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29 of 29 persons found the following review helpful.
Flying the friendly skies on unfriendly airplanes
By Kyle Tolle
On September 2nd, 1998, Swissair flight 111 (a McDonnell - Douglas MD -11) flying from New York to Geneva crashed into the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Nova Scotia killing all 229 people aboard. In the aftermath, the Canadian Transportation Safety Board conducted a 4 ½ year, 39 million dollar investigation that included assistance from the Americans and the Swiss.
Within 9 days of the crash, the flight data recorder and cockpit voice recorder (`Black Boxes') were recovered from the wreckage. Normally this is a substantial help in dissecting a crash but highly strange in this case was that the recorders stopped working 6 minutes before the plane went down. In essence, this lost selective information equated to a major setback for investigators.
At the one year anniversary of the accident, most of the aircraft debris had been recovered and investigators had found burn marks on recovered aircraft parts and drifting debris. Clues pointed to a fire origin someplace in the forward attic section of the plane and this led investigators to focus on an electrically sparked fire. About 150 miles of wire traverse the jet overhead and a severe short circuit (i.e. - an electrical arc) in cracked insulated wire may be catastrophic.
After 3 ½ years of meticulous research, investigators at long last pinpointed a space of 2 square feet above the cockpit as the ignition point and the material that quickened the disseminate of the fire was dangerously flammable fuselage insulation blankets. A re-enactment and simulation of the final 6 minutes of the flight shows the desolating and dreadful series of events that made it totally unlikely to save the aircraft and all of those aboard.
The most adverse messages in this documentary might be at the end and they are chilling in their implications. The Canadian Transportation Safety Board made 23 recommendations to improve flying safety because of this disaster. Unfortunately, the Civil Aviation Board (think: FAA) has only imposed a few of these changes much to the detriment of aviation safety. Furthermore, the airline industry and the FAA knew with regards to the flammable material in the Swissair jet years before the accident occurred and they recognise regarding similar materials in assorted types of McDonnell - Douglas, Boeing, and Airbus aircraft today. There is even footage shown here of 2 former aircraft fires caused by the same flammable insulation that helped fetch down flight 111. Since this disaster occurred, there have been attempts to improve aircraft and distinct features of flying safety but the progression is much too slow and complacent complex mental states carry on to persist in spite of apparent warning signs.
This is now the second NOVA making something publicly available I've seen on aviation issues and I am once again highly impressed with their efforts. My firstborn outing with them was `NOVA: The Deadliest Plane Crash'. Both of these features have met and at times exceeded my expected values for a quality documentary and I commend these programs to everyone.
4 of 4 humans found the following review helpful.
A very helpful and enlightening Documentation
By Galileo
I wonder why this docu cannot be received in Europe, let alone in Switzerland. It is exhaustive and informative material, badly asking a few critical questions but not accusing. It gives a neutral and relieving picture of the pilots who did their best but had no chance. It is still wide-spread that the two of them had an argument on the flight deck, and the Captain's name is still not exclusively cleared even though there's no reason at all to reproach either of them.
This documentation is giving facts and not speculations. It is highly interesting and informative, even to pros like me. It's an ode to the some galore persons working hard to solve this unbelievable case of disaster and, very importantly, to the two pilots who were fighting for their lives and these of their passengers, not to forget their company. It opens ones eyes to the unbelievable nit-picking work crash investigators go through and in the long run find the missing portion at the bottom of a scrap box. Highly recommendable!
3 of 3 persons found the following review helpful.
An eye-opening look at one of the most difficult crash investigations ever
By Daniel Jolley
This is an illuminating look at the tragic crash of Swissair 111 in 1998 and the exceedingly difficult and years-long investigation to pinpoint the cause of the disaster; perchance even more importantly, the context of this completely avoidable accident casts a bright and exceedingly worrisome light on the continuing failures that pervade the air traffic industry. It is a story that goes beyond the tombstone mentality of aircraft manufacturers and airlines executives and reveals the unwillingness and/or disability of the Federal Aviation Administration to see to it the safety of the millions of air passengers each year. This magnificent documentary ought to and closely surely will make you angry.
On September 2, 1998, Swissair Flight 111 bound from New York to Geneva crashed off the coast of Nova Scotia, killing all 229 people on board. With the plane in a literal sense destroyed on impact, it is debris lying 180 feet underwater, investigators had little to go on. The crew had reported a transient smell of smoke in the cockpit that seemingly disappeared when an air conditioning vent was closed - only to return in a significant way minutes later. A non-urgent emergency was declared, and the crew begun plans to land at Halifax airport - but only after circling out over the water to dump fuel and commence it is descent. It never made it to Halifax. Investigators soon learned that both the cockpit voice recorder and flight info recorder had failed for the duration of the emergency, robbing them of any info for the final six minutes of the flight. Thus begun one of the longest, most expensive, and most difficult crash investigations in history. This documentary does an magnificent occupation of describing the unbelievable challenges the investigators faced - collected and sorting through the tons of tiny debris, testing the wind currents in a similar plane to see how a fire above the cockpit would have spread, analyzing miles of recovered wires looking for proof of power arcs, recreating the conditions of the flight, mapping each detail of the plane using modern computer software, etc. Even after determining the cause of the problem, it took some more painstaking months to tell apart the primary source of the spark that caused the fire.
Investigators made a number of fabulously crucial discoveries for the duration of the investigation, the most essential of which was the fact that the insulation around the wiring in the plane's attic was highly flammable. The material had passed FAA tests years earlier, but more stringent testing revealed that this plane and hundreds if not thousands more around the world were fundamentally tinderboxes one good spark away from catching fire. The National Transportation Safety Board was quick to release this info and to commend this flammable insulation be substituted by more fire-resistant material. Unfortunately, the NTSB could do no more than commend such action be taken. Only the FAA has the authority to require safety changes of this type be done. The FAA did enact this recommendation - but gave airlines years to do it. Thus, this documentary ends on a in truth adverse note - at the time of it is release in 2004, galore six years after the crash of Swissair 111, hundreds of planes global were still flying each and everyday with highly flammable insulation protecting the wiring. Not only that, we learn that Boeing and the FAA knew in regards to the insulation issue long before Swissair 111's last flight, which means it is 229 passengers and crew must never have passed from physical life in the basi place. As a viewer, this widespread tendency of airline companies and aircraft manufacturers to ignore huge safety issues until it leads to needless death and destruction infuriates me. Time after time, we also see that the FAA is complicit in what will have to actually be prosecuted as criminal negligence. I must note that this documentary doesn't make this final point, but any person who looks into the history of air disasters over the past few decades will find plenteous proof of the industry's failure to rectify known difficultnesses until hundreds of humans die. I would hope that as a heap of people as possible view this eye-opening documentary for themselves.
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