The Dallas Fort Worth Microburst of 1985 | Episode 35

Not everybody loves flying. Waiting at airports has become like lining up for one of Dante's Rings of Hell, and air travel has never been quite so uncomfortable. Well, we're going to discuss a way you can die midflight that you didn't even know about. Enjoy Hello, and welcome to Doomsday, History's most dangerous podcast. Together, we're going to rediscover some of the most traumatic, bizarre, and awe inspiring but largely unheard of or forgotten disasters from throughout human history and around the world. On today's episode, you'll hear about people being reduced to burning tatters. You'll learn why your two hundred dollars iPod shuffle is more dangerous than lightning, and will even maybe teach you the best seats for surviving a plane crash. Sort of. This is not the show you play around kids, or well being 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, shoot the kids out of the room, put on your headphones and safety glasses, and let's begin. Yippi kaye, yeeha, and all hardy Howdy to one and all a yawl. We've jetted off to so many locations during our time together, but it's been a minute since we went anywhere with a surprise unscheduled layover, and today we'll be spending our time in America's lone star state, Texas. It's hard to miss. It's the biggest state in the lower forty eight as land goes. Texas just by itself is almost ten percent of the entire continental US. It is a hell of a place. And you've probably heard that everything's bigger there. Well it's true. Just outside Houston there's a cattle ranch that's bigger than Rhode Island and Luxembourg. With the roof closed, the Statue of Liberty could fit inside Cowboys Stadium sorry ET and T Stadium now, or maybe by the time you hear this, it could be the Mountain dew Berry blast Slash my Pillow Center for the Athletic Arts. Doctor Pepper, microchips, and breast implants were all born in Texas. Big taste, big tech, big boobs. Even the disasters are bigger here. There's a city here just called Texas City, which has blown up repeatedly, and it certainly deserves its own episode. The biggest natural disaster in recorded US history hit Texas back in nineteen hundred. The Galveston Hurricane killed at least eight thousand people, and that's a record that stands today, more than one hundred years later. But let's not get ahead of ourselves. We're not heading to Houston or Galveston today. We're spending most of our time in the Dallas Fort Worth area. That's just how they say it. And you probably wonder why Dallas and Fort Worth are different cities. I mean, they're partner cities. They're separate, but they have their own unique histories and all. But on a map they appear connected. And to this kind of cowboy megalopolis sitting in the plains of eastern Texas, you know what else is bigger in Texas? The temperature. Dallas Fort Worth sits at about the same latitude as desert locations in the Middle East, and we will be visiting in August, where the average temperature is ninety five degrees fahrenheit or thirty five celsius. Physiologists say that this kind of temperature is pretty much the limit of human tolerance. Anything above that, and you can't even sweat yourself cool enough to maintain your core temperature. Around one hundred and eight or forty two is where your brain will start to damage. Where we are in the plains of Texas, we get a combination of warm, dry wind from the north and the west and all this hot humid air that comes up from the Gulf of Mexico, which means that the weather itself can also be quite excitable. Long story short. With hot air constantly rising into colder air masses above, late afternoon thunderstorms are frequent and welcome occasions, anything that brings a little relief from the heat. Our story today will take place August the second, nineteen eighty five, and even by half past five in the evening, the temperature here was still thirty eight celsius or one hundred and one fahrenheit. Lines of thunderstorms had already been farming throughout the region like clockwork. Anyone with any experience flying into Dallas Fort Worth, but they'd be used to it. For our flight today, we're going to be flying Delta. It's actually one of the oldest airlines in the world. What began from humble origins as the Huff Dolland crop dusters of Monroe, Louisiana back in the nineteen twenties, became the first airline to board more than one hundred million passengers in a single year. We're going to be flying on a wide body three engine L ten eleven TriStar built by Lockheed. We don't really call planes wide bodies anymore, we're just kind of used to it. But back then these were a big deal. In the nineteen eighties, the skies were already full of Boeing seven forty seven's and McDonald Douglas DC tens, and the elevens were introduced to be their kind of more sophisticated uncle or something when you think of fully computerized flight decks some modern airliners. This is where all that kind of began. These were the pride of Delta's fleet. Lockey built about two hundred and fifty of these L tens, and Delta bought almost a third of them. Sitting in the pilot's seat today is Captain Edward ted Conners's fifty seven year old Korean War veteran with almost thirty thousand flying hours. He started with Delta flying old propeller planes back in the fifties and he had an impeccable flight record. Assisting him this afternoon would be First Officer Rudy Price Junior and second Officer flight Engineer Nick Nasick. Both of them were in their early forties and they both served in Vietnam and collectively they had about thirteen thousand hours of flight experience. The L ten eleven sits about three hundred and earlier in the day it was full, but this afternoon's leg, Flight one ninety one was flying from Fort Lauderdale, Florida, straight through to Dallas Fort Worth, and it was only about half full. Interesting thing about Dallas Fort Worth, just to keep the theme alive, it is one of the biggest and busiest airports in the world, you know, because Texas. It's actually larger than Manhattan Island. And before we take off, my favorite thing about Fort Lauderdale, you switch just two letters and it becomes fart Louderdale. We're going to leave Florida with one hundred and fifty two passengers and eleven crew for a total of one hundred and sixty three souls on board. Do you ever wonder why they call it like that? Million years ago? Back in the day they used to keep lists of passengers, and they used to keep lists of crews and cargoes and plants and animals and all this stuff, and it got really complicated. Souls became kind of shorthand for the number of living beings on board. It's where sos came from. Now. Like we said, anyone flying to Dallas Fort Worth was very used to the idea of thunderstorms, and our flight crew today knew that thunderstorms were on the menu. They'd already talked about it before they left. Ever, actually fly through one, it's not that much fun, and it's not just what can happen to the ride. It's really difficult to shake the idea that lightning is going to make your plane break apart, or burst in the flames, or just outright explode. But the fact is, any plane that you've flown on has probably already eaten a bolt at some pine in its lifetime. And in as long as I can remember, there have been maybe five planes that were forced down by complications from a lightning strike. But that's out of billions of flights. You are more likely to be struck by lightning at a bus stop, and statistically that ain't happening either, you are way more likely to have a plane forced to land by a malfunctioning toilet. And even if your plane did catch a bolt, they're designed to disperse that energy along the body. Usually lightning will hit the wings or the tail, and it just leaves from somewhere else. It doesn't even disrupt the electrical systems. According to the pre flight safety speech, your two hundred dollars iPod shuffle is more dangerous and worrying than a bolt of energy as strong as the output of a nuclear reactor. The only real danger of flying in a thunderstorm is during the takeoff for the landing, and that's only because statistically those are the most important times anyways, the first three minutes and the last eight. It was once pointed out to me that airliners are so well designed you can practically bend the wings together until they almost touch without destroying them. But for flight one ninety one, they were happy enough to just avoid all that. Connor Price and Hasick were already approaching when controllers at Dallas Fort Worth were you know what, let's just call it DFW for short, gave them a route that passed real close to a very large stormy looking weather cell Captain Connor's told the tower he'd rather go around it than through it, and after a little back and forth, they were provided clearance on a new route that sent them north of the storm. I'm glad we didn't have to go through all that mass, Connors remarked, as they circle the dark mass of clouds to their south. Experienced pilots can scream and bitch their way into a more comfortable flight plan, even over the wishes of air traffic controllers. Think of it as kind of a perk of the job professional privilege. Deviating from the flight plan ads travel time, which uses fuel, which costs money, and it stresses out passengers trying to make connecting flights. This move added about ten minutes to their flight time, but Connors didn't care. It was just before six and flight ninety one was descending through ten thousand feet on its way around to the storm cell. Just then, the arrivals controller, Jene Skipwall came on the horn and announced that there was rainch hours just north of the airport and people were starting to make ils approaches. Again, not a huge deal, but rain was reducing the visibility and other flights had chosen to trust the instrument landing system rather than their own eyes. It's basically saying, hey, let our radio based, vertical and horizontal guidance gently bring you in. The crew of Flight one ninety one had been all in on their approach checklist and they barely even noticed the storm cell developing. As they made their second to last turn before final approach, the storm was now pretty obvious and it was directly in their path. Price commented that it was pretty sure they were going to get their plane washed. Minutes ahead of them, American Airlines Flight three five to one was passing through the cell and they couldn't see squat again. Not ideal, but not the worst thing in the world. They were less than fifty miles from the runway, and the closer they got, the worse the weather seemed to get. They made their final turn to line up for final approach and locked onto the ISLS signal. At this point, the entire crew it would be way more focused on deploying flaps and slats and trying to create drag across the wings and shave their speed. It's all part of this delicate balance they do to slow your plane down to make sure you make the runway, you know, versus losing lyft and just smacking into it. Now, statistically, there are about sixteen million thunderstorms a year around the world, and as I say this, there's about two thousand of them ranging somewhere. The US gets about one hundred thousand of them a year. But the good news is only about one in ten ever becomes severe. And wouldn't you know it, the pilots were so engaged in the landing prep they barely noticed that the storm directly ahead of them was quickly transforming into a Level four severe thunder storm. They're raided on a scale of one to six. Captain Connor had thousands of hours of experience and knew exactly what to do. The passengers could not have been in better hands. He signaled the approached tower Delta one ninety one heavy out here in the rain feels good, and the controller replied, Delta one nine one heavy Regional Tower one seven left, cleared to land. In English, they were going to land on Runway seventeen left, and one minute ahead of them, a tiny leer jet made its way through the storm and landed very safely on Runway seventeen left. The pilots lowered the landing gear and decelerated to a hundred fifty knots to create more space between them and the lear Jet, and passed through fifteen hundred feet above the ground. In earlier episodes, we've discussed how planes fly at high altitude for all kinds of reasons, but the real benefit is that if anything ever went wrong, it would give you lots of time to work the problem while you glide. Of course, when you're less than fifteen hundred feet off the ground, you would barely have time to think, let alone to try anything. A flash of lightning caught Price's attention and he poked Connor's storm cells can look threatening without actually being threatening, but this one was definitely being threatening, and it was plain chicken with them. Now by the book The Delta Airlines How To Guide, would have them abandon their approach. There's always that economic question about the desire for safety versus the additional cost going around again, which is again ultimately the pilot's call. In this case, a relatively tiny Leer Jet basically a personal business class aircraft that weighs probably about five percent as much as an L ten eleven passed through this cell in one piece, and so would they. So Connors pushed on through the storm and all but immediately realized this was no ordinary storm. They were immediately struck by a strong head wind and it blew them from the front and below. They found themselves quickly building up speed, and it forced their nose up. It is as confusing as it sounds. Price reduced engine power to compensate when Connor said they were about to lose it. The headwinds were immediately replaced by a heavy downdraft, with the engines running a reduced thrust and the nose of the plane pitched upwards. They were now losing lift in the wings and they were starting to drop. This was stalling out of the sky one oh one. They lost about a third of their air speed, and they pushed the thrust levers as hard as they could. Connors was yelling toga, but he hadn't gone crazy. Toga is short for takeoff and go around. You know how you slam your gas pedal to get your car to overdrive gear for passing. It's kind of like that, but in an airplane, kind of shorthand for when you need as much power as possible on very little notice. Captain Connor's was shouting to push it up all the way up, way up, way up, and one ninety one's nose was still pitched up more than fifteen degrees, and the windows became dark and inky black. As the sky roared all around them. They found themselves buffeted and battered by extreme winds and turbulence on all sides. The cabin filled with screaming and the wafts of vomit as they jostled and blew in every direction. Then it finally picked one and dipped madly to the left. Price compensated by jamming the steering air lorons all the way to the left, but the plane pitched upwards again about one quarter of the way to pointing straight up. Connors called the plane a son of a bitch and yelled for them to hang on. Price already had all the thrust leads pushed to max power, but now the stick shaker went off. If he didn't know, control columns on modern aircraft are designed to shape when a stall is in it. It's basically the most impossible signal to ignore, and maybe because it's the most important, if this thing pitched the nose up anymore, they could lose all lift from the wings and just fall out of the sky. Price was doing everything he could to pitch the nose downwards and avoid the stall. When spries, the headwinds did disappeared and in their place was a powerful new downdraft, and then a powerful tailwind struck them from behind. They were now at four hundred feet above the ground and they were still accelerating downwards. Flight one ninety one was in extreme danger. The ground proximity warning system screen whoooo up with the nose pitched suddenly down again, and they were now dropping at eighty five feet per second. The conditions were changing faster than they could even react. Price pulled up as hard as he could, and the passengers felt a full two g's of force as they began to pull out of their dive, and just as the plane was leveling off, the landing gear struck the ground. They were still about two kilometers or just over a mile short of the runway, and the passengers felt like they'd been off roading over railway ties. The plane streaked across the field before it lurched into the air, came back down, bounced and became airborne again and that's good, but they were heading straight for State Highway one fourteen. That's not good. Flight one nyed Vy one was still moving faster than a Formula one race car. We were moving at over two hundred and ten miles or three hundred and fifty kilometers an hour. The tower screamed for them to go around, but there was nothing they could do. We mentioned that the L ten eleven had what we call a trijet configuration, and all that means is that it has three big, beautiful rolls Royce engines, and one was tucked under each wing and the third one was center mounted into the tail well. As the plane touched down in the middle of Highway one fourteen, it slap danced its way across ten lanes of traffic. The engine suspended between the left wing waffle stamped a Toyota Corolla. Now for comparison, the nineteen eighty five Toyota Corolla weighs about two thousand pounds, but the L ten eleven is closer to a quarter million pounds. The plane continued, smucking three light poles out of the ground and careening across another field, but as the fuselage carved its way through the ground, the plane suddenly veered to the left. Pieces of the wings, tail, and the landing You're tore free and it disintegrated as it went. The massive plane began cartwheeling sideways like a giant throwing star until it struck a massive water tank maybe one hundred feet across. It connected somewhere between the cockpit and the wing, and a huge wall of flame erupted, bursting into the cabin, engulfing passengers where they sat. Everything forward of Road thirty four almost instantly exploded, disintegrating into thousands of pieces of debris and shrapnel and viscera catin Connor's first officer Price and second officer Nasik were killed. The tail section, let's call it everything behind Row thirty four ripped clean clean, of course, being in quotes, and was propelled away by the blast. It hurled outwards and skidded hundreds of feet across the grass before coming to rest on a parking apron inside the tail. The last ten rows were relatively intact. Remember a second before, this thing pretty much did the exploding cigar trick, so that's kind of what it looked like. Bodies had been thrown around inside and outside the cabin. Some would close others. Having been badly burned. The whole section lay rolled over on its side, exposed to the elements. Speaking of what's a storm doing well, It certainly wasn't done. It moved south directly towards the crash site. The wind and rain were so powerful they actually rolled the entire tail section back into an upright position, which must have been pretty horrific for the passengers and flight attendants still strapped in. Survivors climbed out and wandered amid the debris until rescuers arrived. Through the howling storm. Airport fire trucks arrived within forty five seconds, and what they saw was beyond description. The plane had been comprehensively disassembled, the L ten eleven, the passengers, everything had been reduced to a blizzard of shredded, burning tatters and sprayed across the field. It really looked like tornado damage. And as quickly as it had come, the weather was gone and the sunshine returned. Rescuers continued searching records for survivors and pulling badly injured passengers from the debris of the tail section, but passengers who would not be using their return fares were placed under yellow tarps. Nearby area hospitals had been put on hat alert, but with that same kind of helpless sadness that New York City faced. After nine to eleven, the ambulances returned, but they were mostly empty. Of the one hundred and sixty three people on board, only twenty nine were found alive, and survival largely depended on where they sat, which is something I'm sure you've heard of before. Everybody seems to have an opinion on it. They say, if you sit in the front, well, that's where the mountains are. And if you sit in the back, a tail strike could get you. And if you sat in the middle, isn't that where planes rip in half and they kind of salt and pepper shaker or all their passengers all over the ground. Everyone from row twenty forward was killed immediately by a combination of the impact the fire, the explosion, and the physical disintegration. Sixty people seated between Rose twenty one and thirty three, fifty two had been killed. Out of the sixty people seated between Rose twenty one and thirty three, only eight survived, and in the tail section seventeen people died. On the left side of the cabin as it was ripped away. Most who survived were seated between rose forty and forty six. Ironically, the smoking section some joked that this was the one time that smoking saved lives. But wait, there's more. Remember the Toyota Corolla William Mayberry was driving that day. He just turned twenty eight that day, it was his birthday, and he brought the total death toll to one hundred and thirty five. Two more died later in hospital, making it one hundred and thirty seven, and ten years later, passenger Kathy Ford died from injuries she'd received during the disaster, so technically she made it one hundred and thirty eight. If you were booking a flight on an L ten eleven to Dallas Fort Worth, would you know where to sit? Well, this will be quick. The odds of you experiencing a forced landing or a crash are extraordinarily rare. You are literally thousands of times more likely to be killed by a lawnmower. That said, if you have a preference between front, middle, or back of a plane, just shout your answer into your listening device of choice. Okay, well here's what I heard. Loud and clear, tail tail of the plane planestone crash backwards, so it's the tail. Final answer, Well, I hate to tell you, but you're wrong. Maybe let's pull up the data. The Federal Aviation Authority studied the question for thirty five years. They studied accidents and deaths between nineteen eighty five and twenty twenty based on injuries and fatalities and how they compared to the seating chart and by the numbers, the worst place to sit is in the middle of the plane, you know, between first class and those first light wafts of the bathroom. In the back seats in the middle of the cabin had a thirty nine percent fatality rate. Compare that to the front third, which had a thirty eight percent fatality rate. Now compare those to the back, which only had a thirty two percent fatality rate. But it's not just by row. When looking at what seats gave the best chance of surviving, the middle seats in the plane's rear third gold starred with a twenty eight percent fatality rate. The worst seats were on either side of the aisle in the middle of the aircraft, with a forty four percent fatality rate. Others say that the aisle seats are the safest. It really boils down to how close you are to an emergency exit. Nobody's waiting for you to stroll out of your window seat. People got places to be. The University of Greenwich determined that sitting closest to an emergency exit did give you the best chance of getting it alive, regardless of what seat position you chose. But really the most important thing in a plane crash is what part of the plane absorbed the impact. If you do a nose first impact, that's a lot of travel reward points left to float in the ether that used to be first class. In a nose down crash landing, people in the back are affected by the increased forces on the cabin by the bull whipping action against the ground, and in a flat belly landing forces are pushed upwards through your body, which kind of makes your survival more of a person to person physical fitness test. What part of the plane took the impact and how forces are distributed through the passengers is the most important part. Sadly, it's not the kind of thing that you get to pick when you're booking your seats. Bottom line is this, By the numbers, we are talking about the difference between thirty nine and thirty eight percent. That is barely worth the calories spent talking about it. Your odds of dying in a plane crash are closer to zero point zero one two five percent, but your odds of dying in a car crash on the way to the airport are closer to one in one hundred. So if you're looking for tips on surviving actual plane crashes or car crashes, you've got a back catalog for that kind of thing. But always remember flying remains one of the safest ways there is to get around. So what happened, Well, I'm no meteorologists, but I will use my layman skills to try to describe what happened. On a hot day, warm air wants to grab moisture and rise up into the sky until it hits the cooler layers of air above. And then once that happens, that updraft loses all its strength and all that heavier, cooler, wetter air returns to Earth. And once that wind hits the ground, it creates a kind of an upside down mushroom cloud where it fans out in all directions, blowing strongly away from the center and They call this a microburst, and back in nineteen eighty five they were known, but they were barely understood because of that reverse mushroom cloud action we described. Any plane passing through the first one takes it in the face, hitting the headwind. Then they get stomped by the full force of the microburst, and they end with a strong tailwind that wants to flick them like a bottle cap. When a pilot hits the headwinds, they want to reduce power to keep them from accelerating upwards, but the effect is kind of like keeping your head down only to then be punched in the top of the head by the downdraft. When winds changed directions abruptly like this, they call it wind sheer. It's a little like being in a washing machine. They'll increase engine thrust to power their way through it until the tailwind comes, grabs their booty and forces them into a descent too steep to recover from. People wonder if there's any way this crash could have been less disastrous, but investigation only pointed out the different ways that it could have actually gone worse. If it hadn't struck the water tank, it would have plowed into a fully fueled and loaded DC eight and a DC ten sitting on the apron, and if it missed the tank and the planes, it was moving so fast and so structurally compromised, it was pretty much going to continue breaking apart and tumbling in flames until everyone was dead. There was no good scenario here. The National Transportation Safety Board determined that the storm cell just short of runway seventeen left first appeared at five point fifty two, and it reached an intensity level of four out of six in just twelve minutes. The L ten eleven came along with onboard weather radar, which was useless this close to the landing because the minimum display range was fifty miles. Now we know Captain Connors didn't love thunderstorms and he understood the potential danger, yet he flew into this one. Why The NTSB figured that the successful landings of the plane directly ahead of them was the main reason that they thought they could get away with it. And back in nineteen eighty five, the overwhelming majority of pilots would have flown through a thunderstorm that appeared on final approach, same as Captain Connors. Did. They calculate the amount of wind shear in a microburse by subtracting the wind speeds at the entrance and the exit of the ride. So, for example, if you had twenty knots of wind in your face and you left with twenty knots at your back, the wind sheer total is forty knots. And to be clear, in nineteen eighty five microbursts, they weren't unknown, but they were just not well understand good. A team from NASA un Lockheed analyzed the air speed, altitude, engine power, and all the other parameters from the flight data recorder and decided that they had experienced seventy two knots of horizontal shear, which they say were certainly strong enough to bring down a plane. Investigators determined that during the stick Shaker's stall warning, when Price pitched the nose down, he did the right thing for a stall condition, but the wrong thing for wind chear. They lost too much altitude and a crash was inevitable. The time from the first headwind to the crash was thirty eight seconds, and of that time only the last ten called for any kind of crazy drastic action. Captain Connor seemed to know something bad was going to happen when he called out that they were going to lose it, but Price was acting on instinct to maintain a proper glide slope. Their training didn't even cover the idea that wind direction could change abruptly, requiring this kind of superhuman decision making. And the reason they didn't receive that training is because the airlines thought it would be confusing if their priority had been to escape by any means rather than staying on the approach profile. First Officer Price might have never reduced the thrust in the first place, and the plane might have sailed right through the entire microburst at max power, and they may have survived with minimal altitude loss. The NTSB wanted to know why the tower didn't know what was going on inside the storm cell. Well, long story short, controllers only really learn about these things from pilot reports and the airport meteorologists. Okay, so they have a full time National Weather Service meteorologist working at DFW, and the guy had access to radar display which showed the intensity of storms in the Dallas Fort Worth area. So what happened to that guy, Well, he was on his dinner break and at the time he left there were no storms, and so there was nothing to report. He couldn't have possibly predicted a storm spontaneously forming at a nothing right between incoming traffic and the end of a runway. All this happened shortly after he left, but he had no idea, you know why, because food was forbidden in the radar room, so he was forced to go off into a different part of the building where the calf was. And even if he hadn't been on break, most of his data was supplied by an observatory way off in Stephenville, Texas, and there was a two minute delay between what they determined and what was really going on. The storm intensified in way less time than that, so even if he had been glued to the data that entire time, he would have reached his conclusion just after they crashed. They couldn't find a scenario where he would have been able to help. Other pilots told investigators that they saw lightning, and two of them even thought that they saw a funnel cloud, but since they never called any of that into the tower, nothing had been passed on to inbound aircraft. When I said people misunderstood microburse ten years earlier, Eastern Airlines Flight sixty six out of New York crashed as a result of wind shear. That crash led to the creation of the l LULL was the low level wind sheared alert system, and because it was so new, it was also quite not so great. How bad you asked, Well, the system detected the wind shear and sounded a warning alarm, except that it was able to do this and sound the alarm about ten minutes after the crash. Three years earlier, in nineteen eighty two, pan Am Flight seven fifty nine out of New Orleans plunged into a neighborhood and killed one hundred and fifty three because of a microburst. The public freaked and politicians got involved. Regular radar could detect moisture in a cloud, but Doppler radar, as it turns out, could also do that, plus determine the wind speeds and directions inside of a storm. They later figured out that microbursts were shown to have played a part in twenty six different accidents over the last twenty years, and over the course of a forty five day experiment in Denver, Doppler was used to detect thirty different microbursts. Based on the data collected. Meteorologists were able to develop a model which would predict with eight vy percent accuracy whether a microburst would occur on any given day, just not where or when. So it was clear that these events were so sudden and violent and short lived that they needed something next level. Well, there already was a plan for the Next Generation Radar System or next rad whose whole purpose was to create a network of Doppler radars covering most of the continental US. Well, guess what it got gas pedaled? You thought I was going to say, canceled. Nope. At the same time, the FAA launched the Terminal Doppler Radar Program, whose goal was to install radar systems directly at airports in order to detect windshear close to the ground. NASA went on and developed a Doppler system that could sit right in the nose of a plane. Pilot training was also overhauled. No more wind shear recovery as to go to where Now was all about wind shehear avoidance, and as a result, the number of wind shehar related accidents worldwide has bottomed out. Today, there is a memorial at Dallas Fort Worth International commemorating those who died that day in nineteen eighty five. It was Texas's deadliest aviation disaster. In the future, when you think about how uncomfortable your legs or elbows get on a plane, at least you get to disembark with them. Plug for TikTok Doomsday Dot the Dot podcast. I made a video about a guy leaving a crash plane that kind of went viral. He had a suitcase in one hand and a water bottle and his phone in the other trying to get that escape footage. I wanted to shout out all those people who bitterly complained that there was no way they would ever leave a plane without their PS five and their George Forman grill and their untapped beer keg. I can't make people care about other people, but people who will willfully go out of their way to jeopardize their safety, I don't know who would have thought. The takeaway from today's disaster is the idea that the only thing that makes it bearable is the evolution of safety that was developed in its wake. Flight one ninety one is often called one of the most influential aircraft accidents of all time. It was enough to make researchers risk their lives flying specially designed vomit comets into the most dangerous weather they could find, all to create lasting changes that keep us all safe today. And it's important to remember that it took several disasters to bring about this change, but none of them as famous and life changing as Delta one nine one. You can find us on Twitter, Instagram, at Facebook as Doomsday Podcast, or you can fire us an email to Doomsdaypod at gmail dot com. Older episodes can be found wherever you found this one, and while you're there, please leave us a review and tell your friends. If you want to support the ongoing production of the show, you can buy me a coffee at buy Me a Coffee dot com slash Doomsday. But if you can spare the money and had to choose, we asked you to consider make King 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, and they are often the first and sometimes 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 five different countries. You can learn more and donate at globalmedic dot CA. On the next episode, We've done planes, trains, and automobiles, but this may be our most unusual vehicle disaster yet. Oh the humanity. It's the Goodyear Blimp disaster of nineteen nineteen. Thanks for listening. Take your headphones and safety glasses off, and we'll talk soon.