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Mayday

1449 statements
286 feature instances
18 referencing feature instances

Mayday	type	TVTItem
Mayday	label	Mayday
Mayday	page	Mayday
Mayday	comment	Mayday, also known as Air Emergency and Air Disasters in the United States and Air Crash Investigation in the UK and Australia, is a Canadian docudrama series about aircraft accidents and incidents. Produced by Cineflix, the series premiered on Discovery Channel Canada on September 3, 2003.Episodes usually start In Medias Res while the disaster is underway, following them with a sequence of the disaster and the following investigation, and at the end a re-enaction of how the disaster occurred and of how measures were taken to prevent the disaster from happening again.
Mayday	fetched	2024-03-04T10:01:48Z
Mayday	parsed	2024-03-04T10:01:48Z
Mayday	processingComment	Dropped link to Airplane: Not a Feature - ITEM
Mayday	processingComment	Dropped link to AnAesop: Not a Feature - IGNORE
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Mayday	processingComment	Dropped link to Tarzan: Not a Feature - ITEM
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Mayday	isPartOf	DBTropes
Mayday / int_112daba0	type	Retired Badass
Mayday / int_112daba0	comment	Retired Badass: Some of the pilots have pasts in various air forces.
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Mayday / int_113472aa	type	Miles Gloriosus
Mayday / int_113472aa	comment	Miles Gloriosus: The first officer of Northwest Airlines Flight 1482 made exaggerated and in some cases completely false claims about his background in order to make himself look good to the captain. A borderline example, since he was an Air Force combat pilot and retired as a major, so he had a decent career and probably took part in several combat engagements, just that his career was nowhere near as glamorous as he described it.
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Mayday / int_1320d787	type	Playing Sick
Mayday / int_1320d787	comment	Playing Sick: In "Deadly Deception", one of the hijackers pretends to be airsick, then takes a stewardess hostage when she comes to investigate.
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Mayday / int_1392fbe7	type	Drunk Driver
Mayday / int_1392fbe7	comment	Drunk Driver: A passenger on Trans-Colorado Airlines Flight 2286 thought she smelled alcohol on the first officer, and a background check turned up evidence of the first officer having a history with alcohol; but lab tests revealed that he had not been drinking before the flight. Played straight with the captain of Aeroflot Nord Flight 821, who was slurring his words and made multiple mistakes during the pre-flight announcements. It was obvious enough that one passenger sent a friend a text saying that she was terrified because the pilot sounded "totally drunk" (which the friend then passed along to investigators after the accident). This was subsequently confirmed by tissue tests on the pilot's remains. Because of his intoxication, he was unable to help his first officer with a tricky landing that the first officer (who was sober but inexperienced, and had struggled with this exact situation in training) couldn't manage on his own.
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Mayday / int_143939c1	type	Trailers Always Spoil
Mayday / int_143939c1	comment	Trailers Always Spoil: In the Birgenair 301 episode, the crash sequence is played in an especially dramatic way, with the narrator stating that "the fate of the flight depends on the crew getting their answers right". This could have worked - many viewers watch the show without checking the info on the presented accident first and could not know whether the plane crashed or not - if not for the opening sequence, where an aviation expert states that "this was the first major crash of a 757" at sea.
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Mayday / int_149ff4b0	type	HilarityEnsues
Mayday / int_149ff4b0	comment	"Kid in the Cockpit" concerned a famous Russian case where a senior airline pilot allowed his teenaged son to take the controls of a brand new Airbus A310. The teen inadvertently disabled the plane's autopilot and the flight crew, unfamiliar with the state-of-the-art aircraft, failed to bring it back under control. Tragic hilarity ensued. An especially needless tragedy given that the investigators found that everything would have been fine if they had just let go of the control column.
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Mayday / int_14ed6ab7	type	Does This Remind You of Anything?
Mayday / int_14ed6ab7	comment	Does This Remind You of Anything?: Auburn Calloway in "Fight for Your Life" and the Air France Flight 8969 hijackers both ultimately wanted to kamikaze their planes into buildings; Calloway targeted FedEx's headquarters in Memphis while the Air France hijackers planned to gun for the Eiffel Tower. The parallels to the 9/11 attacks are not ignored. The in-flight icing tests on the ATR-72 as part of the investigation of American Eagle Flight 4184 used supercooled water mixed with yellow dye for enhanced visibility on the aircraft surfaces. Justified, as the color is dark enough to stand out, while still light enough to maintain visibility through the windows.
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Mayday / int_159e16f1	type	Misplaced a Decimal Point
Mayday / int_159e16f1	comment	Misplaced a Decimal Point: What brought down Varig Flight 254 and killed 13 people.
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Mayday / int_15b2cab3	type	Tempting Fate
Mayday / int_15b2cab3	comment	Tempting Fate: In "Free Fall", when the second officer returns from a bathroom break and asks the captain if there's anything he should know about: In "Desperate Escape", one passenger recalls that the woman sitting next to him expressing relief that the rough landing was over. "And as soon as she said that, all hell broke loose."
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Mayday / int_16ddefda	type	Alcohol-Induced Idiocy
Mayday / int_16ddefda	comment	Alcohol-Induced Idiocy: In "Lethal Limits", the captain was found to have consumed alcohol before the flight, which impaired his ability to react when things went wrong.
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Mayday / int_18867e79	type	The Metric System Is Here to Stay
Mayday / int_18867e79	comment	Unless you went to school in Europe, where 28 degrees is a nice summer day.
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Mayday / int_18cb78a2	type	You Are Already Dead
Mayday / int_18cb78a2	comment	You Are Already Dead: In many cases, the point beyond which a crash is inevitable is several minutes before impact. The fate of everyone aboard Swissair Flight 111 had been sealed the very moment that a short circuit within the wiring harness for the in-flight entertainment system ignited the mylar surrounding the overhead wiring bundle's thermal insulation. Even if the flight crew had diverted towards Halifax at the first sign of smoke from the A/C vent in the cockpit, or even if they had done so at the very moment of ignition, they would not have made it safely down on the ground due to how quickly the fire was burning through crucial electrical components. After the elevator trim jackscrew assembly on Alaska Airlines Flight 261 peeled apart due to the assembly's acme nut becoming de-threaded, the pilots kept it flying for about 10 minutes before the jackscrew's end nut, which was constantly slamming into the acme nut from the jackscrew simply moving up and down uncontrollably, gave up entirely and snapped off. By the time the pilots of Nigeria Airways Flight 2120 realized they needed to return to Jeddah, they were already too far from the airport to make it back in the time they had left. In fact, investigators ultimately concluded that the crash became inevitable almost immediately after the plane became airborne when the pilots, unaware that wheels had caught fire, retracted the landing gear. By the time the pilots of ValuJet Flight 592 realized there was a fire on board, they were only three minutes away from crashing. El Al Flight 1862 was able to remain airborne for eight minutes after the engines on the right wing fell off, but only because it was flying at a speed too high for a safe landing.
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Mayday / int_18d15922	type	Title Drop
Mayday / int_18d15922	comment	Title Drop: Some episodes have the episode title spoken by either the narrator, in a re-enactment, or (very rarely) in an interview. Zig-zagged, as episode titles vary by region. And then there's the almost Once per Episode Title Drop of the series names, with the crew calling out "Mayday" once they realize the situation.
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Mayday / int_19df659c	type	Gone Horribly Wrong
Mayday / int_19df659c	comment	In "Breakup Over Texas", Shift Inspector Anderson has it during his interrogation, when he realizes his actions have Gone Horribly Wrong and caused the fatal crash.
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Mayday / int_1a3b588c	type	Suicide Is Shameful
Mayday / int_1a3b588c	comment	Suicide is Shameful: This presented a massive problem in the EgyptAir Flight 990 and SilkAir Flight 185 cases, which happened with an Egyptian carrier and in Indonesia respectively, when it became clear these had been crashed on purpose. Both Egypt and Indonesia are predominantly Muslim, and The Qur'an itself explicitly forbids suicide, resulting in a major taboo against suicide that makes insinuations that someone took their own life, especially in the course of mass murder, gauche at best. This led to disputes with local investigators that resulted in unresolved cases because the NTSB was essentially accusing the EgyptAir copilot and the SilkAir pilot of a grave sin within a grave sin.
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Mayday / int_1b122c5d	type	Scare Chord
Mayday / int_1b122c5d	comment	Scare Chord: Discordant strings, horns, and pianos, such as the music ten minutes into "Under Pressure".
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Mayday / int_1c398324	type	Death from Above
Mayday / int_1c398324	comment	Death from Above: For 11 residents of Lockerbie, when Pan Am Flight 103 was blown up passing over them. Also happens to 15 residents of Cerritos in "Out of Sight", seven residents of San Diego in "Blind Spot", and five residents of Belle Harbor, Queens, in "Queens Catastrophe". Air Florida Flight 90 smashed over the 14th Street Bridge just before plunging into the Potomac river, striking seven vehicles and killing four people.
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Mayday / int_1c445e86	type	Poor Communication Kills
Mayday / int_1c445e86	comment	Poor Communication Kills: Often the cause of disasters. Crew Resource Management aims to prevent this by encouraging constant communication and cooperation in the cockpit and training all crew members to discard hierarchies that could cause copilots to not take action if an experienced or prestiged captain is making wrong decisions or not taking appropriate measures. Extensive standards for clear and consistent terminology in ATC conversations, and adhering to "sterile cockpit" rules during critical phases of the flight also exist to minimize the chance for errors. All were created in response to crashes involving this trope: In "Missing over New York", miscommunications about Avianca Flight 52's fuel status led to it being kept in a holding pattern instead of given immediate clearance to land. The crew used the word "priority" several times ("We're low on fuel and need priority") but never once used the word "emergency" or issued a mayday. The crew were apparently unaware that in English, "priority" can be relative whereas "emergency" is absolute; an interview with a surviving passenger lends weight to this idea. A very similar oversight haunted LaMia Flight 2933. The captain mentioned a â€˜fuel problemâ€™ to the air traffic controller upon coming into contact with them in a tone that made it sound like a mundane issue, but neglected to declare an emergency or describe just how urgent it was until it had spent several minutes in a holding pattern, spending the last of its fuel.note Though it's worth noting that if he had declared an emergency, there would have been more scrutiny of the plane's fuel levels afterward, which would have revealed that LaMia had been under-fuelling its planes to save money, so the Captain (who was also a co-owner of the airline) may have deliberately downplayed the emergency to avoid getting caught. The cause of the San Bernardino crash was several poor communications put together. The company ordering the shipment had not reported the weight of its cargo to one of the clerks, who couldn't contact them when this missing information was noticed. The clerk estimated the car weights to allow some forms to go through, but in a second instance of poor communication, this estimate was taken to be the actual weight by others involved in the trip. Finally, one of the helper locomotives at the back of the train did not have working dynamic brakes, but no one told the crew at the front this. Put together, it meant the train weighed more and had fewer brakes than the train crew realized, catching them by surprise on a downhill stretch of track and crashing. With correct communication, it is likely more breaking power would have been provided; if not, following operating rules would have prevented the train going down the mountain. Played a small role in the crash of American Airlines Flight 965. The air traffic controller in Cali, Colombia cleared the crew to fly "direct" to Cali, which the pilots interpreted to mean "without flying over any other waypoints", even though the controller meant "without delay". Because of this, the pilots tried to re-program their computer to go directly to the final waypoint, but made a mistake, which resulted in the plane flying off course and crashing into a mountain. An uncoordinated flight crew in "Fatal Focus" led to Garuda Indonesia Flight 200 landing hard and crashing in Yogyakarta. A confusion between expired oxygen generators and empty oxygen canisters helped doom ValuJet 592. note In short, the crew believed the plane was carrying harmless, empty metal canisters - but what they were actually carrying were chemical oxygen generators which got very hot when they were activated, and at least one of them being activated caused a self-sustaining fire in the (airtight) cargo hold that got hot enough to melt away the cabin floor and all control lines. There was no fire detection equipment in the cargo hold because that class was supposed to cause fires to burn themselves out and nobody considered what would happen if oxidizers were involved, meaning the crew only became aware of the fire when it was too late. Poor communication between mechanics led to a missing row of screws going unnoticed by everyone present, which led to the leading edge on the horizontal stabilizer to break off Continental Express Flight 2574, killing 14 people. A double one occurs in the AirAsia 8501 episode. The captain mistakenly tells his copilot to "pull down" - you either pull up or push down the nose - so the first officer pulls the stick back, resulting in a fatal stall. Earlier, when the captain was preparing for a different flight on that same aircraft, he had the very same problem as on the fatal Flight 8501 - the rudder travel limiter failure alert - this time on the ground. The mechanic used the proper procedure to turn it off, but when the alarm returned, he pulled two circuit breakers to calm it down permanently. The captain asked if he can do the same and the mechanic agreed - not realizing (and the captain not specified that) he means in flight, which instantly resulted in autopilot switching off and the aircraft banking, leading to the fatal crash. The Tenerife disaster may as well be called "The Poor Communication Kills crash." Because the airport was shrouded in fog, the two planes were unable to see each other and the controller couldn't see them either, so they were relying on verbal communication to keep them out of trouble. Unfortunately, language barriers and a lack of standardized terminology created a number of misunderstandings, leading to a catastrophic accident. First, the controller told the Pan Am plane to take "the third exit" off the runway, rather than using the actual name of said exit. When the Pan Am crew asked for clarification, he was rather condescending, which may have led them to decide not to continue trying to clear up the confusion. Then, the controller gives the KLM aircraft ATC clearance, or directions on what to do after takeoff. This is not takeoff clearance, but the pilot interprets it as such. note This is why current regulations, put in place in direct response to Tenerife, only allow ATC to say "takeoff" when clearing an aircraft for takeoff or cancelling an aircraft's takeoff clearance, otherwise they must use the term "departure" instead. The KLM first officer reports that they are "at takeoff". He's trying to report that the pilot is literally firing up the engines for takeoff, but the controller and the other plane interpret this as "we're ready for takeoff", so they don't recognize the full severity of the situation (as the Pan Am crew does freak out a bit at realizing just how chomping at the bit the KLM plane is to go). The controller tells the pilots, "Okay, stand by for takeoff, I'll call you". At the same time, the Pan Am crew reports that they're still on the runway. Either message alone would almost certainly have alerted the KLM pilot to wait, but because both transmissions were sent at the same instant, the two signals blocked each other on the radio which was not designed to handle this situation, so all the KLM crew heard was "Okay" followed by static. In the event of simultaneous transmission, the controller is supposed to repeat the message to ensure it gets through, but he doesn't since neither he nor the Pan Am hear the static burst from their radio and the KLM didn't attempt to contact him about it. One final transmission could still have averted disaster. As the KLM plane begins to accelerate down the runway, but at a point where they could still safely reject the takeoff and come to a stop before hitting the Pan Am, the tower tells the Pan Am pilots to "report runway clear", but rather than use the Pan Am plane's callsign ("Clipper 1736"), he refers to them for some reason as "Papa Alpha 1736", a non-standard designation not used at any other point in the conversation. Had they used the proper callsign, there's a better chance that the KLM pilots would have realized which plane the controller was talking to and recognized the implications. Even worse, the KLM flight engineer does seem to realize this and tries to bring this up to the KLM captain in the form of a question ("Is he not clear of the runway then, the Pan Am?"), but is brushed off by the focused captain with a distracted "Oh yes!" Put bluntly, they were still on the runway. Poor communication was suspected as a factor in the crash of Nigeria Airways Flight 2120; the ATC mistook the Nationair/Nigeria Airways flight for a Saudia flight he was also talking to because the Nationair captain used the wrong callsign and the Saudia was reporting the exact same problemnote the first call from the Nationair only mentioned pressurisation failure; the other issues developed later, leading the controller to believe it was the Saudia aircraft having all those problems, and only realised the Nationair flight was the one requesting an emergency landing when they were the other side of Jeddah and about to turn left. Subverted, as investigators determine that the confusion did not cause any delay or otherwise impact the ultimate outcome of the incident; the plane would have crashed regardless.
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Mayday / int_1d3c92da	type	Failsafe Failure
Mayday / int_1d3c92da	comment	A confusion between expired oxygen generators and empty oxygen canisters helped doom ValuJet 592. note In short, the crew believed the plane was carrying harmless, empty metal canisters - but what they were actually carrying were chemical oxygen generators which got very hot when they were activated, and at least one of them being activated caused a self-sustaining fire in the (airtight) cargo hold that got hot enough to melt away the cabin floor and all control lines. There was no fire detection equipment in the cargo hold because that class was supposed to cause fires to burn themselves out and nobody considered what would happen if oxidizers were involved, meaning the crew only became aware of the fire when it was too late.
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Mayday / int_1f250372	type	I Need a Freaking Drink
Mayday / int_1f250372	comment	I Need a Freaking Drink: The reaction of several passengers on Varig Flight 254 when told by the captain that due to a navigation malfunction, the plane is going to crash in the Amazon jungle. Downplayed with one of the pilots of British Airways Flight 9. After making an emergency landing, he says he needs a cold soda.
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Mayday / int_21e5b9c7	type	Failed a Spot Check
Mayday / int_21e5b9c7	comment	Failed a Spot Check: Many of the accidents happen because of the flight crew not paying attention to something they should. "Fight For Your Life" both subverts and plays this trope straight in quick succession; Auburn Calloway, hoping to commit insurance fraud in a murder-suicide plot by killing the crew of Federal Express Flight 705, then crashing the plane, was banking on this happening when he switched off the the DC-10's circuit breaker, but Andrew H. Peterson's diligence ensured that the circuit breaker was flipped back on. Calloway then tried the same trick again, but Peterson once again turned the CVR on, and Calloway neglected to attempt it again, thus making sure that some of the most damning evidence against him other than the most obvious signs of his ill-fated attempt at sky piracy were preserved for the trial he faced after he was thwarted. "Flying Blind": Aeroperu Flight 603 crashes because no one notices a piece of duct tape covering the plane's static port note To be fair, the tape and the fuselage of the aircraft in question were both silver coloured, and the pre-flight walkaround was conducted in the dark with apron lighting instead of natural light; it would have been very easy to fail to notice the tape. "Fatal Distraction": The pilots of Eastern Airlines Flight 401 focused on a burned-out light and fail to monitor their altitude, causing the plane to literally fly into the Everglades. "Ghost Plane": A technician inspecting the Boeing 737 that would fly as Helios Airways 522 forgets to switch back the cabin pressurization panel from manual to automatic. The pilots don't notice the position of the selector switch even when another ground technician tells them to check it. Somewhat justified that they would miss it once things started going wrong, given that hypoxia would have been setting in by that point, but they should never have taken off without checking that in the first place. "Dead Tired": The flight crew of Colgan Air Flight 3407 overlooked their airspeed indicators and their reference speed switch and allowed their plane to slow to the point of stalling. "Lost In Translation": The pilots of Crossair Flight 498, unfamiliar with the western style of attitude indicatorsnote (On the Soviet-built aircraft they were familiar with the attitude indicator consists of a static horizon and a moving aircraft symbol, whereas Western-built aircraft have a moving horizon and a stationary aircraft symbol.), don't realize their plane is banking dangerously to the right, causing it to nosedive into the ground. In "Blowout", a ground crew technician attempted to match the replacement screws by eye, rather than checking them from the inventory. Working in the dark, he failed to notice that the screws were one size too small for the windscreen they were to be fitted into, causing the seal to fail on the next morning's flight. "Focused On Failure": Similar to "Fatal Distraction", the captain of United Airlines Flight 173 to Portland was so focused on a landing gear light problem that he missed both what his fuel gauge and his flight engineer was telling him. The plane ran out of fuel while holding over Portland, although he managed to steer it to a landing in a wooded area with a loss of only ten lives. Later interviews with him would reveal that he thought he had enough fuel left. "Catastrophe At O'Hare": When the investigator interviews the ATC controller who witnessed Flight 191's takeoff and crash, he is surprised when the controller tells him that an engine fell off the aircraft during the takeoff roll. A large General Electric jet engine lying in plain view just by the runway should not be too difficult to spot... "Deadly Delay": The pilots of Spanair Flight 5022 are rushing through their checklists and do the final one from memory rather than actually finding the list and reading it off, causing them to miss some items including flaps (which they'd already missed twice). "Alarming Silence/Cockpit Chaos": similar to "Deadly Delay", the pilots of Northwest Airlines Flight 255 are distracted by the oncoming thunderstorm and discussing how to deal with it and how it could delay their intended flight plan, coupled with dealing with existing delays and reroutings from the control tower to a new runway for takeoff, that they forget they didn't complete the taxi checklist and thus realize they hadn't put the flaps in the proper position for takeoff. This in turn causes them to not realize the significance of several other warning signs. The takeoff warning sounded when the pilots of LAPA 3142 tried to take off, but they ignored it as they didn't see anything abnormal on their instruments. They failed to notice that the indicator telling them their flaps weren't set was on. The crew of Korean Air 007 chats with another Korean Air jet that is supposedly nearby, whose crew reports completely different wind conditions that those KAL007 experiences. Since such dramatic change over a small distance is impossible at that altitude, this should alert the crew that they're somewhere they should not be... which is very bad when the "somewhere" happens to be Soviet airspace. The first officer of TAROM Flight 371 failed to notice the autothrottle had malfunctioned causing one engine to be at idle while the other was at climb power. Understandable since his attention was split between flying the airplane and the captain who was having a heart attack. "Sight Unseen": The crew of Kazakhstan Airlines Flight 1907 didn't realize they were descending below their assigned altitude because the pilot and co-pilot were focused on flying the plane and prepping for arrival while ignoring their altimeters (along with mistakenly believing they were the ones cleared to 14,000 feet instead of Saudia Flight 763) and the radio operator, who was communicating with ATC, lacked an altimeter at his station and needed to rely on glancing over and squinting at one of the former two's several feet away. The operator actually misread the altimeter at 16,000 feet as the assigned 15,000 feet while they were still descending, and by the time he realized the mistake while they visually searched for planes supposedly at their level they were near 14,000 feet and seconds away from the accident. The flight crew of Loganair Flight 6780, after the plane was struck by lighting, thought that autopilot had disengaged. They failed to noticed that the indicator for the autopilot on the display infront of them was still green which meant it was still on. If it was off, the indicator would be white. In addition, when they went to adjust the aircraft's trim, they failed to hear an alarm going off telling them that they needed to disengage the autopilot in order to adjust the trim.
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Mayday / int_22a60f6a	type	Nepotism
Mayday / int_22a60f6a	comment	Nepotism: The captain of TACA Flight 110 is the airline owner's son. Unlike most examples of this trope, he's actually competent at his job-he's getting along real well with his crew before they get into trouble, and when the crisis begins, he skillfully guides the plane to the ground with no loss of life.
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Mayday / int_22cf536c	type	Chekhov's Gun
Mayday / int_22cf536c	comment	Chekhov's Gun: If the narrator makes note of a passenger changing seats, you can bet that this will turn out to be a factor in their survival or death. "Who's At The Controls": The captain slightly bumps his control column while turning to speak to the flight engineer. It caused the descent leading to a crash. "Cockpit Chaos": One of the shots is of a tripped circuit breaker. Later we find out that caused an alarm not to sound and contributed to the crash. "Heathrow Crash Landing": Just before landing, the plane hits a patch of turbulence and the autothrottle increases speed, which both pilots comment on. This actually triggered the whole incident. "Who's In Control": The pilots are constantly bugged by a faulty radio altimeter, which, as it turns out, was a direct cause of the crash. "Fire In The Hold": The company materials that are loaded onto a plane are given some attention. Not without reason, it turns out later. "Caution To The Wind": When an aircraft is accelerating down the runway, cockpit instruments are shown. One of the indicators is moved to the extremely left position. Later it turns out this was a warning to the crew something is not right, but was ignored. "Death Of The President": The pilot resetting his baro altimeter and the navigator reading altitude from the radio altimeter seem right; later we found those were both serious errors. "Ocean Landing": The narration at the start of the episode informs viewers that Ethiopian Airlines Flight 961 will be making a series of short hops across Africa with just enough fuel to get to their first stop, where they intend to take on more. Cue three hijackers storming the flight deck, demanding to be flown to Australia, and refusing to believe the captain when he tells them that they don't have nearly enough fuel aboard. "Fatal Transmission": As the pilots on a commuter plane are coming in to land, they hear a transmission that has some interference mixed in. It later turns out this interference led the pilots to think another plane was waiting, when it was in fact taking off. "Fatal Delivery": The captain's tuning of the radio to Bahrain area control after takeoff from Dubai is given special attention. When the cockpit of UPS 6 becomes filled with smoke from a cargo hold fire, the copilot is unable to see the radio controls, preventing him from tuning to the Dubai frequency and forcing him to use a long chain of radio relays to communicate, contributing to the eventual crash. "Deadly Detail": We are explicitly told that the pilots deployed their flaps and slats before landing. That shouldn't be noteworthy, as it's what all pilots are supposed to do before landing a plane. (Though the crash of Garuda Indonesia Flight 200 involved the flaps and slats not being fully extended.) As it turns out, that was relevant information: the fuel tank was punctured by a bolt that got loose as the slats were deployed. "Afghan Nightmare": A close-up of the plane as it approaches a stall reveals that only two parts of the landing gear have retracted. This is a sign that the hydraulics have failed, having been breached by an improperly secured MRAP vehicle in the cargo hold. "Explosive Proof": In the cabin, the lights are constantly flickering on and off. It's later found that the wiring was in a horrid state, which turned out to be a cause of the accident. In both "Cockpit Chaos" and "Fatal Delay", if one knows just where to look, it's clear that the flaps are fully retracted as the plane tries to take off. "Killer Attitude": The narration makes the personality differences between the pilot and first officer evident early on. It was the abrasive personality of the pilot that led to the breakdown of cockpit communication which caused the crash. "Deadly Discussions": At the start of the episode, an interviewed passenger mentioned that the cockpit door was left wide open, and there was no safety card in the seat pouch. Both hint at the pilots' cavalier attitude and the state of the company respectively. "Nuts and Bolts": In a blink-and-you-missed-it moment, the plane starts to gain altitude before the captain calls rotation speed; the elevator was jammed in the up position by a loose crankshaft because of improper maintenance. "Fatal Climb": In another blink-and-you-missed-it moment, you can see the captain's hands are not on his control column while the plane is in a steep dive; the captain was unconscious after experiencing a heart attack. "Lethal Limits": The captain repeatedly fumbles over his words and is shown lulling his head continuously. Evidence that he's under the influence of alcohol. "Deadly Reputation": In yet another blink-and-you-missed-it moment, you can see that, when the captain goes to pull back the throttles on landing, he's only moving the right throttle instead of both. "Impossible Pitch": Another blink-and-you-missed-it moment: the pilots' attitude indicators are both displaying nearly opposite information, but the copilot's ADI more closely resembles the true position of the aircraft. "Explosive Touchdown": The episode makes note of the plane coming down hard when touching down. Normally this wouldn't be an issue (because hard touchdowns aren't uncommon in commercial aviation) but since the hard landing unsettled an exposed battery and two bottles of gasoline stored in the overhead luggage compartments.... "Pilot Betrayed": The captain mentions that they're just waiting for the wings to be cleared of snow before they take off. Ice inside the engines is later revealed to be the cause behind their engines shorting out.
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Mayday / int_22f6000b	type	Everybody's Dead, Dave
Mayday / int_22f6000b	comment	American Airlines Flight 96 managed to land safely with no fatalities despite a hole being torn into the floor thanks to depressurization from the DC-10's cargo door being blown out since no one was seated in the rows sucked out of the plane. Sadly, the lessons learned from this accident wouldn't be taken seriously enough by McDonald Douglas until Turkish Airlines Flight 981 suffered a similar but even worse blow-out that killed everyone.
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Mayday / int_2310dacb	type	Dead Man Writing
Mayday / int_2310dacb	comment	Dead Man Writing: Passenger Charles Capewell writes a farewell note to his wife when it appears that British Airways Flight 9 is about to crash into the Indian Ocean. The flight ends up landing safely in Jakarta instead.
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Mayday / int_231e8193	type	Mistaken Identity
Mayday / int_231e8193	comment	Mistaken Identity: As the result of both planes reporting pressurisation problems at the same time and Captain Allan mistakenly identifying as "Nationair 2120" rather than "Nigerian 2120"note along with generally inadequate callsign use on both planes, as the report noted, the controller at King Abdulaziz mistook Nigeria Airways Flight 2120 for Saudia Flight 738. This mix-up lasted for three minutes, long enough for investigators to wonder if it prevented the plane from making it back; however, the team ruled this out upon studying the flight path.
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Mayday / int_235f151f	type	Is There a Doctor in the House?
Mayday / int_235f151f	comment	Flight instructor Dennis E. Fitch offered his services to the crew of the crippled United Airlines Flight 232, which had lost the use of all flight controls due to an engine explosion severing the hydraulic systems. He had previously studied the case of Japan Airlines Flight 123 that had also lost all of its primary flight controls and devised strategies of using engine thrust as an alternate means of control.
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Mayday / int_2493b31d	type	Fire-Forged Friends
Mayday / int_2493b31d	comment	Fire-Forged Friends: The passengers and crew of British Airways Flight 9 started their own club after their strange and nightmarish ordeal. They name it the "Galunggung Glider Club". "Death in the Arctic" reveals that Gabrielle and Nicole, who met on board First Air 6560 and were two of the three passengers to survive the crash, have remained close in the years since.
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Mayday / int_25101d1a	type	Post-Victory Collapse
Mayday / int_25101d1a	comment	Subverted by Alastair Atchinson, first officer of British Airways Flight 5390. He keeps his nerves and his plane under control as his captain hangs halfway outside the windshield just a few feet away from him, and even has the presence of mind to use "please" and "thank you" while communicating with the ATC. But as soon as the plane is safe on the ground, he collapses into hysterical sobbing.
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Mayday / int_267ce120	type	Dirty Old Man
Mayday / int_267ce120	comment	Dirty Old Man: The first officer of EgyptAir Flight 990, Gameel Al-Batouti, was caught sexually harassing female employees at the hotel at which he and the other Egyptair crew and management had been staying. This got him in trouble with EgyptAir management, who told him he'd be demoted after returning from JFK to Egypt... which may have led him to crash his plane in revenge.
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Mayday / int_26b2747	type	Alliterative Title
Mayday / int_26b2747	comment	Alliterative Title: A few episodes: Deadly Detail Deadly Delay Deadly Distraction Fire Fight
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Mayday / int_26eb6287	type	Funny Background Event
Mayday / int_26eb6287	comment	Funny Background Event: In "Nowhere to Land," as the pilots of Taca Flight 110 prepare to make a narrow touchdown on the levee, you can see a member of the crew sitting behind them quickly making the sign of the cross.
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Mayday / int_272abb98	type	Shoot the Shaggy Dog
Mayday / int_272abb98	comment	Shoot the Shaggy Dog: The darkest example imaginable in "Out of Control". Almost 2/3rds of the episode featured the frantic efforts of the crew of Japan Airlines Flight 123 to control their 747 after an explosive decompression. Their efforts were doomed from the start. The rear pressure bulkhead, improperly repaired years ago, had destroyed itself and taken the entire vertical stabilizer with it. A crash was inevitable, and when it happened it killed the vast majority of 524 passengers and crew. To make matters worse, rescuers failed to arrive in time, causing all but four of those who survived the initial impact to die from injuries and exposure, making a total of 520 casualties.
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Mayday / int_27b94f39	type	Serendipitous Survival
Mayday / int_27b94f39	comment	Serendipitous Survival: In some accidents, passengers change seats during the flight, which ends up saving their lives when the plane crashes. Cerritos resident Teresa Estrada leaves for the grocery store, and returns to find her house destroyed by Aeromexico Flight 498 and her youngest son being the only survivor. Also happens with two flight attendants on West Caribbean Airways 708, who had to stay in Panama City because there were too many passengers on board. Deconstructed with Crossair Flight 3597; several passengers never showed up for the flight, causing a delay that ended up contributing to the accident taking place, as the pilots were not able to reach Zurich before the intended runway was shut down for the night. Reconstructed in the same episode; because there were so many empty seats on the plane, some passengers were able to change seats, which proved to be a lifesaver when the plane crashed. Inverted with the captains of American Airlines Flight 191 and BEA Flight 548, who were scheduled to have the day off on their respective fatal flights. With Air China Flight 129, a tour guide leaving his passport and baggage at the hotel, delaying their arrival at the airport due to having to go back and get them, saves nearly his entire tour group, since their late check-in meant they got shifted to the back, which ended up having a much higher survival rate than the seats he had initially tried to secure for them. In the Tenerife airport disaster, one passenger chooses to stay behind at Tenerife instead of continuing on to Las Palmas because she lives in Tenerife anyway and wants to see her boyfriend; going to Las Palmas and then back would just be impractical and tiring given how badly the flight had been delayed due to a terrorist attack at her final destination. Despite being warned by a flight attendant that declining to re-board is against regulations, she decides to sneak out anyway when it came time to board. She ended up being the only passenger of KLM Flight 4805 to survive. One journalist who was flying as a passenger on the Sukhoi 100 demonstration flight stayed behind to film the next takeoff. He never got to see the plane land. In the crash of Korean Air 801, passenger Barry Smalls had taken his shoes off during the flight, and was bending down to put them on when the plane crashed on approach, essentially putting himself in an inadvertent brace position. One of his legs was also spared from injury by a carryon bag he'd placed under the seat in front of him, allowing him to escape the plane following the crash. Two simultaneous red lights on a normally busy road prevent any traffic from being in the path of Fine Air Flight 101 when it crashes just after takeoff. In the show, the then Inspector General for the US Department of Transportation at the time of the crash called it an eerie cooincidence.
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Mayday / int_280333d4	type	Hollywood Heart Attack
Mayday / int_280333d4	comment	Hollywood Heart Attack: Invoked in "Fight to the Death"-Captain Stanley Key's autopsy revealed he was suffering from heart disease, leading investigators to suspect he may have suffering from an incipient heart attack during the flight. In "Fatal Climb", Captain Batanoiu is believed to have suffered one of these, as the CVR picks up him saying he feels sick before he loses consciousness. His first officer is so preoccupied with trying to wake him that he fails to correct the rapid left bank until it's too late. In this case, there was no conclusive evidence because there wasn't enough of the captain's body left to autopsy due to the violence of the impact.
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Mayday / int_28114487	type	Bald of Evil
Mayday / int_28114487	comment	Bald of Evil: David Burke, the man who crashes PSA 1771 to get back at his employers. It's inaccurate, though, as David Burke actually had a full head of hair◊. The mustache appears to be accurate.
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Mayday / int_2882c8c1	type	Career-Ending Injury
Mayday / int_2882c8c1	comment	Career-Ending Injury: The pilots of FedEx Flight 705 foiled an attempted takeover by their disgruntled colleague, but the severe head injuries all three sustained left them with permanent damage that disqualified them from piloting. The episode on Air France 358 notes that the captain was badly injured when his seat broke loose during the crash, and was forced to take medical retirement as a result. Subverted in the case of Dennis Fitch, the off-duty flight instructor who came to the assistance of the crew of United 232 after they lost their hydraulic systems. Initially, doctors told Fitch that the injuries he sustained might be career-ending, but he was determined to prove them wrong and ultimately did. The captain of American International Airways Flight 808 was never able to resume his piloting career, although the other two pilots did. The captain of British Midland 92 suffered a spinal cord injury in the crash and was left wheelchair-bound.
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Mayday / int_29e294a6	type	Stopped Clock
Mayday / int_29e294a6	comment	Stopped Clock: The clock stopped when the ferry sank in Express Samina. Three watches were recovered from South African Airways Flight 295; one watch had stopped, while the other two were still running and set to Taiwan time. So, the investigators were able to extrapolate an approximate time of impact based on the assumption that a) the stopped watch was also on Taiwan time, and b) it stopped on impact. The watches worn by the people on Dag Hammarskjold's flight to Ndola stopped when the plane crashed.
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Mayday / int_2a02e5c9	type	Guile Hero
Mayday / int_2a02e5c9	comment	Guile Hero: Captain Leul Abate of Ethiopian Airlines Flight 961, knowing that it'll be suicide to try to fly to Australia with the fuel supply on-board and no chance to land for refueling yet at the same time unwilling to fight the hijackers directly himself, first fools his hijackers by hugging the African coast as long as he can and, once he's found out and ordered to fly out to open ocean, sets a course to take the plane by the Comoros Islands between Africa and Madagascar, a set of remote but popular holiday resort islands to ensure that when the plane goes down he'll have at least a chance to land safely. While he's forced to make a landing in the ocean, he does land close enough that witnesses on the beach were able to both call in emergency services as well as head to the sinking wreck to rescue survivors.
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Mayday / int_2b14367f	type	Bring My Brown Pants
Mayday / int_2b14367f	comment	One final plug has to go to the final star of the show: The DC-10 itself. The aircraft was built for nice, leisurely long distance flights that would not require more than maybe a few turns to line up for the destination runway. It did quite a bit more that day. The maneuvers that Tucker and Sanders put that plane through would've made a test-pilot fill their shorts. To top it all off, the aircraft it self suffered significant damage because of the maneuvers, and then on landing (which it was too heavy for to begin with). FedEx eventually repaired the aircraft, and returned it to service.
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Mayday / int_2b34de10	type	Conversational Troping
Mayday / int_2b34de10	comment	Explored in the Hinton train collision. Averted in the case of the signal lights: The investigators wonder if they might have been green instead of red due to a mechanical fault, but an electrical engineer notes that "a fault does not give a positive green light to any situation â€¦ if there was a fault â€¦ it would have forced everything to go to red." Sadly played straight with the dead man's pedal: It was common practice for CN crew to keep the pedal depressed with a heavy object so they didn't need to keep their feet on it, thus defeating the whole purpose of the mechanism. This, combined with the crewman possibly being incapacitated (and thus unable to disengage the pedal), is believed to have contributed to the accident.
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Mayday / int_2b3bd260	type	Readings Are Off the Scale
Mayday / int_2b3bd260	comment	Readings Are Off the Scale: In the fire-test for the oxygen generators in the ValuJet 592 episode, the resulting inferno becomes so hot, it ends up exceeding the facility's measuring equipment and in fact almost destroyed the facility itself as well. In "Fight for Your Life", during a dive, the plane's air speed indicator maxed out. In "Death Race", the g-force that the pilot of the Galloping Ghost experienced went off the chart of the telemetry data. The NTSB used videos of the crash sequence to calculate that the g-force was 17 Gs, more then enough to render anyone unconscious. In "Runaway Train", the titular train's speedometer reaches and maxes out at 90 mph, but it keeps picking up speed down the mountain. The investigation indicates it reached speeds in excess of 100 mph before it hit the fateful curve and derailed (for reference, the train couldn't go faster than 40 mph around the curve without risking derailment).
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Mayday / int_2b5ea43c	type	Bland-Name Product
Mayday / int_2b5ea43c	comment	Bland-Name Product: In the Metrojet Flight 9268 episode, "Terror over Egypt", the search engine that the investigators use to search information about terrorist groups is named "searchforit.com", clearly standing in for Google.
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Mayday / int_2d4fa515	type	Ax-Crazy
Mayday / int_2d4fa515	comment	Ax-Crazy: Or, in the case of Auburn Calloway on FedEx Flight 705 in "Fight for Your Life", Hammer-and-Speargun Crazy.
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Mayday / int_2dc35926	type	Ghost Ship
Mayday / int_2dc35926	comment	Ghost Ship: Or rather, ghost planes: Helios Airways Flight 522 lost contact with air-traffic controllers and was intercepted by Greek fighter jets, which found that everyone on the plane except a male flight attendant was unconscious. The plane ran out of fuel and crashed. It was determined that an incorrect setting on the cabin pressurization panel caused the pilots and passengers to succumb to hypoxia. Several years prior, in the episode "Deadly Silence", a Learjet 35 operated by Sunjet Aviation was flying from Orlando to Dallas when communication was lost shortly after takeoff. The plane veered hundreds of miles off course and crashed in a hayfield in South Dakota, killing golfer Payne Stewart and everyone else on board. However, the plane had long since succumbed to depressurization for unknown reasons. The pilots also did not don their oxygen masks in time to issue an emergency descent. This kind of scenario, either accidental or engineered, is one of the speculative possibilities mentioned in the disappearance of Malaysia Flight 370, as it seems improbable that the plane could have flown in circles for hours with everyone conscious and yet no one so much as sent a goodbye message to a loved one. Without more evidence, it's impossible to be certain.
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Mayday / int_2f226fee	type	You Didn't Ask
Mayday / int_2f226fee	comment	You Didn't Ask: Why the tower at Denver International didn't give wind gust information to pilots of Continental Airlines Flight 1404. Standard operating procedure at Denver International prior to the crash was if the pilots don't ask for wind gust information, you don't give it.
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Mayday / int_30d2ae29	type	Self-Fulfilling Prophecy
Mayday / int_30d2ae29	comment	Self-Fulfilling Prophecy: The difficulties faced by pilots landing at Congonhas Airport led the captain of TAM Airlines Flight 3054 to carry out an outdated landing procedure out of fear of not coming to a quick enough stop with the current procedure. With the stresses piled on top of him, he ended up making the same mistake that led to the old procedure being abandoned in the first place. The pilot of Atlantic Airways Flight 670 pulled his emergency brake after a landing at Stord Airport during which his spoilers failed to deploy, because he was afraid they would overrun and go over the cliff at the end of the runway. This overrode the anti-lock brakes and caused the wheels to lock up, which created a hydroplane effect that prevented the plane from decelerating, causing it to go off the cliff. Investigators later determined that if he hadn't pulled the emergency brake, he would have just barely been able to come to a stop in time.
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Mayday / int_319e4a2f	type	Even Evil Has Standards
Mayday / int_319e4a2f	comment	Even Evil Has Standards: Exploited. The hijackers of Air France 8969 decide to spare the Algerian passengers from being killed in their plot to blow up the Eiffel Tower, and order the Algerian passengers to de-board; the Algerians refuse to leave, a move that saves the lives of those who weren't executed in Algeria.
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Mayday / int_33a71ee9	type	This Is Wrong on So Many Levels!
Mayday / int_33a71ee9	comment	This Is Wrong on So Many Levels!: Nearly everyone interviewed in the episode on Trans-Colorado Flight 2286 went out of the way to criticize the captain's cocaine usage at least once.
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Mayday / int_33d5b7f2	type	Adapted Out
Mayday / int_33d5b7f2	comment	Adapted Out: "Behind Closed Doors" features Captain McCormick and First Officer Whitney, but makes no mention of flight engineer Clayton Burke, and only features two of the eight flight attendants aboard that flight.
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Mayday / int_35a858b3	type	Cluster F-Bomb
Mayday / int_35a858b3	comment	Cluster F-Bomb: The captain of American Airlines Flight 965 used the F-word several times after losing track of where the plane is going.
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Mayday / int_35b241c0	type	Ooh, Me Accent's Slipping
Mayday / int_35b241c0	comment	Ooh, Me Accent's Slipping: Some of the actors playing multiple and/or recurring roles in the reenactments fall into this as the series progresses. Inverted with Jorge Molina, the actor who played the first officer of Birgenair Flight 301, the lead investigator into TANS Peru Flight 204, and the captain of Spanair Flight 5022.
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Mayday / int_35e49acc	type	Caffeine Failure
Mayday / int_35e49acc	comment	Caffeine Failure: Because they lost so much sleep flying into Newark, the pilots of Colgan Air Flight 3407 didn't get even slightly awakened by a cup of coffee in-universe. Another in-universe example is the captain of Trans-Colorado Flight 2286; the coffee he drank before takeoff did nothing to ward off the effects of his cocaine withdrawal.
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Mayday / int_373283c9	type	This Cannot Be!
Mayday / int_373283c9	comment	This Cannot Be!: Said by the captain of Aeromexico 498 after the collision with the Piper Cherokee.
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Mayday / int_381855db	type	Five-Second Foreshadowing
Mayday / int_381855db	comment	Five-Second Foreshadowing: The in-flight entertainment system on Swissair Flight 111 is mentioned to have been "the source of controversy to come" immediately before the pilots noticed an odd smell from the air conditioner panel. Any viewer can readily make the connection at that point. After ASA Flight 529 crashes, but before the evacuation begins, the narrator makes a point of noting that everyone aboard is alive at this point, when the show typically holds off on revealing that Everyone Lives until after the evacuation sequence in the reenactment (except in situations where that outcome is already obvious, which is not remotely the case with this accident). This suggests that there's a specific reason to note this fact at this exact moment — say, because something is about to happen that will change that. (A similar narrative comment is also heard in the episode on British Airtours 28M, but that episode had already revealed in the teaser that there were fatalities.) In "Ocean Landing", the narration in the beginning takes the time to note that airliners typically only take on enough fuel to reach their planned destinations plus enough reserve in the event of needing to divert, and this also applies if they're making multiple stops, the logic being to refuel at every stop and save on fuel costs. Cue the three hijackers storming the cockpit and demanding the crew fly them to Australia (which would take them near the absolute limit of the flight time if they were fully-loaded on fuel) and refusing to listen or believe their protests they don't have nearly enough fuel for a non-stop flight.
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Mayday / int_38a1e0eb	type	Foreign Cuss Word
Mayday / int_38a1e0eb	comment	In "The Final Blow", the A-320 pilots get a very nasty surprise when, in the middle of what they think is a normal landing approach, they emerge from a cloud bank and there's suddenly a forested mountain right in front of them, with barely enough time to say a single word before impact.
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Mayday / int_396e1c2a	type	Face Death with Dignity
Mayday / int_396e1c2a	comment	Face Death with Dignity: The last words of the captain of Alaska Airlines Flight 261 were a resigned "Ah, here we go." Downplayed in the remake, where he says the same line, but in a much more emotional voice.
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Mayday / int_3aec9e5e	type	Properly Paranoid
Mayday / int_3aec9e5e	comment	Properly Paranoid: The first officer of American Eagle Flight 4184 was said to have predicted his own fate on account of the problematic design of the ATR aircraft's de-icing system. Sometimes, passengers can tell when disaster is imminent, such as Joe Stiley on Air Florida Flight 90 and Michael Quinlan on Garuda Indonesia Flight 200, and take a brace position before impact.
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Mayday / int_3b20d7f4	type	Runaway Train
Mayday / int_3b20d7f4	comment	Runaway Train: The title of one Crash Scene Investigation episode, detailing the San Bernardino train wreck. A heavy freight train went down a steep downhill gradient with woefully inadequate brakes, causing it to lose control and derail into a sleepy neighborhood.
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Mayday / int_3bc88a7f	type	Foregone Conclusion
Mayday / int_3bc88a7f	comment	Foregone Conclusion: If someone who was on the plane is interviewed, they survived whatever ordeal happened in the episode. Similarly, if every single interview is with a friend or relative of a passenger rather than survivors themselves, it's likely that the incident in question left no survivors. (At most, there may be a Sole Survivor or a very small number of survivors, but it's not likely to be very many.) If a friend or family member is interviewed, it's likely that the particular individual they're discussing did not survive. Averted a few times, usually related to older accidents, where the person survived the accident but died at some point before the episode was filmed, so a friend or relative recounts the person's story, but this only happens if the story is particularly significant. (For example, in the episode regarding the Munich disaster, the pilot's daughter tells how her father's name was dragged through the mud after the accident.) Averted once in a while by deliberately not showing a particular interview until after the person's survival has been revealed. The first example of this usage involves Tim Lancaster in "Blowout". If the aircraft involved is a Qantas jet airliner, you can be sure everyone survived, because Qantas has never had a jet airliner fatality.
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Mayday / int_3c0a4666	type	Noodle Incident
Mayday / int_3c0a4666	comment	Noodle Incident: It's never established how the captain of Trans-Colorado 2286 was able to get an aircraft in and out of an airport in just 7 minutes.
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Mayday / int_3c694b06	type	Cryptically Unhelpful Answer
Mayday / int_3c694b06	comment	Cryptically Unhelpful Answer: In the Tenerife disaster, when the Pan American crew ask for clarification on which exit to take, the ATC simply responds, "The third one." This doesn't help the crew, since they don't know if that means the third exit from the start of the runway or the third one from their current position.
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Mayday / int_3c88d6c2	type	Flat "What"
Mayday / int_3c88d6c2	comment	Flat "What": An investigator into Comair 3272 lets one loose when he sees the discrepancy in the airline's and manufacturer's manuals over the use of the aircraft's de-icing boots.
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Mayday / int_3d2c6d30	type	Skewed Priorities
Mayday / int_3d2c6d30	comment	Skewed Priorities: The investigation of the Tenerife crash discovered that the air traffic controllers were listening to a soccer match on the radio and may not have been paying full attention to what was going on. In fact, they had it turned up so loud that the sounds of the game can be heard on the transmissions from both planes. A passenger on KLM Cityhopper 433 scolds her adult daughter for swearing in response to the aircraft suddenly rolling to the right.
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Mayday / int_3eb0f889	type	Pun-Based Title
Mayday / int_3eb0f889	comment	Pun-Based Title: Often, eg, "Dead Tired", "Under Pressure", "Turning Point".
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Mayday / int_3ed23024	type	Surprisingly Realistic Outcome
Mayday / int_3ed23024	comment	Surprisingly Realistic Outcome: As Chad Erickson in "Killer Attitude" learned the hard way, you can do all the prep work in the world for an upcoming job and still have a nasty surprise thrown hard at your face. "Ghost Plane": Being trained to fly a light aircraft will not prepare you for flying a commercial airliner like a 737, as Andreas Prodromou finds out when he tries to take control of Helios Flight 522 after the flight crew passes out. "Flight 574: Lost": The reason why airlines are expensive is because it costs a lot of money to keep up with and update the regular maintenance and training courses to fulfill safety regulations. When airlines skimp those costs in order to promote themselves as "cheap", the risks of something going horribly wrong increase accordingly. Even before the Flight 574 disaster (a crash caused by the double-whammy of known faulty equipment not given the proper maintenance and the pilots being under-trained to deal with system failures in-flight), Adam Air and various other inexpensive Indoensian airlines were plagued by multiple crashes and failures, with Flight 574 proving to be one of the straws that broke the camel's back prompting a massive restructuring of the entire Indonesian aviation business to either meet the expected standards or lose their licenses to fly, the latter the fate Adam Air would suffer. Almost Once per Episode: Even the best trained and most experienced professionals can make mistakes sometimes, and even the best designed and most reliable equipment can have problems sometimes. Also shown in a number of episodes: sometimes, a pilot faced with an emergency situation can do everything right and then some, and it still won't be enough to create an ideal outcome. For example, the pilots of United 232 performed a remarkable feat of airmanship in getting their crippled plane to a runway (and saved the lives of over half the people onboard), but despite their best efforts, it was simply not possible to land the plane safely; the damage was just too severe.
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Mayday / int_3eee0728	type	Captain Obvious
Mayday / int_3eee0728	comment	Captain Obvious: Sometimes done in-universe. The glaring example occurs in the Air France 447 episode, when one of the investigators detailedly explains what a stall is and how the Airbus behave after stalling, using cutouts and diagrams. While the audience in front of the TVs may not know this, in-universe he explains this to a group of aviation experts and aviation journalists who certainly know what an aerodynamic stall is... One interviewee in the episode on PSA Flight 1771 stated that "it wouldn't take much knowledge or experience on a passenger's part to know that they were in deep, deep trouble." In the United 173 episode, after the investigators hear on the CVR that the plane exhausted all fuel, one of the guys states: "The engines didn't have any fuel!" Ya think, buddy?... "28 degrees... That's cold enough for water to freeze." Indeed it is, as anyone who attended elementary school knows full well. Unless you went to school in Europe, where 28 degrees is a nice summer day. When it's revealed in "Killer Attitude" that Captain Falitz had struck a co-pilot, a person being interviewed helpfully states, "For a professional pilot to have a physical altercation with one of his colleagues is completely unacceptable."
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Mayday / int_3f0b2f50	type	Make It Look Like an Accident
Mayday / int_3f0b2f50	comment	Make It Look Like an Accident: Auburn Calloway intended to do this for his suicidal hijacking of Federal Express Flight 705 in order to give his family his $2.5 million life insurance policy for death in a work-related accident. It's the reason for his choice of murder weapons (a bunch of hammers and a spear gun), as fatal injuries caused by these were far more likely to be misjudged as caused by the plane crashing than, say, gunshot wounds.
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Mayday / int_3fe2b13f	type	Ungrateful Bastard
Mayday / int_3fe2b13f	comment	Ungrateful Bastard: The captain of BEA Flight 548 accuses a junior pilot of being such during his "The Reason You Suck" Speech to him just before boarding his flight to Brussels.
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Mayday / int_40bb59d0	type	Blatant Lies
Mayday / int_40bb59d0	comment	Blatant Lies: In "Deadly Silence", one of the warnings that should have alerted the pilots of an improper takeoff configuration didn't sound due to a tripped circuit breaker. In the investigation, it was discovered that due to being a nuisance alarm, pilots themselves often deliberately pulled out the circuit breaker to prevent it from sounding. The pilot who informed them of this claimed he had only heard of it being done, but had never done it himself, before reaching behind him and pulling the circuit breaker without looking.
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Mayday / int_40cc0c7e	type	Bittersweet Ending
Mayday / int_40cc0c7e	comment	Bittersweet Ending: "Pilot Betrayed": Captain Stefan G. Rasmussen was lauded as a hero for performing the emergency landing of Scandinavian Airlines Flight 751 with no loss of life. But he was so deeply traumatized by the incident, and his "trust" in the aircraft is so badly shaken (as the crash was partly caused by a new safety feature that he was not aware of), that he chose not to resume his flying career at all. "Fight for Your Life": Though the crew of FedEx Flight 705 were able to stop Auburn Calloway from carrying out his murder-suicide plan, they were unable to return to duty because of the effects of the injuries they sustained during the struggle. "Runaway Train": Frank Holland, the engineer of the train that crashed, was absolved of all blame and continued to work as an engineer, but he was never able to take another train down the Cajon Pass. The pilots of United Airlines Flight 232 managed to get their plane onto a runway despite having no functioning hydraulic systems and saved over half their passengers (the last time such a crash happened, Japan Airlines Flight 123, it ended with the plane crashing into a mountain and only four survivors), but over 111 people still died. Despite the incredible feat they'd accomplished, Dennis Fitchnote and potentially other members of the crew as well; Fitch is just the only one who mentions it never fully got over the ones they couldn't save.
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Mayday / int_41be2c1b	type	Spoiler Title
Mayday / int_41be2c1b	comment	Spoiler Title: Quite a few episodes give away key aspects of the accident through the title. You can probably figure out what happened in "Bomb on Board", in "Dead Weight", a large component is an overloaded aircraft, in "Frozen in Flight", icing of the wings downs the plane, in "Dead Tired", pilot fatigue is a massive factor, and so on. Needless to say, however, there's still a lot of extra details to go over to explain why these things happened to begin with.
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Mayday / int_420c50b7	type	A.I. Is a Crapshoot
Mayday / int_420c50b7	comment	A.I. Is a Crapshoot: Basically what happens on Qantas Flight 72, as the faulty ADIRU basically causes the plane's automated systems to go haywire, with contradictory warnings, various ECAM warnings and the PFD going into a state of confusion, as well as the AOA sensors going crazy, causing the plane to pitch down.
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Mayday / int_42c186e	type	A Tragedy of Impulsiveness
Mayday / int_42c186e	comment	A Tragedy of Impulsiveness: Nigeria Airways Flight 2120. The project manager had the opportunity to get the tires topped off if he wasn't so adamant that the flight remain on schedule and take off with the tires under-inflated. Santa Barbara Airlines Flight 518. The whole accident would've been completely avoided if the pilots hadn't gotten caught up in their time in the terminal, and then rushed to get the plane in the air on schedule without properly setting up the flight computers. What put the nail in the coffin in Tenerife. While many other factors piled up to set the scene, the KLM captain's impatient decision to begin the takeoff roll without any certainty about their clearance, knowing that the Pan Am plane had been behind them and with no confirmation that they were clear, was the final link in the chain.
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Mayday / int_437e70f5	type	What a Piece of Junk
Mayday / int_437e70f5	comment	What a Piece of Junk: What the captain of Santa Barbara Airlines Flight 518 says of his plane as he and his copilot are taxiing to the runway. True to the trope, the massive equipment malfunction that sent it into a mountain was caused by the pilots' rushed startup; all they had to do was wait 28 more seconds than they did before moving, and there would've been no problems with the flight.
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Mayday / int_43a045de	type	Dropped a Bridge on Him
Mayday / int_43a045de	comment	Dropped a Bridge on Him: Discussed in an interview in the episode covering the death of Dag Hammarskjold:
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Mayday / int_43b154c9	type	Not Even Bothering with the Accent
Mayday / int_43b154c9	comment	Not Even Bothering with the Accent: This tends to be a common trend in re-enactments, particularly when portraying Scandinavians and New Zealanders. A lot of generic radio traffic where there isn't a dedicated actor is voiced by the same person, regardless of where the episode is taking place. Perhaps particularly noticeable during the Qantas Flight 32 episode where the pilots speak to Singapore ATC and ground staff.
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Mayday / int_443f9d8a	type	Ask a Stupid Question...
Mayday / int_443f9d8a	comment	Ask a Stupid Question...: The opening exchange between the pilots of Northwest Airlink Flight 5719:
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Mayday / int_4508b16b	type	The Guards Must Be Crazy
Mayday / int_4508b16b	comment	The Guards Must Be Crazy: Interviews in the Metrojet episode lend weight to the idea that this trope likely contributed to an airliner bombing in 2015.
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Mayday / int_49bbfaee	type	Everything's Better with Rainbows
Mayday / int_49bbfaee	comment	Everything's Better with Rainbows: Subverted, American Eagle Flight 4184 hit the ground at the end of a rainbow.
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Mayday / int_4b989393	type	Cutting Corners
Mayday / int_4b989393	comment	A very similar oversight haunted LaMia Flight 2933. The captain mentioned a â€˜fuel problemâ€™ to the air traffic controller upon coming into contact with them in a tone that made it sound like a mundane issue, but neglected to declare an emergency or describe just how urgent it was until it had spent several minutes in a holding pattern, spending the last of its fuel.note Though it's worth noting that if he had declared an emergency, there would have been more scrutiny of the plane's fuel levels afterward, which would have revealed that LaMia had been under-fuelling its planes to save money, so the Captain (who was also a co-owner of the airline) may have deliberately downplayed the emergency to avoid getting caught.
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Mayday / int_4ce37dd1	type	Snipe Hunt
Mayday / int_4ce37dd1	comment	Snipe Hunt: Used to lock someone out of the cockpit. It is suggested that SilkAir Flight 185's captain may have found an excuse to get his first officer out of the cockpit, then locked him out, disabled the flight recorders, and intentionally crashed his plane. Implied in an almost identical playout with Germanwings Flight 9525. The first officer suggests that the captain take a bathroom break, which the captain proceeds to do. As soon as the cockpit door is sealed behind the captain, so is the plane's fate.
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Mayday / int_4e3d253b	type	Downer Ending
Mayday / int_4e3d253b	comment	All twelve occupants of United Express Flight 5925 initially survived the collision with a Beechcraft King Air A90. Another pilot named Paul Walker came to the rescue, trying in vain to open the door as the plane was burning, but when the door wouldn't open, Walker was forced to leave to get help. The plane then exploded with no survivors.
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Mayday / int_4e7c4536	type	Wham Line
Mayday / int_4e7c4536	comment	Wham Line: One of the survivors of Air Canada 797 recalls that after the explosion, a flight attendant said she needed to "count the survivors", and he realized that the way she was saying it implied that there were people who had not survived. As the flight crew of Nigeria Airways Flight 2120, as yet unaware that their plane is on fire, deals with the hydraulic problem, the controller giving them strange instructions because he's mistaken them for Saudia Flight 738, and the deluge of nonsensical warnings their plane is giving them, a flight attendant rushes in with a report that explains everything:
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Mayday / int_4ec4c5ab	type	Harsher in Hindsight
Mayday / int_4ec4c5ab	comment	Harsher in Hindsight: An in-universe example in Northwest Airlink 5719 episode. The opening banter seems harsh on the side of the captain, but it can be assumed to be an example of Culture Clash between an outspoken New Yorker captain and the quiet Minnesotan first officer. Later in the episode, it gets far darker and shows the captain's aggressive and unfriendly nature.
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Mayday / int_4f4372e9	type	Early-Installment Weirdness
Mayday / int_4f4372e9	comment	Early-Installment Weirdness: The writing in the first season is noticeably different from seasons eight onwards, with the narration in the past tensenote (eg, "investigators soon recovered the black boxes" rather than "investigators soon recover the black boxes"), factors not apparent at the time often more prominent early in the episode, and the endings considerably more bleak.
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Mayday / int_5009999d	type	Painting the Medium
Mayday / int_5009999d	comment	Painting the Medium: In an interview with expert Jeff Wise, the camera zooms in on his face as he explains that "[the] ability [of the crew of Singapore Airlines Flight 006] to deal with multiple streams of information is becoming narrower and narrower".
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Mayday / int_50b05d30	type	Disproportionate Retribution
Mayday / int_50b05d30	comment	Disproportionate Retribution: Auburn Calloway wanted to hijack a FedEx DC-10 and crash it for insurance fraud because he had been laid off from his job. Gameel Al-Batouti may have slammed his aircraft into the Atlantic Ocean for supposedly being outed for harassing female EgyptAir employees. David Burke killed everyone on a plane because he had been fired for theft and his ex-manager refused to help him get rehired by the company. An unintentional example which contributed to the Tenerife disaster: KLM had a policy that air crews could lose their licenses if they exceeded their maximum duty time even if it was because of something out of their control, which motivated the captain to try to get off the island as quickly as possible, leading to a string of mistakes on his part.
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Mayday / int_53407671	type	Action Survivor
Mayday / int_53407671	comment	Action Survivor: Captain Leul Abate of Ethiopian Airlines had experienced two prior hijackings in his career before the fateful day Flight 961 would be taken over by three would-be hijackers. He would go on to survive this third hijacking and subsequent crash as well.
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Mayday / int_550754dc	type	Improbable Infant Survival
Mayday / int_550754dc	comment	Improbable Infant Survival: For many episodes, the trope is largely averted in fatal plane crashes, but there are some kids who defied the odds: "Alarming Silence": The sole survivor of Northwest Airlines Flight 255 is a 4-year-old girl. "Lost": A 4-year-old girl was among the 4 survivors of American Airlines Flight 965. (Her brother was initially found alive, but died in the hospital from his injuries.) "Missing Over New York": Ten of the eleven babies on the plane survived the crash. "Operation Babylift": All the infants aboard the C-5 Galaxy were seated in the cabin, which saved their lives when the plane crashed.
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Mayday / int_5532b579	type	Acoustic License
Mayday / int_5532b579	comment	Acoustic License: During the KLM Cityhopper 433 investigation, when the cockpit voice recording is played, the operator is asked to fast-forward the recording, but he actually rewinds it, as anyone familiar with tape or cassette players clearly sees. (The spools are moving anti-clockwise when played, then move clockwise when rewound, then anti-clockwise again when played.) In the LAPA 3142 episode, the conversations in the cockpit during the fateful roll are shown as normal with no unusual background sounds... but the final sequence shows that a loud alert horn was sounding all the time, even partially muting the voices on the CVR. Similarly, in the Tenerife episode, the initial play-through of the reconstruction shows the controller telling the KLM crew to stand by for takeoff, followed by the Pan Am crew reporting that they're still on the runway. In reality, those transmissions were simultaneous, which was actually a critical piece of the accident sequence as it prevented the KLM pilots from being able to clearly hear either. It's shown accurately later in the episode, after the team discovers this fact.
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Mayday / int_56515a39	type	Artistic License â€“ History
Mayday / int_56515a39	comment	Artistic License â€“ History: There are many incidents where the producers do not have access to the CVR to base the episode's scripts on, or where the CVR doesn't cover the whole emergency. Reasons for this include the incident aircraft not being fitted with a CVRnote British European Airways 548, Trans-Colorado 2268, the United Nations Ndola crash, the Grand Canyon disaster and the Munich disaster, the CVR breaking or malfunctioningnote Arrow Air 1285, Chalks Ocean Airways 101, Partnair 394 and Copa Airlines 201, the CVR being lost completely and never recoverednote El Al 1862, American Airlines 11, and United Airlines 175 or damaged beyond the point of usabilitynote Hughes Airwest 706 and American Airlines 77, there being legal barriers to the public release of the CVR transcriptnote Air France Flight 358 and First Air 6560; both of these incidents occurred in Canada, a country with very strong case privacy laws and where CVR recordings are usually treated as privileged information, the CVR losing power due to the nature of the incidentnote National Airlines 120, Swissair 111, American Airlines 191, South African Airways 295 and Nigeria Airways 2120, the CVR being intentionally disabled pre-crashnote SilkAir 185, the time elapsing from the incident to the end of the flight being long enough for the critical portion of the tape to be overwrittennote Helios 522, China Airlines 006 and the Lear Jet crash, and the rare instance where it's a complete mysterynote LaMia Flight 2933. In these cases, especially if none of the pilots survived to say what happenednote which is the case for all of the aforementioned incidents except Air France 358 and China Airlines 006, the cockpit recreations are dramatized based on what makes sense given the known facts of the incident and any recordings that do exist. For instance, we don't know if Nigeria Airways Flight 2120 captain William Allan uttered the words "I've lost elevators. Christ, I have no control!" in the moments before his plane crashed, since the recording ended as he was taking over from co-pilot Kent Davidge after the first officer's aileron controls crapped out, but the accident report does note that the plane only seemed to become fully uncontrollable just before the crash, so this would be a conceivable reaction to losing control at the last moment. In cases where nobody survived, what was happening in the cabin is also conjectural, as there's no such thing as a cabin voice recorder. Just in "Under Pressure", in-flight director Kay Smith grabbing mechanic Jean-Paul Philippe's attention after smelling smoke, leading to him discovering the fire, is based on Philippe being the only mechanic on board, meaning he'd be the expert on issues with the plane, and passengers trying to open the doors is probably based on doors being found in the unlocked position. Even when there is a cockpit voice recording, there's still only so much that an audio-only recording can tell, so when an audio recording is all they have (if the flight crew doesn't survive), there's still a certain amount of conjecture involved. For example, we don't actually know that the captain of TAROM Flight 371 had a heart attack or that the first officer was distracted from flying due to his attempts to assist the captain, but it's a scenario that fits with what they have from the flight control inputs and audio recordings. The episode covering Malaysian Flight 370 shows dramatizations of each of the theories regarding its disappearance. Since the black boxes have not been recovered (nor has the crash site itself been located) and the crash is unlikely to be solved anytime soon, all of the dramatizations are also conjectural. A similar format is used in the episode covering the crash that killed Dag Hammarskjold. With no witnesses, no recorders, and the plane badly damaged by fire, multiple theories abounded as to what caused the accident. Every theory is shown as the investigation goes through them; the episode eventually reveals that investigators decades after the fact determined a likely scenario, but there's no way to be sure. Even when the outcome is known, some episodes will play out each of several theories as the investigators consider them, even those that are subsequently proven not to be true, so viewers are shown depictions of things that never happened. A few also similarly depict a what-if scenario where the crash is averted, to show how that could have been accomplished. In "Air India: Explosive Evidence", the first officer pages a flight attendant over the PA system, saying that a young passenger would like to come up and see the cockpit.note In the pre-9/11 era, most airlines had no rules against allowing passengers into the cockpit area. Nowadays, with the exception of a few special scenarios, the only chance youâ€™ll get at stepping foot in the cockpit as a passenger will be when the planeâ€™s on the ground. This was never recorded on the cockpit voice recorder (the last thing heard on the CVR was a discussion about customs). In "Terror In San Francisco", the episode covering Asiana Flight 214, the captain and first officer are the only people in the cockpit. In reality, the relief first officer was in the cockpit jumpseat. He even tried to warn the pilots that they were descending too quickly, but they didn't listen. In "I'm the Problem", David Burke is depicted as bald. The real Burke had a full head of hair.
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Mayday / int_5a3b8032	type	The Un-Reveal
Mayday / int_5a3b8032	comment	The Unreveal: In some cases: It is known that South African Airways Flight 295, the subject of "Fanning the Flames", was brought down by an on-board fire. But whether it was accidental or the result of Apartheid Era espionage remains unknown. Subverted with "Death and Denial", about Egypt-Air Flight 990. The episode presents the case that the plane was deliberately brought down by the First Officer, and that the Egyptian government's official explanation of mechanical failure was made because of suicide being extremely taboo in Arab culture. Therefore, the cause of the crash is known, yet cannot be officially determined because of the differing politics and social mores between the U.S. and Egypt. Subverted again with "Pushed to the Limit", about SilkAir Flight 185. Like in "Death and Denial", this episode presents the case that the plane was deliberately brought down by a crew member (this time, the Captain), and that the Indonesian government's official explanation of mechanical failure was made because the entire Boeing 737 line, at the time of the incident, was susceptible to a mechanical issue with the rudder's control unit that had previously caused the crash of two other 737s (which themselves were profiled in the episode "Hidden Dangers"). Again, known cause of crash, no official determination. This explanation was offered because of a similar suicide taboo due to Indonesia's large Muslim population. Averted in "Murder in the Skies"/"Crash in the Alps" about the Germanwings 9525 crash. Evidence pointed to the crash being caused deliberately by the copilot; this time, no one attempted to challenge this conclusion. Only after this accident (the only one out of five total crashes suspected to be cases of pilot suicide to be undisputed as a pilot suicide) were recommendations passed to mandate the presence of at least two crew members on the flight deck at all times during the flight. "Massacre Over The Mediterranean"; the original report concludes that Aerolinee Itavia Flight 870 was shot down by a missile fired from an unknown second plane. Soon after, two of the investigators withdraw their names from the report. A few years later, another inquiry produces a second report which determines that the first conclusion was wrongly based on an assumption that there was a hole in the side of the plane near the front. The third and more complete investigation shows compelling forensic evidence for a bomb placed under the wash basin in the rear toilet, however the report is ignored by Italian authorities still pursuing the missile theory. The episode seems to side with the bomb theory, ending with the conclusion that the Italian legal system is not the best system for investigating crashes. With the disappearance of Malaysian Airlines Flight 370 unresolved at the time of airing, the episode about this flight puts forth the theory that the plane was intentionally flown off-course (and that the Captain was in the best position to do so) but doesn't definitively say who did it. Played with in "Deadly Mission". Investigators looking into the case decades after the fact are able to establish a likely scenario that fits the evidence, but with no flight recorders and one important piece of potentially contradictory evidence not available to investigators, they acknowledge there's no way to be sure. "Deadly Silence": While the investigators know that the crash was caused by the plane losing cabin pressure, they are unable to determine how the depressurization happened, as the plane had no flight data recorder, the cockpit voice recorder only recorded the final 30 minutes of the flight, and the wreckage was too fragmented to provide any clues. Also "Turning Point" with Northwest Airlines Flight 85. While the NTSB did determine that the cause of the rudder hard-over was the failure of an end-cap due to metal fatigue, they were never able to ascertain what caused the metal fatigue itself, which means they don't know what set off the sequence that lead to the lower rudder to get jammed to the left, forcing an emergency landing in Anchorage. (They were, however, able to prevent future incidents by addressing the direct cause and adding a safety mechanism.) Similarly, "Fight For Control" and Reeve Aleutian Airways Flight 8. Though the plane managed to land with no fatalities, the broken propeller that caused the disaster fell into the ocean and could not be recovered, so investigators were never able to determine what caused it to break off. Discussed in "Explosive Proof" about TWA 800; although the NTSB concluded that the accident was a fuel tank explosion, some continue to believe that the plane was shot down. In "Free Fall", the investigators were never able to figure out why a line of sensor data was mislabeled by the flight system, causing Qantas Flight 72 to go into a nosedive twice.
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Mayday / int_5ad80bf8	type	It's All My Fault
Mayday / int_5ad80bf8	comment	It's All My Fault: When all four engines fail on British Airways Flight 9, the cockpit crew strongly suspects that this is due to some mistake on their part. Captain Moody specifically says, "I think we've cocked something up" at one point. It turns out that it's really not their fault; they flew into a cloud of volcanic ash, which doesn't show up on weather radar, so they had no way of detecting it beforehand. The investigation clearly shows that they weren't to blame, and they end up receiving multiple awards and commendations for managing to land their plane safely under such difficult circumstances.
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Mayday / int_5b12f598	type	Million to One Chance
Mayday / int_5b12f598	comment	Million to One Chance: Several featured incidents involve a total loss of all three hydraulics systems on a plane. The odds of such an occurence were calculated to be a billion to one against. However, this calculation was only meant to express the odds of all three hydraulics failing on their own and independently of one another. Generally, when such a thing happens, it's because all three were damaged by something else, like a rupturing fan disk or a missile attack.
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Mayday / int_5d86966a	type	Man on Fire
Mayday / int_5d86966a	comment	Man on Fire: Several of the people on Atlantic Southeast Airlines Flight 529 fall victim to this when leaking jet fuel ignited. Thankfully, we don't actually see this portrayed in the reenactment. There were some people on board Nigeria Airways Flight 2120 who were engulfed by the flames consuming the plane. Many of these people fell out of the rapidly disintegrating plane.
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Mayday / int_5deb34da	type	Ace Pilot
Mayday / int_5deb34da	comment	Ace Pilot: Deconstructed in the Tenerife disaster. Captain Van Zanten was KLM's most experienced and decorated pilot and was regarded with such esteem that he served as KLM's spokesman and appeared in KLM's print adverts. It was this preceding reputation — as well as the fact that he was the pilot who had certified his first officer on the Tenerife flight — that probably factored into the crew's reluctance to stop him from impatiently taking off from the crowded, foggy airport, without permission from the tower. This resulted in the destruction of two jumbo jets, the loss of 500+ lives, and the worst aviation disaster in history. When KLM found out that one of their jets crashed in Tenerife, they tried to contact Captain Van Zanten to join the investigative team. They then realized that he was the pilot involved in the crash. Played straight with the crew of Japan Airlines Flight 123; while ultimately they perished in the crash, they fought to the very last second to try to save their Boeing 747, and kept it aloft for longer than any attempt at replicating the accident in a flight simulator could. While unfortunately the JSDF's inaction in getting to the crash site (believing No One Could Survive That!, they put off their rescue operation until the next day) meant that many people who had survived the crash died from their injuries and hypothermia during the night, the crew's efforts were a direct factor in ensuring that the four people who were found alive at the crash site had survived their ordeal. Played tragically straight with UPS Airlines Flight 6's first officer, Matthew Bell. When the Boeing 747 operating the flight suffered a horrific cargo fire, his captain, Douglas Lampe, went to retrieve his reserve oxygen mask after smoke breached the cockpit, only to be overcome by the fumes, pass out, and slowly asphyxiate. Bell kept flying the plane, and throughout the rest of the flight did his absolute best to save the aircraft and prevent a disaster on the ground. While the plane became uncontrollable and crashed into the ground, resulting in Bell's death, he fought until the very last second, and was within miles of reaching the nearest airport, only missing because the thick smoke made it impossible to see his instruments. Played straight with FedEx Flight 705, in which the crew, despite having been badly wounded and suffering from various horrific injuries at the hands of Auburn Calloway, not only managed to fight their would-be murderer off, but fly their DC-10 in ways that were previously thought impossible, including steep dives, near-vertical bank angles and even fully inverted. Keep in mind, what Calloway did to them made them medically unfit to fly. Other accidents like United Airlines Flight 173 and Flash Airlines Flight 604 also show how having an ace pilot can be a liability instead of an asset. Flight crews are trained to work together as a team, to prevent accidents like these. Reconstructions happen in a few episodes, such as Captain Sullenberger and the Flight 1549 crew. Considering the panicky reactions we have seen from even the blameless flight crews so far in the series, the Danger Deadpan demeanor with which the 1549 pilots handled their situation is almost surreal. The Captain of British Airways Flight 38 made a split second decision to reduce the flap setting when the jet suddenly lost engine thrust seconds before reaching the runway at Heathrow airport. Doing so reduced lift, which would almost certainly prevent a safe landing, however it would also reduce drag and allow the plane to clear a busy main road and make it over the airport's exterior fence. The counter-intuitive action allow the aircraft to make a semi-controlled crash on the airfield instead of stalling and dropping onto the road, destroying the plane and likely killing scores of passengers, crew and motorists in the process. Both played straight and deconstructed a bit in the episode on United Airlines Flight 232. The pilots (including Dennis E. Fitch, a senior pilot and instructor who happened to be aboard as a passenger that day) absolutely lived up to this trope, guiding the severely damaged plane to a runway and saving 185 lives. But it's deconstructed in the sense that, even with all their skill, the pilots were unable to prevent the plane from crashing on the runway, and 111 people still died, not because said pilots did anything wrongnote in fact, it's generally agreed that they did better than anyone could possibly have expected, but because even the best pilots are limited by the state of the aircraft and the nature of the problem, and in this case, those factors created a situation where a perfect outcome just wasn't possible.
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Mayday / int_5eecd64c	type	Oh, No... Not Again!
Mayday / int_5eecd64c	comment	Oh, No... Not Again!: In "Falling from the Sky" (British Airways Flight 9), the crew manages to get their four failed engines working again, but barely get a chance to celebrate when one of them starts surging again. One of the passengers can be heard crying out "Not again!"
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Mayday / int_5ef41330	type	Voiceover Translation
Mayday / int_5ef41330	comment	Voiceover Translation: Used whenever a non-English speaker is interviewed so that the audience can understand what's being said.
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Mayday / int_61a35c24	type	Improbable Piloting Skills
Mayday / int_61a35c24	comment	Improbable Piloting Skills: Many episodes have pilots managing to keep their planes from crashing despite overwhelming odds.
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Mayday / int_61a503a7	type	Hell Is That Noise
Mayday / int_61a503a7	comment	Hell Is That Noise: The burning oxygen generators in the fire test for the ValuJet 592 investigation produce a horrific metallic wailing sound that disturbs even the investigators. Many of the verbal GPWS and TCAS warnings that tend to occur during an incident, partly because of the creepy, forceful text-to-speech voice, and partly because of what they portend â€” these are often among the last things the crew hears before impact: [WHOOP WHOOP] "PULL UP." "TERRAIN, TERRAIN." / "CAUTION, TERRAIN." / "TOO LOW â€“ TERRAIN." / "TERRAIN AHEAD." "OBSTACLE, OBSTACLE." / "CAUTION, OBSTACLE." / "OBSTACLE AHEAD." "CLIMB, CLIMB." / "DESCEND, DESCEND." / "CLIMB, CLIMB NOW." / "DESCEND, DESCEND NOW." "TRAFFIC, TRAFFIC." "STALL, STALL." "SINK RATE, SINK RATE." "BANK ANGLE, BANK ANGLE." "AIRSPEED LOW."
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Mayday / int_62434fe2	type	Sanity Slippage
Mayday / int_62434fe2	comment	Sanity Slippage: With the new residence policy for the pilots of Northwest Airlink, the captain of Flight 5719 grows increasingly aggravated and prone to outbursts, both verbally and even physically, which proves to be his undoing when his first officer is too intimidated to provide the altitude callouts for the approach into Hibbing.
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Mayday / int_63b02752	type	Hair-Trigger Temper
Mayday / int_63b02752	comment	Hair-Trigger Temper: The captain of Northwest Airlink Flight 5719 had this in spades. He took out his frustration about a company policy requiring pilots to relocate by flying aggressively, and he continuously chewed out fellow crew members, one of whom claimed to have actually been physically struck by the captain.
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Mayday / int_6411dac8	type	BadassNormal
Mayday / int_6411dac8	comment	Badass Normal: The passengers of United Airlines Flight 1549, bracing for impact as their plane headed into the Hudson River, in January, started calling out to each other to confirm that the passengers in the emergency rows were ready to carry out immediate evacuation.
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Mayday / int_6439de78	type	Heroic Sacrifice
Mayday / int_6439de78	comment	Heroic Sacrifice: Arland D. Williams Jr., one of the most famous Real Life examples of the trope, survived the initial crash of Air Florida Flight 90 but insisted on passing over the rescue line to other passengers. His body being entangled with the wreckage, he sinks below the icy Potomac and drowns. The actions and death of Ed Gannaway, the captain of Atlantic Southeast Airlines Flight 529, are regarded as this. Famous photojournalist Mohamed Amin spent his last moments trying to rally passengers against the hijackers of Ethiopian Airlines Flight 961. He is killed when the plane is ditched in the Indian Ocean. Folk music legend Stan Rogers was last seen alive trying to help other passengers out of Air Canada Flight 797 while fire engulfed the cabin, as recounted in the episode "Fire Fight". This very nearly happens to the captain of the same flight. After doing an excellent job at getting the stricken DC-9 to perform a successful landing, the pilot is too exhausted to move, and slumps against his seat as the fire begins to rage through the cabin and into the entrance of the cockpit just behind him. Had the co-pilot not noticed and yelled to the fire department to douse him with water to help shock him into being able to climb out through the cockpit window, he would have died only seconds later when a devastating flash fire ripped through the cabin.
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Mayday / int_670db7d7	type	Formula-Breaking Episode
Mayday / int_670db7d7	comment	Formula-Breaking Episode: Three episodes focus on non-air crashes (two train wrecks and a maritime disaster).
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Mayday / int_6a1a1f8a	type	Glasses Pull
Mayday / int_6a1a1f8a	comment	Glasses Pull: A few investigators in the re-enactments have removed their glasses after confronting a major shocker in an investigation.
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Mayday / int_6a2ae11f	type	Improbable Weapon User
Mayday / int_6a2ae11f	comment	Improbable Weapon User: Lampshaded and justified with Auburn Calloway on FedEx Flight 705. His plan was to kill the flight crew with hammers and a spear gun to take control of the plane and crash it into the FedEx headquarters in Memphis, while making the attack look like the whole thing was an accident.
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Mayday / int_6d332aea	type	Driven to Suicide
Mayday / int_6d332aea	comment	Driven to Suicide: The NTSB report on SilkAir Flight 185 concludes that the captain, plagued by debts caused by bad investments and problems at work (including a demotion for reckless flying), intentionally crashed his plane. The fact that the crash occurred on the anniversary of a training flight of which he was the sole survivor (his plane was forced to turn back due to mechanical issues, while three of his comrades were killed when their planes crashed in bad weather) can't have been good for his mental state either. Also happened with EgyptAir Flight 990 (according to the NTSB), LAM Mozambique Flight 470, and Germanwings Flight 9525. This is also a theory for the crash of Flight MH 370, though this remains unproven due to the fact that the wreckage has not been found. Discussed in the case of Crossair Flight 498. Interviews and narrator dialogue make mention of the captain's emotional difficulties as a commuter pilot in a distant country whose native languages were beyond his knowledge or unusable outside his job requirements, and it's briefly hinted that he deliberately took one of his tranquilizer pills shortly before the flight; however, the traces found in his system weren't able to support this theory. This was the intent of Auburn Calloway with his hijacking of Federal Express Flight 705, both as revenge for his lay off and to commit insurance fraud to provide for his divorced family, but the heroic efforts of the crew stopped him.
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Mayday / int_7040b6bc	type	Understatement
Mayday / int_7040b6bc	comment	Understatement: The captain of British Airways Flight 9 certainly qualifies. Flight Attendant Deborah Neil, aboard Pacific Southwest Airlines 1771: Regarding the investigation of ASA Flight 529, the episode briefly discusses how the airline industry had tested an allegedly less flammable fuel by crashing an empty plane via remote control, and video is shown of said test. As the test plane explodes in a fireball, the narration notes that the experiment was "not a conspicuous success".
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Mayday / int_70ade2c4	type	Culture Clash
Mayday / int_70ade2c4	comment	In an intra-national example, it's mentioned that there was Culture Clash in the case of Northwest Airlink Flight 5719, where an outspoken, abrasive, and very temperamental New Yorker Captain clashed badly with his more understated Minnesotan first officer.
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Mayday / int_71152dd	type	One Dialogue, Two Conversations
Mayday / int_71152dd	comment	One Dialogue, Two Conversations: This is a major contributing factor in the Tenerife crash. When the KLM pilot is about to take off, the co-pilot tells him that they can't do so without ATC clearance (which only specifies the route that they're to take). When the controller then gives it, the crew thinks that they have been cleared for takeoff. To make things worse, the KLM co-pilot then tells the tower, "We are now at take-off," and the ATC misinterprets this to mean that they are in takeoff position, not in the actual process of taking off.
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Mayday / int_7286e96d	type	Idiot Ball
Mayday / int_7286e96d	comment	Idiot Ball: Exemplified in some of the pilot error cases. The crew of Eastern Air Lines Flight 401 become so distracted by a minor problem with the landing gear that they fail to check where and how low they are flying. United Airlines Flight 173 suffers a similar fate, and for the same reason; in that case, what was overlooked was the fuel levels, which were becoming dangerously low. The captain of Aeroflot Flight 593 decides to show off the brand new Airbus A310 by letting his teenaged son take the controls of an aircraft that neither he nor his crew are familiar with themselves. The teenager pulls the yoke to the left, disengaging the autopilot. He continues to pull on the yoke, making the plane enter a dive. The actual crew doesn't notice what's happening until it's too late. He actually let an even younger child (his daughter) sit in the pilot's seat as well, but she didn't touch anything hard enough to register as a command. Not that it mattered in the end. The pilots and the ground crew in the "Gimli Glider" incident both fail to double-check whether the plane's fuel supply has been measured by pounds or kilograms. The hijackers of Ethiopian Airlines Flight 961 read in the in-flight magazine that the plane can fly to Australia, and do not believe the captain when he says the plane does not have enough fuel to get there. When the plane has to be ditched, not only do the hijackers not sit and fasten their seatbelts, but one of them takes the co-pilot's seat and wrestles with the controls while the captain is trying to ditch without loss of life. Not surprisingly, none of the hijackers survive. The captain of Garuda Indonesia Flight 200 heard fifteen cockpit alarms and two pleas for a go-around from the co-pilot because they were approaching the airport too quickly. His response? Asking if the landing checklist is complete or not. Unsurprisingly, the plane bounces several times and overshoots the runway, killing 21 people. The captain would have been sentenced to prison for negligence...had the Indonesian Government not quashed the prosecution. The first officer of Air France 447 pulls back on his side stick when the autopilot disconnects due to the pitot tubes briefly freezing over when all he had to do was keep the plane flying level until they cleared themselves in less than a minute. Instead, he causes the plane's nose to go up and leads the plane into a stall, and then keeps pulling back for nearly the rest of the time (roughly four minutes) until the crash, not even bothering to inform his copilot, who is confused on why the plane refuses to respond as he tries to push his side stick forward to make the nose go down due to conflicting inputs. By the time he blurts out what he's been doing to the just-as-confused captain when he comes back inside to help and the captain realizes what's wrong, they're too close to the ocean to save the plane.
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Mayday / int_737d7dbc	type	Senseless Violins
Mayday / int_737d7dbc	comment	Senseless Violins: Auburn Calloway used a guitar case to get his weapons onto FedEx Flight 705.
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Mayday / int_77315f4f	type	You Have to Believe Me!
Mayday / int_77315f4f	comment	You Have to Believe Me!: One survivor of Air Inter Flight 148 went out in search of help and ran into two journalists looking for the plane, who didn't believe he was a survivor until they followed him back to the crash site, bringing the rest of the rescuers back with them.
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Mayday / int_77d826c7	type	Stern Teacher
Mayday / int_77d826c7	comment	Stern Teacher: The Northwest Airlink 5719 captain is very demanding in regard to his first officers, and does not tolerate any mistakes or omissions, no matter how small. In and of itself, this is not bad - after all, there was a number of episodes showing how the tolerance of minor errors and complacency in a pilot's performance ended up in a tragedy (Crossair 3597 for example) - but in combination with his extreme Hair-Trigger Temper, this ends up fatal.
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Mayday / int_78270847	type	Curse Cut Short
Mayday / int_78270847	comment	Curse Cut Short: The captain of Delta 191 shouts out "Hang onto the son of a—!" before the scene switches to a shot of the plane closing in on the ground. "Cutting Corners" shows the captain shouting "Holy-" before cutting to an exterior shot of the plane as it goes into a dive.
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Mayday / int_7870735b	type	From Bad to Worse
Mayday / int_7870735b	comment	There were some people on board Nigeria Airways Flight 2120 who were engulfed by the flames consuming the plane. Many of these people fell out of the rapidly disintegrating plane.
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Mayday / int_78d0ebcf	type	Crying Wolf
Mayday / int_78d0ebcf	comment	Crying Wolf: On Aeroperu Flight 603, pieces of duct tape covering the plane's static ports caused the flight instruments and onboard computer to behave erratically, causing contradictory alarms to sound off in the cockpit all at once. So when the pilots heard the ground proximity warning system ("TOO LOW TERRAIN") they assumed it was another malfunction, especially because the air traffic controller was telling them they were still at 10,000 feetnote unbeknownst to either the pilots or the controller, the controller's altitude information was based on the plane's altimeter rather than being independently verified by radar, so the controller's altitude readings for the plane were based on the malfunctioning altimeter. It wasn't. Since the plane's radio altimeter, which the GPWS relied upon to determine when and if it needed to go off, was not reliant on the static ports and was thus fully functional, the GPWS was one of the few things actually working. Most MD-80 pilots often taxied with only one engine doing all the work, while the other was left at idle. As this would require the throttle for the taxiing engine to be advanced past the point where the circuit for the takeoff configuration warning would be closed, said warning would constantly go off until the flaps/slats were properly configured for takeoff. As takeoff configuration usually isn't set until shortly before take-off, MD-80 pilots often pulled a circuit breaker to silence the alarm. In the case of Northwest Airlines Flight 255, however, the plane's flaps were configured improperly prior to takeoff, and with the breaker pulled, the pilots never knew this was the case until they inevitably crashed. In the PSA Flight 182 midair collision, Lindbergh Field's new radar system attempted to detect possible mid-air collisions, but constantly malfunctioned, indicating an imminent collision when there was none. When the plane crossed into the path of a Cessna, the alarm sounded again, but the controllers assumed it was another malfunction. The 2010 Polish Tu-154 crash. The crew, surprisingly, ignores the "PULL UP" command from the TAWS systems; as the investigators found out, the pilots frequently landed on a small military or ex-military airports and the TAWS always went off note The TAWS has a database of major airports and does not alert the crew when they are simply about to land, but the rural military airfields were not in the database, so they gradually learned to ignore the alerts during approach and landing. This time it was a fatal error. The pilots demonstrating the Sukhoi 100 in Indonesia made the exact same mistake with their TAWS system. Justified, as their navigation charts didn't show the mountains in the area, and they thought they were flying in the other direction. The captain of Trigana Air Flight 267 had a habit of deactivating the GPWS because it relied on a coarse terrain map and went off frequently even during routine approaches. The crew of British Midland Flight 92 (the flight involved in the Kegworth air disaster) didn't trust the vibration readings indicating that the left engine was shredding itself to bits because these were known to be unreliable in previous 737 models, and smoke entering the cockpit from the cabin indicated that it was the right engine that needed to be shut down because that supplied cabin air. Little did they know that, in the 737-400, both engines supplied air to the both the cockpit and cabin, and, more relevantly, the vibration detection instruments actually worked properly; it was the left engine that had gone bad. Somewhat justified on Cathay Pacific Flight 780, where the GPWS went off during the landing approach and the pilots ignored the warning because they were actually making a controlled landing. However, since the fuel valve for their one remaining engine had been jammed open by a substance that shouldn't have been in the fuel system, they couldn't decelerate the plane before they touched down. Due to this, the computer didn't understand that they were trying to land since they were about a hundred miles per hour faster than they should have been and triggered the warning system.
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Mayday / int_7a163538	type	Brooklyn Rage
Mayday / int_7a163538	comment	Brooklyn Rage: Captain Marvin Falitz of Northwest Airlink Flight 5719 is stated to come from the New York area and it's mentioned that his brash, temperamental attitude clashed badly with his younger, more understated Minnesotan First Officer, contributing to the crash.
Mayday / int_7a163538	featureApplicability	1.0
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Mayday / int_7d32da92	type	Lost in Transmission
Mayday / int_7d32da92	comment	Lost in Transmission: This is a critical cause of the Tenerife disaster. Critical warning messages from the ATC and the Pan American plane end up cancelling each other out, and neither is heard by the KLM plane. To make things worse, the KLM crew had announced they were taking off, and the ATC initially responds, "Okay-" before the interference occurs. This reinforces the KLM crew's belief that they had been given takeoff clearance.
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Mayday / int_7d89315b	type	"The Reason You Suck" Speech
Mayday / int_7d89315b	comment	"The Reason You Suck" Speech: The captain of BEA Flight 548 chews out a younger pilot for supporting an approaching strike shortly before boarding his flight to Brussels, which investigators consider to be a possible factor in the eventual crash of the flight.
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Mayday / int_7e6c0522	type	Off with His Head!
Mayday / int_7e6c0522	comment	The aftermath of the Aeromexico 498 crash. Limbs ripped off and burned bodies are shown, and the Piper Cherokee's interior is splattered with blood. We are thankfully spared the information how the Piper's pilot and passengers died.
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Mayday / int_7ec94d53	type	Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds
Mayday / int_7ec94d53	comment	Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds: Vitaly Kaloyev, grief-stricken by the loss of his wife and two children in the Ãœberlingen accident, would go on to murder Peter Nielsen, the man he held responsible for the catastrophe.
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Mayday / int_7fbb2a3	type	Nice Job Breaking It, Hero!
Mayday / int_7fbb2a3	comment	Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: Some of the accidents result from a well-intentioned action backfiring: In the crash of United Express Flight 5925, the Cherokee pilot's muddled attempt to explain the King Air's takeoff causes the two aircraft to collide. "Sight Unseen": The radio operator on Kazakhstan Airlines Flight 1907 notices that the plane has descended below its assigned altitude and informs the captain, who then puts the plane into a climb-right into the path of Saudia Flight 763. "Deadly Solution": the captain of Indonesia AirAsia Flight 8501 decides to deviate from procedure and reset a circuit breaker during flight, setting off a chain of events leading to the aircraft stalling and crashing into the ocean.
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Mayday / int_7fbe9a30	type	Freak Out
Mayday / int_7fbe9a30	comment	Freak Out: The captain of US-Bangla Airlines Flight 211, detailed in "Meltdown Over Kathmandu", happened to suffer a nervous breakdown due to his behaviour impacting his job at the airline. During the flight, he cried profusely, ranted furiously and ignored his co-pilot's questions about the route, who was on her first flight to Kathmandu, and spent much of her time passively listening to him as she was afraid to make him snap out of it. As a result, the captain put the plane into an unstabilised approach to the airport, missed his approach entirely, began flying the plane aggressively to the point that he buzzed the tower with the Bombardier Dash 8, then lost altitude and crashed into the ground, killing himself, the co-pilot and 49 others.
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Mayday / int_80251be3	type	How We Got Here
Mayday / int_80251be3	comment	How We Got Here: The episode on Korean Air Cargo Flight 8509 starts with a family witnessing the plane nosedive into the woods and carrying out a fruitless search for survivors, after which the scene switches to two hours earlier. This happens again with TANS Peru Flight 204: survivors scramble out of the wrecked remains of the aircraft and watch as fire consumes their would-be tomb, after which the scene switches to one hour earlier, when they were boarding the flight. The episode focusing on USAir Flight 1493 starts with the post-crash fire, then goes back 15 minutes to the 737's approach to Los Angeles International Airport. Valujet 592 opens at a press conference six months after the crash. Family members are seen outraged over the FAA's failures to implement regulations that could have prevented the disaster before cutting to the boarding of the doomed flight.
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Mayday / int_8163e2bb	type	Dramatic Drop
Mayday / int_8163e2bb	comment	Dramatic Drop: A flight attendant drops a tray of snacks when she sees a ghost from the crew of Eastern Airlines Flight 401 walking by.
Mayday / int_8163e2bb	featureApplicability	1.0
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Mayday / int_82a631b8	type	Present-Day Past
Mayday / int_82a631b8	comment	Present-Day Past: Count the number of times that they had episodes covering plane crashes in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s where you can see cars from the 2000s. One particularly egregious case is the Pan Am Flight 103 episode, as the opening segment documenting a German police bust on two terrorists working for the PFLP that happened two months before the Lockerbie bombing shows 21st century cars. In the episode about the Tenerife jumbo jet collision, which takes place in 1977, the air traffic controllers have, of all things, a modern personal computer in their office. Also one of the jets taxiing is a Cessna 525, while a plane shown taking off is a narrow-body with winglets - a 737 NextGen or an Embraer E-Jet. Cessna 525 first flew in 1991, 737 NextGen in 1997 and E-Jet in 2002. (This is in the regular ep, not the 90-minute special.) In many episodes, the passengers tend to be shown in generic modern clothes and hair rather than in obvious contemporary fashions. May be somewhat justified in that given that this is an ongoing show with a limited budget that requires many actors and extras, they would not only need to provide a lot of period clothing but also do many contemporary hairstyles/wigs. Notably averted in a few episodes, such as "Munich Air Disaster" and "Grand Canyon Disaster", as the clothing is of the appropriate era (which is the 1950s). A subtle one occurs in the Grand Canyon episode: in 1956, the controller uses a modern "taxi into position and hold" command. Moreover, the first officer repeats his command as he heard it; this was introduced after the Tenerife disaster. In the 1950s, the ATC commands were acknowledged with simply "OK" or "Roger". A more obvious one in the same episode is where, despite it being 1956, the ATC tower has a functional computer monitor in the tower, similar to the anachronism found in the Tenerife episode. In the Garuda Flight 421 episode, during the waterborne evacuation, one of the cabin walls near the exit doors displays the Garuda Indonesia logo. However, the logo displayed is incorrect, since it is the current one, distinguishable by its unique font. In 2002 (the year Flight 421 actually crashed), Garuda Indonesia were using a different logo◊ that was adopted in the mid-1980s, and only transferred to the current logo in 2009 as part of a re-branding. This error also appears in the Garuda Flight 152 episode. The same type of logo error happens in the Air Canada 797 episode, as although the plane is in the 1965-1993 livery, the logo on the headrest covers in the cabin are of the 2005-2017 variant. A common anachronism in the series is the "airliner placeholder", where either defunct airlines or airlines that did not exist until later are used to fill out the background at airports. In "Titanic in the Sky", when Qantas Flight 32 was backing away from the gate at Singapore Changi Airport, several aircraft can be seen parked at the gates around the Airbus A380. However, the aircraft parked range from airlines that fly to Changi in real life but with a completely wrong aircraft type (three Air France aircraft are seen in the scene, one of which is an Airbus A320; in reality, Air France operates only one flight to Singapore from Paris, not with an Airbus A320 but with a Boeing 777) and airlines that never flew from Singapore and went out of existence way before the date of the accident (multiple Pacific Southwest Airlines aircraft, mostly Boeing 737-200s are seen; FYI, PSA never even flew out of the continental United States during its operational life span and the airline went out of service in 1988.) This also happens in "Speed Trap", where when Flight 706 is on the ground, out of the cockpit window you could see a plane's tail with the Air China logo on it. This is a very obvious anachronism since back in 1971 (a year the episode explicitly stated the accident occurred), Air China didn't even exist as it was founded in 1988. Yet again, also appears in "Fatal Delay", as when Spanair 5022 was taxing on the apron, you can see a PSA 737 and a AirWest DC-9 in the background. A minor anachronism, but many of the Boeing documentation in the past (such as repair manuals, logbooks, documents and such), especially in episodes set before 1997, display the post-1997 Boeing logo which included the sphere and ring logo of McDonnell Douglas after the latter merged with the former. In the Swissair Flight 111 episode, a passenger is shown watching Tarzan on the in-flight entertainment system. The accident happened on September 2, 1998, while the movie wouldn't be released until the following year.
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Mayday / int_830f2f0e	type	Police State
Mayday / int_830f2f0e	comment	Since so many of the accidents involved American aircraft (mainly from Boeing or McDonnell Douglas) and/or an aircraft component that gets major attention from investigators is American-made (such as a flight recorder), then American investigators were often sent to assist investigations. These investigators often ran into problems in countries where the police force or military have greater powers over the investigation, or countries with an Obstructive Bureaucrat or two. Sometimes, they were more cooperative, like the in-flight breakup of China Airlines Flight 611.
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Mayday / int_8409a385	type	Exactly What It Says on the Tin
Mayday / int_8409a385	comment	Exactly What It Says on the Tin: What else would a show called "Air Crash Investigation" be about?
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Mayday / int_86000262	type	WilhelmScream
Mayday / int_86000262	comment	Wilhelm Scream: One is heard in the Proteus Airlines 706 episode. Another is heard in the Northwest Airlink 5719 episode. Yet another is heard in the Comair 3272 episode. Several are heard in the TWA 800 episode.
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Mayday / int_87a38662	type	Murder-Suicide
Mayday / int_87a38662	comment	Subverted with EgyptAir Flight 990. First Officer Gameel Al-Batouti definitely enjoyed this on account of his seniority with the airline (he was the oldest first officer in the whole company at that) and was nearing retirement despite a known record of sexual misconduct. However, according to exiled EgyptAir captain Hamdi Hanafi Taha, this was about to be revoked with prejudice due to said actions finally catching up to him. Unfortunately for everyone, this would only take effect after the plane landed back in Cairo, so Al-Batouti had something to say about that.
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Mayday / int_88a97dd4	type	Stiff Upper Lip
Mayday / int_88a97dd4	comment	Stiff Upper Lip: British Airways Flight 38, a 777, is on final approach to Heathrow, when the engines stop providing necessary thrust. The aircraft, carrying 152 souls and a significant fuel reserve, is on the verge of stalling and crashing into the densely populated suburb, while flying low, which means essentially no margin for any emergency stall recovery procedure. Despite the extreme severity of the situation, the first officer sounds at best mildly annoyed about his plane's lack of proper response. The BA38 crew, however, can't hold a candle to the crew of British Airways Flight 9. Subverted by Alastair Atchinson, first officer of British Airways Flight 5390. He keeps his nerves and his plane under control as his captain hangs halfway outside the windshield just a few feet away from him, and even has the presence of mind to use "please" and "thank you" while communicating with the ATC. But as soon as the plane is safe on the ground, he collapses into hysterical sobbing.
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Mayday / int_89fb838b	type	Cold Ham
Mayday / int_89fb838b	comment	Cold Ham: Happens rather frequently in the re-enactments, usually when investigators make an alarming discovery that provides a major clue if not the biggest clue to the whole mystery.
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Mayday / int_8abe13b6	type	It Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time
Mayday / int_8abe13b6	comment	It Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time: The root cause of some of the disasters caused by pilot error. "Kid in the Cockpit" concerned a famous Russian case where a senior airline pilot allowed his teenaged son to take the controls of a brand new Airbus A310. The teen inadvertently disabled the plane's autopilot and the flight crew, unfamiliar with the state-of-the-art aircraft, failed to bring it back under control. Tragic hilarity ensued. An especially needless tragedy given that the investigators found that everything would have been fine if they had just let go of the control column. "Deadly Detour" detailed Proteus Airlines Flight 706 deviating from their assigned route because a passenger wanted to fly over a famous French ocean liner, the SS France. There were a number of private planes swarming toward the ship, and when the pilots decided to do a 360 around the ship after canceling Instrument Flight Rules and going to Visual Flight Rules, a collision with one of the other sightseeing planes was bound to occur. The captain of Indonesia AirAsia Flight 8501 got fed up with a recurring alarm concerning the rudder travel limiter unit, so he used a trick a ground mechanic had shown him and pulled the breakers on the flight computer. Unknowingly to him, this caused the autopilot and all protection systems to switch off; it did not matter on the ground because those systems would be activated during pre-flight checks anyway, but in the air, the crew would have to turn them all back on, but they were too confused and the situation developed too quickly. This directly led to the plane going out of control and crashing. The co-pilot of SpaceShip Two, having unlocked the feathers too late in a simulator, decided to unlock the feathers early during an actual flight with disastrous results. The captain of American International Airways Flight 808 decided to try to go for the difficult to land on runway 10 rather than the easier runway 28 at GuantÃ¡namo Bay just for the heck of it. He ended up crashing the plane trying to make a too sharp of a turn to line up with the runway. Fortunately, nobody died but the Captain sustained career-ending injuries. Nationair's project managers were intended to smooth wet-lease operations and make them operate more effectively. However, they proved to be a bunch of Pointy Haired Bosses who pressured maintenance crews into ignoring their better judgement just to keep to schedule, causing maintenance problems and degrading the company's safety culture. This culminated in a project manager causing a plane to catch fire and getting 261 people, himself included, killed. The captain of Air China 129 decided to take control of the plane when his first officer was struggling with the approach. This caused confusion as to who was doing what, leading the captain to miss a critical turn, which caused him to go off course and crash.
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Mayday / int_8c55e307	type	Ultimate Job Security
Mayday / int_8c55e307	comment	Ultimate Job Security: Captain Lutz was allowed to stay with Crossair despite multiple foul-ups on the job simply because they were expanding rapidly and needed all the manpower they could get. Same story with the captain of TransAsia Flight 235. And again with the captain of LAPA Flight 3142. Subverted with EgyptAir Flight 990. First Officer Gameel Al-Batouti definitely enjoyed this on account of his seniority with the airline (he was the oldest first officer in the whole company at that) and was nearing retirement despite a known record of sexual misconduct. However, according to exiled EgyptAir captain Hamdi Hanafi Taha, this was about to be revoked with prejudice due to said actions finally catching up to him. Unfortunately for everyone, this would only take effect after the plane landed back in Cairo, so Al-Batouti had something to say about that.
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Mayday / int_8c96ae78	type	No One Could Survive That!
Mayday / int_8c96ae78	comment	No One Could Survive That!: "Gimli Glider" was about a Boeing 767 that ran out of fuel over Canada because of improper calculations involving pounds vs kilograms. The pilot managed to miraculously pull off a dead stick landing that couldn't be replicated by any subsequent pilot that attempted the scenario in a simulator. The pilots in the simulated flight always ended up crashing the plane. The same thing happened with UA 232. Unlike the Gimli Glider incident, the UA 232 pilots were unable to save everyone, but the repeated simulator failures showed that it was a miracle anyone at all had survived, let alone over half the passengers and most of the crew. "Falling from the Sky" concerns a British jumbo jet that saw all four of its engines fail after accidentally flying into a cloud of volcanic ash over Indonesia. After managing to restart the engines, the flight crew managed to land the plane despite the windscreen having been sandblasted opaque, relying entirely on instruments. "Blowout" concerns a captain who was partially sucked out of his own cockpit thanks to faulty maintenance of the windscreen, his body subsequently subjected to a freezing 500mph slipstream over 17,000 feet above England. Despite overwhelming physical odds, the captain survived the ordeal with only frostbite and a few bone fractures. And he continues to fly. Japan Airlines 123 lost its vertical stabilizer and the hydraulic systems that powered its flight controls, and the flight crew managed to keep it flying for a whopping 32 minutes afterwards. Four passengers from the rear of the plane survived the crash. When recreating the accident in simulators, not only was it impossible to produce an outcome where the plane could've landed safely, but no one kept it in the air as long as the real crew did. Tragically, this line of thinking also almost certainly cost lives in this accident. Because the rescuers assumed no one could survive a crash like that, they didn't see getting to the crash site as particularly urgent, and so didn't reach the site as quickly as they could have. In fact, some passengers had survived the impact, but many of them succumbed to exposure and their injuries because of the delay in rescue operations.
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Mayday / int_8cf6aa	type	Literal Metaphor
Mayday / int_8cf6aa	comment	Literal Metaphor: The people aboard Air Moorea Flight 1121 were literally hanging by a thread. Lampshaded in-universe by one of the investigators. Similarly, Alaska Airlines 261. In that case, it was a nut thread — most of the acme nut's threading had been sheared off due to insufficient lubrication of the jackscrew itself, so it was only the few remaining threads preventing a catastrophic stabilizer failure; predictably, they're not up to the job and ultimately fail, causing the fatal plane crash.
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Mayday / int_8d0785d5	type	Didn't Think This Through
Mayday / int_8d0785d5	comment	Didn't Think This Through: The hijackers in "Ocean Landing" didn't realize that airliners typically only take on enough fuel to get to their destination plus reserves in case they need to divert, not their maximum capacity. Their insistence on flying to Australia (which from their starting point would take ten hours, near the maximum non-stop flight limit) results in the plane running out of fuel and crashing into the Indian Ocean with only 50 of the 175 people on board surviving. The hijackers in "Deadly Deception" make the same mistake, thinking that their plane can make it to Vienna (which is 500 miles from Sofia) when it really only has enough fuel for the flight to Varna (which is 226 miles from Sofia). The pilots manage to fool them by making several turns to prolong the flight while authorities on the ground turn out the lights in Varna to keep the hijackers from recognizing it from the air. It was even later pointed out that had the hijackers managed to reach Vienna, they would've been arrested and imprisoned instead of being granted asylum.
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Mayday / int_8d4fcaa5	type	Self-Imposed Challenge
Mayday / int_8d4fcaa5	comment	Air Illinois Flight 710 captain Lester Smith was known to fly into storms and order first officers to disable the overspeed warnings, and ultimately met his end when he failed to return to base or divert to a different airport in response to a failed generator. The worst part is, there was no pressure from Air Illinois to fly like a madman; it was all an ego-driven Self-Imposed Challenge.
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Mayday / int_8fb11f42	type	You Answered Your Own Question
Mayday / int_8fb11f42	comment	You Answered Your Own Question: Inverted in the TAM 402 episode. The Brazilian investigator's first reaction to seeing the FDR's evidence of a reverser deploying in flight is "This shouldn't even be possible!". Later, when he looks into why the pilots were confused by the aircraft's safety system to prevent a deployed reverser from causing a crash, he discovers that the extreme unlikelihood of a reverser deploying in flight led to the associated training being deemed unnecessary by the manufacturer.
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Mayday / int_900d51a0	type	One-Liner, Name... One-Liner
Mayday / int_900d51a0	comment	One-Liner, Name... One-Liner: Two survivors from First Air 6560:
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Mayday / int_90c018ac	type	Justified Trope
Mayday / int_90c018ac	comment	The first officer of TAROM Flight 371 failed to notice the autothrottle had malfunctioned causing one engine to be at idle while the other was at climb power. Understandable since his attention was split between flying the airplane and the captain who was having a heart attack.
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Mayday / int_90d44f44	type	Karmic Death
Mayday / int_90d44f44	comment	The pilots of LaMia Flight 2933 not only took off with only the absolute bare minimum of fuel that they needed to reach their destinationnote or so they thought; the investigators later determined that their calculation was off such that they were probably short even of this total, but then subsequently failed to take seriously the warnings they were getting that the plane was dangerously low on fuel, presumably because they didn't want to do anything that would call attention to the plane's fuel situation, lest it come out that they were illegally cutting corners to save on costs. The final straw came on approach to their final destination, when the air traffic controller instructed them to enter a holding pattern; rather than inform her that they were low on fuel and needed to land immediately, they complied and entered the holding pattern where they remained for 15 minutes, burning off the last of their fuel in the process, only very belatedly raising the alarm after it was already too late. When the plane ran out of fuel, so did the pilots' lives.
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Mayday / int_90e31482	type	Laser-Guided Karma
Mayday / int_90e31482	comment	Adam Air and Manx2 each went to insanely dangerous lengths to cut corners at the expense of flight safety. Both airlines were sold off and/or liquidated after their respective disasters. The same fate, for the same reason, was narrowly averted by ValuJet, who escaped the taint of the the Flight 592 disaster by executing a "reverse merger" — buying up up a competitor (AirTran) and using their name for future operations. AirTran, the re-branded ValuJet, continued to operate until 2014, when the company was bought out by Southwest.
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Mayday / int_91697559	type	Half the Man He Used to Be
Mayday / int_91697559	comment	Half the Man He Used to Be: When the bomb goes off aboard Philippine Airlines Flight 434, the attendants try to help the passenger under whose seat the bomb was located... and realize the lower half of his body is missing.
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Mayday / int_917bed8a	type	Minnesota Nice
Mayday / int_917bed8a	comment	Minnesota Nice: Minnesotan First Officer Chad Erickson of Northwest Airlink Flight 5719 is implied to be this trope, with an interviewee noting that his quiet, understated, midwestern attitude clashed with that of the more brash, outspoken, (and much more temperamental) New Yorker Captain Marvin Falitz. This, coupled with Erickson's fear of getting a bad report from Falitz, made him too intimidated to make altitude callouts or contradict his Captain, resulting in the crash.
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Mayday / int_91a2039b	type	I Am the Noun
Mayday / int_91a2039b	comment	I Am the Noun: David Burke's last words were "I'm the problem" as he shot the pilots of Pacific Southwest Airlines Flight 1771 to cause a crash. This was also the name of the episode in some locations.
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Mayday / int_939bf44a	type	Personal Effects Reveal
Mayday / int_939bf44a	comment	Personal Effects Reveal: As to be expected from a disaster docudrama series. The wreck of Arrow Air Flight 1285 yielded T-shirts saying "I survived Gander, Newfoundland". Irony at its finest. A notable inversion is in the case of Northwest Airlink Flight 5719. A singed wallet is found in what's left of the airplane with a woman's photo inside; it's later revealed to have belonged to the first officer.
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Mayday / int_94680696	type	Shaped Like Itself
Mayday / int_94680696	comment	Shaped Like Itself: A surviving stewardess from Air Ontario Flight 1363 described the takeoff as "slow and sluggish like a slow, sluggish person running up a hill".
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Mayday / int_950bbfa7	type	Take a Third Option
Mayday / int_950bbfa7	comment	Take a Third Option: The captain of Air Canada Flight 143 ends up in a difficult spot approaching Gimli after the plane runs out of fuel. He's too high to make the runway, and diving toward the threshold would make the plane too fast to stop on the runway safely; at the same time, he doesn't have enough altitude to be able to make a 360-degree turn and land on the runway. He ends up putting the plane into a sideslip to get the plane down faster without increasing the plane's speed, and it works.
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Mayday / int_95713538	type	Outside Ride
Mayday / int_95713538	comment	Outside Ride: The captain of British Airways Flight 5390 went through this when a blown-out windshield got him sucked out of the cockpit and pinned to the fuselage. It also happened to the co-pilot of Sichuan Airlines Flight 8633, when his windshield blew out and partially sucked him out of the airplane. Unlike the pilot of BA Flight 5390, the Sichuan co-pilot managed to get himself back into the airplane after being pinned to the fuselage.
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Mayday / int_95c2a9dd	type	Outliving One's Offspring
Mayday / int_95c2a9dd	comment	Outliving One's Offspring: Implied if not stated outright in many if not almost every accident with fatalities. Definitely true with United 811, which was investigated by the parents of victim Lee Campbell. Exaggerated with the Uberlingen mid-air collision, where most of the passengers were children. One of the narrators for Germanwings Flight 9525 is Klaus Radner, whose daughter and grandson are among the murder victims. The captain of LAM Mozambique Flight 470 lost his son in a car crash one year earlier. It's suspected that this, along with other troubles in his life, played a role in his decision to crash the plane.
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Mayday / int_96181ea7	type	Loads and Loads of Loading
Mayday / int_96181ea7	comment	Loads and Loads of Loading: The flight data recorder from TAM 402. Lampshaded in-universe by the Brazilian investigator. Justified, as the device was a solid state recorder which, at the time of the accident, was not very common.
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Mayday / int_963086ce	type	Damn You, Muscle Memory!
Mayday / int_963086ce	comment	Poor communication was suspected as a factor in the crash of Nigeria Airways Flight 2120; the ATC mistook the Nationair/Nigeria Airways flight for a Saudia flight he was also talking to because the Nationair captain used the wrong callsign and the Saudia was reporting the exact same problemnote the first call from the Nationair only mentioned pressurisation failure; the other issues developed later, leading the controller to believe it was the Saudia aircraft having all those problems, and only realised the Nationair flight was the one requesting an emergency landing when they were the other side of Jeddah and about to turn left. Subverted, as investigators determine that the confusion did not cause any delay or otherwise impact the ultimate outcome of the incident; the plane would have crashed regardless.
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Mayday / int_970ca74e	type	Big "OMG!"
Mayday / int_970ca74e	comment	Big "OMG!": One of the passengers in the Hinton rail disaster yells one when he realizes his train is about to collide head-on with a freight train. The co-pilot of United Airlines Flight 585 gets a triple share of this during the plunge down to Earth. The captain of TAM Flight 3054 shouts this as his plane skids off the runway. This is also the reaction of the approach controller who handled Korean Air 801 when the tower controller tells him that the plane didn't land and is out of radar contact, as it quickly becomes clear what the most likely explanation is (a crash).
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Mayday / int_97fa0a10	type	Mass "Oh, Crap!"
Mayday / int_97fa0a10	comment	Mass "Oh, Crap!": Any shot of the passenger cabin just before impact will usually lead to this.
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Mayday / int_99c3dd05	type	Lifesaving Misfortune
Mayday / int_99c3dd05	comment	Lifesaving Misfortune: A tour guide whose group was on Air China Flight 129 had to return to a hotel to retrieve his passport; while the group made it onto the plane, the entire group ended up seated toward the rear of the plane. As explained by the narrator, this mistake proved to work in his favor when the plane crashed; he and most of his tour group were among those who survived.
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Mayday / int_99ddfcec	type	Unwitting Instigator of Doom
Mayday / int_99ddfcec	comment	Unwitting Instigator of Doom: In the Charkhi Dadri mid-air collision, the radio operator of Kazakhstan Airlines Flight 1907 notices that the flight is below its assigned altitude and tells the captain to climb just moments before the collision. Had the Kazakh plane not climbed, they would've passed harmlessly under the Saudi plane. Nigeria Airways Flight 2120: Project manager Aldo Tetamenti simply didn't have training that would have positively influenced his judgment, yet Nationair gave him authority to override the decisions of people that did have that training. In his decisions regarding the underinflated tyres that he could never have understood the implications of, he unknowingly pressured maintenance crews into releasing an unsafe plane (that he was on) and not telling the flight crew about it for fear of causing a delay. The result was a horrific in-flight fire that killed everyone on board. Had he allowed the tyres to be topped up on the day, the flight would have made it to Sokoto safely, and Nationair wouldn't have collapsed two years later. The flight crew's routine action of retracting the landing gear doomed the flight ten seconds after they lifted off. Had they left the landing gear extended for a little bit longer and asked the tower to look at the gear, the controller might have been able to say something along the lines of "Nigerian 2120, do not retract your landing gear, you have flames on the left bogie", giving them a chance to get back on the ground and probably off the plane; as it stands, they only found out about the fire when it was too late. Peter Nielsen for the Uberlingen disaster. If he had said nothing, the Russian pilots would almost certainly have obeyed their TCAS system and climbed to avoid the other plane. To make matters worse, even if the Russian crew hadn't listened to TCAS and had done nothing, the DHL plane, which was descending in accordance with their own TCAS, would have passed harmlessly underneath the passenger plane. In an attempt to prevent a collision, Nielsen inadvertently ordered the Russians to do the one thing that kept them in the cargo plane's flight path. The pilots of Alaska Airlines 261 attempt to force their jammed stabilizer loose. Instead, this maneuver ends up shearing the threads off the screw, making the plane completely uncontrollable. With the Tenerife disaster, the reason the Pan Am and KLM flights were at Tenerife in the first place is because of a terrorist attack at Gran Canaria Airport earlier in the day by Canary Island separatists, who had planted a bomb there. The flights were diverted to Tenerife while the bomb threat at Gran Canaria could be assessed, as the phoned-in threat had specially mentioned bombs, meaning there could've been more than one. The terrorist group's single bomb injured just 8 people with no fatalities, but it indirectly set off the chain of events which led to the deadliest air accident in history. Les Filotas' dissenting report on Arrow Air Flight 1285—arguing that it was impossible for a thin layer of ice to bring down a plane and that the cause had to be an in-flight explosion, never mind the failure to find explosive residue or the aerodynamic implications of an uneven solid forming on what is supposed to be a smooth surface—prevented much-needed improvements to deicing procedures from being implemented, leading to the later crashes of Air Ontario Flight 1363 and USAir Flight 405. Some idiot at SabreTech thought "expired" meant "empty" and labelled a box of expired oxygen generators as empty oxygen canisters, leading to 144 cans of an exothermic chemical reaction designed to create oxygen being loaded onto ValuJet Flight 592 and burning the plane down in midair. A Helios technician performing a routine pressurisation test of the Boeing 737 that would fly as Helios Flight 522 the next day forgets to set the system from manual back to automatic after he was finished, resulting in Helios Flight 522 not pressurising and flying aimlessly around Athens until it ran out of fuel and crashed into mountains near Grammatiko, only avoiding crashing into Athens because of quick thinking by a flight attendant who managed to stay conscious and break into the cockpit.
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Mayday / int_9a2aee13	type	Heroic Bystander
Mayday / int_9a2aee13	comment	Heroic Bystander: Lenny Skutnik, an employee at the Congressional Budget Office, who dove into icy cold water to rescue one of the survivors of Air Florida 90, and was honored by President Ronald Reagan at the State of the Union address, seen in "Disaster on the Potomac". David McCorkell survives the crash of ASA Flight 529 and is one of only a few passengers to make it out of the wreckage before it catches fire, but when he hears co-pilot Matt Warmerdam calling for help, he runs back into danger and risks his life to try and save Warmerdam from the burning cockpit. Though he's not able to free Warmerdam, he becomes this just for the attempt, and his efforts may have contributed to Warmerdam ultimately surviving the crash, giving him enough oxygen and relief from the heat that he was still alive to be rescued when the fire department finally reached him. (It should also be noted that it wasn't fire or heat that ultimately forced McCorkell to abandon his efforts, rather, the axe he was using to try to break through the cockpit glass literally broke apart in his hands.) The pilot of the famous Gimli Glide crash landed into a landing strip-turned-racetrack, which happened to be full of a drag racers and their families. Since no decent drag racer would dream of turning up to a race without a fire extinguisher, the participants were able to rush forward and help put out a small fire that had broken out in the cockpit.
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Mayday / int_9beeb7d6	type	Death by Ambulance
Mayday / int_9beeb7d6	comment	Death by Ambulance: Mentioned in "Terror in San Francisco", after a victim who was ejected from the aircraft was run over by an emergency vehicle, but ultimately averted as the investigation determined she was already dead prior to being run over.
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Mayday / int_9d12bbc1	type	Foreshadowing
Mayday / int_9d12bbc1	comment	Foreshadowing: The CGI animations are always based on what happened, even before it's known exactly what happened. Eagle-eyed viewers can spot things such as El Al Flight 1862 missing its #3 and #4 engines in the opening animation, among others. In "Stormy Cockpit", an investigator explains the idea that planes often have an inclination to roll one way or the other but it's not a big deal by using an analogy of a moving car, pointing out that if you let go of the steering wheel in a car, sooner or later it will deviate from a straight path no matter how straight it was traveling at the time. This turns out to be pretty much exactly what happened on the flight in question; the captain, believing the autopilot was engaged, let go of the control wheel, but the autopilot was in fact not engaged, so the plane's natural inclination caused it to bank further and further to the right until it reached a critical angle and crashed. When Captain Eric Moody is first introduced in "Falling From The Sky", the narrator mentions that he "had his first taste of flying at the age of 16, when he took a gliding lesson." Later, all four of the plane's engines fail and can only be restarted after several minutes of gliding. In "Under Pressure", among the deluge of nonsensical warnings the flight crew receives is a gear unsafe light, and smoke is shown from the mid-section of the plane where the landing gear would be. Investigators later discover that the landing gear caught fire during the taxi and that was where the fire originated, meaning the landing gear was indeed unsafe. In "Fire in the Hold", ValuJet Flight 592's PA system is mentioned to have just been fixed after crapping out on the way to Miami and the autopilot is still broken, showing that SabreTech, ValuJet's maintenance contractor, isn't particularly great at its job. Sure enough, the fire that brings Flight 592 down turns out to have been the result of SabreTech improperly packaging and mislabeling expired oxygen generators which were loaded onto the plane under the mistaken impression that they were empty oxygen canisters.
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Mayday / int_9d17b859	type	Made of Iron
Mayday / int_9d17b859	comment	Made of Iron: British Airways Flight 5390 captain Tim Lancaster was blown out of the cockpit and spent a long time dangling from the window by his legs, exposed to extreme cold and very fast winds. Somehow, he managed to survive with relatively minor injuries and returned to piloting only five months later.
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Mayday / int_9d473705	type	Official Presidential Transport
Mayday / int_9d473705	comment	Official Presidential Transport: "Death of the President" deals with the crash of the Tu-154 carrying the president of Poland, as well as a former president and several other officials. The episode about the crash of Partnair Flight 394 discusses the dangers of counterfeit parts and notes that even the supply chain for Air Force One had been potentially contaminated with bogus spares.
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Mayday / int_9e0c3153	type	Punctuated! For! Emphasis!
Mayday / int_9e0c3153	comment	Punctuated! For! Emphasis!: Happens in a handful of interviews: The nephew of EgyptAir 990's relief first officer: "This! Is! A simple! Plane! Crash!" Journalist Paul Eddy: "...if an Airworthiness Directive had been issued as it should have been after Windsor, Paris. Would not. Have happened; it was an entirely. Avoidable. Accident." Aviation expert David Learmount: "Frank Taylor's team didn't. Reach. Any. Conclusions. Except... ones which were based on hard. Physical. Evidence."
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Mayday / int_9f80e1da	type	Sarcasm Mode
Mayday / int_9f80e1da	comment	In yet another Aeroflot incident, Aeroflot-Nord Flight 821's captain Rodion Medvedev, decided it would be a great idea to fly while intoxicated! To make it worse, there were serious questions to their compentency as both had issues during their training. What happened next? Well, you should know by now.
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Mayday / int_9f8a12d7	type	Who's on First?
Mayday / int_9f8a12d7	comment	Who's on First?: Double subverted with Garuda Indonesia Flight 152. Another plane that had been in the area had the same flight number as Garuda 152, and at one point the controller accidentally used that plane's callsign instead of Garuda's. While the mix-up was quickly resolved, it still contributed to the accident, because the pilots did not recognize the first transmission as meant for them, and the controller left out a small but critical detail when he repeated the directions.
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Mayday / int_a0efb4e7	type	It's Probably Nothing
Mayday / int_a0efb4e7	comment	It's Probably Nothing: Said by a passenger on British Airtours Flight 28M before the reason for the aborted takeoff becomes apparent.
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Mayday / int_a1575551	type	Living Prop
Mayday / int_a1575551	comment	Living Prop: In "The Heathrow Enigma", the relief first officer is treated like this; he's present in the cockpit, but he is never acknowledged by the other pilots or the narration.
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Mayday / int_a1b141f4	type	My God, What Have I Done?
Mayday / int_a1b141f4	comment	My God, What Have I Done?: The air traffic controller in "Deadly Crossroads" has this reaction when he realizes he's just caused two planes to collide. The controllers in "Out of Sight" and "Cleared for Disaster" have similar reactions when they learn that their actions played a role in those episodes' accidents. After landing British Airways Flight 9, the crew pores over the flight records thinking they made a near-catastrophic mistake. Fortunately for them, they are not at fault. The captain of AirAsia Flight 8501 just after he pulls two circuit breakers to silence a annoying alarm and the plane instantly starts going out of control. The captain of TransAsia Airways Flight 235 when he realizes he shut down the wrong engine. The pilots of the Embraer Legacy 600 are devastated as they learn they have collided with a Boeing carrying 154 passengers. While the Embraer manages to land safely despite damages to its wing and tail, the Boeing crashes with no survivors.
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Mayday / int_a1d48853	type	Stupid Crooks
Mayday / int_a1d48853	comment	Stupid Crooks: The hijackers of Ethiopian Airlines Flight 961 in "Ocean Landing", who thought their aircraft could make the trip to Australia since they read it in the in-flight magazines, and refused to believe the captain and ATC when they tell them repeatedly and bluntly they don't have enough fuel for the 10-hour flight.
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Mayday / int_a2022cc9	type	Killed Mid-Sentence
Mayday / int_a2022cc9	comment	Killed Mid-Sentence: The cockpit voice recorder of Air India 182 ends during a discussion amongst the cockpit crew about customs seals. Enforced in the episode on TWA 800; after the fuel tank ruptured and the CVR stopped working, the re-enactment in the cockpit has the pilots conscious just long enough for the captain to get the attention of the flight engineer before being consumed by fire as the nose breaks off. In "Caught in a Jam", the flight attendant is in the middle of briefing passengers for landing when the plane strikes the hill.
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Mayday / int_a220d528	type	What Could Possibly Go Wrong?
Mayday / int_a220d528	comment	Exaggerated with TAM 402. The thrust reversers can only be activated when the plane's wheels are on the ground. Even if a reverser deploys in flight, the power on that engine cuts itself to idle without alerting the crew of the problem. And the cables attached to the throttles can withstand over 900 pounds of force, more than any pilot can apply. What Could Possibly Go Wrong?
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Mayday / int_a280f130	type	Take This Job and Shove It
Mayday / int_a280f130	comment	Take This Job and Shove It: The pilot interviewed for the episode on Chalk's Ocean Airways Flight 101 quit his job due to the constantly increasing safety issues in the years leading up to the accident.
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Mayday / int_a3a4a800	type	Too Clever by Half
Mayday / int_a3a4a800	comment	Too Clever by Half: Captain Falitz in "Killer Attitude" makes it clear that he thinks he knows everything in terms of procedure, reprimanding the first officer for minor mistakes. This backfires when he goes for an unorthodox landing approach, without fully explaining to the first officer what's going on. The first officer isn't sure what's expected of him, so he doesn't say anything for fear of angering the captain. This ends in a fatal crash when the captain descends too quickly.
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Mayday / int_a4905771	type	Double-Meaning Title
Mayday / int_a4905771	comment	Double-Meaning Title: The episode retelling the crash of Nigeria Airways Flight 2120 is titled "Under Pressure", which could refer to both the plane's tires being under-inflated and the flight crew being "under pressure" to get to their destination as quickly as possible.
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Mayday / int_a4c37cbe	type	Mood Whiplash
Mayday / int_a4c37cbe	comment	Mood Whiplash: The pilots of Atlantic Airways Flight 670 are quite jovial and relaxed during the flight and approach to Stord Airport. But shortly after touchdown, they quickly fall into panic.
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Mayday / int_a56e3cba	type	Language Barrier
Mayday / int_a56e3cba	comment	Language Barrier: This is suspected as a factor in Helios Airways 522. The captain and first officer had different native languages, and neither of them had a knowledge of English beyond what was necessary for their jobs, which made it difficult for them to communicate with each other and diagnose the problem. Mohammed Mahmoudi, the baggage handler who operated the door on Ankara, the DC-10 about to take off as Turkish Airlines Flight 981, was fluent in three languages, but none of them were the English or Turkishnote the episode says it was just English, but this seems to be inaccurate printed on the sticker warning him to make sure the door was closed properly before trying to latch it, meaning he didn't know what the window on the door was for. The bad instructions Mahmoudi was given in lieu of being able to understand the sticker first-hand prevented him from closing the door properly, leading to the subsequent disaster.
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Mayday / int_a679184b	type	Due to the Dead
Mayday / int_a679184b	comment	Due to the Dead: Clarabelle "C.B." Lansing, the sole fatality on Aloha Airlines Flight 243, had a memorial garden planted in her honor at Honolulu International Airport.
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Mayday / int_a74d419a	type	Unfinished, Untested, Used Anyway
Mayday / int_a74d419a	comment	Unfinished, Untested, Used Anyway: The Galloping Ghost was possibly the most heavily modified P-51 ever. The pilot flew the plane in the Reno Air Races without testing to see if the modifications were safe. Subverted, in that it wasn't the mods that led to the crash, but an ancient part that had been left on the aircraft for far longer than its design life, which ultimately suffered a fatigue failure.
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Mayday / int_a7b324e	type	Handicapped Badass
Mayday / int_a7b324e	comment	Handicapped Badass: The Captain of TACA Flight 110 was missing an eye but still managed to land his crippled plane. On a levee no less. Niki Lauda, former three-time Formula One world champion, survived a horrific crash at the NÃ¼rburgring in 1976 that badly burned his face, all but destroyed one of his ears, and seared his lungs with toxic combustion products that nearly killed him. As mentioned in the episode concerning his airline, he was back on the race track a mere six weeks after his near-fatal crash. When Lauda 004 crashed, he was actively involved in the investigation, and was prepared to resign had it been found that his airline was in any way at fault, because he believed he would not deserve to hold his position if that were the case. When it became apparent that the accident had been caused by a fault in the aircraft, he absolutely refused to be mollified by Boeing, and held their metaphorical feet in the fire until they admitted culpability and updated the design of the 767 thrust reversers to ensure the same accident couldn't be repeated. He also went to extraordinary lengths to keep Lauda Air in business in spite of the loss of a quarter of its fleet with the loss of the 767. The crew of FedEx Flight 705, despite being brutally injured by Auburn Calloway and becoming partially paralysed and in shock from blood loss, managed to take a fully-loaded DC-10 cargo plane and fly it in ways that had previously been thought impossible.
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Mayday / int_a7d5e560	type	Exhaustion-Induced Idiocy
Mayday / int_a7d5e560	comment	Exhaustion-Induced Idiocy: A good chunk of the accidents profiled involve pilots making bad decisions due to suffering from fatigue.
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Mayday / int_a8559a9f	type	RealLife
Mayday / int_a8559a9f	comment	In the episode about American Airlines Flight 587 the plane simply pitches downward when the vertical stabilizer separates. In Real Life, losing the vertical stabilizer causes uncontrollable movements in the yaw axis.note Although it does also cause a pitch-down moment, by moving the airplane's center of mass forwards. This part is especially baffling since the episode on the Uberlingen disaster correctly portrayed the effects of vertical stabilizer separation. Ironically, this trope was a factor in the accident itself. American Airlines' then-current training program, which the co-pilot was trained using, exaggerated the effect of wake turbulence to a degree that would cause experts in aerodynamics to headdesk to the point of drawing blood - wake turbulence cannot cause a plane as big as an A300 to bank as badly as the co-pilot was taught it could, and the countermeasure he was taught to use to correct this alleged problem (massive rudder deflection) was something that Airbus, the A300's manufacturer, had specifically warned against doing in flight. In short, the co-pilot pounded the rudder like a punching bag to counteract a nonexistent severe bank because whoever wrote the training materials (most likely the training department at American Airlines) didn't fully understand how large planes worked.
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Mayday / int_a8a04f6f	type	And I Must Scream
Mayday / int_a8a04f6f	comment	And I Must Scream: Andreas Prodromou, the flight attendant aboard Helios 522. Imagine being in a plane, when everyone else falls unconscious, or worse, dead from hypoxia. You stagger towards the cockpit, taking gasps of oxygen from your personal tank, hoping beyond hope that the pilots are still awake. They aren't. You see two fighter jets trying to communicate with you, but you can't talk to them; you don't know where to tune the radio. You try to pilot the 737 towards Athens, but can't, as you only know how to fly light aircraft. All you can do is wait, and slowly die from hypoxia, as the plane continues burning through the last of its fuel... Matthew Bell, the first officer of UPS Flight 6, during the final minutes of the stricken plane's flight; with its cargo set ablaze by spontaneously combusted lithium ion batteries, the fire is now raging just a few metres behind your seat; you last saw the captain stepping out of his seat in an attempt to fight the fire, but hasn't returned, as he has likely either suffocated on the smoke or outright incinerated by the fire itself. All the while, you're desperately trying to reach the airport, only to be unable to see the runway due to smoke blocking your vision... and your plane is still descending towards the ground... It's mentioned in a few episodes that the level of compensation awarded to victims and their families is affected by a number of factors, one of which is how badly the victims probably suffered during the disaster. This is mentioned in the Aeroperu episode, as the autopsies showed that many of the victims survived the crash itself, only to drown in the pitch-black night in the middle of the ocean, surrounded by the dead and dying, or being dragged to the bottom by the wreckage they're still trapped inside of. Most of the passengers of JAL Flight 123 had enough time to write farewell letters to their families; of the people on board, a significant number also survived the crash, only to slowly die as the freezing climate of Kanto's mountains began to set in through the night, ultimately leaving only four survivors of the incident alive. While the flight was... short, the passengers of American Airlines Flight 191 were among the first to enjoy a new feature: a video screen in the cabin that let passengers see the view from the cockpit. In a horrifying twist, this meant they were able to watch as the plane lost control and plunged back to the ground.
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Mayday / int_a8cbf649	type	I Should Write a Book About This
Mayday / int_a8cbf649	comment	I Should Write a Book About This: A passenger from British Airways Flight 9 went on to write a book about the incident.
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Mayday / int_a9de8105	type	Dangerously Loaded Cargo
Mayday / int_a9de8105	comment	Dangerously Loaded Cargo: Mayday has covered several plane crashes caused by or impacted by loose cargo, and it's been brought up as a possibility in several more.
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Mayday / int_a9f86a47	type	What a Senseless Waste of Human Life
Mayday / int_a9f86a47	comment	What a Senseless Waste of Human Life: While this can be said about most accidents which were inherently preventable, the disgust of the NTSB investgators in the remastered version of the Alaska Airlines Flight 261 crash ("Pacific Plunge") is pretty evident. 88 people died for a saving of a couple of dollars' worth of grease, with the maintenance team ignoring an instruction to replace a dangerously worn part after one mechanic did their job diligently, by claiming it was just within limits. The rest is history.
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Mayday / int_aa30e350	type	Sole Survivor
Mayday / int_aa30e350	comment	Similarly, if every single interview is with a friend or relative of a passenger rather than survivors themselves, it's likely that the incident in question left no survivors. (At most, there may be a Sole Survivor or a very small number of survivors, but it's not likely to be very many.)
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Mayday / int_acecb17d	type	Chekhov's Skill
Mayday / int_acecb17d	comment	Chekhov's Skill: The captain of the "Gimli Glider" happened to be an experienced glider pilot and pulled off some gliding maneuvers to land the plane after it ran out of fuel. The first officer was also a former RCAF pilot who had been previously stationed at Gimli. One of the pilots on FedEx Flight 705 used to fly jet fighters in the Navy, and used his instincts from that area to maneuver the plane to keep hijacker Auburn Calloway off-balance. Flight instructor Dennis E. Fitch offered his services to the crew of the crippled United Airlines Flight 232, which had lost the use of all flight controls due to an engine explosion severing the hydraulic systems. He had previously studied the case of Japan Airlines Flight 123 that had also lost all of its primary flight controls and devised strategies of using engine thrust as an alternate means of control.
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Mayday / int_ad1db87c	type	Oh, Crap!
Mayday / int_ad1db87c	comment	Oh, Crap!: Expressed by various pilots, passengers, and/or air traffic controllers just before and often while the bad stuff goes down. Perhaps seen most effectively in "Crash of the Century"/"Disaster at Tenerife", which covers the Tenerife disaster. The First Officer of the Pan-Am flight is positively horrified as he sees the KLM jumbo barreling down the runway towards his plane, as is the Dutch captain seeing the Pan-Am plane directly in front of him. In "Head On Collision", a rail passenger (Kenneth Cuttle) with a view of the track in front of him realized that his passenger train is about to collide with a freight train head-on. In "Blowout", the captain shoots a nervous look at his first officer when he sees the cockpit window start to rattle. In "Deadly Crossroads", when the pilots of the Bashkirian Airlines flight realize that the DHL plane is heading straight for them, they panic and desperately try to climb, while the other plane frantically tries to increase their dive. Unfortunately, it's too late. In a similar vein, in "Sight Unseen", the Kazakh pilots push their aircraft to full power upon realizing that they've descended too far in an attempt to climb back up. In a truly sorrowful twist of fate, had they not realized that they were too far below their assigned altitude, and kept descending, they would have descended below the Saudi jet and it would have been a near miss rather than a fatal collision. In "Hudson River Runway", the pilots are shocked when the birds get sucked into the engine. In "Air France 447: Vanished", the captain has this reaction when he realizes that his co-pilots' diverging inputs to the side-stick controls are leading the plane into a stall. In "Breakup Over Texas", Shift Inspector Anderson has it during his interrogation, when he realizes his actions have Gone Horribly Wrong and caused the fatal crash. In "The Final Blow", the A-320 pilots get a very nasty surprise when, in the middle of what they think is a normal landing approach, they emerge from a cloud bank and there's suddenly a forested mountain right in front of them, with barely enough time to say a single word before impact. The captain of AirAsia Flight 8501, when the pulling of two circuit breakers resulted instantly in the plane going out of control. In "Impossible Landing", the emergency crews were prepared for the plane to land on Runway 31, and had assembled on nearby Runway 22 so they could respond immediately. Unfortunately, the plane, which was only minimally controllable, ended up aligned with Runway 22 instead. Upon realizing what was happening, the emergency responders had this reaction. (They did manage to clear the runway in time.) Captain Bryce McCormick of American Airlines Flight 96 is already on edge as he struggles to control his failing aircraft, but his shocked exclamation of "A HOLE?!" when the stewardness informs him of the extent of the damage on the phone is definitely this, coupled with sharing a shocked look with his co-pilot.
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Mayday / int_ae1c0901	type	The Blind Leading the Blind
Mayday / int_ae1c0901	comment	The Blind Leading the Blind: In "Kid in the Cockpit", the captain of Aeroflot Flight 593 lets his teenage son operate the controls of an aircraft he has little experience with himself. You can guess what happens next. Both pilots of Northwest Airlines Flight 1482 were new to flying for the airline, and the first officer claimed to be more knowledgeable than he actually was, leading the captain to place too much trust in him. They end up on an active runway, resulting in a collision that kills 8 of their passengers. A near-literal case with Aeroperu Flight 603, where the plane's instruments began to behave erratically and give contradictory information, leading the crew to rely on air-traffic control for information. Neither the pilots nor the air traffic controller realized that the information being transmitted to ATC was also inaccurate since the altimeter was receiving erroneous readings from the obstructed static ports, which in turn caused it to give faulty data to both the plane's instruments and the transponder.
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Mayday / int_ae3d6438	type	Deadpan Snarker
Mayday / int_ae3d6438	comment	Deadpan Snarker: Captain Alfred C. Haynes on United Airlines Flight 232 while getting ready to land without functioning flight controls.
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Mayday / int_aebdaf03	type	Sentimental Music Cue
Mayday / int_aebdaf03	comment	Sentimental Music Cue: It usually plays this trope straight at emotional scenes (victim funerals, photos of the plane wreckages, the last few seconds when there's no hope, the first few seconds after the crash, etc).
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Mayday / int_b1dde8fd	type	Loophole Abuse
Mayday / int_b1dde8fd	comment	Loophole Abuse: How David Burke smuggled a gun on board PSA Flight 1771 to take revenge on the boss who fired him and the airline. At the time, airline employees could circumvent the X-ray machines as nobody thought to consider that the airline's own employees could be a security risk. Burke was actually an ex-employee but the airline hadn't removed his credentials when he was fired. Not surprisingly, ever since the incident, cabin crew and pilots go through the same security checks as passengers do and all ID badges are immediately removed when an employee leaves or is fired.
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Mayday / int_b47d95be	type	No OSHA Compliance
Mayday / int_b47d95be	comment	No OSHA Compliance: When building SpaceShip Two, Scaled Composites assumed the pilots would never unlock the feathers too early during a flight and thus didn't have a fail-safe mechanism to prevent an uncommanded deployment of the feathers if they were unlocked early. Scaled Composites also never warned its test pilots of the dangers of unlocking the feathers early.
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Mayday / int_b579ecc6	type	Gave Up Too Soon
Mayday / int_b579ecc6	comment	Gave Up Too Soon: "Stormy Cockpit": After the plane slips to a dangerous bank angle, the captain belatedly engages the autopilot, which slows the roll and begins to right the plane. But because the plane doesn't level off immediately, the Captain believes it's not working and starts making manual inputs, causing the autopilot to shut off. "Runway Runoff": When the plane continues to veer off the runway despite his rudder inputs, the pilot believes that his rudder steering isn't working and abandons it to try a different form of steering. As it turned out, the rudder was working, it was just an unusually strong wind gust, and additional rudder inputs would have had a better chance of averting the crash than the alternate method he tried.
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Mayday / int_b58b4e3c	type	Too Dumb to Live
Mayday / int_b58b4e3c	comment	Project manager Aldo Tetamenti simply didn't have training that would have positively influenced his judgment, yet Nationair gave him authority to override the decisions of people that did have that training. In his decisions regarding the underinflated tyres that he could never have understood the implications of, he unknowingly pressured maintenance crews into releasing an unsafe plane (that he was on) and not telling the flight crew about it for fear of causing a delay. The result was a horrific in-flight fire that killed everyone on board. Had he allowed the tyres to be topped up on the day, the flight would have made it to Sokoto safely, and Nationair wouldn't have collapsed two years later.
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Mayday / int_b5a47148	type	Captain Crash
Mayday / int_b5a47148	comment	Captain Crash: Captain Lutz of Crossair Flight 3597 was almost literally this before his fatal accident, and yet his airline continued to let him fly.
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Mayday / int_b89ed08a	type	Obvious Rule Patch
Mayday / int_b89ed08a	comment	Obvious Rule Patch: Whenever an investigation uncovers human error or faulty mechanics on a crash, rules are updated and enforced to prevent future accidents. But in some cases, nothing was ever done until another similar event happens, such as the case of Germanwings Flight 9525. In this case, pilot suicides happened at least four times before it became mandatory for two flight crews to be in the cockpit at all times.
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Mayday / int_b8e8fa85	type	Military Alphabet
Mayday / int_b8e8fa85	comment	Military Alphabet: To be expected in a docudrama series about airplane accidents. In one particularly noteworthy example, the captain of Philippine Airlines Flight 434 who just had a bomb go off on his plane is having difficulty communicating their situation to air traffic control, so he spells out the word "bomb" in radio code. That gets the point across.
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Mayday / int_b95cc514	type	Turbine Blender
Mayday / int_b95cc514	comment	Turbine Blender: In the episode on United Airlines Flight 811, it's mentioned that human remains were found in the right inboard engine. Fear of this, and of subsequent engine damage, is the reason that the co-pilot of British Airways 5390 instructs the flight attendants not to let go of the "body" of the captain. Turns out to be a good thing they didn't for another reason. The investigation after the Hudson River Miracle finds the remains of geese inside each engine, a flock having flown into the plane after it took off, leading to engine failure.
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Mayday / int_ba0ff694	type	You Have GOT to Be Kidding Me!
Mayday / int_ba0ff694	comment	You Have GOT to Be Kidding Me!: The Northwest Airlink 5719 captain's reaction to the airline's new residence policy. Imagine what it must have been like for the pilots of TWA 800. They were waiting for a missing passenger whose bags were in the cargo hold, and after an hour, they get a message from the tower that the missing passenger was on board the whole time. Their reaction fell under this trope. The crew of Pan Am 1736 when they learn that even though the airport's reopened, they're still unable to get going because the KLM is refueling. The first officer and flight engineer outright go outside and measure the distance between the planes' wingtips just to see if they can just squeeze past the KLM and go already, but unfortunately it's too small to be safe. Investigators occasionally have this reaction to particularly bizarre or egregious behavior from pilots.
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Mayday / int_bbf11c0	type	Genius Bruiser
Mayday / int_bbf11c0	comment	Genius Bruiser: Auburn Calloway is a skilled fighter and shows himself to be a very cunning and perceptive man.
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Mayday / int_bc00493f	type	Precision F-Strike
Mayday / int_bc00493f	comment	Precision F-Strike: The first officer of DHL 611 mere seconds before colliding with Bashkirian Airlines 2937 over Uberlingen.
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Mayday / int_bc3b029b	type	Impairment Shot
Mayday / int_bc3b029b	comment	Impairment Shot: Done in "Turning Point", where Seol Ik-Soo struggles to get himself out of the tangled wirings of the wreckage of Air China Flight 129. As the sun shines down on the accident, Seol's vision gets blinded by it.
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Mayday / int_bcac7f63	type	Distant Prologue
Mayday / int_bcac7f63	comment	Distant Prologue: The China Airlines Flight 611 episode starts with the tailstrike accident in 1980 that eventually led to the plane's breakup in 2002. A brief summary of FedEx Express Flight 14 is presented before the start of the story of FedEx Express Flight 80. The first scene of "Delivery to Disaster", about the crash of Atlas Air Flight 3591 in 2019, is set in 2012 and depicts Conrad Aska (the first officer on that flight) training with another airline.
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Mayday / int_bcbe3097	type	EveryOneLives
Mayday / int_bcbe3097	comment	After ASA Flight 529 crashes, but before the evacuation begins, the narrator makes a point of noting that everyone aboard is alive at this point, when the show typically holds off on revealing that Everyone Lives until after the evacuation sequence in the reenactment (except in situations where that outcome is already obvious, which is not remotely the case with this accident). This suggests that there's a specific reason to note this fact at this exact moment — say, because something is about to happen that will change that. (A similar narrative comment is also heard in the episode on British Airtours 28M, but that episode had already revealed in the teaser that there were fatalities.)
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Mayday / int_bdbfd01c	type	Perfectly Cromulent Word
Mayday / int_bdbfd01c	comment	Perfectly Cromulent Word: David Burke's airsickness bag note contained the word "ironical".
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Mayday / int_c0d598fe	type	Evil Gloating
Mayday / int_c0d598fe	comment	Evil Gloating: In "I'm the Problem", David Burke wrote a taunting note on an airsickness bag, which investigators assumed was given to Ray Thomson shortly before shooting him and sending the plane into the ground.
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Mayday / int_c26ebed4	type	Finagle's Law
Mayday / int_c26ebed4	comment	Finagle's Law: "Eye of the Storm": After an engine on a Hurricane Hunter catches fire, an investigation reveals it was caused by a faulty fuel sensor, which fed too much fuel to the engine causing the fire. The investigator notes it could have failed at any point in the flight, but just happened to occur in the worst part of the hurricane on a mission that required them to fly much lower than usual. Then one of their prop de-icing boots comes loose and threatens to damage another engine, which would have left the aircraft with insufficient thrust to escape.
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Mayday / int_c2cedc1c	type	Big "NO!"
Mayday / int_c2cedc1c	comment	Big "NO!": Yelled by the crew of USAir Flight 427 just before their plane hits the ground.
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Mayday / int_c313d43a	type	True Companions
Mayday / int_c313d43a	comment	True Companions: In "Crash of the Century", the crew of Pan Am Flight 1736 are shown to be a pretty close bunch who clearly respect each other yet aren't afraid to throw jokes around in moments of levity and work well as a team. Contrast that to the crew of KLM Flight 4805, where Captain van Zanten is a harsh taskmaster toward his fellow crew members, giving them backhanded compliments at best.
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Mayday / int_c32ff031	type	Xanatos Gambit
Mayday / int_c32ff031	comment	Xanatos Gambit: Implied with David Burke by the fact that he shot Ray Thomson first. Even if he didn't succeed in storming the cockpit of PSA 1771, he still got his primary target picked off.
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Mayday / int_c335b9ec	type	Irony
Mayday / int_c335b9ec	comment	The wreck of Arrow Air Flight 1285 yielded T-shirts saying "I survived Gander, Newfoundland". Irony at its finest.
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Mayday / int_c3c18143	type	Hope Spot
Mayday / int_c3c18143	comment	Hope Spot: Air Canada Flight 797 managed to safely land after a severe on-board fire, and it seemed that the passengers would all make it off the plane... until the plane's doors were opened and a flashover occurred, which incinerated the interior and killed 23 people. Nigeria Airways Flight 2120 was two miles from the runway and seemed like it would just about safely land... then the plane became uncontrollable and slammed into the ground, killing anyone on board who somehow wasn't dead yet. ASA Flight 529 was ripped apart as it made an emergency landing in a field, but incredibly, all 29 passengers and crew survived the impact. Then sparking wires ignited leaking fuel, setting off a raging inferno that engulfed the only exit, forcing passengers to run through the flames to escape. Nine people died, including the captain, and another eleven were seriously injured.note The episode gives the number of fatalities as ten; this likely includes a passenger who died of a heart attack two months after the crash, probably induced by the stress of the event. She's not officially considered a crash fatality because the link between the incident and her death is not conclusive, but many unofficial counts include her. All twelve occupants of United Express Flight 5925 initially survived the collision with a Beechcraft King Air A90. Another pilot named Paul Walker came to the rescue, trying in vain to open the door as the plane was burning, but when the door wouldn't open, Walker was forced to leave to get help. The plane then exploded with no survivors. Propair Flight 420 was literally seconds from making a one hundred percent survivable emergency landing at MontrÃ©alâ€“Mirabel International Airport when the wing lost its structural integrity causing the plane to roll before impact, and hit and skid down the runway upside down before coming to a stop just off to the side of the runway. No one onboard survived. PSA Flight 1771. After the pilots are shot dead by a disgruntled employee who then sends the plane into a dive, an off-duty pilot attempts to reach the cockpit and take control of the plane. Unfortunately, the killer shoots him dead before he makes it to the cockpit, removing the last person who could stop the disaster.
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Mayday / int_c435ec5d	type	Aesop Amnesia
Mayday / int_c435ec5d	comment	Aesop Amnesia: Unfortunately, there are many lessons to be learned from one or more accidents that aren't learned, are forgotten, or are ignored which then leads to another accident, maybe worse than the last. Pilots engaged in conversations not relevant to the flight at inappropriate times (preparing for take-off or landing) have contributed to a mid-air collision (PSA Flight 182), two takeoffs with retracted flaps resulting in crashes (Delta Air Lines Flight 1141 and LAPA Flight 3142), a plane taking off on the wrong runway (Comair Flight 5191), an unrecoverable stall on approach (Colgan Air Flight 3407) and a demonstration flight crashing into a mountain (the 2012 Mount Salak Sukhoi Superjet crash). Pilots skipping, rushing, or not reviewing flight checklists during important moments in the flight have also contributed to two takeoffs with retracted flaps (Spanair Flight 5022 and Northwest Airlines Flight 255), a plane crashing into a mountain (Santa Barbara Airlines Flight 518), a stall as a result of skipping deicing that lead to the plane crashing into the Potomac river (Air Florida Flight 90) and a landing with no spoilers during bad weather (American Airlines Flight 1420). Target fixation, poor situational awareness and poor crew resource management with the rest of the crew have been contributing factors to two improper landing approaches ending with the plane crashing into terrain (Korean Air Flight 801 and First Air Flight 6560), two instances where fixation with a minor fault lead to a crash (Eastern Air Lines Flight 401 and United Airlines Flight 173), a non-stabilised approach and resulting hard landing on a runway (Garuda Indonesia Flight 200), an unrecoverable bank to the left after taking off (Korean Air Cargo Flight 8509), a plane crashing into construction equipment on a closed runway (Singapore Airlines Flight 006) and the infamous Tenerife Disaster (KLM Flight 4805 and Pan Am Flight 1736). Problems with maintenance staff or other ground crew making mistakes due to improper or inadequete training, overwork (sometimes causing them to try and take shortcuts just to not fall behind), technical difficulty in doing things the proper way, or just plain poor oversight have contributed to an engine falling off during takeoff (American Airlines Flight 191), a plane running out of fuel during flight (Air Transat Flight 236 and Air Canada Flight 143), two instances of covered pitot/static tubes which lead to malfunctioning flight instruments (Aeroperu Flight 603 and Birgenair Flight 301), an improperly adjusted elevator control cable (Air Midwest Flight 5481), a rear cargo door falling off causing an explosive decompression (the 1975 US Air Force C-5 Galaxy crash), a missing row of screws causing an elevator to break off mid flight (Continental Express Flight 2574), a missing cotter pin causing the right side elevator to get jammed into the climb position (Emery Worldwide Flight 17), an onboard cargo fire caused by mislabeled cargo (ValuJet Flight 592), an airline using illegal aircraft parts (Partnair Flight 394), a takeoff with an improper stabiliser trim setting and back heavy cargo (Fine Air Flight 101), two instances of improper repair of damage from a tailstrike (Japan Airlines Flight 123 and China Airlines Flight 611), an entire wing falling off a seaplane (Chalks Ocean Airways Flight 101), a cockpit windscreen blowing off mid-flight (British Airways Flight 5390), and a bolt in a slat mechanism coming loose and puncturing a fuel tank (China Airlines Flight 120). Airlines putting safety standards second to another objective (such as cost-cutting or keeping schedules) have contributed to an elevator jackscrew assembly failing during flight (Alaska Airlines Flight 261), underinflated tires starting a catastrophic fire during takeoff (Nigeria Airways Flight 2120), and a plane running out of fuel at the edge of its flight range because the airline was too cheap to plan a proper flight plan (LaMia Flight 2933). The two FedEx MD-11 crashes are another example. Land the plane too hard and let them bounce, and it might flip over because of the shift of gravity. Despite this being hypothesised in the first non-fatal accident's investigation, it happened again a few years later, and this time the crew of the MD-11 were not as lucky. No fewer than seven accidents covered by the show involved substandard, inexperienced or badly trained pilots being employed by a rapidly growing airline or company. Derrick White with United Express Flight 6291 in 1994, Gustavo Weigel and Luis Etcheverry with LAPA Flight 3142 in 1999, Pavel Gruzin/Rastislav KolesÃ¡r with Crossair Flight 498 in 2000 and Hans Lutz with Crossair Flight 3597 in 2001, MartÃn OlÃva/Ã�lvaro SÃ¡nchez with Learjet XC-VMC in 2008, Jordi Lopez and Andrew Cantle for Manx2 Flight 7100 in 2011 and Liu Tze-chung with TransAsia Flight 235 in 2015. Respective death tolls are 5, 65, 10, 24, 9, 6, and 43 in that order. A more specific example is the episode "Behind Closed Doors." American Airlines Flight 96 was a brand new DC-10 that had its cargo door blown out while climbing. Investigators found a significant flaw with the cargo door that enabled it to be closed but not locked. Rather than fix the underlying issue, McDonnell-Douglas took the easier and less expensive step of installing a peephole on all DC-10 cargo doors so that ground crews could verify that the door was locked. Problem solved, right? Wrong. Turkish Airlines Flight 981 crashed into a forest in France two years after the American Airlines incident, for the exact same reason, and killing 346 people in what was at the time the deadliest single aircraft accident. It then came out that the system was still flawed because it only worked if the baggage handlers knew they needed to check, and many of them didn't note there was a sign warning baggage handlers to check that the door was properly latched, but it was only in English and maybe the airline's local language, and many baggage handlers around the world didn't know English and, particularly for international flights, might not necessarily know the airline's language either (in this instance, Turkish), including the one who loaded the Turkish Airlines plane. Only then did the FAA act, and by this time, the DC-10's reputation had gone down the gutter. Man-versus-Machine: Pilots not being able to understand the actions of their aircraft in time due to complexities of modern aircraft equipment has led to a plane going off-course into a mountain (American 965), a crew not realizing their autopilot partially disengaged (Aeroflot 593), a demo flight crashing because the engines were set lower than they should have been (Air France 296), multiple incidents where pilots failed to realize their flight computer was in the wrong mode (Turkish 1951, Asiana 214, China Airlines 140), pilots failing to notice/correct dangerous attitudes (Adam Air 574, China Airlines 006), a transponder being accidentally switched off (2006 Brazilian mid-air collision), incorrect settings being entered (Air Inter 148, Varig 254), and a pilot accidentally disabling his own plane to silence a nuisance alarm (AirAsia 8501). Explicitly mentioned in "Deadly Crossroads". The year before the Uberlingen disaster, two Japan Airlines planes came frighteningly close to colliding under nearly identical circumstances. This should have alerted the airline industry that a potentially serious problem existed and needed to be fixed, but no action was taken until the same problem occurred again over Uberlingen, and this time the people involved weren't so lucky. Also mentioned in "Split Decision". The majority of the investigators of Arrow Air 1285 concluded that the plane was brought down by ice on the wings, but a vocal minority believed it was an act of terrorism and submitted their own contradictory report. This meant that the warnings regarding aircraft icing weren't taken as seriously, which resulted in more ice-related accidents. There were four crashes before Germanwings Flight 9525 which were proved to be cases of pilot suicide. In two cases, half of the investigators disputed the conclusion due to Islamic taboos against suicide, while the other two crashes received little, if any, media attention due to happening in developing countries. Any one of them could've prevented the Germanwings crash and/or one or more of the later incidents.
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Mayday / int_c4b8e2ae	type	One-Woman Wail
Mayday / int_c4b8e2ae	comment	One-Woman Wail: Happens in the closing soundtrack of "Ghost Plane", the episode that covers the Helios Airways Flight 522 disaster in Greece.
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Mayday / int_c75df49a	type	Shout-Out
Mayday / int_c75df49a	comment	Shout-Out: The Metrojet episode has the air traffic controller discarding sunflower seed shells in an ashtray. The captain of Qantas 72 drops one to Airplane! to cut some of the tension in the cockpit: "Looks like I picked a bad day to quit sniffing glue."
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Mayday / int_c8a8c595	type	Retirony
Mayday / int_c8a8c595	comment	Retirony: The pilots of Partnair Flight 394 were both a few months from retirement. Subverted with David Cronin of United Airlines 811, who was also close to retirement, but survived. Possibly invoked by the relief first officer of EgyptAir Flight 990, who was only months from retirement but on the verge of being terminated on return to Cairo. Inverted with the junior flight attendant of American Eagle Flight 4184, who was killed on her first day on the job. The flight engineer of El Al Flight 1862 was close to retirement.
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Mayday / int_c8ce7b2d	type	Smash to Black
Mayday / int_c8ce7b2d	comment	Smash to Black: Used in a few episodes, most notably 9/11: The Pentagon Attack with a shot of the passenger cabin just before impact.
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Mayday / int_c9a71d47	type	Innocence Lost
Mayday / int_c9a71d47	comment	Innocence Lost: In the dramatization, two-year-old Felix Schenk's last moments were crying over the impending crash of Germanwings Flight 9525 as his mother comforts him, not aware he was about to die (a two-year-old can't grasp such concept as death), but fully aware something horrible is happening and terrified beyond belief. (Since there are no recordings in the cabin, it's unknown what he or any of the others actually experienced in their last moments.)
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Mayday / int_ca87e3ec	type	No Name Given
Mayday / int_ca87e3ec	comment	No Name Given: The pilots of Proteus Airlines Flight 706 are never once referred to by name, either during their introduction or during the credits.
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Mayday / int_cc1c16eb	type	Midair Collision
Mayday / int_cc1c16eb	comment	Mid Air Collision: There's also runway collisions (e.g. "Crash of the Century").
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Mayday / int_cdfe12c3	type	Nothing Is Scarier
Mayday / int_cdfe12c3	comment	Nothing Is Scarier: The final seconds of the ValuJet 592 CVR are complete and total silence before cutting off. In "Deadly Silence", the CVR does have audio, but it's only alarms in the cockpit and other noises made by the aircraft's operation; there's nothing from the crew or the passengers, who were almost certainly dead at this point due to hypoxia. The Learjet investigator assisting with the case noted how disturbing it was. In episodes where the plane loses all engines in flight, the cessation of engine noise has this effect.
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Mayday / int_ce1c73e2	type	Just Plane Wrong
Mayday / int_ce1c73e2	comment	Just Plane Wrong: Several examples, surprisingly enough: One example is in the episode "Bomb on Board", which recycles the same clip for taking off and landing with the thrust reversers deployed. "Crash of the Century", the episode about the Tenerife disaster, which involved a collision between two 747s, Pan Am and KLM, introduces the KLM plane with a shot of it in flight... with winglets, identifying it as a 747-400, which at the time of the disaster (1977) would not be put into production for another 11 years. It's possible that they may not have been able to find a Boeing 747-200 that could be re-dressed as a KLM plane. In one episode, it is clear that the people making the show believe that any wide-body twin-jet in an American Airlines livery must be an A300. Averted in the episode about the crash of American Airlines Flight 587, which actually was an A300. In the episode about American Airlines Flight 587 the plane simply pitches downward when the vertical stabilizer separates. In Real Life, losing the vertical stabilizer causes uncontrollable movements in the yaw axis.note Although it does also cause a pitch-down moment, by moving the airplane's center of mass forwards. This part is especially baffling since the episode on the Uberlingen disaster correctly portrayed the effects of vertical stabilizer separation. Ironically, this trope was a factor in the accident itself. American Airlines' then-current training program, which the co-pilot was trained using, exaggerated the effect of wake turbulence to a degree that would cause experts in aerodynamics to headdesk to the point of drawing blood - wake turbulence cannot cause a plane as big as an A300 to bank as badly as the co-pilot was taught it could, and the countermeasure he was taught to use to correct this alleged problem (massive rudder deflection) was something that Airbus, the A300's manufacturer, had specifically warned against doing in flight. In short, the co-pilot pounded the rudder like a punching bag to counteract a nonexistent severe bank because whoever wrote the training materials (most likely the training department at American Airlines) didn't fully understand how large planes worked. In the episode "Behind Closed Doors", in the part about American Airlines Flight 96, they used a clip of an MD-11 taking off to show Flight 96's take off. Flight 96 was a DC-10. This one is particularly striking because the type of aircraft is incredibly significant to the events of the episode — the episode is about a design flaw in the DC-10. In "Fire on Board", which was about Swissair Flight 111, when the narrator mentions the first officer shutting down the number two engine, a shot of the right-wing engine shutting down is shown. In reality, on the MD-11 and other trijets, the middle engine is designated as number two. In "Death At Narita", when discussing autothrottle control, the MD-11 is shown to have four throttle levers, even though it has only three engines. In the shots showing the pilot controlling the thrust manually, the number of levers is correct. Subverted as the crash site shows remnants of cabin windows in the wreckage, which seems unusual, considering that the crash was a cargo plane. note The plane was originally built as a passenger plane, which was then converted into a cargo plane when it was bought by FedEx. In the TAM 3054 episode, when the A320 cruises towards its destination, the thrust levers in the cockpit are in the full forward position (maximum thrust). Such setting is used when the plane is rapidly accelerating; in cruise flight, at a stable airspeed, the levers would be anywhere between 1/2 and 3/4 forward position, not fully forward. In "Crash of the Century", Captain Van Zanten scolds his first officer for reviewing his approach plate at a latter stage of their flight. Actually, the crew (especially the pilot flying, the copilot in this instance) is expected to refer to their approach plates and procedures during the approach and landing; flying an approach without referring to the approach plate is considered a gross negligence. (However, this could simply be a case of Captain Van Zanten being a Jerkass.) A common example in the series is Just ATC Wrong. In real life, a flight passes through several different controllers (Ground Control is responsible for the taxiways, Tower Control clears the flight for take-off, Approach & Terminal Control handles the ATC of a climbing aircraft within the airport's radar coverage, then various Area Control Centers handle the aircraft as it cruises from one area to another); in the series it's common to have one controller handling all the flight. A glaring example is in the Kegworth crash episode, where a bearded controller with a bespectacled colleague clears the flight to takeoff from Heathrow, then, when the crew declares an engine fire, the very same controller with the same colleague handles their emergency descent, even though they are now in the area of an entirely different airport, East Midlands. Also, a controller who lost a plane is immediately replaced by a colleague, as he's now too distressed to ensure safe handling of his duties. This is correctly presented in the US 1549 episode, but in others (TACA 110 for example), a controller who had a plane under his control disappear from radar is still at his post. In the El Al 1862 episode, when the Master Warning light comes on, one can see a "Sidestick Priority" label just next to it. A sidestick is an Airbus feature (except the A300/310), while El Al 1862 was a 747. (El Al has a 100% Boeing fleet.) Two instances in the TACA 110 episode. When the flight attendant opens the door, it does so outward. Doors on the aircraft are of the plug-door variety, and they always open inwards (as you can see correctly in just the very next shot). Also, both pilots have their shoulder harnesses on during the emergency, but the third pilot on the flight deck never does. In "Blind Spot", the Cessna 172 that collided with PSA Flight 182 is depicted as having a wraparound rear window like modern 172s. The actual Cessna involved in the accident◊ had the window arrangement of pre-1963 models. Also in "Blind Spot", the livery on PSA Flight 182 was incorrect. The episode had it having an older livery the airline used that included a pink stripe on top of an orange and red stripes. In the footage shown of the actual crash site, the wreckage clearly shows that it had the last livery PSA used before its merger with USAir in 1988 which had orange, red-orange, and red stripe. In the China Airlines 006 episode, several shots of the plane are seen at cruising altitude. However, the plane in the episode has the dimensions and looks of a 747-200. While correct for the airline, as China Airlines had operated the 747-200 (including China Airlines Flight 611), the real incident aircraft was a completely different 747 variant, the 747SP. In the Cathay Pacific 780 episode, when one looks at the aircraft's ECAM display, the FOB indication is constantly displaying 20400. FOB stands for Fuel On Board, and with one engine operating, it should be decreasing in value. In the KLM 433 episode, as the emergency vehicles are deployed at Schiphol, an aircraft with a distinctive Delta logo on its tail is visible. Delta does fly to Schiphol, but the aircraft visible has a T-tail, meaning it is either an MD-88, MD-90 or a Boeing 717 - none of which have the necessary range for a transatlantic flight. In "Dangerous Approach" a TANS Peru aircraft is sitting on the tarmac at Stapleton Airport. TANS Peru was a local line which did not operate international flights. Furthermore, the aircraft is likely a 737-300 or -500; TANS operated only 737-200s (instantly distinguishable by their long, thin "cigar" Pratt & Whitney JT8D engines. In "Deadly Myth" the aircraft's airspeed indicator is scaled up to 400 knots. The aircraft was an Embraer 120 Brasilia turboprop, with a maximum speed of under 330 knots. Particularly in the later seasons, early Boeing 747-100/-200s are often depicted with tapered humps, which only appeared on the later 747-300s onwards. The hump on these early variants was smaller and teardrop-shaped. In ""Death in the Arctic", First Air Flight 6560 is correctly depicted as a 737-200. However, the plane in reality had visible modifications◊ refered to as a gravel kit to allow for landing on non-paved runways.
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Mayday / int_ceec4df5	type	Roaring Rampage of Revenge
Mayday / int_ceec4df5	comment	Roaring Rampage of Revenge: The final part of the Uberlingen episode sees the flight controller who accidentally caused the crash get stabbed to death by the father of a family on board. The man is arrested, but he ultimately gets only eight years and is later released and even given a medal.
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Mayday / int_cf92fea8	type	Cassandra Truth
Mayday / int_cf92fea8	comment	Cassandra Truth: In "Flying on Empty" (Air Transat Flight 236), the captain didn't believe the computer telling him that one of the wing tanks was emptying faster than the other one due to a fuel line having broken inside the engine - right up until that engine failed from running dry, with the second engine also failing 13 minutes later.
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Mayday / int_d001deb0	type	Naked in Mink
Mayday / int_d001deb0	comment	Naked in Mink: Implied in one scene of the EgyptAir 990 episode, where the relief first officer, who's wearing a robe, calls two girls across the courtyard, who look out the window and are stated to see him exposing himself to them.
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Mayday / int_d028ca10	type	Deliberately Monochrome
Mayday / int_d028ca10	comment	Deliberately Monochrome: Done usually during flashbacks when the investigators are piecing together the events leading up to the incident. One first-responder to an especially grisly crash of an airliner onto a suburb recounted that in his mind's eye he sees everything in muted brown shades (which his counselor told him was a coping mechanism). Shots from his perspective are rendered in sepia tones.
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Mayday / int_d0b60f23	type	GoshDangItToHeck
Mayday / int_d0b60f23	comment	Gosh Dang It to Heck!: Zig-zagged in "28 Seconds to Survive"; in the reconstruction, the pilots of Santa Barbara Airlines Flight 518 use words that are somewhat milder than the CVR transcript.
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Mayday / int_d0f0a80d	type	One-Word Title
Mayday / int_d0f0a80d	comment	One-Word Title: The Mayday title, as it's a phrase signalling an emergency in an airplane, and the show is about air crash investigation.
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Mayday / int_d129e13e	type	"Eureka!" Moment
Mayday / int_d129e13e	comment	"Eureka!" Moment: In "The Plane That Flew Too High", the investigators realize what started the chain of events after seeing a light flicker as the air conditioner comes on.
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Mayday / int_d1b4f0ef	type	Everybody Lives
Mayday / int_d1b4f0ef	comment	Everybody Lives: A major accident from which there are no fatalities is shown about once or twice a season. It's not as uncommon as one might think. The fact that 309 people were able to evacuate from Air France Flight 358 (Season 4) before it was consumed by fire was all the more remarkable considering that similar accidents involving fire like British Airtours Flight 28M (Season 9) and Air Canada Flight 797 (Season 4), resulted in fatality rates of about 50%. The show on Flight 28M explains how safety improvements made after that event made such an improvement possible. A seriously incredible (and improbable) version occurred with BA 5390. While the passengers' survival was more than likely once copilot Atchison got control of the plane, pretty much everyone was sure the Captain was dead, given that he was sucked most of the way out of the plane at over 20,000 feet. But, to everyone's shock, as paramedics were removing the "body", he actually began to come around. His injuries, as it turned out, were remarkably minor, and (probably because he was unconscious for most of the ordeal) he actually seemed to be less traumatized by the incident than the flight attendants (especially the three who were holding onto him). The Season 13 episode "Getting Out Alive" examines the factors that can help make this more likely, though only three of the five crashes mentioned in the episode qualify as this trope (one of the other two is very close — only three fatalities out of 307 occupants — but the other, Air Canada 797, suffers 50% fatalities). TACA Flight 110 made a successful deadstick landing on a levee, saving the lives of everyone aboard. American Airlines Flight 96 managed to land safely with no fatalities despite a hole being torn into the floor thanks to depressurization from the DC-10's cargo door being blown out since no one was seated in the rows sucked out of the plane. Sadly, the lessons learned from this accident wouldn't be taken seriously enough by McDonald Douglas until Turkish Airlines Flight 981 suffered a similar but even worse blow-out that killed everyone. Subverted in the cases of British Airtours 28M and Atlantic Southeast 529. In both of those accidents, the narration notes that there was a critical point in time where everyone was alive, but events still to come meant that both incidents ended with a significant number of fatalities (42% and 31% respectively).
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Mayday / int_d397657d	type	Hoist by His Own Petard
Mayday / int_d397657d	comment	Hoist by His Own Petard: The crew of FedEx Flight 705 were able to use Auburn Calloway's own weapons against him.
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Mayday / int_d429d0f6	type	Canada, Eh?
Mayday / int_d429d0f6	comment	Canada, Eh?: Mostly averted except once during the Nationair 2120 episode. As the aircraft was accelerating for takeoff, the captain asked the first officer "You're not leaning on the brakes, eh?" after one of the tires blew. Justified in that this is an exact quote from the CVR and the flight crew was Canadian.
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Mayday / int_d4f5426	type	Absence of Evidence
Mayday / int_d4f5426	comment	Absence of Evidence: A key factor in Silk Air Flight 185 is when the investigators recover the flight data recorder and cockpit voice recorder, they realize both devices didn't just stop recording before the crash (thus denying them full context of the plane's final minutes), but they failed separately from each other; the former went off a minute before the fatal crash, but the latter was stopped several minutes prior. Not only should this be near impossible since the black boxes draw power from the same source so they should have stopped within seconds of each other at best, analyzing a test run of the cockpit voice recorder being overloaded by a power surge showed it picks up the distinct sound of its own circuit breaker being tripped before cutting off. The Silk Air's cockpit recorder didn't pick up such a sound, only the last sound of the captain's harness hitting the floor as he got out of his chair. This leads investigators to the chilling possibility that the cockpit voice recorder's circuit breaker was tripped manually and intentionally, thus the plane crash was not due to some mechanical failure, but deliberate action on part of a pilot.
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Mayday / int_d7639dba	type	Achilles' Heel
Mayday / int_d7639dba	comment	A more specific example is the episode "Behind Closed Doors." American Airlines Flight 96 was a brand new DC-10 that had its cargo door blown out while climbing. Investigators found a significant flaw with the cargo door that enabled it to be closed but not locked. Rather than fix the underlying issue, McDonnell-Douglas took the easier and less expensive step of installing a peephole on all DC-10 cargo doors so that ground crews could verify that the door was locked. Problem solved, right? Wrong. Turkish Airlines Flight 981 crashed into a forest in France two years after the American Airlines incident, for the exact same reason, and killing 346 people in what was at the time the deadliest single aircraft accident. It then came out that the system was still flawed because it only worked if the baggage handlers knew they needed to check, and many of them didn't note there was a sign warning baggage handlers to check that the door was properly latched, but it was only in English and maybe the airline's local language, and many baggage handlers around the world didn't know English and, particularly for international flights, might not necessarily know the airline's language either (in this instance, Turkish), including the one who loaded the Turkish Airlines plane. Only then did the FAA act, and by this time, the DC-10's reputation had gone down the gutter.
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Mayday / int_d848560f	type	Unusual Euphemism
Mayday / int_d848560f	comment	Unusual Euphemism: One of the racers at the abandoned Gimli air base cries out "Holy crow!" when he sees Air Canada 143 barreling down toward the racing strip.
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Mayday / int_da1c8191	type	Writers Cannot Do Math
Mayday / int_da1c8191	comment	Writers Cannot Do Math: The American version of "Death of the President" makes a fundamental error regarding the comparison of altitudes achieved by the aircraft, claiming that 300 feet (the aircraft's minimum descent altitude for the trial approach) is "more than 10 times [the] height" of 36 feet (the height of the first tree clipped by the aircraft). The obvious math error is obvious.
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Mayday / int_dab2f3ee	type	Good Smoking, Evil Smoking
Mayday / int_dab2f3ee	comment	Good Smoking, Evil Smoking: Gameel al-Batouti, the pilot suspected of deliberately crashing EgyptAir Flight 990, was portrayed as a smoker. Oftentimes, investigators are seen smoking cigarettes while they're working.
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Mayday / int_db33bc7e	type	Ludicrous Gibs
Mayday / int_db33bc7e	comment	Ludicrous Gibs: In cases where there's almost nothing left of the airplane, any recovered human remains are extremely fragmented, assuming they haven't been buried deep underground or completely burned to ashes. In two episodes ("Out of Sight" and "Behind Closed Doors"), this was invoked by people interviewed. In "Out of Sight", a fireman who responded to the crash and a woman who lived in the area both said they didn't see any intact bodies. In "Behind Closed Doors", a journalist who went to the crash site shortly after it happened said you couldn't walk anywhere without the risk of stepping on what used to be part of a human being.
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Mayday / int_dbca2c99	type	Red Herring
Mayday / int_dbca2c99	comment	Red Herring: On more than one occasion, something initially emphasized in the dramatization or the investigation turns out to not have had a real impact on what happened. For example, communication problems were initially thought to be a factor in the crash of Nigeria Airways Flight 2120, since the ATC mistakenly thought he was talking to a different plane, but the investigation later determined that the mix-up had no effect on the outcome.
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Mayday / int_dc031fde	type	Inelegant Blubbering
Mayday / int_dc031fde	comment	Inelegant Blubbering: The copilot of British Airways Flight 5390 devolves into this after he manages to land the plane. Considering what he'd just been through, it's hard to blame the guy.
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Mayday / int_dc3b74bc	type	Pointy-Haired Boss
Mayday / int_dc3b74bc	comment	Pointy-Haired Boss: Nationair appointed project managers to support crews on charter projects, but as Nationair higher-up William Fowler notes, the project managers ended up unwittingly degrading the company's safety culture by putting excessive pressure on the pilots and mechanics, leading to urgent maintenance being neglected and planes being released in an unairworthy state. Among that urgent maintenance was replacing and later topping up tyres on the plane that would serve as the ill-fated Nigeria Airways Flight 2120, eventually resulting in that plane catching fire. To make matters worse, while this isn't covered in the episode proper, this Medium article points out that Nationair wasn't liable for the weather radar failure that caused the plane to be stuck in Ghana and wouldn't have been liable for further delays caused by the tyre change or any other essential maintenance, meaning that flight's project manager, Aldo Tetamenti, had misunderstood the contract with Nigeria Airways and thus got himself and 260 other people killed for no reason.
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Mayday / int_dc579c91	type	Contrived Coincidence
Mayday / int_dc579c91	comment	Contrived Coincidence: Frequently a factor in accidents, where two or more seemingly minor details come together to cause disaster. "Crash of the Century"/"Disaster at Tenerife": The Tenerife disaster had several, but the most prominent are; informal terminology used by the ATC staff, the KLM taking on 55 tonnes of extra fuel, two critical transmissions (either one of which would have alerted the KLM captain to the situation) cancelling each other out because of a flaw in the radio system, and both planes being just two of several widebody planes diverted to an airport that wasn't designed for them. The Air Inter crash: A momentary gust of turbulence activated a feature of the autopilot that made the plane - already descending too fast due to an erroneous autopilot input - descend more quickly into the path of the mountain. "Desert Inferno": A slightly under-inflated tire on a DC-8 leads directly to a horrific in-flight fire and death of all 261 onboard. Investigators later determine that the reason the tyres didn't crap out earlier was because the conditions weren't just right before. Previously, it had taken off in cooler temperatures or from airports in Africa with smaller taxiways, but King Abdulaziz International has a gigantic taxiway, which led to an eleven minute taxi on a taxiway you could cook an egg on. "Blowout": An incorrectly chosen set of windshield screws caused the windscreen to come loose, resulting in an Explosive Decompression that partially sucked the pilot out of the plane. "Vanishing Act": An erroneous compass heading sends Varig Flight 254 off-course, resulting in the plane running out of fuel and crashing into the Amazon. The aircraft was supposed to fly a course slightly east of North (27.0 degrees) but due to confusion over the flight plan documentation and the compass settings in older versus newer jets (the former accept only integers while the latter could take increments of .1 degrees) led to the plane flying due west (270 degrees) instead. None of the flight crew noticed that they were flying directly into the sunset... "Deadly Delay": A faulty electronic relay causes a temperature sensor to stop working, delaying takeoff. When the flight crew finally does take off, that same relay causes the take-off warning configuration alarm to not sound. Consequently, the plane takes off in an improper configuration and stalls. "Edge of Disaster": The pilots of Atlantic Airways Flight 670 decide to make a straight-in landing at Stord Airport, where rain has caused the short, un-grooved, hilltop-mounted runway to collect water and become slick. The straight-in approach means the pilots are landing in a tailwind, and after touchdown, the spoilers fail to deploy. Noticing that the plane is slow to decelerate and fearing they won't be able to stop in time, the captain activates the emergency brake — which overrides the anti-lock brakes, causing the wheels to lock up and skid down the runway with enough force to heat the water on the runway to steam, creating a hydroplane effect and leading to the very outcome the captain had hoped to prevent. If he hadn't done that, the plane would have stopped in time. "Deadly Silence": An improper checklist and the pilots' subsequent delay in donning their oxygen masks caused the eventual crash of the Learjet carrying pro golfer Payne Stewart, killing all on board. "Deadly Detail": A missing washer allowed the slat downstop assembly to become loose, fall out, and puncture the fuel tank when the slats were retracted — causing fuel to leak and land right on the engine's hot tailpipe, starting a fire. "Target Is Destroyed": The crew forgot to put the autopilot into waypoint mode after takeoff and left it in magnetic compass mode. This led the aircraft to stray into Soviet airspace and provoked a deadly response from their airforce. "Cutting Corners": An MD-83 suffered a catastrophic structural failure in its horizontal stabilizer which plunged it into the ocean and killed everybody on board. The root cause turned out to be inadequate maintenance checks resulting in insufficient lubrication on the jackscrew that drove the horizontal stabilizer which then caused accelerated wear of the acme nut that the jackscrew threads into until the threads of the nut were sheared off. A couple of dollars worth of lubricating grease would have averted the accident. "River Runway": Downplayed. While not an immediate cause of the accident, a single faulty cell in the plane's battery prevented the pilots from being able to start the APU after both engines flamed out and two attempts were made to restart them while the plane was in the storm. If the APU had been successfully started, the engines could've started running again once the plane left the storm clouds, and the accident would not have happened. "Deadly Solution": A cracked soldering joint in the plane's rudder travel limiter unit caused it to send a series of alerts to the cockpit that the pilots responded to incorrectly, causing the plane to stall and fall into the ocean. Double subverted in "Afghan Nightmare". The pilots discussing a broken fastener in the cargo hold gives the initial impression that a single broken fastener caused one of the MRAP vehicles in the cargo hold to break loose and smash through the bulkhead, crippling the plane and putting it into an unrecoverable stall. As it turned out, the airline's manual on installing fasteners didn't specify that the straps had to be tied at a specific angle to properly restrain the cargo. As a result, none of the fasteners were able to hold the vehicles in place; the single broken fastener was an ignored canary in the coal mine. "Scratching The Surface": A tail strike incident with poorly-done repairs that were falsely reported as completed ultimately led to the aircraft tearing apart in mid-flight a little over 20 years later. From there, nicotine stains caused by smokingnote smoking was allowed on China Airlines flights until 1995 formed around the doubler plate used in the repair, and had any engineer noticed the stains during routine maintenance, it's quite likely that the in-flight breakup would've never happened. In "The Plane That Flew Too High", the plane was on the verge of a stall, but the crew had already started descending to a lower altitude because of turbulence, and would have overcome the problem without ever realizing it was more than a few odd engine readings if not for a poorly timed gust of wind that altered the plane's attitude and pushed them past the stall threshold. "Nowhere To Land": The engine's ability to handle water intake was only tested with the engines at full power. When the crew reduced power for landing, the engines could no longer handle the volume of water they'd taken in and both failed almost immediately. "Fatal Climb": The captain collapsed at the exact moment when someone needed to be handling the throttles to counteract a known periodic malfunction. If he had collapsed at any other point in the flight, it probably wouldn't have resulted in a fatal crash. A positive example in "Fight For Your Life": Auburn Calloway and his flight crew had exceeded their maximum flying hours by just one minute the day before FedEx Flight 705 and were replaced by a new crew. The original crew that Calloway would've been up against if he wasn't replaced would've been two pilots (Calloway himself would have been the third crew member), one of whom was female. Given that it took the three men, two of whom were former military, everything they had to overcome Calloway and get the plane onto the runway, it's likely that if the original crew had been flying that day, Calloway would have been able to overpower them and accomplish his objective. Another positive example in "Impossible Landing": Dennis Fitch, a senior pilot and DC-10 flight instructor, just happened to be aboard United 232 when the engine blew out and severed the hydraulic lines, and was able to help the flight crew. Apart from the matter of experience (since all the pilots were quite experienced themselves), just having someone who could sit right in front of the throttle levers and do nothing but manipulate them was a huge help to the pilots, who would otherwise have had to manipulate the throttles from the sides and split their attention between that and other tasks. Taking that load off the pilots likely prevented an unsurvivable crash into some random field or, worse, building. Yet another positive example in "Deadly Pitch". Fine Air Flight 101 skidded across a major roadway at rush hour, but by pure chance, the area the plane crashed through had red lights at both intersections at that exact moment, so the spot they hit was clear of traffic, and as a result, there was only one ground fatality. If one or both of those lights had been green at the time of impact, it's likely the death toll would have been much higher. An investigation-related example happened in "Split Decision": Some members of the investigation team were sure that ice on the wings brought Arrow Air Flight 1285 down, while others felt equally certain it was an act of terrorism, resulting in a bitter controversy which ultimately spelled the end of the Canadian Aviation Safety Board. A cockpit voice recording, allowing investigators to get some level of detail on what the pilots were dealing with, would likely have preempted the dispute before it even started, but the CVR on Arrow Air 1285 was broken at the time of the accident, so there was no recording to settle the matter. "Panic on the Runway": The captain of British Airtours Flight 28M, thinking he had burst a tyre, instructed his first officer to not apply full braking to avoid damaging his plane, and had decided to pull off the runway. When a fire warning activated, the crew were already mentally committed to this decision and complete the maneuver, not having any way to know that a crosswind was present that would make the fire much worse (this only being studied during the course of the investigation). If they had stopped on the runway, the fire would have been much less severe, probably giving everyone enough time to evacuate. Which in turn would have likely delayed the major safety improvements that came out of the accident for years... "Choosing Sides": In the case of British Midland Flight 92, the captain and his first officer, after shutting down the wrong engine, had just started a review of their actions which may have led to them discovering the error. Unfortunately, ATC calls them at the worst possible moment, distracting them enough that they never completed the review. "Blind Spot": A bit of static over the radio meant the controller heard a different syllable (ATC heard "passing", the crew actually said "passed" and was meant as an implied question). This minor detail might have caused the controller to think that the plane was now clear of traffic, when in fact it was not. Another positive example: In "North Sea Nightmare", a random system glitch caused the autopilot to disengage and give the pilots total control over the plane allowing them to get the plane out of a dive with seconds to spare. Yet another positive example in "Falling From the Sky." When the crew put on their oxygen masks, the first officer's was broken so Captain Moody made the decision to increase their rate of descent to a safer altitude for him to breathe. This caused the plane to descend out of the volcanic ash cloud that, unbeknownst to the crew, was responsible for shutting down their engines, allowing them to be restarted.
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Mayday / int_dd082289	type	A Million Is a Statistic
Mayday / int_dd082289	comment	A Million Is a Statistic: Zig-zagged between episodes. Some episodes go out of the way to make the audience cry at the loss of life; others focus solely on the investigation into the accident. And there are episodes that occupy the middle ground between the two.
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Mayday / int_dd797c1c	type	Universal Driver's License
Mayday / int_dd797c1c	comment	Universal Driver's License: Averted in "Ghost Plane". The lone conscious flight attendant was licensed to fly light piston aircraft, but his training proves insufficient to operate a 737.
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Mayday / int_de7b7cbf	type	Drugs Are Bad
Mayday / int_de7b7cbf	comment	Drugs Are Bad: Double subverted and played for drama. The first officer of Trans-Colorado Airlines Flight 2286 was briefly suspected of being drunk before the crash, but toxicology tests showed he was not drinking before the flight. But the captain failed to notice the mistakes made by his first officer; further tests revealed he had been using cocaine the night before and was suffering from withdrawal. Implied with the captain of Crossair Flight 498; traces of a tranquilizer medication were found in his system, but there was no definitive answer as to whether this had an effect on his flying.
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Mayday / int_df35b851	type	Danger Deadpan
Mayday / int_df35b851	comment	Danger Deadpan: The crew of British Airways Flight 9:
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Mayday / int_df4e55b9	type	Pulled from Your Day Off
Mayday / int_df4e55b9	comment	Pulled from Your Day Off: Yumi Ochiai, one of the four survivors of Japan Airlines Flight 123, was taking her day-off from her job as flight attendant when she boarded the doomed flight. She immediately helped the passengers with their oxygen masks when rapid depressurization occurred.
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Mayday / int_e00b1dc1	type	Unluckily Lucky
Mayday / int_e00b1dc1	comment	Unluckily Lucky: Conversed when episodes touch on the subject of crash survival. Although crash survivors managed to make it out alive, they still had the misfortune of being in an accident in the first place.
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Mayday / int_e11b003d	type	Translation Convention
Mayday / int_e11b003d	comment	Translation Convention: In-cockpit discussion and passenger dialog is in English, even when it's not the persons' first language. Lampshaded in Season 12 episode "Death of the President". The cockpit crew has to use Russian in radio communication with the military airport (in civilian airline communication, English is the official language), and the first words are spoken in Russian. Then there's a moment of radio static and the language changes to English. The investigators examining a crash also talk and write all their notes in English, even when English is not their native language.
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Mayday / int_e19e68	type	Cruel Mercy
Mayday / int_e19e68	comment	Cruel Mercy: Since Auburn Calloway wanted to die, the life sentence he received for his attempted hijacking can be seen as this.
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Mayday / int_e26d8285	type	Explosive Decompression
Mayday / int_e26d8285	comment	"Blowout": An incorrectly chosen set of windshield screws caused the windscreen to come loose, resulting in an Explosive Decompression that partially sucked the pilot out of the plane.
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Mayday / int_e3847ee8	type	Cigarette of Anxiety
Mayday / int_e3847ee8	comment	Cigarette of Anxiety: After escaping the wreck of KLM Cityhopper 433, a passenger starts smoking a cigarette in spite of protests from a rescuer on the scene. The captain of US-Bangla Flight 211 was smoking during the flight, likely due to being in a delirious state at the time.
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Mayday / int_e3c36782	type	Call-Forward
Mayday / int_e3c36782	comment	Call-Forward: In some cases, accidents are mentioned that don't (or didn't) have their own episode. (e.g. Season 1's episode on Aeroperu 603 mentioning Birgenair 301, which got its episode in Season 5) There have even been cases where episodes mention accidents that already had an episode about them but happened after the accident at the center of the episode. (e.g. The episode about the 1978 crash of United Airlines Flight 173 talking about the 2008 crash of British Airways Flight 38 as an example of how landing gear failure is a fairly minor problem.)
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Mayday / int_e431c24c	type	Not Quite Dead
Mayday / int_e431c24c	comment	Fear of this, and of subsequent engine damage, is the reason that the co-pilot of British Airways 5390 instructs the flight attendants not to let go of the "body" of the captain. Turns out to be a good thing they didn't for another reason.
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Mayday / int_e4965307	type	Composite Character
Mayday / int_e4965307	comment	Composite Character: "Missing over New York" and "America's Deadliest" state as much in the opening disclaimer.
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Mayday / int_e4ba33fc	type	Disaster Dominoes
Mayday / int_e4ba33fc	comment	Disaster Dominoes: Some plane crashes are one long sequence of these. For example: "Crash of the Century"/"Disaster at Tenerife", which covers the Tenerife runway collision between two Boeing 747s, has the dominoes from lack of ground radar, an overloaded airport (the result of the two planes being diverted from their destination by a bombing at that airport), bad communication, foggy weather and a captain too eager to take off. Even when the cause of an accident seems straight-forward, it's often the case where it takes a sequence of bad luck and/or questionable actions to bring a plane down. Aeroflot Flight 593 is an excellent example, where it seems like the cause is limited solely to the pilot's son being on the controls, but in fact it's a whole slew of events, including but not limited to the lack of knowledge that the autopilot could partially disengage on the Airbus A310, that eventually brought the plane down. Also, the pilots regained control near the end, but over-corrected and put the plane into a stall. Compounding the error is the fact that if they had done nothing once the bad bank angle was corrected, the plane's automated systems would have prevented the crash. A more limited example is Uni Air Flight 873, featured in "Explosive Touchdown". If either the leaking bottles of gasoline (providing an explosive air-fuel-mixture) or the unsecured motorcycle battery (providing the ignition spark) had not been on board, the explosion would never have occured. However, because both items were brought on board by unrelated passengers, the explosion occured when the wires of the motorcycle battery touched each other and sparked during the hard landing, igniting the explosive gasoline vapors.
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Mayday / int_e50987a9	type	Reconstruction
Mayday / int_e50987a9	comment	Reconstructions happen in a few episodes, such as Captain Sullenberger and the Flight 1549 crew. Considering the panicky reactions we have seen from even the blameless flight crews so far in the series, the Danger Deadpan demeanor with which the 1549 pilots handled their situation is almost surreal.
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Mayday / int_e542d889	type	Gorn
Mayday / int_e542d889	comment	Gorn: The interior of the Fed-Ex cargo plane following Auburn Calloway's attempted hijacking. The aftermath of the Aeromexico 498 crash. Limbs ripped off and burned bodies are shown, and the Piper Cherokee's interior is splattered with blood. We are thankfully spared the information how the Piper's pilot and passengers died.
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Mayday / int_e563bf09	type	Insistent Terminology
Mayday / int_e563bf09	comment	Then, the controller gives the KLM aircraft ATC clearance, or directions on what to do after takeoff. This is not takeoff clearance, but the pilot interprets it as such. note This is why current regulations, put in place in direct response to Tenerife, only allow ATC to say "takeoff" when clearing an aircraft for takeoff or cancelling an aircraft's takeoff clearance, otherwise they must use the term "departure" instead.
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Mayday / int_e567510d	type	Determinator
Mayday / int_e567510d	comment	Determinator: The crew of FedEx Flight 705 in "Fight For Your Life", and how they kept Auburn Calloway from succeeding in his goals. Let us count the ways: James Tucker, an ex-Navy pilot who not only flew the plane with a hole in his skull and half of his body suffering paralysis, but did extreme aerial maneuvers with said jumbo cargo plane (including insane barrel rolls, sharp turns, and a dive so steep that the plane nearly went supersonic) to throw the attempted hijacker off-balance as the man fought with the two other crew members in the galley, eventually trading places with David Sanders to restrain Calloway. With half of his body paralyzed and a hole in his skull. David Sanders, who was also an ex-Navy pilot, was also hit in the head with a hammer and suffered gashes to his head (requiring doctors to sew his right ear back into place), and not only managed to land the extremely weighed-down aircraft successfully, but pulled off sharp turns normally near-impossible with said plane to land it...with his glasses missing and blood flowing into his eyes...manually. Andrew Peterson, the crew's flight engineer, who also got hit in the head multiple times with a hammer and had his temporal artery severed, but managed to fight back despite massive blood loss, eventually helping to beat the shit out of and restrain the would-be hijacker. Also, he was thorough enough in his pre-flight check that he noticed that the cockpit recorder had been shut off by the hijacker in an attempt to cover his tracks beforehand. Twice. One final plug has to go to the final star of the show: The DC-10 itself. The aircraft was built for nice, leisurely long distance flights that would not require more than maybe a few turns to line up for the destination runway. It did quite a bit more that day. The maneuvers that Tucker and Sanders put that plane through would've made a test-pilot fill their shorts. To top it all off, the aircraft it self suffered significant damage because of the maneuvers, and then on landing (which it was too heavy for to begin with). FedEx eventually repaired the aircraft, and returned it to service. This trope is also deconstructed in episodes like "Racing the Storm" and "Death of the President". When pilots insist on continuing to their destination despite dangerous conditions, it can lead to disaster. This is known in the aviation community as "get-there-itis".
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Mayday / int_e624f0e8	type	Suspiciously Specific Denial
Mayday / int_e624f0e8	comment	Suspiciously Specific Denial: In "Alarming Silence," documenting Northwest Airlines Flight 255, one pilot demonstrated how to disable the MD-80's takeoff warning system by pulling a circuit breaker, without looking, though he claimed he'd never done it himself. Possibly averted in that the circuit breaker was mentioned to have been used routinely by a number of pilots, and was therefore covered in oil from fingerprints, making the breaker distinguishable by touch.
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Mayday / int_e77d9cc8	type	Tin-Can Telephone
Mayday / int_e77d9cc8	comment	Tin-Can Telephone: Discussed in an interview in the episode on Northwest Airlines Flight 85 as an analogy for the sound quality of talking to flight operations while flying over the Behring Strait.
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Mayday / int_e906fcc0	type	1-Dimensional Thinking
Mayday / int_e906fcc0	comment	1-Dimensional Thinking: Two boys were riding their bikes down the abandoned runway at Gimli when Air Canada 143 came in for an emergency landing. When they see the plane barreling down toward them, they pedal down along the runway trying to get away from the airplane.
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Mayday / int_e9f517e1	type	Artistic License â€“ Geography
Mayday / int_e9f517e1	comment	Artistic License â€“ Geography: In "Death of The President", Polish investigators have identification tags in dark red with a thin white horizontal stripe through the middle... which is the flag of Latvia. The Polish flag is white-bright red. In "Dead Weight", the destination airport of Air Midwest Flight 5481 is Greenville-Spartanburg Airport, but the narrator mistakenly says it is located in North Carolina. The airport is actually in South Carolina. In "Borderline Tactics", when a DC-8 crashes on an airfield in Guantanamo, Cuba, the emergency vehicle scrambling for help has a clear marking "Boryspil" - an airfield over 5000 miles away in Kyiv, Ukraine. (And yes, the Cubans might use retired Soviet equipment, but the airfield and rescue crew are American.) In "Fanning the Flames," a map showing where the nearest airport is, in Mauritius, displays two islands off the coast of Madagascar but incorrectly labels the western island as being Mauritius. Mauritius is the eastern island, the western island is RÃ©union. In "The Heathrow Enigma", the map that is used to show the plane's journey is an odd mix of countries from before and after 1991. It shows the countries made from the breakup of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia while showing Germany is still devided. Made very odd considering the crash featured in the episode happened in 2008. In "Terror in San Francisco", as Asiana Flight 214 is shown flying over the south part of San Francisco Bay on aproach to SFO, the very large salt ponds in that part of the San Francisco Bay Area are absent. In their place are large fields. Large fields like that do not exist right up to the bay in that area. That part of the bay, where it is not bordered with salt ponds, is bordered by marshland.
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Mayday / int_eb8ec7c8	type	Jerkass
Mayday / int_eb8ec7c8	comment	In "Crash of the Century", Captain Van Zanten scolds his first officer for reviewing his approach plate at a latter stage of their flight. Actually, the crew (especially the pilot flying, the copilot in this instance) is expected to refer to their approach plates and procedures during the approach and landing; flying an approach without referring to the approach plate is considered a gross negligence. (However, this could simply be a case of Captain Van Zanten being a Jerkass.)
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Mayday / int_ed05cfee	type	NaÃ¯ve Newcomer
Mayday / int_ed05cfee	comment	NaÃ¯ve Newcomer: Chad Erickson, the newly hired first officer of Northwest Airlink Flight 5719, was scared stiff by his overly aggressive captain, which led him to not make the necessary altitude callouts on approach due to his fear of angering his captain. He was also thrown in a loop by the captain deviating from the established approach path in an effort to combat icy conditions, and being berated, humiliated and talked down to did not help one bit. A number of times, the less-experienced co-pilots diagnose the emergency correctly, but either do not intervene out of respect for their captains, are overruled by them or are intimidated one way or another: Flash 604, Birgenair 301, TANS Peru 204, West Caribbean 708, First Air 6560, Crossair 3597, Alitalia 404, and Korean Air 801 and 8509.
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Mayday / int_ed3dc201	type	Addiction Displacement
Mayday / int_ed3dc201	comment	Addiction Displacement: Implied. The air traffic controller handling Metrojet Flight 9268 is seen eating sunflower seeds and discarding the shells in an ashtray.
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Mayday / int_ef269207	type	I Can See My House from Here
Mayday / int_ef269207	comment	I Can See My House from Here: In "Blow Out", the captain of British Airways Flight 5390 says this to the first officer shortly before things start to go sideways.
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Mayday / int_f05444a4	type	Once per Episode
Mayday / int_f05444a4	comment	Almost Once per Episode: Even the best trained and most experienced professionals can make mistakes sometimes, and even the best designed and most reliable equipment can have problems sometimes.
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Mayday / int_f1d3f0c9	type	Sesquipedalian Loquaciousness
Mayday / int_f1d3f0c9	comment	Sesquipedalian Loquaciousness: A recurring interviewee on the show, aviation expert John Nance, has a tendency to use complex words when he speaks; this is most evident in his interview in the episode on Turkish Airlines Flight 1951.
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Mayday / int_f458e883	type	Right Man in the Wrong Place
Mayday / int_f458e883	comment	Right Man in the Wrong Place: Dennis E. Fitch just happened to be on United Airlines Flight 232, which suffered a total loss of hydraulics after the tail engine ruptured. He had practiced flying a DC-10 using only engines in a simulator after reading about Japan Airlines Flight 123, and he was able to provide assistance to the flight crew in getting the plane under enough control to save over 60% of the people on board.
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Mayday / int_f5ab45cb	type	Incompetence, Inc.
Mayday / int_f5ab45cb	comment	In "Fire in the Hold", ValuJet Flight 592's PA system is mentioned to have just been fixed after crapping out on the way to Miami and the autopilot is still broken, showing that SabreTech, ValuJet's maintenance contractor, isn't particularly great at its job. Sure enough, the fire that brings Flight 592 down turns out to have been the result of SabreTech improperly packaging and mislabeling expired oxygen generators which were loaded onto the plane under the mistaken impression that they were empty oxygen canisters.
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Mayday / int_f6624c30	type	Together in Death
Mayday / int_f6624c30	comment	Together in Death: In the last moments of "Out of Control", an elderly couple reach out to each other and hold hands one last time before Japan Airlines Flight 123's inevitable crash on Mount Takamagahara. In "Fatal Climb", Terri Chung, who liked making friends with fellow passengers in her travels, reaches out to another one seated across the aisle as TAROM Flight 371 nosedives into the ground.
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Mayday / int_f67171cc	type	Empathy Doll Shot
Mayday / int_f67171cc	comment	Empathy Doll Shot: Some shots of the aftermath of the crash reveal that toys were brought on the plane, a painful reminder that children were onboard. A teddy bear was found wedged in a piece of wreckage from Germanwings Flight 9525. The real-life footage of the wreckage of TWA Flight 800 shows a Mickey Mouse plush floating off the coast of Long Island.
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Mayday / int_f96f188c	type	Drives Like Crazy
Mayday / int_f96f188c	comment	Drives Like Crazy: Well, Flies Like Crazy. The KLM captain in the Tenerife special is portrayed as this, and for good reason. In a rush to get out of Tenerife because he was dangerously close to exceeding duty time limits, he took off unilaterally without explicit permission from the ground or confirmation that the Pan Am plane was off the runway, leading to the deadliest aviation accident in history. Air Illinois Flight 710 captain Lester Smith was known to fly into storms and order first officers to disable the overspeed warnings, and ultimately met his end when he failed to return to base or divert to a different airport in response to a failed generator. The worst part is, there was no pressure from Air Illinois to fly like a madman; it was all an ego-driven Self-Imposed Challenge.
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Mayday / int_fc225bec	type	Artistic License – Physics
Mayday / int_fc225bec	comment	Artistic License â€“ Physics: In the American Airlines Flight 587 episode, an overhead shots shows the A300 falling onto the suburban houses... which remain motionless in relation to the plane, meaning it is falling straight down, without any forward movement. This would be more or less correct if the aircraft had stalled (there would still likely be some forward motion anyway, except in a high altitude stall where the aircraft was already falling through several thousand feet, gradually losing its momentum in the process), but AA 587 did not.
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Mayday / int_fcadd0e3	type	Impact Silhouette
Mayday / int_fcadd0e3	comment	Impact Silhouette: In a mid-air collision where one of the planes is reconstructed, the outline of the other plane involved (or at least a part of the other plane) can be seen on the side of the reconstructed fuselage.
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Mayday / int_fd5603b	type	MacGyvering
Mayday / int_fd5603b	comment	MacGyvering: In the Varig Flight 254 episode, when the aircraft crashes in the jungle, the crew know that the black boxes emit locating signals when submerged by water, but they have too little water. Thus, the captain urinates over the black boxes, and it actually works. In an event similar to the Japan Air 123 incident, United Airlines Flight 232 also loses all flight controls due to an engine explosion, but both pilots and a flight instructor who just happened to be on board managed to bring the plane in for a crash landing in which a majority of the passengers and crew survived.
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Mayday / int_feaf12e8	type	Survivor Guilt
Mayday / int_feaf12e8	comment	The NTSB report on SilkAir Flight 185 concludes that the captain, plagued by debts caused by bad investments and problems at work (including a demotion for reckless flying), intentionally crashed his plane. The fact that the crash occurred on the anniversary of a training flight of which he was the sole survivor (his plane was forced to turn back due to mechanical issues, while three of his comrades were killed when their planes crashed in bad weather) can't have been good for his mental state either.
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Mayday / int_ff54b9ac	type	Eject... Eject... Eject...
Mayday / int_ff54b9ac	comment	Eject... Eject... Eject...: Used frequently during the reenactments with standard alarms or, in more recent incidents, mechanical voice warnings of "PULL UP! PULL UP!"
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Mayday / int_ffad4e9f	type	Shown Their Work
Mayday / int_ffad4e9f	comment	Shown Their Work: In "Deadly Crossroads", the Bashkirian pilots are shown looking toward their right side for the DHL, which is actually approaching from the left. In the uncensored version (you can see it in the censored version too, it's just less clear), it is clearly seen that all the heads in the cockpit turn when a flight crew member yells "There on the left!" The reason for this (which wasn't said in the episode) was that Peter Nielsen (the controller) had actually reported the position of the DHL mistakenly at the Bashkirian's 2 o'clock position when in reality it was at their 10 o'clock. It was probably omitted to keep the sympathy level for Nielsen higher among the viewers, as if him getting murdered by Vitaly Kaloyev, who was hailed as a hero in his hometown, wasn't enough. note It's also important to point out that this mistake contributed little to the disaster anyway. The DHL's lights would have been visible to the Bashkirian pilots in the dark sky long before the collision, and while they couldn't have been able to judge the DHL's speed and altitude, they could judge its clock position. In "A Wounded Bird", as the narrator mentions the flight attendant preparing the cabin for the emergency landing, the reenactment shows a moment where an exit row passenger says she doesn't want to be responsible for opening the door (or possibly feels she's unable to), and a man sitting further back offers to do it and switches seats with her. Though the incident isn't mentioned either by the narrators or any of the intervieweesnote none of the individuals directly involved were interviewed; the flight attendant declined to appear, and both passengers were killed in the disaster, this is an accurate depiction of something that happened in the minutes leading up to the crash. Unfortunately, it's subverted a few minutes later when the same woman is seen standing outside the plane in an embrace with a man after the crash, both with no visible injuries and even their clothing intact: in reality, the woman in question, Lucille Burton, was horribly burned exiting the crashed plane; she would not have been able to stand, to say nothing of how she would have looked* reports later stated she was burned over 100% of her body, and she died within hours of the crash. Her husband Lonnie — who would presumably be who the man was meant to be — suffered a similar fate. In "Taxiway Turmoil" a Lufthansa Boeing 737 is seen parked at the Detroit airport. While a German airline's mid-range aircraft seems out of place in central USA, this particular 737-500, D-ABIA was delivered to Lufthansa in December 1990, the month of the accident shown, so it's likely making a stopover on its delivery flight from Seattle to Germany.
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The following is a list of statements referring to the current page from other pages.

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Mayday	hasFeature	Captain Crash / int_34078ffe
Mayday	hasFeature	Dangerously Loaded Cargo / int_34078ffe
Mayday	hasFeature	Empathy Doll Shot / int_34078ffe
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Mayday	hasFeature	Men Are the Expendable Gender / int_34078ffe
Mayday	hasFeature	No One Could Survive That! / int_34078ffe
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Mayday	hasFeature	Unconventional Learning Experience / int_34078ffe

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