The Air Africa Congo Halloween Crashtacular of 1996 | Episode 94

Take the most frightening death that you can imagine, and then double it, then double it again, and then add fire. This is our Halloween episode, and by the time we're done, your favorite horror movie will have all of the impact of a baby food commercial. I'm not saying you'll never sleep again. I'm not saying it, but I am apologizing in advance, and I remind you that a doomsday barfag is only an email away. Hello, and welcome to Doomsday History's most Dangerous podcast. Together, we are going to rediscover some of the most traumatic and on inspiring but largely unheard of or forgotten disasters from throughout human history and around the world. On today's very special Halloween episode. Get ready to endure the most gore laden story that we have told in a long time. You'll get a pretty vivid sense of why airlines from the Congo are considered at the top of the list for most dangerous in the world. You'll learn how little stopping power a chainlain fence truly provides against something the size of a building and twice as fast as a train. And you'll see just how much of an impression twin fifteen foot tall horizontal lawnmower blades can make on the human body and then will make it worse. And if you were listening on Patreon, you would learn how the fall of the USSR made irradiating your least favorite city easier than ever. You would learn how the former King of Belgium, of all places, preemptively tried to out Hitler Hitler, and you would hear about how cargo made aim military flight in Afghanistan. Basically, do a skateboard trick into the ground. This is not the show you play around kids, or while eating, or even in mixed company. But as long as you find yourself a little more historically engaged and learn something that could potentially save your life, our work is done. So with all that said, shoot the kids out of the room, put on your headphones and safety glasses, and let's begin a happy holiday. Greetings to you, my bloodthirsty listeners. It's a spooky time of year, and this is a show that occasionally knows how to scare. So, however, shall we honor the season and mark the occasion by we're visiting an episode that I shelved five years ago, all the way back in the first year of this show. This is a story so awful and horrific that I honestly thought at the time it cause what little audience I had to abandon the show in droves. And here we are five years later, and be warned, we are about to explore what may very well be the most disturbing tale we have ever explored, at least from an injury point of view. So throw some candy at the kids, grab something non water soluble to potentially throw up in. And remember all those things I told you about fondling your parasympathetic nervous system from our last episode. This never intended to be heard. Episode begins now, and to begin today's story, we are returning once again to the Motherland Africa. Actually, our story oddly begins in far off, faintly haunted Moscow, Russia. Sorry about that. When the Soviet Union kurploded back in nineteen ninety one, everything that they took for granted flew out the window like leaves in a cold wind. And it was enough just to make sure people weren't able to just u haul away a bunch of leftover nuclear arms. There was an entire world of resources thrown to the wind, and not just things people professionals skills. When the Soviet Union gasped its last breath, there were as many as nine thousand planes and about six hundred thousand pilots and support and maintenance staff suddenly unemployed. Everybody and their brother seemed to have a cup and a will adjust flight trim for food. Sign A lot of those people went private and were able to find something to feed themselves, but not everybody. A lot of them had to look further afield for work. Now. The Kremlin had had its fingers in pies all around the world. They'd supported anti colonial movements and leftist governments across Africa, and many African countries were facing their own headaches. Without getting into it, for their governments to say that keeping on top of civil wars and arms trafficking and humanitarian crises was unreasonably difficult really paints the situation with a forgiving brush. For today's crisis, we are returning to the very heart of Africa, the Congo, and we've actually been here once before. You may remember. On August twenty fifth, twenty ten, we boarded a fill air Let L four ten, flying from the capital of Kinshasa with several stopovers in Kiri and Pokoru and Samendwa and Bandudu along the way. About four stops into our flight, it turns out that one of the passengers had smuggled a live crocodile, all folded up in his carryon onto the plane. After unlipping itself from the bag with its teeth, it escaped, which led to an immediate panic, which drove the passengers running and screaming towards the front of the plane. Once they were all inside the cockfit, the pilots became helplessly pinned against the controls by the mass of humanity trying to now hide with them, which drove the flight sharply into the ground, while actually it landed on a house, But you get my point. We covered this tail in all its glorious detail a few years back, and incredibly, of the twenty one people on board, one survived to tell the tale, and the crocodile reportedly also survived the crash until rescuers arriving at the scene mauschedied it to death. And we haven't been back to the Congo since, but we are about to change that. Some call it the Green Inferno, but for our purposes we'll be calling it Zaire and I'll explain that in a bit. Back then in the nineteen nineties, for the Zyrean government, keeping tabs and control over remote areas of endless forest was laughably difficult, and in environments where formal systems don't really work, darker markets tend to spring up, and that included the aviation industry. African states like Angola and Zayer needed qualified pilots to pick up the slack that national airlines dropped. Transporting of people and goods was in heavy demand, and sometimes weapons or random military cargo just don't ask. Let's just say if you had a plane and knew what all the controls were called, you were sitting pretty for some pretty solid and lucrative freelance work. As long as you were sober enough to pilot an older Soviet airframe or cargo plane, and you were willing to fly in sketchy conditions in and out of what they euphemistically called low infrastructure airstrips, there was a paycheck waiting for you. Pilots from Russia and other former Soviet states flooded the area, and two things you need to know about this kind of work. First, it was sketchy. Like we said, sometimes you'd be hauling legitimate cargo like food or mining equipment or fuel, and sometimes maybe something a little more dubious, stuff that explodes, stuff that makes other people explode, explosives, projectiles, you know that kind of stuff. And second, it was dangerous. Your chances of dying in a plane crash in this part of the continent was roughly twenty five times higher than in Europe. Case in point. In May of two thousand and three, an Illusian seventy six was flying after takeoff from Conshasa when its rear cargo hatch failed and opened at seven thousand feet and one hundred and fifty passengers fell out. Safety restrictions in Sub Saharan Africa are perfectly strict, but without the regulators to enforce them. Because of that, oil leaks and duct tape panels and worn out tires, maybe cockpits filled with empty vodka bottles were all on the table. The most common cause of accidents weren't mechanical. They were because of overloading. Planes in this part of the world were only considered loaded when there was just no more room to be had. In December of two thousand three, an entire Boeing seven twenty seven plunged into the ocean off the coast of Benin. The pilots initially refused to fly altogether because of overloading, until the ground crew told them that they'd unloaded luggage to reduce their weight while they lied, and one hundred and thirty nine people died because of it. The politics of Zaire in the mid nineteen nineties were described as brittle. Its leader was a man named Oobutu sesse Seiko, and I don't want to speak out of school, but as leaders go, he was deeply corrupt and everybody knew it. Back in nineteen sixty, the country was called Congo and it had just gained full independence from Belgian rule. Joseph Kasavubu became president and Patrice Lumumba became Prime minister. Worth pointing out that Congo has both a president and a prime minister. The president was the head of state. They were in charge of the army and foreign policy, while the Prime Minister was the head of government. They ran all the day to day with parliament. This was a lofty arrangement that had been designed to provide balance and prevent corruption, and it worked. Just fine right up until Mobutu snuck in through a coup, suspended parliament, banned all other political parties at the end of a gun, and placed the country under military rule. He had been born Joseph Desiree Mobutu, but now that he was strutting around the capitol like Darth Vader, he changed his name to Mobutu sesse Seko Cuku Nvendu wa Zabanga. He was the one responsible for changing Congo's name to Zai, and he would run the country for the next three decades, becoming one of the richest people on earth until the next guy rolled in on top of a tank and kicked his ass out. But let's not get ahead of ourselves. Babutu had a real hands off attitude around infrastructure. Oversight over things like aviation and customs and border control was fairly awful, but the United Rebels of Angola didn't mind. The who the Unaio Nacional para Indepenzia total de Angola. And you're probably asking, was that Portuguese will pronunciation aside, Yes, and that was part of the problem. UNIA had been formed as an anti colonial movement against the Portuguese rule and had been taking potshots at the government of Angola just across the border. For twenty years, and Zayre had become one of their favorite supply roots. US government would quietly buy weapons and vehicles from ex Soviet countries and then load them onto cargo planes headed for Angola, and Unita would pay them with blood diamonds. I couldn't tell you how much the pilots or operators actually knew about exactly what was happening on their watch, But a paycheck's a paycheck. Official flight plans might list car parts en route to some domestic destination, but it might very well be flamethrowers on their way to the front lines of Angola. Speaking of earning a paycheck, today, we will be flying aboard a Russian made Antonov A and thirty two B ferrying cargo from Endolo Airport here in the capital of Conchasa, two hundred and seventy miles or three hundred and seventy five kilometers east southeast to Kahemba, over the border with Angola. The An thirty two B is a Soviet built military style turboprop transport plane slash flying workhorse with a very rugged utilitarian look. Perfect for getting into short air strips and built to survive rough landings. Imagine a large twin engine cargo truck with roof mounted wings. I don't want to call the engines here huge, so let's just say they're impossible to ignore. The A N thirty two B held too massive of Chenko AI twenty series turboprop engines, and they were mounted right into the wings and held up by landing gear so cartoonishly long they looked like stilts. This configuration helps keep the propellers clear of the air field, which gives the A N thirty two B a big eared appearance. It is just shy of five Dodge caravans long that's twenty three meters or seventy five feet, and had an even larger wingspan of about twenty nine meters or ninety five feet or six Dodge caravans wide, and altogether the thing is as tall as a three story building. It was designed to seat fifty, but much like a Dodge caravan Stowe and go feature, with the seats removed, it could stow six to seven tons of cargo. It has a big ramp that opens at the back like the mouth of a whale, so cargo just gets driven straight into the fuselage. If you can picture it, you could think of it like a C one thirty hercules, smaller cousin, and it's not shiny or aerodynamic like a passenger jet. The exterior is coated in lots of rivets and squared edges. Kind of makes it feel a bit like a flying recreational vehicle. How this specific plane ended up in the Congo isn't clear, but a lot of old Soviet gear like this were being sold for scrap for pennies on the ruble in the Middle East and Africa, usually by the same newly unemployed people who still held the keys. Our plane officially belonged to Moscow Airlines. It was a subsidiary of Aeroflot, that's basically Russia's biggest airline. Moscow Airways leased it to a Belgian company that happened to be the sales agent for Skybe Airlift, which was a Congolese airline partially owned by President Mobutu, and then they turned around and leased it to Air Africa, which was another obscure Congolese airline intended for flights in and out of Zayir. They don't even give these things flight numbers, they just refer to the tail number for identification tail number r A twenty six two twenty two to be exact. We don't know if Moscow Airlines knew what their plane was being used for, or even if they knew where it was. And they say the reason they like this level of complexity and confusion around ownership was in the event that anything ever went wrong, it would be hard to know who to blame. This plane had been wet least to Air Africa. If you've never heard of the term, it basically meant that they were leasing the plane and the crew to fly it. It's a little like leasing a car are along with a private driver. Let's all take a deep breath and suck in our guts because we're going to be squeezing in this. I should warn you as not a passenger flight, and the cabin has already been tightly tetrist with crates simply marked supplies. The plane was operating as a freighter and the only occupants other than us were six crew, four Russians, one Ukrainian and one Congolese man. Today we will be running cargo between Kinshasa and Kahemba like we said, Kinchasa is the capital and also the largest city in Zaire. It serves as the gateway between the interior of the country and the rest of the world. It's located in the western part of the country, on the south bank of the Congo River, directly across from Brazzaville. Then that's the capital of the Republic of the Congo. And I know that might sound confusing. The present day Democratic Republic of the Congo, which at the time of our visit were calling Zayre, and the Republic of the Congo are two separate countries that took their admittedly confusingly similar names from the river. They border and cher but one had been controlled by Belgium and the other was French. The history of name changes is long and messy and confusing, so we're gonna skip it. I will tell you this though. The Democratic Republic of the Congo or DRC or again Zaire where we are today, is the second largest country in Africa. It's about four times the size of France. It's almost as big as Greenland for crying out loud, and it sits basically in the very heart of the African continent. For five hundred years from the thirteen hundreds to the eighteen hundreds, this area had been called the Kingdom of Congo with a K. That was right up until eighteen eighty five, when King Leopold of Belgium sailed his at up the Congo River, started leaving toothbrushes and overnight bags around, and eventually took over and renamed it the Congo Free State. And when I say take over, what they called a humanitarian mission, historians called profoundly violent. Everything they did, they said, was to bring civilization to Central Africa. Those are his words, not mine. And they worked overtime to make sure that when they finally left, the Congo would be socially and economically and psychologically devastated. As many as ten million people were killed. And it sounds so barbaric that most people who know about this assumed that it happened hundreds of years ago. Well, they left the Congo in nineteen oh eight. Our flight today will be stick handled by two Russian pilots, Captain Nikolai Kazarin and Andre Guskov. Five years earlier. Kazarin had been a major in the Soviet Air Force, but the minute the Soviet Union collapsed, he lost his salary, his housing, everything, while his fellow pilots were selling their uniforms for food. Kazerin knew that Africa was the land of opportunity for men who could fly an Antonov or an Illusion or a Tupelev. Some pilots joined reputable flight and relief operations, but there was a lot more opportunity and a lot more money to be made in grayer operations. Nikolai found himself here in Zayre, flying from Moscow Airlines on least to a patchwork outfit called Air Africa Right, which was just one of dozens of cargo operators that kept the continent moving. Nikolai and his co pilot, Andre Guskov carried paperwork borrowed from another company, Skybe Airlift. We told you about them too, and that paperwork technically cleared them to fly. Everything was a little loosey goosey as far as legal issues and clearances went, but this it was perfectly normal. Sayre's aviation authority was on a different level. Case in point, and I'd never heard this term before, but smoothing your clearance to depart sometimes required facilitation payments, which is a pretty interesting way to say bribe. I mean no one cared. Our story takes place January eighth, nineteen ninety six. Sitting on the runway ready for departure. Our Antonov is squatting low on her gears, dipping a little deeper with every new pound of cargo, and then again when we were fueling up to carry it all. And that is really the thing about planes. You need fuel to carry the weight. And the more weight you add, the more fuel that you need, which adds more weight, which requires more fuel. And you see where I'm going with this. The heavier the plane, the heavier the plane needs to be, and the harder it is to get off the ground. And it's possible that we're just a smidge heavy. But Captain Kazarin had experienced everything from Siberia and tundra to African dust storms, and dropped into places where the runway set in quotes, was little more than a clearing in the trees. They say that the runway at Endola was fairly poorly maintained and lined with wrecked planes and riddled with potholes. But if anyone was going to pull off a simple take off, Kazarin was our man. The runway was about seventeen hundred meters or fifty five hundred feet long. But have you ever heard of a displaced threshold? That basically means the starting line is moved up for safety reasons, so you don't actually get to start from the furthest end of the available runway. Ndolo was a single runway airport sitting right in the heart of Conshasa's urban sprawl. Not long after King Leopold finally left in nineteen twenty five, Belgian war hero Adminri made the first direct flight between the two countries, and to celebrate the Belgian Airlines, Sabina started building up the site with hangars and offices and buildings that remained there ever since. And the thing was, after that, Kinshasa continued to grow around it, and Endola did not grow with it. It couldn't. That's the problem with urban airports. In the nineteen fifties, in Jili, International was built well outside the city so it could grow to its heart's content. It had a runway so long it was designated by NASA as an emergency landing strip for thus Space Shuttle. That's about eight hundred Dodge caravans long to Endolo's three hundred and thirty five, so with Jili taking international flights, Endolo was left to handle smaller planes and charters and military flights. Endolo sat like a ribbon of concrete hemmed in by the city. On all sides. It was surrounded by neighborhoods and warehouses, and there was even an open air market crouched just across from the end of the runway. Who knows, maybe we'll visit it. The market was called Simba Zadiki and it was located in one of the busiest parts of the city. Vendors set up stalls offering everything you can imagine produce fabric, bolts, housewares, bootleg albums, dental implants, goats, you name it. People ran produce in wheelbarrows through narrow alleys between corrugated iron sheeted stalls with tarps overhead to block the sun and the rain. Women balanced heavy baskets full of fruit or fish, or soda bottles or who knows what on their heads while vendors hawked the crowds shouting out would be customers, while music poured out of a hundred radios, and your nose is assaulted by every kind of cooking smoke possible. There's children running around in music playing and a competing labyrinth of smells and yells and probably sea shells. It's a busy, busy place. There's got to be a few thousand people walking around, and every now and then everything would come to a quick stop and everyone would kind of duck as a prop plane would cut low across their heads before lifting into the sky or making a landing. Not far away, the market had grown around the airport fence for decades, and you might think, doesn't that seem dangerous? Well, all I'll say is that an airport does not make the best neighbor. Meanwhile, at the far end of the airstrip of said airport, our Antonov An thirty two B sat idling on the tarmac. She crouched like an old man with bad knees. They could tell she would be using every inch of the runway today. The An thirty two B had taxied in a position, lining her nose with the centerline of the runway and ready to go. With the throttles pushed forward, the massive engines spooled up, screaming and kicking up dust behind them. Both engines produced over five thousand horse power of thrust, straining to begin the takeoff roll, and the only thing holding them in place were the brakes, which Kazarin now released. The Antonov crept and accelerated sluggishly. They used the rudder pedals to keep them on the centerline as they rumpled down the runway, building up speed by the second. The control column quivered and shook as they passed V one v one, or rotation speed for the As they passed V one v one or rotation speed for the A M thirty two B is around two hundred kilometers or one hundred and twenty miles per hour. It's what they call the decision speed. It's the point in any takeoff where an airplane reaches a critical speed where bailing on the takeoff is no longer going to work out for you. Getting up to the speed had taken longer than they might have light. The engine screamed, and the city skyline and the Zimba Zidiki market rushed closer and closer, faster and faster. Because Aaron pulled back gently on the stick to lift them off the ground, but the Antonov refused to climb, they had to keep going. The pilots were doing the math and came up with a terrible moment of realization they were not going to make it. No one could agree exactly how high off the ground the plane got, but it wasn't nearly enough. As the vehicle met the end of the runway, the left landing gear struck an earth and embankment and collapsed. This brought the aircraft down hard, slamming violently against the ground, which then caused the aircraft to yaw and skid. Whatever directional control it had left was gone. The only thing standing between them and the Symbazidiki market were a couple of chain lank fences, some gravel, a roadway, and a lot of very surprised drivers, and all of that did very little to slow them down as they entered the market place, and what happened next was one of the most deadly and disturbing moments in the history of powered flight. The plane began sliding through the marketplace. It destroyed stalls and vehicles, literally everything in its path. At over two hundred kilometers an hour, the left wingtip contacted the ground, partially separating and skithing the legs off everything in its path. Everything it touched turned into a blizzard of flying wood and sheet metal and bone. You name it. The collapse landing gear put extreme torsional stress on the fuselage in the wings, and then the front collapsed, turning the nose of the plane into a battering ram that exerted the same equivalent slap of a small nuclear bomb. It turned everything it touched into a blizzard of flying wood and sheet metal and car parts. But it hit a lot more than stalls and cars. Any individual in its path would absorb tens of thousands of meetons of force and be instantly accelerated to twice the speed of a train. Every soft tip issue in the body would rupture simultaneously in some kind of order. The skull would likely explode on impact, and the rest of the body would be segmented, reduced to the consistency of cat food, and then thrown. The nicest way to say it is they would experience an unsurvivable blunt force compressive trauma, resulting in traumatic amputations and catastrophic disruption of the body. They call it polytrauma. That's where every system of your body is injured at the same time. In this case, they literally explode and any extremity or bone separates from the body and becomes its own projectile, again accelerated to two hundred kilometers an hour. Then you start to get your secondary impacts, as the let's call them bio segments make targets of those not directly injured by the plane. To make things worse. As it skidded, the belly and tail section begin to rip apart, peppering the crowd with high velocity shrapnel and debris which fanned out in a wide slicing spread. You ever heard of the Kessler syndrome. This describes something called collisional cascading. It's this idea that where a satellite, for example, blows up, and the debris starts to impact other satellites. They blow up and create more debris, which destroys more satellites, and on and on, And it's the same idea here, but with severed limbs. The human body was not designed to catch one hundred pounds of frisbeeing sheet metal or a car hood or a plane tire, and the market had been densely crowded, mostly with women and children, which made avoiding the racing plane all but impossible for most, but not for lack of trying. So imagine being borne down on by a machine as tall as a three story building, traveling hundreds of miles an hour, watching as the nose catches people unaware, like insects on the front of a car, and each new addition is immediately rendered unrecognizable with mutilation injuries one after another. Contact with the body of the plane, the gear struts, and the wheels imparted crush injuries and skeletal fractures in all that it touched. People who had been run down under the massive wheels were left with cartoonish tire indentations on their bodies. And would it, by any chance peak your interest to learn that this disaster has barely begun. It's about to get a little upsetting. I have to remind you that on either side of the plane sat a four bladed spinning propeller and at maximum throttle, spinning at close to eleven hundred rotations per minute. That means that whatever they touched was sliced eighteen times per second, and not just that they were fifteen feet across spinning as a circular disc, racing towards you like lawnmower blades, spinning as fast as they are mechanic able to. They're only three feet off the ground, more than low enough to interact with people and vehicles and structures and everything. Direct contact with the propellers led to profound lacerations, amputations, and dismemberments. And you would be forgiving for thinking in your head that they would have appeared like slith, like deli sliced meat. But the forces being imparted were so powerful that they would have looked more like they had held a grenade. Those lucky enough to simply be sent flying by the rush of the impact and the wall of debris and the humanity building around the front of the plane still received spinal injuries, internal traumas, skeletal fractures, and skin removal from skidding unprotected at high speed along the ground. And here is the thing, This is not even the worst part of this disaster. You pull your face out of the thing you're yaking into and ask, how in the how five do you make this worse? Well, you set the whole thing on fire. As we said, the plane had been holding as much fuel as possible before takeoff, and it had not burned through even a fraction of a percent before all of this happened. It had been carrying as much as thirteen thousand pounds of aviation kerosene, which unleashed as the plane began breaking apart. They call it jet a and it is not the kind of thing that you want to get in your mouth or your eyes or a deep flapping cut. Jeta doesn't vaporize as easily as gasoline, which just means that at room temperature, it's harder to ignite. I say harder, but not impossible. As it erupted, a sudden, white orange flash swallowed everything in front of it, and people closest to the crash never had a chance. Those a little further away saw the air itself ignite and in a matter of seconds exposed. Skin blistered, and hair and clothing burst into flames. People inhaled fiery gases that burnt the airways as the wall of heat rolled over them, burning through clothes and skin in an instant. The roar of the fire would have been so loud it would have drowned out the panic of people pushing and fighting to flee, screaming for friends and children. The layout of the market was tight and not exactly evacuation friendly at the best of times, and now every direction was blocked by walls of flame and debris, which people tore at with their bare hands. Many collapsed before the flames even reached them. Many who survived the fire died within days from their burns or the poison in their lungs from the resulting infections, and of course the horrendous list of wounds and traumas we already talked about. The liquid itself doesn't even burn, it's the vapors that do so. From there, the heat from the flames keeps vaporizing more fuel, so once a fire starts, it sustains itself and just keeps spreading everywhere. And it's not the kind of stuff you're gonna put out with water. It needs special aircraft firefighting foam that coats everything to rob it of its oxygen. It's amazing stuff if you have it, which we don't. So imagine this building sized bulldozer with dual lawnmower blades bearing down and skidding towards you, engulfed in flames with a dense billowing trail of black smoke pouring out the back. And now you're engulfed in flames with a dense, billowing trail of black smoke pouring out of your back. Would you know what to do. There's not much I'm going to be able to tell you as far as best practices for surviving a full body crushing or skeletal explosion, but I can certainly give you best practices for triaging a deep slashing laceration injury from flying metal or glass or shrapnel, or coping with embedded or impaled debris you know, wood or rebar or aircraft parts. Okay, so you went to the market because you wanted new socks, but instead you have a deep, gaping slash wound, the kind of thing that's too ungainly to simply staple shut. First step in any situation like this is to make a lot of friends real fast, and then get the authorities on the phone. First practical step is to find the cleanest cloth or gauze or clothing that you can find, fold it into a pad, and then use it to apply direct pressure against the wound to slow or stop the bleeding, and keep it there no matter what people think. Once it's saturated with blood, you're supposed to change it out, but don't let up on the pressure. Just leave it there. If the wound is on a limb, you want to figure out how to elevate it above the heart. This also can help reduce bleeding. Survival very much depends on keeping your blood pressure up, which means keeping as much blood in your body as you can. As a last resort, if possible, you can use a makeshift tournique to tie the area a few inches above the wound to slow blood loss. The trick is to find that sweet spot between tying off. The area is tight enough to stop the bleeding, but not so tight that you start killing the surrounding tissue or limb by constricting blood flow. Remember, tourniquets are temporary. Ambulances are better once the wounds are stabilized. Make sure the victim is laying down. You want to try to keep them as warm and comfortable as possible under the circumstances, because you're going to try to keep them from slipping into shock. And it occurs to me most people don't even know what shock even is. When you see someone after an accident turn pale or cold, or breathing too quickly, If their skin starts to grow clammy, or they start to drift off or go quiet, that sounds like shock. Their blood pressure is crashing, which means their organs aren't getting enough oxygen rich blood, and their body is shutting down to keep their heart and brain alive. In many mass casualty events, as many as half of the people who die are from preventable shock. Oh but wait, what's that sticking out of your shoulder. While this is one of the most important rules about trauma, a foreign stabable could be plugging a major vessel, and removing it would lead to catastrophic bleeding. If it's on fire, blow it out. And if it's still doing that, don't you anything, Just pinch it to make it stop. But whatever it is, believe it be. Just stabilize it in place. It's kind of the same rules as packing a wound against bleeding. Instead you're patting and wrapping around the object to immobilize it, to keep it from moving around inside and creating even more damage. Of course, if the object is sticking out of your eye or your neck or your chest, you don't really want to put pressure on it. You just need to stabilize it lightly. If it is in the chain and you can hear air, then air is leaking from a lung into the surrounding space. You're gonna want to seal the area around the wound with anything airtight like plastic wrap would be perfect. You want to seal it almost completely, grosser not a chest wound is still gonna need to let some of that air escape or they could eventually suffocate. And I'm not getting into the whole thing. But in a disaster like Ndolo, the people who survived were the ones whose bleeding was controlled quickly. Bottom line is pressure saves lives, and if something is stuck in you look with your eyes, not your hands. Just leave it for the professionals. The plane only came to a stop after striking several buildings, leaving a path of obliterated market stalls and vehicles in its wake, and of course the hundreds of injured and unmoving bodies. Hundreds more lumbered dazed, struggling to understand what just happened. The combined aroma of jet fuel, burning produce and timber and plastics and human flesh was unforgettable. The cockpit of the plane was still partially intact. The Ukrainian and Congolese crew members they had died, but the four Russians were still alive. They were just trapped in the wreckage. Nikolay and Andre were able to escape, but the other two surviving Russians were never seen again. I mean they were seen, but they had had spontaneous cosmetic makeovers, if you follow my meaning. Rescue workers, soldiers and warndinary citizens clawed through the debris with bare hands to pull bodies out of the smoldering wreckage, but others did it with murderous intent. They were looking for the flight crew. Will never know exactly how many had been injured that day because so many had hobbled off or were driven away before rescue personnel arrived, and out of the hundreds and hundreds of bodies lined in rows on the street, only sixty six of them could be identified. Many were burned beyond recognition. Others had been torn to pieces, slashed, squished, viscerated. My point being they had been rendered unrecognizable and the recovery effort was pure nightmare fuel PTSD for everyone. Firefighters from the nearby Kinshasa Barracks and Indola Military Airport arrived quickly, but ordinary people were already using buckets of sand and whatever was at hand to beat back the flames. Victims were transported in everything from military trucks to taxis. To wheelbarrows to Mama Yemo Hospital which today is conshasa General and it was immediately overwhelmed. Two other hospitals took on the overflow of patients. And if only it had just been the patients. See. Family members and curiosity seekers had mobbed the accident seen right after, and no small number of them became immediately outraged and descended on the hospitals, looking to murder the surviving pilots, but they were met with police batons, which only added to the lengthy list of people injured that day, which surpassed five hundred. No one even knows how many people died that day. It has been quoted as high as three hundred and seventy. People across Conshasa mourned for days and the funerals stretched on for weeks, and they were all closed casket. So what happened, Well, we saw what happened, But why did it happen is the better question, and I can answer this on two levels. On the higher level, Sayer had been falling apart under Mobutu's rule while he was getting rich in his country and its infrastructure went ignored and crumbled all around him. People weren't getting paid so in order to survive. Everything became a hustle, and every everything became a little corrupt, and with Angola next door tearing itself apart with war, Zayer started slipping them weapons, and the aviation industry got sucked into the corruption, and Dolo Airport became something between an aerial taxi stand and the Contina from Star Wars. Airlines like Skybe started selling fake flight permits to smaller carriers like Air Africa, which means no one really knows what's what, which is a dangerous way to operate, and the kind of rules that make sure flights in other countries make it reliably from point A to point B got thrown out the window. This is a long roundabout way of saying everything was sketchy. Then there is the more practical, factual, distractable way of looking at it. The antonov An thirty two B weighs thirty seven thousand pounds empty, the maximum takeoff weight is fifty nine thousand, four hundred pounds, and witnesses commented on how grossly overweight our flight looked. Of course, the ground crew said otherwise, and we were most assuredly loaded down with weapons. We were overweight by almost six hundred pounds, which may not sound like a lot, but it was more than enough to make sure if a Halloween movie were ever made of this story, it would have the most over the top body count and would be so gory it would be banned in most countries. The zaire and government moved pretty quickly to a sign blame. The pilots were arrested and survived their hospital stay long enough to be charged with involuntary manslaughter. They admitted in court that they had borrowed clearance papers from Skybe and they could tell that the flight had been overloaded. Both men were found guilty and sentenced to two years in prison. Outrage aside, that was the statutory maximum. Air Africa, Moscow Airways and Skybe Airlift were ordered to pay the victim's families the equivalent of one point four million dollars. Moscow Airlines folded up shop later that same year. It took SKIBE two years to formally dissolve and legally wind down. You have to remember they were a much bigger organization and had a lot more to lose, and sure enough, they lost at all. The government followed up by putting a weight limit on planes coming in and out of Endolo. Nothing ridiculous, but enough to effectively ban heavy cargo flights. But for many in Conchasa, who only see spinning fan blades of blood every time they blink or try to sleep, these changes were too little, too late. The memory of that morning of the fire and the screams from the market never left. I mean, how could they? You only had to hear about it. Shortly after the disaster, President Mobotu was diagnosed with prostate cancer. Now don't clap, you're clapping for cancer. While he was off getting world class treatment in Switzerland, angry rebels swept through his country, and by rebels I mean an amalgam of troops from neighboring Angola and Rwanda, and Uganda and Burundi who each had reasons for being pissed at him for supporting death in Angola and then getting rich off it. Within a year, Mobutu's government was toast and the names IIRR was thrown in the trash with it. From that day forward, it became formerly known as the Democratic Republic of Congo. It took the fall of the Soviet Union and Angola in civil war, and one ill placed Congolese market place, all holding hands to make this horror possible. You could definitely question any city that allowed a public market right where a failed takeoff was going to land, and Nikolai Kazarin did. It would be easy to imagine him as just some arrogant Russian cold warrior who did his time and then left it all behind. But no, when he returned to Russia, he didn't hide from reporters. He could have blamed the Congolese cargo handlers and the system that rewarded risky behavior for making him do it, but he didn't. He accepted his part in the disaster. Reportedly, he thought about it a lot. He thought about the burnt out Antonov, He thought about other pilots and other parts of the world taking similar risks, and in his quieter moments, he thought about all the women and children that, because of him, never returned from the market that day. The Simbzidiki market was rebuilt, but it was never as long large or popular. Go Figure and Dolo remains in use today. Of course, only lighter aircraft visit it. It's become a shadow of its former self, and the city, just like a living jungle, grew even closer around it. As a result, like most crashes in the Congo, of which there have been plenty, no proper investigation was conducted. Russia wanted no part of it, and the NTSB wasn't invited because no Americans were involved. This disaster set three records of note. First, it was the worst plane crash ever recorded in the history of African aviation. They were supposed to fly three hundred and seventy five kilometers, but they only made it three hundred and thirty meters or just under one thousand feet. It also has been said to be the third deadliest plane crash in all of human history, and third is debatable, but not on this show. When American Airlines Flight eleven and United Airlines Flight one seventy five crashed into the World Trade Center in two thousand and one, it became the deadliest ground casualty aviation accident of all time, with two thousand, nine hundred and seventy seven killed. The term ground casualty refers to the people killed by the plane, but not on the plane. The thing is nine to eleven was a disaster, but it wasn't an accident. As a kind of a rule, I generally don't cover intentional acts of terrorism on the show, and terrible as it may be, nine to eleven was disastrous, but by my strict definition, it was actually mass murder. It was its intentionality that keeps it separated from every other episode that we've done. Our flight today was negligent homice side, and because of that, the Air Africa Congo crash tacular of nineteen ninety six, in all of its inglorious detail, remains the deadliest ground casualty disaster in the history of human aviation. So maybe you can see why I thought this story was a bit much for a fledgling audience to take in. Back then, I just thought it was gratuitous. But now, in the light of five years of atrocious body counts an unspeakable horror, it simply just checks the boxes for every type of anatomy based gore, just to a higher degree than we're used to doing it in the context of a Halloween episode, felt like the only real way to temper it. I actually started compiling this first episode on the show back in twenty sixteen, believe it or not, which means I've purposely shielded you from this story for nine years. It's one of those stories where everything it happened happened so quickly and it was just so awful. It might have been actually harder on the survivors than the victims. I have a friend who once came into close contact with a body that had been bisected just below the shoulders, and it took years for him to come to terms with it as well as he actually has. So imagine that multiplied by hundreds. If you've made it this far, I congratulate you, and I should probably make guys survive the doomsday Halloween episode. And all I got was this lousy T shirt shirts, And we will figure out T shirts, by the way. And in the meanwhile, now is as good a time as any to remind you that a personalized Doomsday farfag is yours for the asking. If you feel like this is the kind of thing you want to play on a loudspeaker outside your house to welcome tricker treaters this year, and you simply don't know what to do with all the money, you'll inevitably say by not having to hand out any candies at all, you've already shown a real talent for decision making, So why not consider becoming a supporter of the show at patreon dot com slash Funeral Kazoozoo. It doesn't ask much of you. I mean, the majority of supporters simply sign up make a small monthly donation to help keep the show that they love an Adore alive, and then they just kind of disappear. They get ad free episodes, and again, I am so so sorry about these ads. I don't actually have any control about how many they are, or their placement or their content. The only content control I have is the extra content that patreons receive, you know, all of the good stuff, and those donations are the entire reason that I have been able to do this show as often as I have over the last five years. Of course, as I always say, if you're into it, but you're not into a whole thing, you could always simply visit buy me a coffee dot com slash Doomsday, and just make a one time donation. And now I'd like to share a quick but very heartfelt shout out too, Monica Remicate, Johnny Wilkie foul On True Tas Matilda, Neilie Arnold, and Sebastian Bachman Dueling. Thank you all so much again. There is no show without you guys. You can reach out to me on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook as Doomsday Podcast, or fire us an email to doomsday Pod at gmail dot com. Older episodes can be found where if you found this one, and while you're there, please leave us a review and tell your friends. I always thank my Patreon listeners, new and Hold for their support and encouragement, but I also ask if you could spare the money and had to choose, to consider making a donation to Global Medic. Global Medic is a rapid response agency of Canadian volunteers offering assistance around the world to aid in the aftermath of disasters and crises. They're often the first and sometimes the only team to get critical interventions to people in life threatening situations, and to date they have helped over six million people across eighty nine different countries. You can learn more and donate at Globalmedic dot Ca. On the next episode, believe it or not, we are gonna kill way more people. Wait what, shut up? No, it's true, but it won't be nearly as graphic or grizzly because the majority will be vaporized. And this story takes place four hundred years ago, so you just know it's gonna be good. It's the Great Wangon Chain Armory disaster of sixteen twenty six. We'll talk soon. Safety goggles off, and thanks for listening.