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29 of 29 humans 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 selective information recorder and cockpit voice recorder (`Black Boxes') were recovered from the wreckage. Normally this is a substantial aid 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 info 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 elements and drifting debris. Clues pointed to a fire origin someplace in the forward attic division 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 in the end 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 excessive damage and destruction and exceptionally bad or displeasing series of events that made it out of the question to save the aircraft and all of those aboard.
The most unfortunate 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 when it comes to the flammable material in the Swissair jet years before the accident occurred and they know when it comes to 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 proceed to persist in spite of apparent warning signs.
This is now the second NOVA visual representation I've seen on aviation issues and I am once again highly impressed with their efforts. My introductory outing with them was `NOVA: The Deadliest Plane Crash'. Both of these features have met and on occasion exceeded my expected values for a quality documentary and I commend these programs to everyone.
4 of 4 persons 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, seriously 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 totally cleared 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 numerous a lot of people 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 share at the bottom of a scrap box. Highly recommendable!
3 of 3 people 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 entirely 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 makers and airlines executives and reveals the unwillingness and/or disability of the Federal Aviation Administration to assure the safety of the millions of air passengers each year. This splendid documentary must and almost 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 humans 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 begin it is descent. It never made it to Halifax. Investigators soon learned that both the cockpit voice recorder and flight data recorder had failed for the duration of the emergency, robbing them of any data 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 progressed computer software, etc. Even after determining the cause of the problem, it took a great deal of more painstaking months to discern the primary source of the spark that caused the fire.
Investigators made a number of fantastically 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 basically tinderboxes one good spark away from catching fire. The National Transportation Safety Board was quick to release this data 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 genuinely unfortunate note - at the time of it is release in 2004, a good deal of six years after the crash of Swissair 111, hundreds of planes international were still flying every day 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 ought to never have passed from physical life in the initial place. As a viewer, this widespread tendency of airline companies and aircraft manufacturers to ignore big safety issues until it leads to needless death and destruction infuriates me. Time after time, we likewise see that the FAA is complicit in what will have to genuinely be prosecuted as criminal negligence. I will have to 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 troubles until hundreds of humans die. I would hope that as a heap of humans as possible view this eye-opening documentary for themselves.
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