ST Alpha - "So in this time of no going out, no sports, I've turned to niche streaming stuff and have been watching MayDay: Air Disaster Investigations" (Reading a Post)

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So in this time of no going out, no sports, I've turned to niche streaming stuff and have been watching MayDay: Air Disaster Investigations

Posted by JD (aka Jason Dean) Mar 20 '20, 20:39

So these are one hour shows with recreations of typically an airline crash (not always though) and then a breakdown of why.

I've previously watched another series like this and remember being kind of comforted by it as I remember that finding issues and how things were corrected.

This series is slightly freaking me out as most of the way through episode 11 and the previous 10....it seems to me that most of these episodes are traceable back to human error. Cost cutting maintenance in a couple, cascading bad decisions, a missed piece of tape over a sensor during cleaning (!)

Some amazing flying by pilots for some of these as well. I think my favorite overall crew story is where a BA Pilot was sucked out of the cockpit when a windshield blew off. A rotating group of the cabin crew frantically hangs on to the pilot's legs and while they can't pull him in due to the aerodynamic forces, they don't lose him either. The co-pilot lands the plane with the cockpit being swirling mess of stuff blowing around..cause there's a window missing.

Everybody survives, including the pilot

But the root cause turns out to be errors in maintenance. Humans beings save but human beings cause the problem.

I guess I'm not flying anytime soon anyway

I've generally been a fearless flier as I've always loved planes, space, etc and then went on to study the stuff. These shows are hammering home that the weak point is often humans and as we're all kind of living through right now, apparently we can be quite the chuckleheads at times. 8-|

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Airways_Flight_5390 (en.wikipedia.org)

Responses:

I started watched a lot of this show.... - Walt_Disney Mar 21, 09:20
Still probably statistically the safest way to travel. Billions of people flying (last year anyway), only ever a couple hundred deaths. -- nm - mafic Mar 21, 05:56
Yeah, some of those can freak you out. - ty97 Mar 20, 20:44 8
- In this ep, the Eastern seaboard ATC stations are teaming up to put a 707 in a series of holding patterns so long that the 707 is all but out of fuel - JD Mar 20, 20:59 6
  - IIRC, the pilots should have called an emergency which would have let them land -- nm - ty97 Mar 20, 21:01 5
    - So while the investigation does make a big deal that the pilots never used the word 'Emergency', the FAA does settle to pay 40% - JD Mar 20, 22:00 1
      - If you ever get that low on fuel you should be declaring an emergency - ty97 Mar 20, 22:04
    - I think this recreation favors the pilots as there's been an effort to show how many times they get handed off from a controller who - JD Mar 20, 21:09 2
      - Have you gotten to the Tenerife Disaster yet? -- nm - ty97 Mar 20, 21:32 1
        
        That wasn't part of this series but I remember reading about that in Newsweek growing up and then trying to find everything I could - JD Mar 20, 21:50
- He did indeed return to flying. I guess broken bones and frostbite are relatively minor for being OUTSIDE the airplane for like 20 minutes -- nm - JD Mar 20, 20:53

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So in this time of no going out, no sports, I've turned to niche streaming stuff and have been watching MayDay: Air Disaster Investigations

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