Airline Disasters

[00:00:00] Disclaimer, this episode includes the usual amount of adult language and graphic discussions

[00:00:05] you've come to expect around here.

[00:00:06] But in the event it becomes an unusual amount, expect another call from me.

[00:00:11] Welcome back to Skared All the Time.

[00:00:12] I'm Chris Kalari.

[00:00:14] And I'm Ed Vaccola.

[00:00:15] And welcome aboard, SATT Air.

[00:00:18] Before we take off, I ask that you please direct your attention to my voice as we review the

[00:00:22] emergency procedures for this podcast.

[00:00:25] There are six emergency exits on this episode. couple quick things. One, I know we just said it, but the podcast is gonna pretty instantly have a sudden drop in quality in a minute because we had an issue with Chris's microphone, so we were forced to kind of resort to Zoom for part of it. So, and by part of it, I mean the whole rest of it, but I think it's very listenable. It is. I will never again joke about a drop in quality

[00:01:42] in the cold open,

[00:01:42] because I clearly fucked us.

[00:01:44] I cursed the episode.

[00:01:46] And we don't have it in the budget

[00:01:47] to have any headphones kind of like a high pitched bell sound. Sure. Okay, the last order of business, since we're already on the topic of pets, lost a couple good ones. Lost Stu, who was a hell of a dog. Lost Stella, who was a hell of a dog. Two dogs I'm very into, even knowing you know how I feel about dogs. These were two sweethearts.

[00:03:01] So, RIP, God bless those two animals.

[00:03:04] RIP, God bless.

[00:03:05] So let's move on to people dying, shall we?

[00:03:07] Absolutely. What's your feeling on flight flying? What's your nervousness level? Let's set sort of the the floor here for what we're talking about My nervousness level is pretty low when it comes to flying Flying is one of those things and I don't know if I brought it up on the show or not before but it's one of those things where it's just seems really out of my control and Basically when I get on an airplane

[00:04:21] I resigned myself to the position of if fucking this thing's gonna fall out of the sky. It's gonna fall out of the sky like

[00:05:23] My dad had a friend who was a pilot and we'd go up in his little plane. I love that stuff, but on top of my pressure ear issues, which is only an issue when you're

[00:05:28] going up, you know, in a commercial grade flight, I also get motion sickness from everything.

[00:05:33] So that includes warm, small planes and they're always fucking warm up there.

[00:05:39] And so when I was flying in the Arctic Circle in Alaska, got super sick with every little bump.

[00:05:46] And I also one time threw up on a Virgin America flight. at that. I was like, blah, blah, blah. So the craziest noises came out of me. Yeah. And it's like old couple who were sitting next to me, like looked at me and then I had to just look at them with the eyes of, I know this is going to smell for the next four hours and I'm sorry. Like this, this row is ruined now. Perhaps for Patreon, we can get a recording of your infamous sitting next to a guy who

[00:07:03] is shitting himself story because that's very't remember the name of them for the longest time.

[00:09:25] and everything around flying made me crazy scared.

[00:09:28] And you know, I actually, it got so bad that I used to take the train home

[00:09:30] from Los Angeles to Pennsylvania for Christmas.

[00:09:33] It would take three days.

[00:09:35] I would rather do that.

[00:09:37] My cousin does that too.

[00:09:38] He did that, he's done that more than once.

[00:09:40] Like the train across the country.

[00:09:43] Yeah, that sounds,

[00:09:44] that sounds to me like, that feeling of like, oh, this is just people I don't know are driving this thing. And I mean, people I don't know drive buses and Ubers too, but they're on the ground, so it doesn't seem as scary.

[00:11:00] And speaking of people you don't know driving the thing, and I'm sure this will probably

[00:11:04] come up maybe, but like, I'll never I do always enter a flight with the idea of A, it's out of my control, and B, I just feel like the person flying it doesn't want to crash either. You know, I'm sure we'll hear examples of the opposite coming up. No.

[00:12:20] What I'm saying is I'd like to enter with the idea of, you know, they don't want to

[00:12:23] fucking go down either.

[00:12:24] So it's a win-win.

[00:12:26] Everyone's out here. long time and now I'm bringing this whole fucking plan down. I will say like to pivot off feeling good to say one last thing before we get into some of our airline disaster stories for the day. I think and if there's a rich person out there, first of all, congrats on being rich. Congrats on being rich. First of all, second of all, Mr. Big hoity toity Warren Buffett, sir, supporter, amazing. No wonder they went out of business. I didn't realize that. I should have used that. Yeah, someone was not charging enough, but yes, Virgin America fucking rules. It was genuinely great airline. As a person who is nervous flying, I mean, not anymore because Xanax is great.

[00:15:00] Modern medicine.

[00:15:01] Yeah, but it was just, they put, look it a million times. I was constantly traveling. Like everyone else just had a person standing there being like, Oh, well, things over here. And you know, if the fucking cabin loses pressure, but they had like a crazy fun song and dance video that was actually not the

[00:16:20] worst thing, the most boring thing to watch. Yeah. Just give it a little,

[00:16:24] just give it a little jazz and especially now when you're paying fucking,

[00:17:21] fully sucks. Yeah.

[00:17:22] And then I fly JetBlue now exclusively because, and don't get me wrong, they have their follow

[00:17:26] ups.

[00:17:27] I mean, I think since we've started this show, I've posted on the official scared all the

[00:17:30] time.

[00:17:31] Like one night I was having like a terrible night flying with them, but they have, I think

[00:17:35] undeniably the best leg room in coach.

[00:17:38] And I like that they have the snack cabinet where you don't have to wait for anybody.

[00:17:41] You can just like walk and get your own snacks and drinks and refill everything, you know,

[00:17:45] of the free items or whatever.

[00:17:47] So I'm as a kid. I remember TWA, things that were big news when we were young. But just in terms of crashes, if I'm not mistaken, I think

[00:19:02] airline travel is the most safe travel statistically. And the MH370, the Malaysia flight, there's a lot out there about it. There's also no conclusions on that, so fuck it. Yeah. So it's hard to talk about the disaster because we don't really know what the disaster was. And there's just, there's so many tragic, violent, depressing stories in the history of this topic that it was impossible to pick.

[00:20:22] So 9-11's off the table, right?

[00:20:25] Because I have no interest in talking about that.

[00:20:27] 9-11's off the table.

[00:20:28] Okay. body count when you say hosting you mean like it was where it took off from where it crashed What do you mean by that where the crash happened? Oh boy? Okay by landmass Russia has the most airtime to be over China has a lot of airtime to be over America has a lot of airtime to be over. Well, this is it guess it's unfair because it happened on the runway

[00:21:41] So a lot of things do and that's why when we take off

[00:21:44] I'm like fucking tragedy averted. Yeah, and when we land I'm like tragedy is coming right now disaster like reports and like kind of post-mortems on what happened. So there's not a lot of, no one's focusing on the horrifying details of being in one of these crashes. So just to say, you know, a lot of this is very fact-based, but I still think these disasters, especially if you're afraid of flying, are really interesting and really good to hear about.

[00:23:03] And flight is a hundred years old, basically. KLM flight 4805. Let me just say KLM, wonderful outfit. I really enjoyed my time flying with them and they give you apple juice. I don't know if it's a Dutch thing, but I do like that they give you apple juice. Not like, hey, would you like apple juice? It was like, hey, here's some apple juice, which I do like. What up KLM? Put some purple lights on your planes and make it cool and I'll be there.

[00:24:22] Awesome. including the two in our story, got diverted to a second airport Los Rodeos. So Los Rodeos was a tiny little nothing airport and the runways backed up almost immediately. Planes were like, it sounds like parking just wherever they could and it was so busy times, two or three times, I think it was three, and then they were like, you know what, we're flying to Hartford, so good luck finding your way home from Hartford, a totally different airport, we're going there, and we landed there, and I have just no idea

[00:27:03] if anyone landed that night there.

[00:27:04] It was so unbelievably like pea soup fog, I was terrified. I don't think we almost crashed, but it really felt like we almost crashed. Oh my God. So yeah, very scary to be in fog on a plane. But anyway, in the middle of all this fog and airline traffic, both the KLM flight and the Pan Am flight are trying to take off. This next part, there's a lot of technical flight control terminology that I didn't quite understand

[00:28:22] for what happened next.

[00:28:23] But essentially it seems like air control

[00:28:26] had miscommunications that got compounded the collision, that's on the Pan Am plane. Now on the KLM plane, these guys are already moving approximately 160 miles an hour and by the time they figure out that they're going to hit, they're only 330 feet away. So I don't know how many feet per second that is, but it's not very many feet and not very many seconds. So the KLM pilots jam the aircraft the aircraft that had actually delayed the flight and caused to take off at the same time, all of the fuel exploded into a giant fireball. So immediately, all 248 passengers on the KLN plane died, and 335 passengers and crew

[00:31:01] aboard Pan Am had died. 70 survived, but on why can't I get on the fucking plane it's like bro do you know what a fire than if you're not starting any fires. That's true. So, I would have said, no thank you. So something I thought might be interesting, I was going to say fun, but it's not really fun but interesting, to cover maybe in these disasters are whose names make the headlines. Because you know you always hear that thing about like, oh, if you go on a plane, you

[00:33:42] see Kanye West is on the plane.

[00:33:44] That's the best example you can come up with.

[00:33:46] I don't know.

[00:33:47] Tim McGraw, Derek Jeter on the plane. was pointing to an old man and said, what if it's his time? Wow, what a great line. Yeah, she had no answer for that one. Well, unless that guy was a defector from the KGB or something, hopefully it would not be his time in a way that would take the whole plane down. You know, he could have suffered a simple heart attack,

[00:35:01] maybe vomited blood onto your brother,

[00:35:03] you know, something a little more safe.

[00:35:05] This was the height of the Cold War probably

[00:35:07] when they were on a plane together, died in a fire. Damn dude, fastest gun in the West. RIP Eve, God bless. RIP God bless. So that is the largest loss of life in a single airline disaster, but I don't think it's the scariest because for my money, this plane disaster, if you

[00:36:24] squint, it's sort of just a big car crash. It was just kind of a big explosion in a Because if you believe that death is non-existent, like a state without any past, present, future, or memories, the only thing that really gives your life any context is having enough time to be aware that death is coming. Because once you're dead, nothing exists for you anymore. So like the white light, the DMT release in the brain,

[00:37:41] all that stuff is like a really important part of dying.

[00:37:45] Because if you die, like if someone right now,

[00:37:47] not to give anybody anxiety, would make it a contender for the scariest airline disaster of all time. So it's one of the worst examples, or best I guess if you look at it that way, of a long drawn out crash with so much time to know that you're fucked. This happened in August 1985. They were going from I believe Tokyo to Osaka

[00:39:00] and 12 minutes after takeoff, well after reaching that cruising altitude where you kind of like,

[00:40:03] keeping the doors on or threaded like two threads in. Yeah.

[00:40:03] Like someone's either not having enough time to finish it or whoever's on that part

[00:40:06] of the assembly line is fucking doing a terrible job.

[00:40:09] Well, yeah, in this case, it was a matter of fixing the repair

[00:40:13] with one line of rivets instead of two.

[00:40:16] That's all it took for the next half an hour of hell to happen.

[00:40:21] And I'd be interested to find out if there was some corporate policy where it's like,

[00:40:24] oh, we don't want to spend money on rivets.

[00:40:26] Yeah. By 1985, to the credit of engineers and physicists and airlines and lessons learned from all kinds of other accidents and disasters, planes are pretty well built. And so this thing just keeps right on trucking. There's actually a surviving photo from inside the plane developed from film found in the

[00:41:40] wreckage of everyone sitting there with their oxygen mass dangling and a flight attendant

[00:41:45] helping people put them on.

[00:41:46] And the photos like eerily calm. a distress signal and the ground control goes back and forth with the flight engineer and the pilots to try to get them to bank towards the nearest airport. Now imagine the drop in your stomach as the pilot of this plane when you realize that you cannot bank the plane left or right. Well, you have no vertical stabilizers.

[00:43:00] Your ailerons are all fucked.

[00:43:02] Half your wing ripped off.

[00:43:03] You have no control over the plane.

[00:43:05] Yeah. cycle, which I think sounds like a series of records from a straight edge hardcore band in like DC in the 80s, Fugoid cycle. But the reality of what a Fugoid cycle is, is so much worse. So I found an article on Media that describes this crash in great detail.

[00:44:20] And according to that article, a Fugoid go a little up, a little down, what have you. And basically you set it to keep it on the horizon line of we're going straight. We're not going down a little bit. We're not going up a little bit. We're going straight.

[00:45:40] So I imagine if you think you're gonna fall out of the sky,

[00:45:41] maybe you set the trim way up

[00:45:43] to just kind of constantly tell the plane to be going up

[00:45:45] and not down.

[00:45:46] But I don't know enough about planes

[00:45:48] to even say what I'm saying, Then, because they lost at least 55% of their vertical stabilizer, including the rudder, a Dutch roll was introduced on top of the Fugoid cycle. Which I have to imagine a commercial airliner not designed to be doing Dutch rolls. No. The article explains that in a Dutch roll, a plane without lateral stabilization starts

[00:47:01] to behave like a fish-tailing trailer on the highway, rolling and yawing from side to side and feet every 90 seconds while going left and right 50 degrees each way. Also like every, you know, 12 seconds, I think it is. It does make me laugh about the Dutch roll aspect where it's like if you're going Dutch, you're paying half and a Dutch roll would only roll halfway, not a full roll.

[00:48:21] Well, it's like what is with the Dutch and this world perception that they won't go all

[00:48:26] in on anything. the other. So if they tried to stabilize the Dutch roll by counter firing the engines one direction to the other, it would make the fugoid cycle rip the plane out of their control and vice versa, which is just like, come on, man, like you sit in a cockpit at that point, be like, what the fuck did I do? How am I here? It's at that point, everyone's memories went back to the

[00:49:42] guy at Japan Air who just six months earlier was like, hey, I know it's expensive, but maybe

[00:50:44] that my old coworker was reading in the book was essentially like all the things I learned,

[00:50:47] I learned like almost crashing.

[00:50:48] Yeah, yeah.

[00:50:50] It was like stories of, okay,

[00:50:53] here's something I didn't think would kill you in a plane

[00:50:55] and here's how I got around it

[00:50:57] or here's how you can avoid it.

[00:50:59] But it wasn't like, here's the rules of flying.

[00:51:01] It was like, here's the things

[00:51:02] you're maybe definitely gonna run into

[00:51:04] and you should be aware of how to correct this. brain doesn't work that way. No. So I will say at this point, the pilot's brains on Japan Air 123 probably weren't working much at all because unfortunately, during the confusion and the miscommunication and pulling G's every up and down like yeah, they had forgotten to or chosen

[00:52:21] not to put their oxygen masks on. And the, as someone who just like really loves people who are great at their jobs, and like steely eyed and could get shit done, these guys were amazing. They lowered the landing gear to try to create some drag, see if that could help slow the

[00:53:41] plane down.

[00:53:42] And they finally managed to fire the engines in the right way to make a right turn towards night screaming and wailing and shouting to each other, which means there were a lot of survivors relatively. There were potentially more than four, but they took their sweet ass time because they were like, no one's going to survive what we just heard happened. Yeah. So doctors later estimated that they think they could have saved 20 to 50 more people

[00:55:00] from the crash if there hadn't been a delay in getting people out there.

[00:55:04] So that's heart wrenching.

[00:55:06] Jesus Christ. The pilots, you're working, you're busy, the time is flying by and the ticking clock is ticking, but to anyone just sitting in your seats, you're begging for death at a certain point. Like you're fucking doing spins, you're doing circles, you're going up, you're going down. Bags at this point have fully blown out of the tops of the fucking trays.

[00:56:20] If you are at a window seat,

[00:56:22] you're looking at like a twilight zone level,

[00:56:26] you know, Gremlin has, I think, egregious. But the fact that it's like in the mountains in rural Japan, I could see how that could be like a logistical nightmare. Well, and I'm pretty sure there was an American, I wanna say like a Navy helicopter or something that flew over first maybe, and they were like, we should get down there and save people. The Japanese were like, I don't remember

[00:57:42] if it was because they were afraid that they'd look bad

[00:57:45] or what it was, but they told the Americans no.

[00:57:48] They were like, we don't need your help. The problem for those of you listening to this as entertainment, no matter how scary the crashes are, a lot of the information, like I said, is really boring and technical. So it's like finding good ones to talk about are tricky. Oh, okay, here's a good one. In the previous two crashes that we talked about, the pilots did everything they could to avoid disaster.

[00:59:02] One thing I know really scares people though,

[00:59:04] is the idea that their pilot of their plane

[00:59:07] might be suicidal. what it would do to the, I guess the psychology of a pilot who would have to be going to withdrawal on long flights if they're an everyday smoker. And so they let them smoke with a regulator in the cockpit to like kind of blow the smoke out, I guess. But they were allowed to smoke after 1995 or whenever the hell we stopped smoking on planes

[01:00:21] because they were worried that like,

[01:00:22] do you want an irritable pilot who's like,

[01:00:25] I fucking can't smoke for 12 hours, are you kidding me?

[01:00:27] That I think is should be able to go back to being a celebrity who's that's the scared all the time promise that we will edit this out because I can't say any of those things scared all the time air will will make sure it's behind the pilot and guides the plane into a rapid descent. And one of the things that I think is so scary about this crash is that when Sondenheim returned to the cockpit and realized he couldn't get in,

[01:03:01] he started banging on the door and trying to break it down

[01:03:04] in front of all the passengers.

[01:03:06] So if you were sitting there, And even though the passengers had no way of knowing that their pilot was suicidal, they did know they were going down really fast. And I think it's kind of weird to think that everyone, including the pilot, died probably assuming that there was some kind of a medical emergency, like that the copilot had like a heart attack or something.

[01:04:20] Because I don't think anybody would be like, oh, well, shouldn't have left it to the suicidal

[01:04:25] guy.

[01:04:26] I guess, yeah but I mean, what's the, I don't even know, what's like patient privacy rules around my patient, I guess you even know your patient's profession necessarily?

[01:05:42] I mean, you might.

[01:05:43] I mean, he said he's unfit to work.

[01:05:44] Yeah, well, I guess if he wrote notes.

[01:05:46] Yeah, so I would imagine like,

[01:05:48] if anyone's at least, even if misguidedly, like they believe in something, like there's a cause, there's a purpose, whereas this motherfucker killed 150 people because his girlfriend broke up with him, which just seems so, there's no greater.

[01:07:02] Is that really what happened?

[01:07:03] Yeah, yeah.

[01:07:04] It was a lady, a lady broke up with him

[01:07:05] and he fucking decided to kill 300 people over. 2019, like I don't ever think about the COVID years, but 2018, we're dealing with fucking pilot suicides as recently as 2018, I don't love that. Yeah, but this guy wasn't even really a pilot. So to fully appreciate this story, you really need to hear the audio and maybe we'll put it in. I don't know if it'll cut in very well.

[01:08:20] I'll certainly put a link so that you can go

[01:08:22] to a YouTube video and watch flight simulators. So it's bizarre that he was even able to pull this off. I will say at home flight simulators are pretty fucking intense now. Like Microsoft simulator is, it's truly simulating. I mean, every button, switch, flap, whatever is all represented.

[01:09:40] It's so wildly realistic, that stuff.

[01:09:42] I mean, how that translates to being able to do know, you don't just turn the flight over and it stays straight ahead and stuff Yeah, I do believe there is a series of things that you know mechanically you need to engage for some of these So yeah, he definitely wouldn't have just played video games. I guess yeah part of what's really crazy about the whole situation And again, this is where like the video and the audio comes in is that there was and I kind of remember seeing this

[01:11:02] like play out live on the internet between Twitter and

[01:12:03] when you listen to the audio, he sounds pretty happy. He doesn't sound angry, he doesn't sound upset,

[01:12:06] he sounds like he's getting away with something

[01:12:09] and that he's really enjoying himself.

[01:12:11] Now this guy's wearing a Tommy Bahama shirt.

[01:12:13] Yeah.

[01:12:14] He's wearing flip flops, flying the plane.

[01:12:15] That's what it sounds like.

[01:12:16] I imagine him kind of looking like the pilot

[01:12:19] from Chip and Dale Rescue Rangers, you know?

[01:12:23] Just like, you know, a big jolly dude.

[01:12:27] When it was suggested by Air Traffic Control isolated for us after pulling off one last barrel roll. So this motherfucker barrel rolled straight to heaven. Hell yeah dude and I'm sure that plane was ensured that he stole. There's no losers here. No I mean look again I certainly don't encourage it or recommend it but you know the weirdest thing is no one really knows what happened like even when they investigated it seemed like his

[01:13:42] relationships were all okay. I don't remember if episodes of the season we've got some real high scoring fears. Luckily I'm placing it low because I have faith in, I don't know, pilots not wanting to be suicidal and I have faith in the numbers that statistically it is still the safest form of travel as long

[01:15:00] as I guess you're not flying on Boeing allegedly. I don't know what the

[01:15:04] legality of saying that is. It's just funny because it used to be, you know, turn into Japan's largest roller coaster. So I am gonna just go ahead and say I'm keeping it low for my sanity. I unfortunately, because I've had such a severe issue in this, I do have to place it high. Where did we end up with, I think we said we placed. Eating alive is the top, is the moment.

[01:16:21] Eating alive is the top.

[01:16:23] Man, I gotta put airline disasters up there

[01:16:26] because I've just's such a wrong place, wrong time. Yeah. Like wrong place, wrong time. I'm perfectly comfortable dealing with on the show. But when it's wrong place, wrong time for hundreds and hundreds of

[01:17:43] people, it bums me out. Yeah, true. But do this without each and every one of you so glad you're still listening thanks for being here I'm Chris Kalari and I'm Ed Vaccola and this has been scared all the time and we will see you in the wild blue yonder we don't want you to fall out of our lives or out of the sky so stick around keep coming back scared all the time

[01:19:04] it's co-produced and written by Chris Kalari and Ed Vaccola edited by Ed Vaccola additional support