest in making passenger jets safer this was one of the biggest disaster in the indian aviation history and it could have been avoided if the procedures were in place as the hunt for the killers continues extraordinary steps are taken to tighten security and to see if jets can be made to withstand the force of a bomb it's may 1997 more than 10 years after a terrorist bomb destroyed air india flight 182 an out of service 747 is about to take part in a remarkable test two bombs are placed in the front cargo bay two more are put in the back well the burning thorpe test was actually intended to prove five years worth of research that we can protect an airplane using hardened luggage containers or hardened liners in the cargo hole the plane is also pressurized to simulate the conditions a jet would encounter at cruising altitude pressurization is the key to that kind of experiment the added energy that you have from the pressurization inside the airplane adds to the damage you can think of it as a balloon if you take a pin and you put it in a balloon that's uninflated you get just a simple hole size of the pin however if you blow that balloon up and you hit it with a pin it pops catastrophically when the bombs are detonated the result is devastating the force of the blast plus the pressure inside the jet to store the plane apart and that's the closest we can come to seeing what would have happened to a jet in flight the destructive power of bombs on jets is well known but what the tests at bruntingthorpe showed was that relatively simple measures can substantially minimize the damage caused by an explosion one of the bombs in the rear cargo hold was placed in a normal luggage container but the bombs in the front cargo hold were different one was placed in a specialized container strengthened with a material similar to that found in bulletproof vests the other was put in a normal container but placed beside walls that had been reinforced with a blast absorbing liner when the bombs explode the front of the plane is virtually untouched we had no breach of the airplane skin with the liner or with the hardened luggage containers but towards the rarity airplane or the tail where we didn't have any of the hardened materials it was a catastrophic failure for the airport the standard luggage container did nothing to minimize the blast both the protective lining in the front cargo bay and the hardened luggage container were able to absorb the force of the explosion it's only speculation would steps like these have saved air india very likely would they make the industry safer today absolutely despite the dramatic results of the tests in britain hardened luggage containers are not used by world's airlines while effective at stopping bombs they're extremely expensive the hardened containers are not in use now because it's just not economically feasible the containers cost the tens of thousands of dollars just to purchase and they're very fragile they're composite materials so if you run into this automotive forklift they're pretty much useless from that point forward there have been significant improvements made to the way that passenger luggage is screened at most international airports more sophisticated color x-ray systems using multiple scanning beams are now used but i am indeed confirmed wait i'll get my brother he'll tell you oh okay okay i'll check it through but you have to check with air india when you get to toronto [Music] and there are stricter regulations about luggage getting sent forward on connecting flights in the case of air india the most important thing of all was passenger baggage reconciliation this is the key to detecting an explosive device or a terrorist no plane leaves with baggage unattached to a specific passenger inside that plane and and that must be so [Music] seed is 10b i think one of the the most difficult piece of news for the families to accept was the many ways in which this tragedy could have been prevented i mean it was absolutely unforgivable that a bag could be interlined to another destination without a passenger accompanying it the quality of training that security guards at airports get also came under scrutiny during the years after the air india crash it's still an area of concern for some security experts there's a real failure to train security personnel and that failure is because you cannot pay rent a cop subsistent wages to look after your security when you get on board an aircraft in the air india case police eventually traced the bombing to seek extremists living in canada they're fighting to have an independent sikh homeland created in india the man who confessed to assembling the bomb is sent to prison the man suspected of masterminding the plot is killed several years later while under arrest in india both men had deep ties to canada's west coast sikh community it's a connection that still bothers lata pada it was a deliberate act of terrorism and hurts even more that they were executed by canadians on canadian soil against canadians more than 20 years after the destruction of the air india flight the shock of the day is still fresh and many questions remain unanswered we still don't know who the two people were who checked in the bags apart from the basics of who made the bomb we don't know much about who else assisted them we don't know who picked up those tickets [Music] there's a vow of silence that has hindered the investigation this inquiry will be launched immediately in 2006 the canadian government launched an inquiry into the air india bombing another investigation of what happened and why the shocking death of so many is a continuing source of anger and disbelief [Music] no matter what the inquiry finds the sobering facts are the same 329 people killed in an instant there are memorials now in ireland and canada mourning the victims of the air india crash marking the day a terrorist bomb ripped through the lives of so many it's just so tragic about all our lives that we lead every day is an ordinary day in our lives but some days unexpectedly something completely totally unexpected shatters your life and that was one of those moments [Music] at the time it was the worst crash in aviation history it was just a scene of absolute utter devastation 1974 more than 300 people died when their plane fell from the sky there's barely anything left here that's recognizable as being a part of an aircraft you couldn't walk anywhere without the danger you're going to stand on a part of a human being the key to understanding the disaster is found thousands of kilometers away an unusual piece of evidence that tells the troubling story of a crash that could have been prevented [Music] [Music] [Music] june the 12th 1972 one of the newest members of american airlines fleet is in detroit michigan [Music] paige flight 96 a brand new dc-10 is getting ready for takeoff captain bryce mccormick and co-pilot paige whitney have been in the plane for hours back there so when we're in flight if you can get a chance just to look at that detroit is just a stopover on a flight from la to buffalo and then to new york you ready to try one page all right sir [Music] mccormick has flown the plane out from california but whitney is going to fly the next leg [Music] both men want as much time at the controls as possible neither one of them has more than 75 hours flying the dc-10 few pilots have more there simply aren't enough of the planes in the air in 1972 the dc-10 had just been introduced [Music] the plane is the latest advance to passenger jets its style and its size set it apart from other airliners the mcdonnell douglas corporation has spent more than a billion dollars developing it in the late 60s there was a race going among the three major manufacturers of jetliners uh mcdonnell douglas boeing and lockheed to see who could get the first jumbo out so they got really busy on getting this ec10 in to production as fast as they could and one of the things that they could not suffer were many delays based on some problem with the design american airlines is one of the first companies to buy the plane flight 96 is one of those planes just the fifth dc-10 ever built cydia smith has just been trained to be the chief flight attendant on the dc-10 i was excited because it was the one of the first jumbos that we had and i was going to have the opportunity to fly number one which is what i always wanted to do on a big jet [Music] okay you got it and on the wheel i got you [Music] [Music] just after seven in the evening flight 96 lifts off from detroit airport [Music] just minutes after takeoff the plane is rising easily through 3500 meters over windsor ontario canada i was sitting in my seat and the captain had turned off the fasten seat belt sign and i was making my way to the galley and i had to go sort of downhill because we were climbing to go to the galley to turn on the coffee [Music] when i when i punched the coffee and i moved over to one side that's when it happened [Music] i remember falling over because the plane was going was like this but all of a sudden it just went like this i saw ceiling compartments fall and i saw things coming out of pockets and everything and i thought to myself oh boy it it felt like the last day of my life we hit something we lost an agent here in the cockpit the crew is fighting for control of their jet the throttles which control the three engines have snapped to idle the plane loses almost all its thrust the huge jet begins slowing plane immediately took a huge drop and the next thing that happened was i was hit in the face with with a piece of the plane my husband was frantically trying to find a stewardess to give me something to put a pressure on my face to stop the bleeding mccormick takes over control of the plane [Music] he and whitney wrestle the jet level [Music] but flight 96 has been badly damaged no i've got full rudder here [Music] the rudder on the tail which controls the direction of the jet is jammed to the right that's forcing the plane to swing dramatically in that direction while mccormick fights to turn his damaged plane back to detroit cydia smith is shocked to see a gaping hole in the floor of the main passenger cabin people were asking me you know what to do and i knew that i didn't know what to tell them smith has been able to account for all of her passengers but flight attendant sandra mcconnell is missing can you hear me and finally i saw her come out of one of the bathrooms mcconnell has to cross the hole in the floor to move to safety and almost every step she took the floor kept collapsing the crew brings up power to the engines on the wings but the third engine on the tail stubbornly refuses to respond senator this is american airlines flight 96 we got an american emergency roger type of emergency we've got a jammed rudder we need to get down and make an approach along with his engine and his rudder mccormick is also having trouble controlling the elevators on the tail of the plane they help him move the massive plane up and down they're slow to respond but he can move them [Music] the situation isn't completely hopeless [Music] without complete control of the elevators and with a rudder that's frozen to the right mccormick has to use his engines to turn the plane by increasing the thrust on one side of the plane he can change direction but it won't be fast i have no rudder control whatsoever so our turns are gonna have to be very slow and cautious all of the passengers move as far away from the hole in the back as possible but apart from the cut to loretta kaminsky so far there are no other serious injuries [Music] landing [Music] bryce mccormick's dc 10 is badly damaged the lives of everyone on board now depend entirely on his ability to land a plane that can barely fly with explosive suddenness a short flight from detroit to buffalo has become the most challenging flight of captain bryce mccormick's career he's down an engine and he can't move his brother [Music] as he heads back to detroit mccormick begins to slow his plane down so it can land safely but when he does his plane begins falling dangerously fast ideally mccormick should be descending at 700 feet a minute but now he's falling more than twice that fast 1600 feet per minute what's the sink rate 1600. at this rate mccormick will crash well short of the runway he increases power to his engines to slow his fall 700. mccormick has slowed the plane's descent to 700 feet per minute but to do that he's had to increase his forward air speed which means he'll be landing far faster than usual for the first time since the beginning of the crisis mccormick talks to the passengers ladies and gentlemen this is your captain speaking we've had a small problem but the plane is under control now and we're heading back to detroit for an emergency landing bryce mccormick was as calm as if he were welcoming you on the plane as the plane nears the airport flight attendants ask passengers to remove their shoes and any sharp pieces of jewelry they had to take off their shoes and glasses we collected everything in a blanket less than half an hour after leaving the badly damaged dc-10 struggles back to the detroit airport the few minutes that it took to get back to detroit were the longest minutes that i will ever remember spending on an airplane because we were sure that we were not going to survive captain bryce mccormick now needs to give the jet even more power to push the nose up for landing [Music] his plane is still drifting to the right and traveling fast i have no runner to straighten it out when it hits [Music] the dc-10 with 67 people aboard roars toward the runway at almost 300 kilometers an hour [Music] the landing was the most frightening part of the entire flight when the plane hits the ground it begins veering hard to the right once the plane landed it seemed like we just went on forever i mean it was just forever one set of landing gear wheels runs off the runway and through the grass after a harrowing touchdown the plane eventually comes to a stop just 300 meters from the end of the runway okay engines off at your discretion shut him down every woman wanted to hug him and um he was just amazing because we it was just at that moment that we all realized that we were alive because of him that he literally had saved our lives [Music] if you take a look at something like this and you say well there's good flying and there's bad flying this is beyond good this is superlative this is using every instinct you have as an airman and all the all the capabilities you have to stay calm enough to get the situation assessed with the plane on the ground the crew has its first opportunity to inspect the damage the captain and i walked back when everybody was off we walked back to the back and we just looked up and saw this hole and it was just so weird there's no indication that the jet hit something as the pilots first thought what has caused such damage to the airliner the hole was so enormous that if anyone had been sitting in the seats that were there they would have been sucked out immediately at that point they still felt it might have been a bomb but while the incident had happened with explosive suddenness no indication of a bomb is found [Music] as investigators begin their work they discover that not all of the dc-10 is at the detroit airport [Music] a coffin that the plane was carrying in its cargo hold is discovered 30 kilometers away from the detroit airport near windsor ontario canada [Music] investigators also find the plane's rear cargo door [Music] doors are not supposed to fall off airplanes especially since it wasn't rather new airplane you would not expect something like that to happen when they examine the cargo area of the plane they discover that the very design of the door makes it a potential weak spot most doors on a jet open inward in fact the door is slightly larger than the frame it fits into as the pressure builds inside a jet this type of plug door is actually forced into the frame of the aircraft the design makes the door extremely safe but mcdonnell douglas designed the cargo door on the dc-10 to open outward that decision was made to increase the amount of storage space on the plane when it's closed hooks on the dc-10s door grab hold of a bar on the plane's door frame to make sure it's closed baggage handlers push down on a lever which drives locking pins through the hooks which hold them in place [Music] when investigators examine the cargo area of the plane they don't find any structural damage around the door when they study the locks on the cargo door itself they find that the latches are not completely closed and the pins that are supposed to make sure the door is locked are not in their locked position when we interrogated the cargo handler that closed the door it became immediately apparent that he used excessive force to close the door and in fact he said he had to use his knee to get the door handle to go flush investigators make a frightening discovery it's possible to close the lever on the outside of the door even if the hooks and locking pins are not in the closed position [Music] paul eddie is a journalist who investigated the history of the dc-10 what windsor showed is that you could actually pull the handle in order to buckle the top fixture so that the handle went home properly but the locking pins had not gone through the spools this means that baggage handlers can believe the door is closed when it's not [Music] not only can the outside lever be closed without the locks being fully engaged there's no way for the crew of the plane to know [Music] the faulty locking pins will still turn off the warning light even though they aren't in their proper position the door was a ticking time bomb [Music] as passenger jets climb the difference between the pressure inside the plane and the pressure outside the plane grows if a door isn't properly shut it will blow out with explosive force the problem on the american airlines flight began as the plane passed through 3 500 meters when the door blew the coffin in the cargo hold was sucked out when the air pressure inside the plane was released anything that wasn't firmly attached was pulled out of the airliner it's a really startling thing if you're not expecting it what you've got is a lot of air stuffed inside this pressure vessel that now wants to get out and the bigger the airplane is the more powerful the hurricane of air leaving the airplane is during that period of time by itself explosive decompression does not make a plane unflyable so why had captain mccormick experience such difficulties controlling his jet investigators take a closer look at the back of the plane's cabin and learn that the very design of the dc-10 makes it vulnerable when the cargo door blew off there was so much pressure on the floor of the cabin that it collapsed into the cargo compartment below when it did the floor ripped into some of the planes critical control systems when it collapsed the floor it took the cables that control number two engine and it took most of the cables or impeded most of the cables that had to do with the flight controls in the back i think it's going to fly [Music] it left mccormick just enough control to keep his plane level the remarkable flying of bryce mccormick had saved the lives of everyone on board flight 96 [Music] but there was a problem with one of the newest and most expensive planes flying over north america in the windsor incident there was an obvious flaw and that's where the ntsb said look here is really the smoking gun the ability to close that thing without having all those locks engaged let's make sure we change this system right now every dc-10 operator needs to know this i want everything checked i want all the bolts chuck miller is the head of the ntsb's aviation safety bureau it's his responsibility to point out problems with the new dc-10 and propose solutions [Music] he helps write the fixes he thinks mcdonnell douglas needs to make to keep the plane safe [Music] he was a very very professional man and he had his investigators had enormous respect for him chuck didn't sit back in the office chuck was always on the scene for chuck miller fixing the dc-10 is a matter of professional pride for mcdonnell douglas the near accident over windsor has enormous implications their billion dollar gamble came close to tumbling from the sky if anything else goes wrong the company itself could be at stake [Music] march the 3rd 1974 a perfect spring-like day in paris [Music] it's been almost two years since a dc-10 came close to crashing near windsor ontario now more than 50 of the new planes are flying around the world one of them plane 29 is owned by turkish airlines normally the last leg of this trip from turkey to england wouldn't be very crowded but today the dc-10 is filling up fast [Music] people are squeezing into seats throughout the plane a strike at a british airline has passengers scrambling for any flight back to london wendy wheel is one of many last minute additions to the flight a model she's returning home after a shoot in spain we've been married for 18 months and we were about to start a family i believe the secret of her success for modeling was not just that she was very attractive girl um and good model material but she was genuinely liked by all the photographers because she had such a pleasing lovely light personality with all the new passengers boarding the flight is a little behind schedule and it's not only the crew who are waiting at the back of the plane is baggage handler mohamed mahmudi with all the new passengers he's not sure if there are any more bags to load [Music] not expecting any other luggage mahmudi locks the rear cargo door [Music] the dc-10 is set to go just after 12 30 in the afternoon thy flight 981 lifts off into the skies above paris [Music] london is less than an hour away price control this is tango hotel yankee 981 we're at six zero requesting clearance to flight level two three zero one roger [Music] as it flies away from the airport the dc-10 continues to gain altitude [Music] twenty seven hundred meters [Music] three thousand meters thirty three hundred meters the huge jet shutters and banks to the left [Music] the captain flew out are you sure just 16 seconds after the start of the crisis the crew struggles to save their crippled jet the nose is pitching down the plane picking up [Music] speed i can't bring it up she doesn't respond passengers of the back of the plane witness a horrifying scene two rows of seats have simply disappeared through a huge hole in the floor passengers can see the sky over france seven thousand feet hydraulics the crew discovers that they have no hydraulic power with which to control the plane [Music] without it they can't move their rudder or elevators even without its most basic controls the plane begins to level out but it's fallen too far looks like we're going to hit the ground the dc-10 is traveling almost 800 kilometers an hour the flight from paris to london never even makes it to the english channel just nine minutes after taking off turkish airways flight 981 becomes the worst plane crash of all time in london the flight is listed as delayed the news of the crash comes out slowly i went to the ticket office kiosk and i asked what has happened to the flight and instantly the look on the gentleman's face behind the counter told me something was wrong instantly there's barely anything left here that's recognizable as being a part of an aircraft i looked on the television and i just thought well i just hope she's dead because i just saw the carnage of the forest in samlis and it was like looking at the first world war trench movie flight 981 carrying 346 passengers virtually disintegrates on impact there are no survivors it was just a scene of absolute utter devastation and the the litter of personal possessions electric wires bits of metal bits of bodies just strewn everywhere i mean you couldn't walk you couldn't walk anywhere without the danger you're going to stand on a part of a human being [Music] i still have nightmares about this even though it's 33 years ago investigators for the french accident investigation bureau are quickly on the scene my first job was to evaluate the scope of the wreckage and to begin the first invitation on the spot at first i was unable to know what has happened i was just seeing that a terrible crash has occurred and that it will be a very hard work for the investigators despite the enormous force of the crash the black boxes made of three layers of hardened steel and insulation survived their contents could provide valuable clues about the crash most the speculation was that it must have been a bomb because you know you've got a almost brand new very powerful airplane flying in clear blue sky and it gets to 12 000 feet and falls out of it investigators are called to a field 15 kilometers from the crash site [Music] they find a piece of fuselage and two rows of seats from the dc-10 [Music] somehow they fell free of the airliner before the rest of the plane smashed into the forest when investigators arrive the bodies of the passengers who were in the seats have already been removed when relatives of those who died in the crash arrive in france they're directed to a small church in the town of san luis one of the saddest sites i've ever seen is in this church [Music] they laid out on tables everything they'd found you know clothing um possessions teddy bears rings watches and then relatives who wanted to were allowed to come and walk around these trestle tables with all this stuff like that [Music] they produced a little packet with my wife's wedding ring and rings engagement ring it was all pretty battered up so you could imagine the thoughts that went through my mind [Music] since the accident involves an american plane the ntsb's chuck miller joins the investigation for the second time in two years he's dealing with a problem with the dc-10 i don't believe that miller suspected for one moment that the door hadn't been fixed after windsor but it becomes clear that the piece of fuselage found in france is in fact the plane's rear cargo door it seems like a repeat of the windsor accident miller is left with a haunting question why hadn't the problem been fixed when he saw the door of course saw that it had it hadn't been done the fix hadn't been made and that's when i think his anger became very very strong indeed miller takes an unusual step although the official investigation is just beginning he gives journalist paul eddie an important tip i said if you've got any ideas what made the door come off he said yeah if i were you i'd go and look at a place called windsor ontario hello i'm chuck miller miller shares his suspicions with the french investigators you please pass these around these were taken on june 12 1972 right after the incident we have asked for the report on the windsor accident and our american colleagues were also volunteers to give us a lot of details now we had an american airlines flight from detroit to buffalo have its cargo door blow off and he has been very frank and i'll explain what he was thinking of the windsor accident after all the work done during the american airlines investigation had something been overlooked was there another problem with mcdonnell douglas's enormous plane with the information from chuck miller french investigators take a closer look at the plane's cargo door they make a shocking discovery there is no new problem it's just like the american airlines case all over again the latches that are supposed to hold the cargo door closed aren't locked and since two rows of seats were sucked out of the dc-10 over paris it's clear that the floor on the plane collapsed just as in fact when investigators listen to the cockpit voice recorder they find that the turkish flight crew had even less control of their plane than the crew of american airlines flight 96 we need to get down and make an approach i think it's going to fly over windsor bryce mccormick was able to recover his plane and land it but in paris all the hydraulic systems were destroyed the hydraulic fluid helps crews move the rudder and elevators on the tail not being able to control them meant the crew couldn't keep their plane in the sky the basic problem was the paris flight was much heavier in terms of the number of people on board the uh the floor when it collapsed collapsed was such a tremendous amount of pressure that it literally severed all the cables and controlled the back they had no hope after that point you and each of you solemnly swear that the testimony shortly after the crash of turkish airlines flight 981 chuck miller is back in the united states our first witness this morning is mr c.o miller director of the bureau of aviation safety of the ntsb this time he's facing questions from american senators a potentially catastrophic design defense a special hearing begins to find out how a problem that was identified in 1972 could bring another plane down two years later of course our understanding up to this time they all had been what you've got to now discover is why wasn't that door fixed would a major venerable mighty american corporation deliberately do something like this so less than a month after the near crash over windsor the ntsb had made two very specific recommendations miller and his investigators recommended that a change be made to the locking mechanism engage the lever they wanted to make sure that it was physically impossible for baggage handlers to close the lever without the locking pins being in place they also suggested that vents be put into the floors of all dc-10s would rapidly allow the pressurized cabin air to equalize without collapsing the floor but in the two years since the accident neither one of these recommendations was implemented [Music] there is a fundamental problem at the heart of aviation safety and that has been in the united states for a very long time and that is that it's the job of the ntsb to discover what's happened uh and to come up with recommendations as to how to prevent it happening again but it has absolutely no authority to implement them the ntsb does not have regulatory authority they have to turn to the faa as they did and say we want these things done and that's where the system went wrong if the faa the federal aviation administration issues an air worthiness directive planes are pulled out of service until the proper fix is made but as serious as the problems on the dc-10 were no air worthiness directive was ever issued a so-called gentleman's agreement between the head of the faa and the head of mcdonnell douglas stopped it from happening the gentleman's agreement is the root cause of paris there is no question that if an air worthiness directive had been issued as it should have been after winter paris would not have happened it was an entirely avoidable accident mcdonnell douglas assured the faa that it would fix the problem voluntarily an air worthiness directive would cast a shadow on the still fledgling dc-10 the last thing in the world you want is for the public or any of the airlines who are going to be operating these airplanes to think oh maybe there's some flaws in this bird since so an air worthiness directive especially one that requires you to go back and re-engineer something is a really horrific thought for a manufacturer mcdonnell douglas did make changes to the way the cargo door was built [Music] a peephole was cut in the bottom of the door so baggage handlers could see if the locking pins had engaged several warning signs were also attached to the plane's door the company also made other changes to the dc-10 these included increasing the length of the locking pins and attaching a plate to the inside of the door this plate would make it physically impossible to push down the lever if the door wasn't properly locked [Music] but each of the proposed fixes had its own problem many baggage handlers didn't know what the small window in the door was for and the baggage handler in paris read and spoke three languages but not english the only language in which the warning signs were written [Music] the support plate that was supposed to be installed in the door was never attached to the jet that crashed in paris [Music] papers confirming the completion of the work are also uncovered but no matter what the paper trail says the fix was never made again the problem is you don't have an independent faa inspector coming along to look and see and then put his stamp on it because it wasn't an air worthless director in the years following the turkish airlines crash an enormous flurry of lawsuits are filed in california the tragic story of the dc-10 has one more surprise in store it's 1974 and an unprecedented series of lawsuits are being filed against mcdonnell douglas the families of those who died near paris want someone held responsible as time went by i learned more and more about what actually happened and realized that it was not an accident as we would call an accident it was totally avoidable my goal was to expose these people [Music] in the weeks leading up to the trial lawyers who are involved in the case have access to the entire history of the dc-10s development they're not the only ones who pour through the evidence so does journalist paul eddy we were determined to get to those documents and that testimony somebody gave us a key to the depository where the documents were and so at night we would go in and then had a huge accumulated pile of documents to go through in order to find out what they've been up to reading through the immense pile of paper eddie makes an incredible discovery a memo written by don applegate the director of product engineering for convair the company who'd built the cargo door for mcdonnell douglas [Music] i think the point where we knew we got them was the applegate memorandum that specifically pre-warned this this would happen the memo is a damning indictment of the cargo doors that were being made for the dc-10 and the lack of venting in the cabin floors it warns that it's only a matter of time before there's a major disaster involving the doors the airplane demonstrated an inherent susceptibility to catastrophic failure when exposed to explosive decompression of the cargo compartment the memo written just weeks after the near disaster in windsor recommends that immediate changes be made to the dc10 cargo door you know you've got you know you've gone because you know they knew during the court case another chilling find is made not only did mcdonnell douglas know about the problem after windsor they knew during the development of the dc-10 [Music] four years before the paris crash two years before windsor the cargo door failed during a pressure test the company knew there was a problem but the fundamental design of the door stayed the same [Music] i could not believe the large corporation like donald douglas at the time could do such a thing could risk our lives ordinary people's lives for the sake of money well in aviation it's called tombstone technology in other words we always have the balance of money and unfortunately over the years it has been true more times than not that we have had to wait until we had enough people die in an accident to say you know we really are going to have to spend the money over here the applegate memo and other information that comes out during the court case leads to one of the biggest settlements in the history of aviation [Music] mcdonnell douglas paid over 80 million dollars in damages after the paris crash foolproof changes were finally made to the dc-10 cargo door and this time nothing was left to chance [Music] the faa issued an airworthiness directive that ensured the doors would never again open in mid-air and it worked after paris there wasn't another serious incident involving the cargo doors on a dc-10 but the plane's history and an intensely competitive industry did have an impact mcdonnell douglas sold far fewer commercial dc-10s than it had once hoped for most of the pilots that i know who have flown the dc-10 over the years really love the old bird she's probably a little more clunky than the 747 in terms of her heaviness of flight controls but it's still a lovely bird to fly that's fine but you can't disassociate either the either the airplane or the company from the awful reputation of the crash left eventually mcdonnell douglas itself disappears the company was bought by boeing in 1996 in the forest outside paris a monument now stands honoring those who were killed on flight 981 a permanent reminder of one of the most disturbing crashes in the history of aviation you never forget and i've gone on to leader my life for 30 odd years but i've never forgotten [Music] people to this day think it was an accident and it wasn't you

Channel: Mayday: Air Disaster

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Id: xfUqcrUA9cs

Length: 149min 30sec (8970 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 17 2021