Witness To Terror | FULL EPISODE | The New Detectives

On a stormy Halloween night, a passenger plane begins a routine landing, but what happens is far from routine. Investigators must determine what terrible chain of events led to it crashing, killing everyone on board in fog, a Canadian plane aborts a landing maneuver seconds later. speeds into the nearby forest the accident was caused by mechanical failure or a fatal error in judgment the answers are preserved in the indestructible black box that diligently records the plane's final maneuvers and clues the last words the black boxes help Help investigators understand the fields of destruction after a crash, a black box is often the only surviving

witness

to the

terror

On the night of October 31, 1994, American Eagle Flight 4184 took off in the rain from Indianapolis to Chicago less than 200 miles away as the twin-engine turboprop approached its destination.

Air traffic controllers told the crew to expect delays. A severe storm was snarling traffic outside O'Hare International Airport. The plane was put on hold over a rural section of northeastern Indiana. The pilots noticed some ice and activated the equipment to break it. wings depended on the autopilot to keep the plane stable and maintain altitude attendants tried to assure passengers that they would make their connections all other flights were delayed one of the busiest airports in the world was completely paralyzed in a reconstructed announcement From the transcripts, the captain attempted to reassure the restless passengers. The people are listening once again, captain.

I regret to inform you that air traffic control is saying at this time another 30 minutes the plane had been waiting for over 30 minutes due to the storm some passengers have had. They debated whether to board the flight now They became increasingly anxious Finally the transcripts indicated that controllers cleared Flight 4184 to begin landing procedures Pass me that pen again, it was the last communication Flight 4184 would have with controllers when the plane began its descent something went terribly wrong the plane continued its descent gaining speed 7,000 feet 6,000 feet 5 to 4,000 people the plane sank in a muddy soybean field in rural Indiana chattering from the impact fighting the pouring rain and frigid temperatures the Rescue workers searched through the night for any sign of life from the 72.

The passengers and crew finally faced the truth. No one survived when a plane crashed in the United States. It is up to the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) to determine what went wrong. Greg Feith was the lead investigator on the Flight 4184 case when I leave. at the scene of an accident I'm playing Dick Tracy my job is to go out and find all the evidence all the clues to tell us what happened the public demands answers and expects the NTSB to provide them quickly so that the agents arrive quickly. Being among the first to

witness

devastation can often be very overwhelming.

I mean, it's kind of emotional because when you walk through all this rubble you see photographs, you see teddy bears, you see children's clothes and things like that. So you can't help but start moving. Liat acts, but as a researcher, in order for me to remain objective, you have to separate your emotions from that and you have to block them out so you can do your job. to do it effectively and that is not always easy for us when the sun rose the next morning and revealed the true horror of the accident. The impact craters ruined the once peaceful farm, transforming it into a field of death.

The narrow rural roads of Roselawn Indiana are filled with trucks

full

of rescue equipment and the clamor of news crews arrived. A team of NTSB aviation forensics experts was tasked with creating order in the growing chaos so they could focus on the difficult task of finding out what happened immediately, what our investigator and team will do. It's actually what we call documenting the four corners. We want to search for all the remains. We want to make sure both wings are there. The tail section is there. The engines are there, but the research was hampered by health risks.

The fuel covered the entire site. was declared a biohazard, only those with safety equipment entered and exited, rescue workers and investigators joined together to point out evidence and remains, they worked side by side examining each piece as quickly as possible, body parts were transported to the morgue to begin the difficult identification process for us, the investigators, we are analyzing physical evidence from the plane, which is the wreckage itself, for the coroner who has to go out and look for the bodies or the victims. They had it just as bad as us because they didn't have whole people, they had fragments of people, so for both of us to do our job we had to work hand in hand because if you found a fragment of the remains, there could have been critical evidence for the coroner in a piece of a victim and so we worked hand in hand as we looked at all of these remains to be able to help him collect any evidence he needed to identify the people who were on that plane when the bodies were identified, they were released for burial, the family members found mutual comfort and in the chaplains and counselors who volunteered to help, but in the midst of the family pain the investigators continued to work they scoured the soybean field looking for answers to discover how the plane broke up they saw the wreckage from above they examined the scars on The soil created by the impact and the locations of the scattered pieces of the plane's patterns can tell them whether a piece broke off on impact or if it fell during the flight causing the crash.

What they found in the wreckage of Flight 4184 was typically surprising when you have a plane that fell directly or made an emergency landing, you will find the initial impact point and then it will tear you apart with no detail or fan-shaped pattern. At this particular accident location, we had a very high angle of attack and at very high speed. impact on the ground, so we had a main impact crater, but we found the tail section in a very strange place in relation to the main impact crater which led the team to thank how that got there and it was evident that it was a breakup in flight so the story had emerged before the plane hit the ground now investigators had a possible explanation a structural failure may have caused the tail to break in flight but airplane tails don't break there simply must be something have triggered the failure more evidence needed to be examined more data was gathered the weather that night provided the first clue the conditions were ideal for it to freeze too much the freezing rain in which the plane was flying could have been an important factor, but it seemed unlikely Although icing on the wings could cause the tail to fracture, the only way to determine what really happened would be to look inside the plane's black box.

A black box is actually two boxes and they are not black, they are orange, which makes them easier to find. One contains a record of the mechanical operation of the plane, it is called a flight data recorder, the other is the cockpit voice recorder, basically a crash group recorder, it contains an account of everything the pilots say, it also detects alarms, the noise of the engine and perhaps the horrible sound of the boxes impacting, in a matter of hours. They were rushed to NTSB headquarters in Washington, DC, their technicians prepared them for analysis. Sometimes the black boxes provided instant answers.

Other times, they only deepened the mystery. While the investigators prepared the playback equipment, they also prepared themselves. They would be the first. in hearing what the pilot said While facing death head-on after maintaining a holding pattern near O'Hare Airport, Flight 4184 was cleared to descend from 10,000 feet. Seconds later, the plane crashed into the ground, killing everyone on board. Now investigators would listen to the cockpit voice recorder as the plane started. his fatal fall the crew's words during the terrifying final moments are taken from transcripts okay, the chilling tape made it clear that the pilots were completely bewildered, they didn't know they were in trouble until it was too late, but it raised more questions of which he responded to the researchers.

They were no closer to knowing what happened. Their last hope was inside the second box, the flight data recorder or FDR, now every mechanical function or malfunction of the plane would be analyzed. Doug Brazii is a black box expert at the NTSB and is responsible for converting the complicated bits of data from FDR to useful information. The data recorded by an FDR depends on the age and type of aircraft it is on. Gained on Flight 4184 monitored about 100 mechanical functions Bracey downloaded the information to a computer using cassettes that translated the encoded data. The information appears as graphs and the graphs on the computer represent the pilots' actions and the plane's performance over the minutes. finals before it fell to Earth.

The readings were placed side by side on a timeline to see their relationships as the data appeared. Brazi discovered that the plane had experienced. an abrupt catastrophic event to better understand created an animated version of the last moments of the plane it is very difficult to get a sense of time and how fast or slow things can develop by looking at numbers and graphs animation helps us see how fast or how slowly things develop in the crash sequence the animation combines all the functions of the plane just before dropping into a visual model that investigators can study.

It began when the plane began its descent from 10,000 feet without warning, the autopilot deactivated the ailerons on the wings which The control flight suddenly turned the plane violently to the right, the pilots grabbed the controls and struggled to level off, but the The speed of the turn was too great, it ripped the controls out of their hands and the nose sank toward the ground as they passed through the clouds. the ground filled their windshields rushing towards them at 400 miles per hour useless II the pilots pulled back on the controls to raise the nose the resulting stress on the tail was too great it broke just before the plane hit the ground the animation made The sequence of events is tragically clear: the plane was in flight when the plane initially turned at approximately 77 degrees the first time and the nose began to pitch down, the first officer was able to recover it slightly and while attempting to lift the nose up.

The plane then turned again completely 360 degrees, the nose pitched down and the turn continued approximately one hundred and forty degrees until the first officer was able to stop the turn, but due to the very steep attitude the plane was in , as I was trying to get out I had a lot of downforce on the tail section of the plane because I was pulling to the extreme. I was actually moving these flight control surfaces to their maximum high aerodynamic loads. This part of the plane literally came off and the plane was basically gone. The nose of it hit the ground and then fragmented and if it fragmented, this part of the plane ended up being thrown to the furthest point from the wreckage area.

It was now evident that the accident was not caused by the tail breaking in flight. The left icing is the likely cause, but the new Brazil icing would normally appear on the screen as a slow, steady buildup, not a sudden cataclysm, which could have overpowered the plane so quickly and sent it hurtling. to Earth, knowing what makes a plane fly and providing clues as to how it can fall at Embry-Riddle University in Prescott Arizona wind tunnels are used to demonstrate the aerodynamics of flight here the invisible forces of the wind are blown revealing the principle basic of flight the faster air moves over a surface, the less pressure it exerts as the slower moving air beneath pushes upward causing the surface to rise.

Aerospace engineer Richard Felton demonstrates the principle with a simple experiment. Let me demonstrate it with a piece of paper for mine. I'm going to blow on the top of the surface of the paper so I can I'm not going to create anything underneath, there's no magic here, okay and as you can see the paper actually rises up, the wings are not flat like the paper , but they work the same way, the air moves faster through the round top of the wing because it has more surface area to cover, but it is essential that the top surface is smooth and that nothing on it interrupts the air flow .

If the airflow is altered, the object loses the pressure that lifts it. AnyForeign object in the wings can interrupt the air flow, for example ice. It can build up and then break away, leaving jagged edges that can produce enough turbulence to bring down an airplane. 4184 was an ATR 72 series aircraft. Roselawn investigators found that these aircraft had a history of icing problems, but the FDR demonstrated that its de-icing system was working properly and the reading showed no icing patterns normals, then researchers learned of a weather phenomenon called supercooled drizzle, extra-large freezing raindrops, a check with meteorologists told them that the conditions on the stormy Halloween night were suitable for this phenomenon to occur. fatal factor to discover it the manufacturer of the ATR took to the skies over the Mojave Desert in California there they attempted to recreate the exact conditions of the storm in an experiment called tanker test a modified US Air Force plane produced a cloud of eight-foot-wide ice, an ATR like the one at Roselawn flew into the cloud.

The freezing rain clouds were infused with yellow dye so researchers could see ice forming on the nose and wings to ensure the tragedy was not repeated. The test pilots flew very high to increase recovery time. which were prepared to eject if necessary at first a normal freezing rain was released, the small drops of water froze the instant they hit the front of the wings, but the deicing boots cracked and then I saw it released a cloud of supercooled drizzle drops when the drops hit the wings, they did not freeze instantly, but instead spread across the wing, freezing behind and out of reach of the deicing boots, the final piece of the puzzle was finally placed.In Instead, normally when the wing is free of contamination, these bands or the relative wind flow smoothly over the top and bottom of the airfoil, but with the Roselawn accident, when we have the ice ridge represented by this triangle, we have now interrupted . that airflow when the airflow then rejoined or came back across the top of the wing became very turbulent as it left the trailing edge, which is represented by this area right here, that turbulence was just above the ailerons and when turbulence created a very low pressure system, these ailerons began to move from a neutral position to their maximum deflection of 14 degrees in a quarter of a second.

Now investigators have concluded what happened that night and why the pilots were in the holding pattern, they were chatting. the autopilot was on they thought everything was fine what they didn't know was that behind the deicing equipment a ridge of ice was accumulating as they began to descend the ice broke off from what was left leaving irregular edges on the wing causing a flow of Turbulent air The turbulence created a powerful low-pressure system that acted like a vacuum, literally sucking in the ailerons, forcing the plane to spin. Attempts to write the plane only broke the tail, the plane dove into the ground and then everything was silent except for the pouring rain. and then silencing the crater in a soybean field in Roselawn Indiana is a scar that will never heal, but in solving the accident investigators have done everything they can.

After the investigation, the ATR de-icing system was redesigned extending further back in the wing and the ATR. Pilots are now trained for icing conditions. The work of the NTSB and others in the Roselawn case helped reduce the chances of a similar accident happening again. Every plane crash is the result of a fatal mix of conditions. The ingredients come from the plane. The weather and. the pilot himself in Canada investigators tried to piece together the recipe for the airliner disaster the mountains of British Columbia are among the most impressive in North America, but for pilots who fly through them they can be treacherous in 1989 Two young Sky Link Airlines pilots flew five travelers in a 19-seat turboprop from Vancouver to Terrace, just over 400 miles away, making the trip dozens of times and were familiar with the dense morning fog that often cuts through this part of western Canada.

The morning of September 26 was the beginning. One more day, shortly before Flight 70 made its final approach to the runway, a 300-foot fog bank enveloped the airport, reducing visibility to zero. The pilot expected to see the runway lights, he cut through the fog at any moment, instead he only saw you as the plane. He swooped in to land, thought better of it and aborted the maneuver safely, but as he moved away the tops of the trees suddenly became large through the dense AIDS the plane went through the branches rolled and burst into flames the pilots and passengers Transportation investigators died on impact The Safety Board of Canada was given the gruesome task of making sense of the tangled wreckage.

Trees had cracked and fallen onto the fuselage. One of the wings had been cut off. The cabin was crushed. The cabin opened, revealing a tangled mass of wires, cables, and circuits. The force had twisted and broken the propellers. It took days to find pieces of plane that hurtled into the woods. Reading the wreckage would take even longer. It is a forensic skill that requires intensive training at Embry-Riddle University. Investigators would gain experience studying crash debris. real reconstructive on site director of the aerospace safety wall document instructs his students on what to look for and how to find it, just like at a crime scene, what I want the students to be able to do is identify all the things about this scene that are important to be able to find all the parts to be able to understand how those parts got to where they were and what they mean and then to be able to take that and put it into the rest of the story and literally put all the pieces of the puzzle back together and get a clearer picture of what happened to this plane and why it happened according to Wall Dock.

Finding out what caused one accident is the first step in preventing another, the main purpose we do. Investigations are about trying to find out what happened and why it happened and once we've done that we can change things and try to improve the rest of the system. It's an expensive way to learn, but it's usually one of the most impressive. learn and we get the point pretty well that way, every detail of the wreck is painstakingly duplicated right down to the flames. If the crash site is on fire, it is crucial to determine whether the flames started in the air or on the ground, a plane that burns and then crashes shows a different pattern than a plane that crashes and then burns a fire that ignites during flight generally burns hotter than an impact fire because it is fanned by strong wind according to Wall Doc pre-impact fires leave a distinctive signature one of the What we look for when considering pre-impact fire versus fire post impact is evidence that the metal was hot when it hit the ground, right in this area of ​​the engine bay on the left side, you see a little bit of feathering aluminum to get that aluminum.

To sweep up straw or feathers, that metal has to be close to its melting point and right here we see a little bit of evidence that that process has occurred that tells us that we had a pre-impact fire in this left engine compartment, less than 7% of Fires occur on impact, but when they do they make the job of investigators much more difficult when rescuers put out the flames, the force of the water spray moves the parts a considerable distance and the fire in Yes, it can destroy valuable evidence. The fire will tend to get rid of our physical body. evidence that we are looking for, for example, fatigue in a metal structure, if the plane caught fire when it hit the ground, it will tend to erase that evidence and burn it, and fire is one of the worst things we can do at the time.

The fire at the crash site in Canada was just the first of many challenges investigators faced. The burn patterns demonstrated that the fire was the result of the impact, not the cause of it. Lead investigator Roger Ayotte remembers the scene where the plane crashed about 1,500 feet away. The airport and crash site itself were not particularly large. The plane hit the ground at quite a high speed and the destruction was considerable and certainly not evident when we arrived at the crash site, but what the problem had been when we arrived. When we began examining the wreckage, we realized that the plane had, in fact, hit the ground inverted because the engine positions were changed on the ground.

Hayat and his team reasoned that fog could have played a role, but only a minor one; the pilots were too experienced in the collision. - fast and furious the devastation - complete among the charred rubble investigators located the flights black boxes still bolted to the tail their bright orange exteriors were camouflaged with soot perhaps the boxes would reveal what happened they were flown to the headquarters of transportation safety board in Ottawa for analysis At the lab, black box expert Michael Poole and computer analyst Bob Hoyle were stunned to discover that the flight data recorder should have been an electronic device that captured most of the plane's mechanical functions on magnetic tape or microchip, instead it was an outdated and unauthorized model.

Invented in 1951, its use had been banned in many countries. Instead of electronic circuits, the Box used a stylus to record information on a moving roll of aluminum foil. Well, the flight data recorder on this airplane was an old design, it was a foil type recorder, which is a sheet of metal that has five parameters inscribed on the sheet and of those five headings, which is a key parameter , it didn't actually work, so we actually only had four parameters and in contrast to today's modern aircraft which have five 600 parameters per second, there's obviously a big difference here, so we had a data logger very limited flight.

The data from those loggers also have very poor resolution and it takes a long time to extract the information from these foil type loggers. At one time, the foil recorder was a technological advance because it could survive impact and fire. Now its primitive functioning threatens research to find some meaning in the scratches on aluminum foil. He scanned them into a computer. Perhaps modern technology would give him a hand to his predecessor Coyle was able to sharpen and focus the information from the rough edges enough to interpret the FDR showed that the plane flew a steady course towards the trees at more than 200 miles per hour but a marking indicated something strange a sudden increase in speed just before the plane crashed the information was incomplete and contradictory why a plane in the middle of an aborted landing suddenly plunges into the puddle of dirt and his colleagues searched for an explanation on the cockpit voice recorder, only to find more contradictions, the pilot told the co-pilot that they were going to abort the landing, he turned around and tried again.

In the background tape, the engines roared at

full

power, which was consistent with a climb but was not consistent with the final unsettling exchange between pilot and co-pilot. The transcripts indicate that the co-pilot began to notice that the plane was losing altitude. First we listen to the voice recorder. It was quite disconcerting because the crew had initiated a missed approach. They were starting to turn around. We could hear the engine power increasing. They were asking for the train to go up. They were asking for the flaps to go up. starting to climb and for some reason the plane went from a climb to a descent and crashed very quickly, so this was quite disconcerting and that's where we really started to focus on why this plane that should have been able to fly should have gone out.

It has been a big problem transitioning from a climb to a descent and upon hitting the ground, the black boxes only gave vague clues that they contained, none of the hard data that the data set expected from them, conveyed the bad news to their companions. Investigators, the gaps left by the primitive data logger would have to be filled manually. A team of nearly a dozen forensic aviation specialists would have to engage in hard, old-fashioned detective work. Fortunately, they had an arsenal of sophisticated tools to help them. The first step was to determine whether the damaged engine was the cause of the accident or the result of it, so investigators relied on engineering services specialist John Garstang.

As part of the investigation at the site of theaccident, we saw that the right engine was severely damaged and disintegrated in order to understand if this damage occurred. in flight or on the ground as a result of an impact on the ground, we had to know how the plane broke up, that's where we used the information from the tree along with the attitude in which it hit the ground to determine the breakup sequence. Garstang specializes in getting clues from places investigators can't go such as treetops. He mounted a stereoscopic camera on a helicopter and took 3D photographs of the damaged trees.

He used these photos to determine the angle at which the plane hit the forest this is the crash site the red The dots are fragments of the wreckage of the plane that initially descended through the forest starting here. All the black spots are trees that have been damaged, most of which were cut down by the plane. He then created a model showing the plane's trajectory as it passed through the trees. He showed that the plane was level when it hit the treetops. Both engines should have been in place keeping the plane balanced. The swaying did not occur until after hitting the trees.

Garstang concluded that the engines were engaged at the time of impact. He now had to see if they were. Correctly making erratic movements in the plane's final flight path could indicate an engine problem, but because FDR didn't have the data Garstang needed, he had to devise a clever way to reconstruct the plane's movements. He made a map showing the locations of witnesses when they heard the plane. We used the location of the witnesses on the ground and by triangulating from where they are to where they saw the plane or heard it we were able to determine that the general flight path was in an arc like this that We approached the airport in this direction and finally the plane crashed here.

Witnesses determined that the flight showed no signs of trouble and provided Garstang with other useful information. Initially we heard that the witnesses heard noises or sounds like a WoW appealing tone that made us wonder if it is possible that there was a problem with the engine or with the propeller and at the accident site we were missing parts and there is extensive damage to the right engine which initially led us to try to focus on that area to see if it was an area of ​​concern that engine problems are often the cause of small aircraft accidents to see if it was behind this accident.

Chief analyst Bill Taylor dissected the damaged engines. When we're doing engine research and taking them apart, there are two or three things we're looking for. because, first of all, we want to see if there has been a mechanical failure in the engine, which is most apparent, most obvious and the easiest to do; the second is to look for evidence of the power level, which is very useful in an accident investigation and then to simply find out if the engine was producing full power; it may be running but running at a low level, idling as you might say, gives an indication again of what was available to the crew at the time if the engine was at full power when it crashed.

It would have the scars from its moving parts when they hit the engine body. The deep marks indicated that the engines were at high power. The large amount of dirt and debris absorbed by the impact confirmed that finding Taylor gave the engines a clean bill of health, he determined. The surprising sounds heard by witnesses were normal engines. Sounds bouncing off the rough terrain would have to look elsewhere for answers. Checked the landing gear was also working. It was almost retracted at the time of the accident consistent with the procedure for an aborted landing so far. The plane appeared to be in perfect working order so that no clues emerged, the investigators were blocked, but was it possible that something was prompting the pilot to land quickly and take risks?

Could he have been running out of fuel? John Garstang used infrared photography to discover that what we have here on the left is a conventional color. photograph of the forest and on the right is what in conventional photography is known as near-infrared photography the fuel mixes with the natural shadow, but in a near-infrared film photograph the fuel spray appears as a dark spot, records as if The weight and balance gave us a good indication of what the fuel quantities should be and we used the infrared images to confirm that there was a sufficient amount or a large amount of fuel printed at this time.

We have the ground vehicle here, to the left of the right wing, and you can see a general area of ​​discoloration where the fuel was sprayed and there was a fire on the ground and broken branches. The photographs revealed that the plane arrived at the airport with fuel. To avoid another dead end for investigators by all indications Flight 70 should never have crashed, but it did and until investigators discovered why the tragedy could repeat itself, the lingering question remained after aborting the landing why the pilot It would begin to ascend and then sink into the ground. Engineer Jim Foots checked the accuracy of the plane's instruments.

Maybe they were lying. We look. on the instruments and which leads to looking at the phases of the dial and the internal mechanisms of the instruments because, again, not all FDRs record all the parameters, so we can look at the instruments and sometimes get information from the dial of the dial, like the pointer hitting the gear. damage to the train and will tell us what that actual system was doing at the time of impact. If the impact was severe enough, the pointer would hit the dial face and leave a mark; even if the pointer was lost, the telltale mark would remain on most instruments. were destroyed beyond recognition only the altimeter survived and showed that the plane's altitude setting was right where it should have been the pilot should have known how close to the ground he was once again the solution remained elusive but Foot had his suspicions if the plane was going A warning system should have alerted the pilot unless the warning system itself was defective.

He directed his attention to the warning lights. Light bulb filaments can tell a lot about the conditions at the time a plane crashes. Well, we do light bulb analysis even if the aircraft has an FDR or CVR if the FDR gives us an indication that there was a problem, a warning, then we can look at the light bulbs and say yes, this light was on and the pilot had a warning or caution light. A light bulb that comes on when it is broken reacts very differently than a light bulb that is off. It's easy for the trained eye to spot the difference.

What we are looking at here are the filaments and what we are looking for with the filaments is the deformation, as seen here, total unwinding. of the filament, indicating a hot or illuminated filament when impacted, unlike a lamp that was unlit or cold at the time of impact, where we only have a straight, brittle fracture in the foot. None of Flight 78's 37 surviving warning light bulbs were found to have been on but that didn't necessarily mean all was well with the ship still searching for clues. Investigators again focused on the position of the aircraft as they attempted to abort the landing.

Perhaps the plane's nose was tilted too steeply at an angle. Air cannot slide easily over the surface. wings the plane stops and falls from the sky to discover a flight of 70 seats investigators would have to get into the pilot's seat whatever happens to the Sky link flight 70k mwow thwarted now investigators had to reconstruct the tragedy the system to avoid The stall in this type of aircraft was notoriously relentless, giving the pilot very little warning before a stall at low altitude. The difference between stall and crash and life or death is just seconds to see if the pitch or angle of the plane in the air would cause a stall the investigators needed to reconstruct their final moments, for that they needed a flight simulator, they entered all the data they collected along with the pilot's commands from the voice recorder, the simulator would combine these disconnected clues into a close estimate of the position of the plane, we knew what the altitude and speed of the plane were.

The plane was at the beginning of the missed approach. We also knew when they added the power, when they retracted the landing gear, and when they retracted the flaps, so we could go into the simulator and use the parameters that were available in the flight data. recorder and fly the airplane according to those parameters and then through that process determine what the pitch attitude of the airplane was if the pitch was too steep the airplane would have stalled and then crashed, but that was not What happened, the simulator showed the plane pitching. After tireless examination of the plane, investigators were finally able to rule out mechanical failure.

They only had one more place to find answers with the man in the cockpit to determine if he was human. The mistake was the culprit. Roger Ayotte needed to get into the pilot's head once we had eliminated the possibility of any mechanical malfunctions of the aircraft and that was probably a couple of months into the investigation and then we were able to focus all our efforts on the operational and performance aspects. human nature of the accident, while one type of investigators looks for physical clues, another looks for psychological clues. Black box expert Mike Poole created a voiceprint that converts emotion into an image, and human performance researchers Ron Coleman and Beth McCullough were hired to study it.

To explore what was going on in the pilots' minds, they examined his last words, so his first response was a casual, yeah, okay, no big deal. The second is very anxious when the co-pilot alerted the pilot that they were descending, the pilot responded calmly. a simple "ok" McCullough felt there was a lot more going on than the first playthrough led them to believe, but if you have someone next to you obviously expressing concern and with a fairly agitated voice, then you start to wonder and that might be Your first question is is this captain either very calm about the situation, has it completely under control, or is he unaware of the seriousness of the situation.

The first thing we noticed was the anxiety in the co-pilot's voice as he pronounced the second descent after that. I listened to the entire tape many times to try to determine the various operational issues that might have arisen or did arise and also some of the human performance issues that became clear just by listening to the voices, pauses, and voice hesitancy. recording Coleman and McCullough surmising that the pilot seemed unconcerned, oblivious to the fact that he was accelerating towards certain death, they ruled out suicide. Psychological profiles were normal. The investigation team suspected that the pilot was literally lost in the clouds.

I didn't know which direction he was up. and he did not trust his instruments or his co-pilot to clarify it. Did pilot error cause the accident? The team was close to finding out, but before they could, more tests were needed. Was the pilot of Flight 70 really disoriented in the fog? To illustrate what he might have experienced, Mike Poole compiled the data and produced an animated version of the fatal flight. Next to it he created an illusion plane. He relied on what human performance experts believed the pilot may have perceived. In order for the selected gears to go up, he asks for the flaps to be raised and the first officer has responded with the flaps going up halfway, covered by fog unable to see the runway, the pilot looks for visual clues outside his window in his efforts to orient himself.

He doesn't look at his gauges or pay attention to his co-pilots, he is referring to what we know and according to our operational investigators he suspects that maybe he is adjusting the throttles in the cockpit, maybe he is hunting from there with his flight director, he is in fog, you are maybe a little lost as to where exactly the clues are, my writers are to my left, so all these factors can distract you from the task of observing those instruments, the animation showed that the pilot did indeed confuse up With below, the condition is called soma a graphic illusion occurs when pilots are deprived of visual cues, instead relying on gut instinct.

Basically, the human body cannot tell the difference between a force through your stomach pushing against the back of your chair due to thrust due to acceleration on a track. for example, or the same force because you stand up and feel the effects of gravity pushing you back in the chair, although the pilot may have been operating under an illusion, the consequences of his actions were frighteningly real. TheResearchers returned to the simulator to experience Flight 70 fatal illusion themselves. A simulator is a great place to perform an illusion test because it is a machine that has been built to trick the eye and the mind.

In a simulator, you are in a building and obviously can't accelerate you down a track So, but they want to make you feel that, to achieve that what they do is you lean back in your chair and you feel the force of gravity on your chair and then they trick your visual senses by taking the horizon instead of what that you would normally do. you see it rise, they actually keep it level so your eyes think the horizons are level, you feel it forced through your stomach towards the back of the chair, that's the feeling of speeding down the track and that's essentially the illusion somatic graph taken by Roger Ayotte.

In the simulated fatal flight, all the data was entered and the horizon was removed so that you could feel the sensation as the pilot had, but you would fly under instrument flight rules or IFR, relying entirely on your gauges to know where you were. the plane relative to the ground is fine, this is the same approach that is done in IFR conditions, so you have to concentrate totally on your instrument so you can see that you have no visual references outside the cockpit with your view blocked, no I could tell if it was going up. or downward while accelerating but the gauges told him he was heading toward the ground.

The simulated flight showed that the pilot had fallen victim to the illusion that you can fly by the seat of your pants to a certain extent when you are in visual flight conditions and However, that is frequently done when you are in instrument flying conditions, so when you fly in fog or clouds or something like that, then you don't have those visual senses that you have when you fly visually the forces of movement in three dimensions can playing tricks on the mind the inner ear regulates balance and lets us know where we are but needs a visual reference it is extremely difficult to master the human instinct to rely on vision when flying but through sheer force of will a pilot can remain faithful to the instruments until his mind overcomes his body unfortunately the pilot of the cemani flight was not aware of the danger it takes a network of complex systems to keep a plane in the air it also takes a tangle of circumstances to make one crash Both Roselawn Indiana and Terrace British Columbia a combination of factors conspired against the plane dooming the passengers and crew, but on board the planes were the black boxes.

These indestructible witnesses, along with human ingenuity, determined what went wrong when surviving an accident. Black boxes allow us to prevent countless other tu