The Asiana Airlines Disaster of 2013 | Episode 66

Fun fact, according to the National Transportation Safety Board, airplane accidents have a ninety five point seven percent survivability rate. This story actually has a ninety nine point zero two percent survivability rate. But for those that do die, well, you're going to want to limber up because you're going to be shaking your head. Hello and welcome to Doomsday History Most Dangerous Podcast. Together we are going to rediscover some of the most traumatic, bizarre, and onspiring but largely unheard of or forgotten disasters from throughout human history and around the world. On today's episode, you won't learn to fly a plane, but I'm confident I can teach you how not to fly one. We'll learn what happens when you go skydiving at ground level, and will learn about a victim who was killed by her own rescuers twice. And if you were listening to this on Patreon, you would also understand cannabis love hate relationship with a retailer legally called Crappy Tire. We'd see how Boeing became such an absolute fart of a company. We recapped the beloved Christmas tale Diehard Too. We explore the parallels between this disaster and airplane the movie, and you would be privileged to catch the world's first safety segment within a safety segment where we cover what to do if you survive a plane crash and the universe tried to final destination. You about it. This is not the show you play around kids, or while eating or even a 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, shoe the kids out of the room, put on your headphones and safety glasses, and let's begin. Sometimes I like to start these episodes by asking about you. I mean, not how are you or how are you holding up? But more often it's just a quizy you about something hateable, And in this case, I would like to know what your least favorite thing is about flying. About forty percent of people are afraid of flying, but only about five percent say they got it so bad they'd rather drive. There's just something about being flung through the sky at thirty five thousand feet above the dependable safety of solid ground, all while strapped into one hundred and fifty ton metallic tube, all powered by the kind of mechanical and aerodynamic sounding voodoo that some guy on a podcast briefly described one time, and it kind of sounded like birch. And that's just one thing not to like about it. When you hear people say it's more about the journey than the destination, Well, if there was a way that I could be medically sedated, cello wrapped, and then just delivered to my destination with no living memory of the journey, I check that box. I'm six foot two and I have spent more than my fair share of time trying to rest my eyes on my knees, and seventy five percent of people claim that seating and the lack of leg room is their least favorite thing. And by those same statistics, twice as many people would welcome being captive by and listening to a screaming child the entire flight than have the person in front of them recline their seat. I actually had to double check that stat My local theater has reclining leather couches, but airlines are looking at ways to have us sit on a kind of standing bicycle seat with a second row of human asses available at eye level. I'm not even joking. You can look it up, and most people would say that, hands down, the worst thing about flying is customer service, worse than actually nose diving into a mountain, because statistically those kinds of incidents are impossibly rare, while getting screwed over by an airline feels almost like a promise. You can have all the cramped seats, screaming children, delays, cancelations, sleeping on terminal floors, the jet lag, the lost luggage, and all the low rent, flavorless in flight meals in the world, but none of it compares to bad customers service. I myself have been put out of pocket thousands of dollars by Air Canada without so much as a sorry about that. Hey, and I promise you mark my words. In the next ten years, I can see major airlines requiring you to sign a non disclosure agreement with your boarding passes. You know what you don't hear often on a flight laughter? I love laughter. I wouldn't do a show where people die as terribly as I do if I didn't. And when I get an email telling me that someone choke, laugh, cough the piece of food out of their nose, hear me when I say this, it is better than hearing my kids say I love you. Psychologically, laughter triggers the release of endorphins in the brain, which are good at overwriting and breaking the spell of anxiety or fear, even if only temporarily. And nervous laughter it's often involuntary. It's like a part of our ancient cave people approach to social conditioning. I was taught that primates laugh because it lets others know subconsciously that some perceived anxiety or danger it isn't real. Everything's okay. And ever since then, when I see people smiling and laughing, my first thought is, hey, what's so funny? But my second thought is invariably that these are simple hominids making noise and showing their teeth to communicate at a distance that they're not afraid of something. And as much as I can't imagine people bursting at laughing at funerals or accident scenes or court proceedings, it still does happen. And I only bring it up because fair warning, by the time you finish this episode, we are going to test the appropriateness of your sense of humor. You'll see. We'll begin our story today in Seoul, the capital of South Korea, The best way to describe it is it's like living in the future. Soul is a global technological hub. It's a place that seamlessly blends a vibrant future escape with skyscrapers dotting a skyline right alongside its rich cultural heritage and historic palaces. The fashions, the street foods, the K pop music. I know a lot of places like to say that they are twenty four hour cities, but this is legit. The first independent airline in South Korea was Asiana Airlines. It's been around since nineteen eighty eight, offering regular passenger and cargo service to more than eighty destinations across twenty six different countries across Asia, North America, Australia and Europe. Its mission statement was maximum safety and customer satisfaction through service, and they backed that up with awards for being the best airline for on board service and flight attendants for eight years in a row. Look at it this way. The first review of the airline I read was a glowing four out of five star review where the only downside was that their luggage had been obliterated in some kind of accident, but the onboard service was just so good Asiana Airlines has a fleet of forty five wide body airlines, including the Boeing Triple seven. The Triple seven is the world's largest twin engine jet and one of the most popular. They rolled into service in nineteen ninety five, and for the next eighteen years they had a flawless safety record and a reputation as one of the world's safest airliners. In eighteen years, there had only been one Triple seven lost. In two thousand and eight, British Airways Flight thirty eight crashed just short of the runway at London Heathrow after ice in the fuel pipes reduced power. It was a terrible accident, but it was just an accident and no one died. Eighteen years with no major defects and no fatal accidents until this episode. Sorry, I just realized I kind of pulled that band aid off way too fast. That was That was a spoiler. Sorry about that anyways. Today's date was July the sixth, two thousand and thirteen. We are taking an overnight trans Pacific flight from Incheon International Airport in Seoul, South Korea, all the way to San Francisco, California. Asiana Airlines Flight two one four. The estimated flight time is a about ten and a half hours, and true to its reputation, our flight will be unremarkable, relatively comfy, and unexciting in every way. You'd think that an oceanic flight would just zip straight across the Pacific, but instead it actually follows the Chinese coast up to the Bering Sea, where it curves along the Aleutian Islands Alaska, and then approaches from the northeast until zeroing in on SFO Airport. Today's flight has a complement of four pilots and twelve flight attendants and is under the command of forty nine year old Captain Lie Jong Min. Was he good at his job, well, the airline thought, so. They just promoted him to instructor. It's their way of saying, hey, we like what you're doing, go make other people do what you do. He had over twelve thousand hours experience on the Boeing Triple seven, which, if you believe the ten thousand hour myth, clearly qualifies him as an expert at flying. Captain Lee had just finished his instructor training and this was his first time soon supervising a trainee of his own. Forty five year old Captain Lee Kange Cook. He'd just moved up to the Triple seven after six years captaining the airpus A three twenty, and I'll say this right now, it's confusing having two captains with the same name, so I'm going to refer to them by their titles. Training Captain Lee had over ninety six hundred hours flying, but he'd only had the opportunity to spend less than a full weekend piloting of Boeing Triple seven. With two hundred ninety one souls on board, the two captains flew the takeoff and the first part of the ten hour flight before switching out with a reserve team forty year old relief First Officer Bong Dong Wan and fifty two year old relief Captain Lie Jong Ju. They do it this way to prevent pilots from unintentionally killing everyone on board mid nap. The oceanic part of the journey was completely uneventful, and as they finally approached San Francisco, they'd already set up a localizer approach to Runway twenty eight left on the plane's flight management computer. Lee Kyange Cook the approach briefing, during which He noted that at San Francisco, the glide slope equipment for runways twenty eight left and twenty eight right we're out of service. Turns out the runways had been under construction to make them a little longer, and the ILS was taken off line. Now, normally, an instrument landing system or ILS comes with lateral and vertical guidance in the form of a localizer, which helps the plane line up their glide slope with the runway. I know that's a lot to visualize, but if you've ever seen the ILS take over scene in die Hard too, you know exactly what I'm talking about. Now, all that happened at Dulles International, which if you've never been, is absolutely worth it because there is an expansive as hell Smithsonian Flight Museum right there. But we're going to San Francisco, which doesn't have a lot of accidents. Planes have run off the runway, they've hit navigational aids, they've even burst into flames, but no one has died at SFO since nineteen sixty four. Back when flying Tiger Line flight two eight two, you crashed into Sweeney Ridge, which is close to the airport but not actually a part of it. All. The lack of an ILS meant to these pilots was that they were going to need to judge their own descent profile and do a visual approach, which should be fine. The weather was great, visibility was over ten miles. And you ever see the movie Amadaeus, it's kind of a fictional reimagining of the story of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's rise to fame. Well in the movie, Mozart is so good at playing the piano that at one point, when challenged, he plays a song backwards with his own butt just to prove it. I bring that up to say that anyone in that cockpit could have landed a visual approach with their butts, except for Captain Lee Kange Cook. He was nervous. He'd never flown to San Francisco before, and more importantly, he'd never landed a triple seven without ILS support. He'd only ever done it in a simulator. But instead of saying, hey, guys, wouldn't it be funny if I didn't know how to do this, he decided to keep quiet. He found himself racked with professional embarrassment, and he thought he'd never live it down. So he chose the all too human response of suffering in silence rather than risking ridicule. He could only calm himself with the belief that the instructor would correct him if he were doing anything wrong. So how bad could this go? Right? As they approached the San Francisco Bay Area, the pilots ran through the descent checklist. Not having a glide slope meant that the crew would have to eyeball their descent rate, and at this point, relief Officer Bong Dong Juan returned to the cockpit, where his job was to act as an extra set of eyes during the descent and approach, and everything appeared perfectly normal. Their landing speed was one hundred and thirty two knots. All they had to do was eyeball their descent rate, their forward air speed, and their flight path angle. In fact, everything appeared so normal that they were actually able to take a minute to enjoy the scenery and do an entire geography lesson on the Bay area. I'm not kidding, Trainey. Pilot Lee came Cook was screaming inside while the others were pointing out the bridges and the rolling hills. He was basically ted Striker from Airplane the movie. A pilot trapped under circumstances he didn't ask for, forced to land a plane full of innocent lives, even though he had no experience, and there are a lot of parallels between Asiana Flight two on four and Airplane the Movie. As flight two on four descended through sixty three hundred feet, the pilots reported that the airport was in sight, the controller cleared them for a visual approach to runway twenty eight left, the signal from the localizer began automatically aligning the plane with the runway. The only challenge was managing their descent. When airplanes descend, the air speed increases. Of course, a plane descending for landing needs air speeds to decrease. It's not a total catch twenty two, but it does require a balancing act of computer inputs and control surface adjustments, all working together to account for changes in lift and drag as the flaps and landing gear extend. It is, without a doubt, the hardest part of manually approaching a runway. Now, if a bunch of construction workers weren't eating sandwiches all over the ils, it would be sending constant signals about their glide slope, helping the autopilot to make tweaks to the pitch angle and engine thrust. They needed to maintain a three degree approach, just tilted back a little chin up. Trainee Captain Lee Cancook slowed to one hundred and eighty knots, set the thrust levers to idle, and extended the flaps. At this point, the first signs of a problem were starting to show. When they decreased air speed, the autopilot began pitching the nose up. However, because the thrust levers were at idle, the autothrottle was kind of stuck. It couldn't reduce thrust any further. The hell's an auto throttle? Well, basically just think of an autopilot, but for thrust. They just got to keep that speed up. You've slow down too much and the engines will stall out and you fall. And as a result, their descent rate slowed from nine hundred feet per minute to only three hundred feet per minute. Their navigational displays showed them hitting the mark perfectly, Thumbs up all around, except they needed to put those thumbs away. There was confusion between the physical control settings and the auto flight mode, and as a result, their descent rate had slowed from nine hundred feet per minute to only three hundred feet per minute. They were not going to hit their mark. Instructor Captain Lee Jong Men noticed the problem and trainee Captain Lee Cancook changed autopilot modes from flight level to vertical speed and increase their descent to one thousand feet per minute to make up for the difference. I know this is a lot to follow, and no, there's no test at the end. This is not an aviation or engineering podcast, So I'm going to say some things that won't really sink in, and that is okay. If you know the one side of your seat belt clicks into the other, that's all the level of technical savbiness that I need from you. Because of the back and forth between the flight modes, the plane wanted to increase the engine power to drive them further down, but it couldn't reduce them speed any further and anyway, long story short, their target air speed was not gonna happen. Noticing the discrepancy, observer pilot Bongbong Juan commented one eight zero to five miles, which reminded them of the speed and the distance to the runway. But Trainee Captain Lee king Cook's confusion only grew. He didn't know why the different systems were fighting with each other. He just didn't have the experience with these triple seven flight computers, at least not when using them more manually like this. Bong repeated himself three times before Trainee Captain Lee finally replied, okay, yeah, one eight zero five miles. Next he dropped the landing gear, and this had a drag that should slow them down even more. He was hoping it would get them to their target speed of one hundred and eighty knots, but nope, they were still speeding up. It was an annoying game of pitching the plane up and down, trying to second guess their speed, trying to fit into a kind of an imaginary box that traced a healthy glide slope. It's actually a little like spinning platesually, it's a little bit more like raising multiple toddlers. They increased their descent rate to fifteen hundred feet per minute, and the autopilot pitched them down even further. They had finally reached their ideal glide path, and they even managed to hit their one hundred and eighty not target speed. But then Captain Lee Jong Min had him change their descent to one thousand feet per minute and basically handed him one more toddler, and that wrecked everything. No one was thumbing anyone sweatball. Captain Lee Kankook set the target altitude for three thousand feet, which was standard procedure for the airline to prepare for the possibility of a mist approach. All this meant was that if anything went wrong and they hit the go around mode, the computer would automatically take the plane back up to three thousand feet. As Flight two one four crossed away point at two thousand, two hundred and fifty feet, he was now four hundred and fifty feet above his target altitude. Plus they were arguing about the flaps. Flaps are literally those flappy looking things that were along the rear edge of a wing. Moving them around changes the shape of the wing, which offers more lift at slower speeds, which really helps pilots when they have to make steep approaches like this that want of them extended further. But there are maximum speeds that you're supposed to keep under to make the flaps effective. It was all just happening so fast, everything was piling up, And if this were any other job, Trainee Captain Lee Kane Cook would have just gone out to the parking lot to cry in his car. He didn't know how to get them back on course, and none of the instructions he was receiving seemed to help. If world famous superstars like Serena Williams and Tom Hanks confess to struggling with doubt, fear, and professional anxiety, what chance did trainee Captain Lee Kane Cook have? Seventy percent of us question whether or not we're good enough or deserve our jobs. They believe that imposter syndrome is about how we process professional feedback. In other words, the only thing that matters to us is how others see us. We worry that we secretly suck and others will find out, and that all the security that our job brings us will simply blow away. In order, the things that keep people up at night the most, and I mean even corporate CEOs, is fear of incombinence, fear of under achievement, looking weak or vulnerable, followed by work politics and general perceived idiocy. There are a lot of dots that connect between your fears and overall workplace dysfunction. A board flight two on four, this fear resulted in poor decision making and a failure to act even in a crisis. This fear makes us spend more time tiptoeing around potential landmines than actually learning from situations and improving training. Captain Lee Cancook should just admit the approach failed, just made a misapproach and then tried again under less pressure. Or he could have deployed speed breaks and selected a higher vertical speed. But he felt like the whole crew was breathing down his neck and he couldn't think straight. He wasn't panicking, he just couldn't think. Captain Lee Jung Min call it that the plane was acting unexpectedly. The auto throttle was increasing thrust to climb while the autopilot was trying to slow them down to land. The plane was now only three nautical miles from the runway. They were close enough to see the pappy lights. The hell's a pappy light. If you've ever driven around an airport runway, you've probably seen these things. There are a set of four indicator lights that set at the very tail end of runways that tell pilots if they are above or below their optimal glide path. Well, they were too high and too fast. At this point. In a normal flight, the instructor captain would conduct the stabilized approach checklist and their speed and path would be pretty well sorted, and the pilots would more or less babysit the landing with very little input or adjustments. Their plane appeared to be on the three degree glide path. The air speed had accelerated to about one hundred and thirty seven knots, right where it was supposed to be, and the flaps and gear were down, but they were still dropping over a thousand feet per minute. Instead of relaxing, they were making major control inputs, and the thrust levers were still at idle. They were completely unaware that they were going to strike the ground short of the runway. The plane was now at one hundred and twenty two knots, still descending at nine hundred feet per minute, and with its nose pitched up more than seven degrees. Even the pappy lights knew what was up. They were now showing four red lights warning that they were dangerously low. Instructor Captain lejong Men realized that they were slow assing it and he didn't know why the auto throttle wasn't keeping them at one hundred and thirty seven knots. He thought it was maybe malfunctioning. Lee King could pulled the nose up even more, but they just didn't have the speed. Seconds later, the quadruple chime of the caution level alert blared in the cockpit. Le ghan Men pushed both thrust levers to maximum power, which the passengers in the cabin we recognized as a bold move and accepted with alarm. They had slowed to one hundred and fourteen knots and their altitude was only one hundred and twenty four feet, but they were descending at six hundred feet per minute, with the nose high and the engines accelerating hard. Anyone with a window seat could see that the water was quickly rising up beneath them, and they still had a half mile before they hit the runway. That's when the stick shaker stall warning activated. Meanwhile, at SFO, witnesses in the terminal and andreyed bystanders over a mile from the runway could tell that something was seriously wrong. They were only doing one hundred and six knots when the Triple seven's low hanging tail started to hit the water, which splashed over the last few rosa windows, obscuring everything. Imagine taking an unintentional log or flumeride, but with a nine foot tall stone sea wall at the end. That's right, The bottom of the runway devastated the tail section of the plane. Most of the plane, including the wings, remained above the sea wall, but the tail about twenty percent of the plane was lopped off on impact. Rosa seats had the rear tore free from the fuselage and flung from the back. The impact of the tail pitched the nose forward, smashing into the runway. The landing gear would have collapsed into the fuse lage the way testicles ascended back into the pilot's abdomens. Landing gear would have collapsed into the fuselage the way that testicles descend it back into the pilot's abdomens. The Triple seven slid on its engines and belly, throwing up a cloud of dust and debris so massive you could no longer see the plane until the left wing seemingly caught on something, driving the nose into the ground, which lifted and spun the entire thing counterclockwise. It spun nearly three hundred and sixty degrees before slamming back down to the earth with a final shattering impact. If you speak skateboard, what they did was a kind of a flip trick dark slide onto a seed wall, but instead they popped it and tailed a nose. He'l flipped it into a fifty to fifty grind before doing a three sixty flip off their nose, which I think might actually be more of a breakdance thing. At this point, the badly damaged plane slid, remaining upright and somehow almost intact. So you're coming into land, and for the reasons you don't understand, your pilot is trying to get famous enough to cameo in the next Tony Hawk video game, and you didn't bring pads or a helmet. Would you know what to do? Statistically, the odds of being in a plane crash are estimated to be about one in eleven million. For comparison, according to the National Weather Service, your odds of being struck by lightning are only one in about five hundred thousand, So flying seems pretty safe. I mean, your odds of dying in a car are said to be closer to one in one hundred and seven one hundred and seven. Experiencing a plane crash is incredibly rare and frightening. But let's keep you calm and walk you through action z you can take to increase your chances of survival. The crew's main job is not to give you pretzels in clamato. The flight crew's primary role is safety. Believe it or not, it's their primary training. They have rehearsed these scenarios and worse, and they will tell you what you need to do or yell you what to do. In sweet Baby Jesus's name, Make sure your seat belt is on tightly and it sits low across your hips. If oxygen masks drop, put yours on first before helping anyone else. And once the stewarts start yelling, brace place your head against the seat in front of you, the top of your head, not your face. Cross your hands over the back of your head, and bend forwards as much as you can, and it can help to keep your feet flat on the floor. This can help prevent leg injuries. I always remember the story of a man who in a plane crash pulled a bunch of coats over his head and it acted like a kind of a pillowy helmet. And because you are my most valued listeners, I'm gonna tell you a quick anecdote from my past that I wouldn't want anyone else to know. So here goes. When I was in my twenties, I was working with a guy who was traveling to Italy and he really did not much care for flying. Long story short, It gave him a pen light and I told them that if the plane went down in the water, he'd probably be completely disoriented and he would want to know which way was up. So I told him he should hold the pen light in his teeth and just follow the bubbles to safety. Well, he ended up drinking so much before his flight that he was denied boarding anyway. I was able to apologize to him before he was killed the following year in an automobile accident. And why because driving is more dangerous than fly. In let me continue to try and redeem my past deeds. Here, after your plane has gone down, if you smell smoke or fumes in the cabin, the air is likely going to be clearer and safer. Closer to the floor, you would have been told where the emergency exit doors were during your pre flight safety briefing. Most commercial planes have two in the front and two in the back, and you should really decide which one's closer to you when you bored. Once the plane comes to a stop, evacuate as quickly as possible. The rule of thumb is every passenger should be off your plane in under ninety seconds. Just leave your ship and move. If anyone's trying to get their novelty sized bottle at tequila from the overhead bins, feel free to punch them out and firemen carry them off the plane. You probably shouldn't actually be punching people, but as I have said before and I'm saying again now, do not be afraid to engage your inner basic training drill sergeant and scream them out of the way. It may seem harmless, you know, taking a few seconds, but if enough people take a few seconds, other people die and it happens so no one gets to do it. Get it. Once you're outside, you move as far from the plane as you can. That said, if you can do it safely, I think that you should help any injured if you're able, but only if it's safe. And remember that the flight crew and staff will be there to help you too. They're just not going to be handing out any snacks on board the plane. A few seconds passed before the passengers and crew came back online, each reacting in their own volume and fashion to their various injuries. Even the pilots, they were somehow shaken but alive. Emergency vehicles were immediately dispatched. Hey, well, let's hold that thought for a second. I promise this will get weird, and we've barely started. The damages inside the cabin were elaborate. The emergency escape slides at the rear doors one and two on the right side had inflated, which is great, But they did it inside the plane, which is chaos. The evacuation slide on a triple seven is about forty five feet long when it fully extends. If they're not like, if they inflate, folded up inside of a confined space, they take up a staggering amount of room. Imagine surviving a plane crash saying, well, there's the emergency exit door, and then a balloon the size of three Dodge caravans inflates beside you. In less than six seconds, the slides trapped and crushed two of the flight attendants. One was pinned against the wall so hard that she lost consciousness, while the other had her legs pinned and was screaming for help, while the other had her legs pinned and was while the other had her legs pinned and she was screaming for help. Four flight attendants had been seated in the aft galley and all were missing. There was nothing more than a gaping hole in the fuselage where that part of the cabin used to be. A third flight attendant rushed to help, but couldn't help, but notice fire and smoke rising outside the plane, so she picked up an intercom and ordered everyone off the plane. What had happened was the right engine had ripped off the wing and become lodged against the fuselage before the engine oil tank burst into flames, which threatened the cabin and the fuel tanks. The evacuation began no more than ninety seconds after the plane finally stopped moving, but some doors would not open, some doors were just missing, and some of the flight attendants were so badly injured that they themselves needed passengers help with the tail missing. Some just climbed through the hanging Debrison wires and escaped through the hole at the rear of the plane. Outside the plane, the first fire trucks began to arrive, and I should say they're not fire trucks like you might think. This is the kind of thing you have to picture. It's more like a giant old Soviet polar exploration vehicles. The passengers pouring out of every available hole they had to carefully negotiate around them. Back on board, the slides had finally been stabbed to death, and six passengers in the back were found trapped when their seat roads had collapsed. A flight attendant tried desperately to rescue them as the smoke thickened and the fire grew, and she'd almost given up hope when rescue workers appeared like angels through the smoke, and by the time the last passenger was rescued, the cabin was already in flames. By some miracle, even in spite of being blasted off the back of the plane, one of the rear four flight attendants was spotted alive and on her feet. She limped across the runway through the vast debris field of baggage and airplane parts before collapsing. Firefighters managed to find the other three missing flight attendants, all severely injured but miraculously alive. Two of them were still in their seats, while the other two had been thrown loose onto the asphalt. Sadly, they also found the body of sixteen year old Wang Ling Jay. She'd been ejected out of the back of the plane as it pirouetted through the air and killed instantly. She had been part of a trio of Chinese high school students who had headed to California for a fifteen day college tour slashed summer camp to improve their English and see the country and have a great time fun. Fact, almost half the people on board this flight were Chinese citizens. Having read a lot about these girls, let me summarize by saying, as a parent, you would have been privileged to raise any one of them. They'd been seated together in the last few rows in seats forty one, D, E, and G, and when the plane finally came to a stop, only fifteen year old Lou Yipang, the girl in forty one G, remained in her seat. Her friends, sixteen year old Wangling Jay and Yi Mengyuan had been ejected from the aircraft on impact or while it was spinning. Wangling Jie would have died from blunt force trauma, but Yie Meng wan. When firefighters pulled up in Rescue ten, they were waved down by another fire to direct them around the body of a girl who was lying alone on an open field of grass. It was Ye mang Wuan. She lay near the left wing, crumpled in a fetal position, with her eyes rolled up and a grimace described as waxen on her face. They drove around her and began hosing the plane down with fire retardant foam. What I am about to tell you is one of the reasons that I asked you to check your sense of humor right off the top. Less than twenty minutes after, when Rescue ten needed to reposition itself, dashcam footage showed them driving over the body of Yiing meng Juan, and her autopsy would show that she was still alive. You survived being thrown from a plane onto a tarmac at around one hundred knots an hour, only to be run over by the very first rescue personnel. You beat real final destination. Stuff here, but try to put yourself in the responder's shoes. They were responding to a major aeronautic disaster with an unknown number of casualties and the possibility of excis explosions. First responders have to make very quick decisions, and their gut told them that to all appearances, this girl was very dead. They didn't even check her vitals, but they also didn't put down a victim flag to mark the position of her body. People were running every which way out of the plane, and firemen were trying to navigate through the crowds and chaos without hurting anyone. Just take whatever it is that you do for a living and overlay a Black Friday sail onto it, and you kind of get the picture. But it gets worse. Ten minutes after Rescue ten ran over her body, a second rig known as Rescue thirty seven, was arriving on the scene and also ran over Yee's body, which was by now covered in foam and tire tracks. Lou Yie Penn, the girl who remained on the plane, would die six days later from her injuries. See During the crash, one of the emergency exit doors had broken loose and frisbeeed itself directly at her head. She was taken to the hospital with severe traumatic brain injury and never woke up. Three hundred and four out of the three hundred seven passengers and crew survived. Eight of the sixteen crew members suffered serious injuries, along with forty one of the passengers. One hundred eighty two people were taken to hospitals, with at least two of them left paralyzed from spinal injuries. Incredibly, one hundred seventeen people walked away with no injuries whatsoever, So what the hell happened? The investigation began with a flood of phone calls to the NTSB from witnesses to the crash, and they unleashed a massive investigative team to find the cause. This was, after all, the very first ever fatal crash of one of the safest airliners in the world. If they had been flying at the correct speed, it would have been possible for trainee Captain Lee Kane Cook to keep the plane on the three degreelnd path and bring it down for a normal landing. But as it turned out, the main reason for the slow air speed was that the auto throttle did not increase thrust to maintain the target speed, and neither did the pilots until it was way too late. When they were five miles out, they extended their flaps and at this point the auto throttle would switch to speed mode. Just think of it as a fancy, expensive ass aeronautic cruise control. The instructor called it their speed as they were a little over, which the pilot acknowledged, but instead of slowing it down, their speed increased to one hundred and eighty eight knots they were supposed to be doing one hundred and eighty. The pilot at this point must have been worrying about coming into fast and too high, so he increased their descent rate to fifteen hundred feet per minute, which only made things worse, and pilots who have experienced landing at San Francisco call this a slam dunk landing. Normally, they have to leave lower altitudes open for planes that are still taking off, so pilots are often instructed to stay high and then descend very quickly at the last second to come into the airport five mile mark. They were about four hundred feet above their desired flight path and they were getting really close to the point where they needed to figure out if they needed to do a go around. The nose was pitching up, and all the dicking around with the input modes in the world put them in a position that required them to catch up with the glide path from above, which can be notoriously difficult. They seemed to be caught between their high speed and their high altitude, and they only seemed to have enough bandwidth to cope with one at a time. Lee kank Cook told investigators that he considered using the auto throttle to move the thrust levers to idle, allowing him to achieve a higher descent rate. And yeah, this whole thing, these are all very confusing sentences for all of us non pilots. Now imagine being a pilot and making decisions that make no sense, and then realizing that you are no more responsible than a podcast listener. What he didn't know is that when he tried to do this, he caused the plane to try to climb to three thousand feet. Lee kyank Cook disconnected the autopilot in order to stop the nose from pitching up, and he pulled the thrust levers to idle to stop the acceleration, which fulfilled the conditions for the auto throttle to enter hold mode. Think of it like you press the button for what you want in a vending machine, then you put in your money, and then the thing just sits there in hold mode, waiting for you to re identify what the thing you wanted was, because it's a silly machine and it's confusing that way. You're just sitting there waiting for your chocolate bar to drop, while the machine sits there waiting for you to punch in H seven again. In this case, when they set the target airspeed to one hundred and thirty seven knots, it just sat there. It was basically waiting for someone to pick a different flight mode and then hit enter. And so the input just sat there, and as the plane neared one thousand feet above the ground, trainee Captain Lee Kane Cook ordered flight director off. It's all part of the normal procedure for a visual approach flown manually. On this kind of approach, the flight director doesn't have any input signals that are going to tell it where the pilot wants to fly, so its suggestions are not very useful. Therefore, the instructor Captain turned it off, but the captain captain his was still engaged. They missed a step. The normal procedure was to disengage both flight directors and then the monitoring pilot could turn his back on if he wanted. And if he had done this, all the current auto flight modes would have been cleared in the computer and the auto throttle would have skipped the hold mode automatically. But because one was on and one was off, it just stayed there in hold mode. They didn't have the altitude or the speed, and they became one with the sea wall. And I'm probably the only person in the world saying this right now, but credit for the outcome of this disaster is owed to Boeing. Luck plays a role in survivability, but Boeing's dedication to seat design and crashworthiness over the previous decades was everything. The Triple seven stayed in one piece despite being spun and thrown through the air with incredible force, and it did it without ripping open the fuel tanks and seats actually remained bolted to the floor, which was not often the case in most crashes. In most airliners where peer people get thrown around the cabin while still buckled in, and because this crash had more to do with human pilot error than anything hardware related, we really shouldn't pick on them too relentlessly. Several of the errors that were made during this flight might be partially attributed to fatigue. The trainee pilot said that he only got five and a half hours of sleep in the previous twenty four hours, and the monitoring pilot did get eight, but it was over multiple sleep periods. An eight hour sleep is way better and more restorative than eight one hour naps, and this would reduce the chance for the pilot monitoring to notice things were not going the way they should have. The pilot had been making adjustments to the speed without calling them out, and normally the way this works, one pilot makes the change, calling out what he's doing, and the other pilot will verify, yes, this is the correct thing to do. It really helps log details into the voice recorders, and that should be normal operating procedure. Here is where it gets frightening. The pilots at the controls were very, very experienced. One of them had over twelve thousand flight hours, but investigators discovered that these pilots had very rarely ever manually flown their planes. Out of all those thousands of hours they've maybe manually flown only a couple hundred. They had become entirely too dependent on automated systems like the isls, And this is actually a very real concern in aviation. A lot of people worry about the lack of airmanship in modern piloting. See Pilots used to just grab the stick and roll with it, but pilots now can spend their entire careers flying under automated systems without ever having to eyeball or stick handle anything. So the whole reason airliners used to shop for pilots right out of the Air Force is because they had the skills to think on their feet. They'd seen and done everything. And this pilot today was landing manually for the first time on a plane he didn't know, doing a slam dunk approach into San Francisco, which was an airport he didn't know, and with every foot closer to the runway, achieving that stabilized approached became increasingly unlikely. Even pilots in simulators had difficulty landing in this scenario. They mismanaged things which caused distraction, which led to the instructor. Paying less attention to what was going on, they did not attempt to go round until they were below one hundred feet and only eight seconds from impact. The National Transportation Safety Board determined that the unintended deactivation of automatic air speed control, the flight crews inadequate monitoring of the air speed, their poor training, their lack of communication, their lack of instruction, fatigue, and the incredibly delayed execution of a go round all contributed to this accident. In August of twenty thirteen, a little over a month after the disaster, Asiana Airlines announced that crash survivors would receive ten thousand dollars no catches, for just whatever they needed. Families of the deceased were paid undisclosed amounts, and the pilots of this plane eventually did return to work, but not before going through a whack of new training. One year after the loss of Asiana Flight two fourteen, a Malaysian Airlines Boeing Triple seven flying from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur was brought down by a missile over Ukraine, and a few months before that, possibly the most famous Boeing Triple seven in history went missing with all two hundred and thirty nine passengers. Malaysian Airlines Flight three seven zero disappeared without a trace on its way to Beijing, and what happened to it remains a mystery to this day. And the closing thought, we do not blame victims. However, in this situation, none of the girls who had died had been wearing their seat belts. Always wear your seat belts on a plane. We've all heard stories of planes hit by severe turbulence out of nowhere. Hell, I've been on a flight like that. It's just safer. And we don't know why they made this choice. There could have been any number of reasons, but with that at one tweek in history, this story would have been an incredible story of survival. I promised this episode will get weird, and there is no better time than the present to make that come true. See local Fox affiliate KTVU report it on the disaster with the following misinformation as quote confirmed by an NTSB official from the agency's DC office. The four pilots flying that day were identified as Captain sum Ting Wang, we Too Low, Holy Fuck, and Bang ding Ao. Three people at KTVU were fired and the whole thing was blamed on an intern at the NTSB and then quickly buried under the rug, just like y Meng Wan was buried under all that phone. Yeah, it's a terrible fact and a really strange transition. But listen, if you are a regular listener, why not consider becoming a supporter. It would really help fulfill my dream of doing this full time, And if you and a thousand of your friends could spare a buck or two, you would really help keep the show and frankly me going. Before I tell you about Patreon, I remind you that if you're into it but you're not looking for a whole relationship, you can visit buy me a coffee dot com slash doomsday to make a one time donation, and those of you who do, I appreciate you from a deep place. I just thank getting episodes a little early, with no sponsor interruptions and with additional ridiculously interesting material is worth it, And if you agree, you can find out more at patreon dot com, slash funeral Kazoo. Quick but heartfelt shout out to Lisa Leavera, Andrew Willin, ruther Leanne Dubon, Robert Joyce, Michael Munt, and Anthony Jackson for helping support the show on Patreon. Now you can reach out to me on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook as Doomsday Podcast, or you can fire an email to doomsday Pod at gmail dot com. And this is the part where I remind you that I am more distracted than medicated and very slow to respond, and I apologize. Older episodes can be found wherever you found this one, and while you are there, please leave us a review and tell your friends. And I always thank my Patreon listeners old and new for their encouragement. But if you did have the money and had to choose, I always ask you to consider making a donation to Global Menic. 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 three point six million people across seventy seven different countries. You can learn more and donate at Globalmenic dot ca. On the next episode, we are going to tackle an entirely different kind of air disaster. This one resulted in a few dead people, a lot of dead animals, and a lot of environmental damage, and it was all done for charity. It's the Cleveland Balloon Flesh Disaster of nineteen eighty six. We'll talk soon. Safety goggles off, and thanks for listening.