The Nigeria Airways Disaster of 1991 | Episode 58

You've flown on a plane that was late, You've flown on a plane that experienced turbulence. You've even flown on a plane with unruly passengers. But I'm willing to bet you've never flown on a plane that melted. Hello, and welcome to Doomsday Histories Most Dangerous Podcast. Together we are 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, not to get our heads cut off in front of the group, you'll learn the most disturbing thing to ever unintentionally fall from an airplane in aeronautic history, and we'll find out if Canadians are actually evil. This is not the show that 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, shoot the kids out of the room, put on your headphones and safety glasses, and let's beg in a salamu a lacum. Everyone, we are going on a trip a once in a lifetime kind of trip, and I hope you survived the experience. Pack your company as steel toed walking shoes, your favorite prayer matt and if you have one, an in flight neckpillow slash headscarf. We are traveling all the way to Saudi Arabia, and yes, this is our very first trip to the Middle East. It's basically that part of the map where Africa and Asia and Europe all meet together. It's the birthplace of religions, it's the home of ancient culture and an a ton of history, and it's the focal point of geopolitics. We're basically covering the entire Arabia peninsula. I tell you what. I'll list off the names of all the Middle Eastern countries and you keep count of the number that you have ever heard of Cyprus, Lebanon, Syria, Iran, Iraq, Israel, Jordan, Palestine, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Guitar Brain, the United Arab Emirates, Oman, Yemen, and turkeya everyone just calls a Turkey. They changed their name recently, so I don't know how you did, but I got sixteen out of sixteen because I am a geography nerd, and it doesn't matter what you got, because the only real question is how have we never been here before? Well, this part of the world just doesn't have the kind of history of disaster that we kept from places like the UK or America. In a nutshell, it's mostly arid desert. It's dry, so the kind of things that make people buckle in fear, or heat waves and sandstorms and earthquakes, yeah, droughts and wildfires, which is why it won't sound right when I say this, but the most common disaster in the Middle East is flash flooding. If you only know it from the news, you might think of the Middle East as a dust colored magnet for political violence. But in reality, it's a vibrant and fascinating place, teeming with sights and sounds and unique cultures, scenes of lush greenery and blue waters and pristine shores. Whatever it is that you have in your head about this part of the world, it is so much more and more complicated than all that. For the purposes of narrowing down things, today's story will be taking place in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. About eighty percent of Americans see it as an unfriendly, non combatant enemy state. That buys their missiles and controls the price of gas because of the ocean of oil that dwells beneath its desert heart. They say, if Saudi Arabia decided to stop selling oil to other countries, they'd have enough to last them for the next two hundred and twenty years. If you look at the Middle East, it is by far the biggest country there, and it's the thirteenth largest in the world. It straddles the Arabian Peninsula and is bordered by Jordan, Kuwait, and Iraq in the north, and Oman and Yemen in the south. And when I say it's the thirteenth biggest country in the world, it's about the size of Greenland, and Greenland is chonky. We're going to start our trip in Jedda. Never heard of it. It's a port city on the Red Sea that has welcomed visitors for over three thousand years. Today most people think of it as a gateway destination for pilgrimages to holy cities like Mecca or Medina, and it is. But that wasn't a short flight to get here. So let's just hang out for a second. Now that we're in Saudi Arabia, you've probably never been here, and it can be a pretty polarizing place, you know, politically and all that. But damn if there isn't a lot to see and do even here in Jedda. Let's take a minute to marvel at the historic districts and the beautiful stone walkways that have inspired artists and visitors for centuries. There's even a district with homes so old that they're actually made of coral. And all this side by side with some of the most futuristic and amenity pack resort towns on the planet. Imagine wings suiting off the Jetta Tower, the soon to be completed tallest building in the world, directly into a dinner reservation at a three thousand year old restaurant. Soak in the shimmering sunset over the Red Sea, and stroll past parks, sculpture gardens, mosques, restaurants, and amusement parks along the spectacular Corniche. It's this pedestrian coastal walk that they have about twenty miles or thirty kilometers long. It's great. Now that said, so, a podcast is taking you on an unexpected trip to Saudi Arabia, and you've heard their kind of strict there, and you're already a kind of upsetting person even in your home country, So would you know what to do well for starts. Notice I didn't say to pack any condoms or alcohol right off the top. It's probably a good idea to cover a few things that nobody wants from you while we're here in the Saudi Kingdom as country, Saudi Arabia is conservative and Islamic, with its very own specific laws and cultural norms, which is really just shorthand for It's an absolute monarchy with restrictions on all civil and political freedoms, with surveillance everywhere. It's completely unlike anything you're used to wink, So no drunken public behavior or banging aloud. The sale of alcohol is strictly prohibited. I made a comment about dress like at the beginning of the episode, and the idea here is the more clothing the better. A hot fashion trend every year in Saudi Arabia is opaque, dark tones with heavy coverage. Modesty is all the rage. No shoulders, no knees, nothing in public, and that includes religious symbols of faith for faith other than Islam. Saudi Arabia is a multicultural country, but by all accounts, as a majority Muslim country, if you don't have something Muslim to say, it's probably best to just shut up. Whatever you're protesting doesn't matter. It's prohibited. In America, you could just walk up to the White House, well within five hundred yards of the White House and just flip the thing off. Try that against the royal family or government officials or even government policies in Saudi Arabia and see how that goes for you. General rule of thumb, if you have beef with some country, maybe just don't go there. That just seems like a win win for everyone. All right, But where were we? Oh, don't go there hoping to do some gambling. Don't go there looking for a polled pork sandwich, and no eating or drinking during the entire month of Ramadan. It's a time of fasting and spiritual growth. In fact, it's one of the five pillars of Islam. The others are daily prayer, declaration of faith, giving alms, and the pilgrimage to Mecca, which we will get to and for the most part, just switch the pilgrimage to regular Sunday service and it's basically no different than the pillars of Christianity. The only one that's not obvious to all is the giving alms. It's about donating your time, money, service, or resources to others, you know, food, clothing, shelter, whatever you've got. The idea behind it is to free ourselves from our obsession with possessions and also the fear of losing the things that we have. Christianity puts a slightly different spin on it, where you're going to get paid back once you get to heaven with interest. And like I said before, Islam prohibits the consumption of pork products, which is funny because it's even pork flavored products, and who knows what those things are made out of. And oddly the same goes for frog and frog flavored snacks, which I didn't know was a thing. And I don't know if the objection is religious or what. What else you got? Oh, do not go there thinking you're going to pick up a bunch of soup in your porn or even used tires, even used clothing is prohibited. And you remember dabbing. It was that kind of dance where kids suddenly posed with their face and their elbow and their other arm just kind of pointing out it was like the most important dance on the planet for about five seconds a couple of years ago, until adult saw it and we're all, well, this seems easy and and now nobody wants to do it. Well. In Saudi Arabia, a TV host did this one day and was arrested for it by law that dance is associated with foreign drug culture. But not just that they kind of frown on dancing. There was once a woman who was arrested for kind of shuffling back and forth because it was seen as too close to dancing. You're going to want to default to a really strict footloose space rule set. It's their place, they can do whatever they want to you. Oh, and that goes double for witchcraft and sorcery. And if you're thinking you're just going to get away with a fine, consider this. Saudi Arabia's criminal justice system is based on a form of Sharia law, which means, in the worst case scenarios, execution is usually carried out by beheading with a sword or sometimes hanging and once in a while just getting blown away by a firing squad. And I really tried to think about this one for a while and only silver lining I was able to consider was at least they're all public executions, so you get a chance to see your friends before you go. Oh, I can already hear you kind of panicking. Remember that cyclical breathing technique. I keep teaching you, breathing in for three seconds, holding that breath for three seconds, and then just letting it go for three seconds. Well, it's going to be okay. I haven't lost a single listener yet on one of these trips. Why don't we learn a thing or two about how we're even getting there? Nationaire? Oooh, true, you've never heard of them. They're a small airline out of Quebec that went bankrupt back in nineteen ninety three, But lucky for us, we are boarding a flight in nineteen ninety one. Now, when I say airline, I mean like airline in the sense that it operated a fleet of not one, but two rickety but flyable Douglas DC eights. Industry insiders don't use words like flyable. They say serviceable. But for my money, all I care is if it can fly. And in our last Patreon extended episode, we touched on how a company could take a look at, say the cost of improving the working condition and compare it to the cost of adding suicide nets to the side of their buildings and then making the most cartoonishly evil choice possible. I'm just saying companies are not always well intentioned or run by our best and brightest and no spoilers. I'm not calling Nationaire evil or dim, at least not yet. What they may have lacked in quality or size, or reputation or equipment they look to make up for in strategy. Nationair just wasn't set up to take on other carriers headhead. Instead, what they were focused on was trying to fill service gaps for other airlines. And right there is a universal truth of business, and I'm going to teach it to you right now, free of charge. The simplest strategy for any new business is to find a gap and then just fill it, you know, like, why can't I open this jar? Ah, I've fallen down a flight of stairs and I can't get up. Ooh, slap shop, shake weight sna pants. The only reason Doomsday exists is because the whole world overflows with true crime podcasts, and this left negligent homicide enthusiasts like yourself high and dry. The Nationaire took on this same idea and was looking to flexial themselves directly onto another carrier schedule. At first, Nationaire found themselves scrapping at cuppies and they were really hoping for more of a tuna size contract. But in June of nineteen ninety one, a small bay leen whale of an opportunity swam up right beside them. There was this airline that had been contracted to carry Nigerian pilgrims to Saudi Arabia to take part in the Hajj from Mecca, and they went bankrupt and this created a bit of a scramble to try to find a replacement carrier to take over the route, and nation Air brass they did that thing where your pupils turn into dollar signs and your eyes keep springing out of your head and then you just pant out loud until you hyperventilate pass out. And this has happened on our show before. It's been a while, but it never turns out well. Both Mecca and the Hajj are a bit of a big deal in the Muslim faith. Mecca sits in a desert valley in western Saudi Arabia and It is the holiest city in all of Islam, which is a huge deal because as of twenty twenty, about one in four people around the world are Muslim. Word is Mecca was the birthplace of the prophet Muhammed, where he received his first revelations from God. And at the heart of Mecca is a grand mosque, and I do mean grand. They call it the Majid alham or the Sacred Mosque. You may have seen it before. The exterior of the complex is adorned with intricate Islamic and architectural details and geometric patterns and chronic verses in Arabic calligraphy. The complex itself features this huge open courtyard paved with marble. It's all very bright, surrounded by white marble pillars and minaret towers with these ornate designs, and it's tought by a mosaic of domes and arches. But the thing that you might know about lays in the middle, and it is arguably one of the most important places on the planet, the Ka'bah. It is the most acred single sight in all of Islam. The Kabba is to all appearances, just a giant cube covered with black silk, to which to me, always gave it this real air of mystery and seriousness. The story is it was built by Ibrahim to celebrate God, and I'm sure it took him long enough to build because he never left. It became his tomb. Christians know him better as Abraham, who you know, the guy who God told the cut his kidnaff. Well, it is also believed that he is the prophet who coined and popularized monotheism, or you know, the idea that there's only one true God up till then the God that you wanted to talk to on any given day came from a well of deities. This whole new God concept was more. If anyone but me comes through that door, shoot them as prayer goes. Most faces are pretty come as you are, but Muslims put their own flavor on it by saying you have to point yourselves towards the Kabba. My friend Oswin, he's not Muslim, He's actually Indian Catholic. But he has an alarm clock that is shaped like a miniature Grand mosque and it plays the ad had called the morning Prayer instead of beeping. Mosques around the world have loudspeakers built into minaret towers. To make sure that no one misses the calls to prayer. And I was gonna say that the calls can be beautiful, but I almost feel like haunting might be the better word. Getting out of bed is a lot less to ask for than crossing the planet to take part in a mass pilgrimage. According to the teachings of Islam, every Muslim with the physical and financial means must take the Hajj to Mecca at least once in their lives. Just think of it as a once in a lifetime fundamental religious obligation. Now, he might be thinking, we've done religious stories on the show before, and they usually end in people getting incinerated or pressed into ham or delivered to their divine reward as a kind of a bloody, flaming mist. And by comparison, you look and you think, well, thejaj looks more like a great place, and maybe get your footstepped on. And yeah, it's busy. On a good year, it takes more than three hundred and fifty thousand people just to staff this thing. Imagine the aerial shot overlooking the original nineteen sixty nine Woodstock Festival and think to yourself, that's just the number of volunteers working the Hajj. Now, for those of you who pay the most attention, those of you who've already got your goggles on, you take one look at a crowd this large, and you know I'm going to warn about crowd crushes, and with pretty good reason. The Hajj Da Mecca is no stranger to death and disaster. The Hajje has seen everything from plagues to flooding. There's even been times when the thing flooded so bad that visitors actually swam around the Caabah. In nineteen ninety, over two thousand people were trampled and suffocated in one single event, which was described as a progressive troop collapse, which is not a term that I had heard before. Thirty one people died in twenty twenty three alone. The ritual of circling the Kabbah and a large group goes back all the way today six point thirty a d to which death counts not really available. In fact, I found it difficult to get any sense of the number of people have been killed over the years. I can say that in the years between two thousand and two and twenty fifteen, ninety thousand, two hundred and seventy six people did not get to make the full trip if you follow my meaning. So not to put too fine a point on it, but the Hajj is one of the world's largest and most deadly religious pilgrimages. The only thing bigger would be the annual Hindu pilgrimage to the Ganges River in India. They get about twenty million Hindu pilgrims every year. They come because the Ganges connects the Himalayas to the Bay of Bengal and they believe that it can purify and cleanse you of sins. So the difference is that the Hajj draws in about three million visitors from one hundred and eighty different countries, all during a narrow window lasting less than two months. But it also gets around thirteen million a year during the ten month down season off season, which really isn't that much less. So the takeaway is it's just always going to be packed, FYI. And interestingly, this used to be the kind of thing that only though very wealthy, could participate in. That was until those two brothers got on that rickety pillowood and flew over Kittyhawk in North Carolina. Adding air travel into the mix changed this thing forever, turned it into a global event. Jetta Airport's enormous Hajj terminal can hold eighty thousand pilgrims at a time, and it even has its own mosque and an open air market, which brings us back to the reason that we're here. Nationaire had left at the chance to service this route. They had expanded from one hundred and fifteen employees to more than fourteen hundred, and its fleet had grown to seven DC eights, two Boeing seven fifty sevens and four Boeing seven forty sevens. Now, I don't know where those planes came from, and passengers did complain that they were dirty and noisy and uncomfortable, but they were still planes, and Nationaire couldn't hear all of that over the bill counting machines rattling through fat stacks of cash. A story begins July the tenth, nineteen ninety one. Flight twenty twenty one was scheduled to leave Jedis King Abdullah Zi's International Airport for Sokoto, Nigeria, at eight in the morning. Halfway through refueling, it turns out that the fuel provider hadn't been paid so that kind of turned into a whole thing, so the departure was pushed back. In fact, it was delayed so long they actually had to switch planes. What was originally a Boeing seven forty seven flight was now going to be a bit more snug Douglas DC eight, which and again turned into its whole thing because passengers didn't want to have to sit on each other's laps, and that push takeoff to eight The next morning, Very shortly before takeoff was actually going to happen, lead mechanic JP Philippe showed up on the ramp at the Haush terminal and asked whether they had any nitrogen to inflate the tires. Some of them had been running a little low, so he just wanted to top them off. But it turns out the nearest available nitrogen was at the Saudi Arabian Airlines maintenance facility on the opposite side of the airport, and no one I wanted to go to that much trouble for a few soft tires. After a twenty four hour delay, the flight was scheduled to depart in twenty minutes, and according to lag, the tires were going to be replaced after they landed in Sokoto anyways, so couldn't have been that big of a deal. Flying this day will be Captain William Allen, who spent twenty eight years with the Royal Canadian Air Force. His first officer, Kent Davitch, was nearly as experienced, and joining them that day was flight engineer Victor fair tire pressure enthusiast JP Philippe project manager. Although tatamente nine flight attendants and two hundred and forty seven passengers, all of them pilgrims from northwestern Nigeria returning home after completing the Hajj, we won't get to know them very well. Captain Allen warmed up. The two engines taxied to the end of the runway and received clearance to roll to take off speed. As they raced down the runway picking up speed, the crew and passengers felt a bang from beneath, like clipping the speed bump at highway speed or something. The pilots heard a muffle flap and felt some minor vibrations, and Captain Allen figured that they must have blown a tire and they went for it all The hub up cleared itself as soon as the plane left the ground and the rest of the takeoff went very smooth. Flight twenty one twenty gained altitude and reached about two thousand feet when all hell broke loose. They lost cabin pressurization. Cabins are sealed and pressurized to maintain a pleasant and safe environment, and the higher you go, the lower the pressure outside and exposure that leads to hypoxia, which makes for not think so good. If you were in a plane when pressurization failed, you'd obviously get the hint once those supplemental air mass dropped from the overhead, which is good for the hole not breathing thing, but doesn't really help with the ear drums or the nose bleeds. Losing air pressure at a high altitude can be caused by anything as simple as a malfunctioning pressurization system to a full on hole in the hole, anything from a window crack to a door seal failure, and in this case, they had no idea what was happening. Now, normally, pop a window and you'll emergency descend to a lower altitude so that you can breathe without your oxygen mask. But they were only at two thousand feet and Captain Ellen was all sorry, but yeah, no, Hey, they just didn't have any altitude to spare. In flying, there's a checklist for almost anything you can think of, and the higher you are, the more time you have to identify and work a problem. Sure, on a normal day, circuit failure warnings and alerts lit up their instrument panel like a Christmas tree. The crew was immediately overwhelmed and swamped with overlapping issues which were just impossible to prioritize. Now, imagine you're driving on a highway and the check engine light blinks on and you lose power to the wheels and the brakes. For First Officer Davitch, that's exactly what happened. He was losing control of the hydraulics. You ever try to operate a vehicle with no power steering, You just have to brute force those wheels to turn against the asphalt. Well, imagine controlling the flight surfaces of a passenger plane with nothing but adrenaline and an expired gym membership. I picture them pulling on the steering column the way people tried to pull Excalibur from a stone. He'd lost aileron control. You know those flaps on the backside of the wings that pivot up and down. Those are called the elevators, and they control the pitch and the lift or descent of a plane with Ailerons are like sideways elevators set in the rear fin stabilizer, and their whole job is to control the roll of the airplane. They're the whole reason that you don't just corkscrew through the air. And you know what commercial passengers really hate more than pain for pillows or getting beaten senseless and dragged off an oversold flight. It's rolling uncontrollably. We did not get to hear Captain Allen's feeling on the aileron issue because as soon as he took over the cockpit voice recorder fitsed out, But we do know that's why flight attendant burst into the cockpit, backlit by the warm glow of an open flame and a screen of the passengers, to tell them, oh, hey, sorry, yeah, I don't know if you saw, but yeah, there's smoke back here in the cabin. Hey sorry, And no they had not Alan handled the controls and the radio. While Dutch and Fair frantically tried to stay on top of the list of mechanical failures. He screamed in recall of the tower, merciful the radio still worked. I mean, it has to feel pretty good knowing that it's still working, But less so when it becomes clear that the tower had no idea who they were talking to and instructed them to continue to climb to five thousand feet. Well, not no idea. They had been confused with another flight, Saudi Arabian Airlines flight seven thirty eight, which took off ten minutes before them and was having their own pressurization problem. At this point, inside the cabin, a wall of fire wooshed down the length of the aisle. You can just use your imagination. The nature of the airframe turned the cabin into inescapable death trap. And I have to tell you something even worse about these flights. Because of the nature of pilgrimage, there are a lot of people who are leaving their homes for the first time. A good percentage of these people have never needed or wanted to be on a plane before, so imagine how nervous people are on their very first flight. The acceleration, the sinky feeling of takeoff, the sight of flame bursting through the flooring by your feet, and passengers did make an attempt to open the but the speed of the air would have made that impossible. The levels of panic would have been unimaginable, so don't bother you can't. The passengers would have felt the heat from beneath their seats well before seeing or smelling anything breaking through into the cabin. By the time the fuselage started to fall apart and burn through the fire received nourishing oxygen, which was the last thing these people needed. You know how chaotic at a pressurization can be like a worst case scenario, hole bleue out of the wall, air rushing everywhere, making everything a flying object, and the fire. If you put a hair dryer on a charcoal fire, you can heat acting up enough to melt aluminum pretty quick. The air racing through Flight twenty one twenty must have created an inferno beyond comparison. As a human animal, we are programmed to try to flee what we can't fight, but there's nowhere to flee. There was no safety or escape. There could be no escape. There was nowhere to escape too, And at this point air traffic control real their mix up and directed them towards a proper runway for their return, not realizing that the plane was screaming so low to the ground, with flames hamorrhaging out of every pore, and witnesses stood in I can't really decide between silent horror and abject terror because they both kind of have that same look. But either way, people witnessing this had to swallow their own vomit as bodies and other cargo each actively A flame dropped from the plane onto the streets below. Singed life bests, black and sea cushions, and charred bodies reigned over Jetta as if the plane were frightening enough to look at by itself, and the volume of fire blasting from the plane could not be understated. TV and movies have taught us that there is no way a plane could be this much on fire without exploding. It looked like a flaming phoenix of legend, leaving a trail of flame and thick black smoke in its wake, and at approximately eight thirty eight and thirty five seconds within sight of the runway, the plain finally struck the barren desert and a steep descent, banking sharply to the right, burst into an enormous fireball, killing all two hundred and forty seven passengers and fourteen crew, So what happened well, within hours, the Civil Aviation Authority of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia launched an investigation because they wanted answers, but because the crash involved a Canadian aircraft with a Canadian crew, Canada's Transportation Safety Board got involved, and they were in a mood to tear Nation Air's head off and shut down its neck. Their Canadian politeness only extended so far. The mine bending horror of Nigeria Airways Flight twenty one to twenty actually began several days earlier. On July seventh, when the DC eight was sitting in Ghana, the weather tracking system crapped out and they had to wait for another one to get flown in. But in the meantime, a maintenance team decided why not begin some inspections, and that included checking tire pressure, and the pressure and tires two and four out of about a dozen was not great. They were a little soft one hundred and sixty psi instead of one hundred and eighty, which was the minimum value, but nobody actually topped them up. The plane had already been scheduled to have a number of its tires replaced, including those with the lower pressure, but the tire storage room was locked and no key, just shrugs, and it took so long for anyone to find a way in that by the time mechanics were about to start, a fax came in from although Tatamante, the project manager, saying screw it, just let it wait till later as they saw it, and you risked the Nigerian Airways contract like missing a flight for unscheduled maintenance was not worth it. So the new tires were loaded into the cargo hole for replacement when the plane got to Sokoto and one of the flight mechanics took a pen and kind of turned the six in one point sixty into an eight oom. Problem solved. Basically, they fudged the maintenance release, clearing the plane for takeoff, and at a ten am the DC eight, operating as Nigerian Airways Flight twenty one to twenty pushback from the and began taxiing towards Runway thirty four l for takeoff, which took eleven minutes as it slowly crept across the blazing Arabian sun cooked asphalt. Now, while underinflated tires might not seem like a big whoop. They do put extra strain on the other tires on the same axle. Tire number two had been running under inflated for days, which caused tire number one to overheat. As they departed Jetta, tire number two came away from its rim, which created a huge ball of sparks as it streaked along the runway. The rim would float red, then orange, then white hot, and it only took a second for overheated tire number one, which was already straight from the microwave pot to the first planes. Investigators wanted to know why they wouldn't have aborted their takeoff if they knew something was off. Well, if you watch enough air disaster recreations, you get used to hearing people talk about V one. Long story short. Up to a certain point, a plane racing down a runway can still safely abort the takeoff, but after the point V one, it it's either lift off or eat trees or whatever else is at the end of the runway. Nation air pilots had been trained only to reject a takeoff for three scenarios an engine failure, an engine fire, or a total electrical failure. But that didn't happen here, So Captain Smith obeyed his training. And have you ever seen that trick that people would do where they'd use their tongue to curl up and hide a smoke in their mouth while when the flight crew retracted the landing gear. That's exactly what happened. The fire wasn't excited that it was going to Nigeria. The fire wasn't even excited that it was its birthday or if this was its first flight. All fire wants to do is eat, which it did. The fire consumed everything it could. The cabin de pressisation was the first sign of trouble. And I should tell you today this happens less than fifty times a year, which makes it about a one in a million chance of it ever happening to you. The fire began in the wheelwell where there wasn't any kind of fire or heat detection systems, and before long wires and controls were melting out of existence by the minute. Gradually the fire ate through the hydraulic lines, which danced like like roadside windsock men, spraying flammable hydraulic fluid everywhere, making things so so much worse. The fire burned a hole in the fuselage, which led to the rapid deep pressurization of the cabin, And while they were trying to turn back, the fire breached the center fuel tank, which ignited and spread unstoppably in all directions, and as the hydraulic fluid was lost, all of the plane's controlled systems died with no survivors. You'll have to take my word for it, but these people would not have suffered long. Between the in air tramplaying and the poor breathing and the flames, most would have been killed quickly. Passengers burned to death where they stood between the seat rows, and those that fell from the plane were already gone. Some witnesses thought the plane had exploded in flight, others said that it abruptly rolled over and dove into the ground, and others thought that it had broken half mid air and its tail section went spiraling behind it. It was such an incredible fireball. People just couldn't even tell what they saw. Speaking of Gonde, Nationaire's rep as an airline also died in that fire. They did try to do some damage control, but nah, remember earlier when I said I wasn't saying Nationaire was evil or dim. Well, let's explore that a bit. The Nationaire team's ORG chart was a disaster. The project manager and the operations officer had the exact same job description, but they reported to two different departments. The flight engineers were responsible for signing off on the airworthiness of the plane before each flight, but they don't oversee maintenance work, so how the hell would they know if it had been done properly. There were also problems with management. The airlines founder, Robert Obedia ran the company like a bit of a dictatorship, and he had been described as vindictive. Pilots complained that they would receive financial penalties if they were found guilty or at fault of any kind of incident, which made them way more likely to just cover up their mistakes. Teen eighty nine, the airline laid off hundreds of employees and cut pay across the board by twelve percent, which also created resentments. Most employees felt that the company culture pressured them to prioritize the mission over any kind of safety. A lot of pilots told investigators that, yeah, we deviate from acceptable norms all the time to make sure if we get our on time performance, but they wouldn't elaborate. And wait there's more. Pilots resented the fact that they were often forced to downgrade from the seven forty seven to the DC eight, and the flight attendants had a problem with their hours. It was one time they walked off a flight in Florida after being asked to complete an eighteen hour day. And how did Nationair respond Well, they fired all the flight attendants and followed up by suing them to recoup the cost of canceling the flight. Fast forward to ninety one and Nationaire staged a lock out of all its unionized flight attendants. They even brought in strike breakers to keep things going while they bled the union dry. The lockout finally ended in early nineteen ninety three, but one week after they got their jobs back, the airline filed for bankruptcy. They owed tens of millions of dollars to the Canadian government in unpaid fees. But wait, there's more. While all this is going on, Robert Obedia used his testicles, which would never fit through a Douglas dcaight passenger entry door, to give himself a bunch of low interest loans and dividends from the company. He did this while the company already owed employees and creditors a ton of money. But don't worry, he didn't get away with it. He was tried and convicted of eight counts of fraud. Hooray except for the part where he never went to prison and his current whereabouts are not known. When I was a teenager, the president of my auto insurance company pulled the exact same trick. We Canadians call it the old moose knuckle Nationair filed for bankruptcy in nineteen ninety three, to which you would correctly say, good screw you, you suck eh. But wait, hold on. The reality was because of this, all the relatives of the victims who died in the crack had no way to claim compensation. Not one ever received so much as an apology, let alone any kind of legal settlement. After this accident, smoke detectors and fire extinguishers would become more common in the wheel wells, and the importance of tire pressure was drummed into mechanics and pilots heads. That is the best case for any disaster, you know, for lessons to take hold and to make sure that the kind of disaster can never be repeated. Which is great, but it's pretty cold comfort for the families, and most of the families never got their loved ones bodies either. Only nine of the fourteen crew members were identified and no attempt was ever made to identify any of the passengers. Shortly after the accident, a memorial plaque was created and inscribed with the names of the victims. But before you say, oh, that's nice, the flight attendants had to dig deep into their own unemployed pockets to pool enough money to have it created. This flight from mains the deadliest accident involving a Douglas DC eight and the deadliest involving a Canadian airline of all time. They don't really cancel the Hajj no matter what. The last time it was canceled outright was when Napoleon invaded Egypt in seventeen ninety eight. So if you were to visit at any point in the last two hundred and twenty years, there is a chance you might have seen anything from a cartoonishly flattened foot to a stack of bodies too tall to see over. But thankfully a very slim mathematical chance. And what don't we take on this show slim mathematical chances? Obviously, I've heard from probably ten listeners since we covered our first crowd disaster a few years back who wrote to say they will never look at big crowds and their personal safety the same way again, and good for them. That's why we're here. Doomsday does, after all, have the safest, most well prepared listenership in the world. As your second favorite podcast ever tried to save your life, go ahead and ask them if they even care. I'd also like to point out that if you had been listening to this episode as a Patreon member, not only would you have heard it sooner and at free, but this episode would be over twenty percent longer, as we looked into why maps suck, the death of flat earthers, the world changing power of infomercials, the great Oman cyclone of nineteen seventy oh I taught you how to become rich, and we touch on about a half dozen other ways people have died terribly in the East. Personally, I don't just me. I think getting episodes a little early, with no sponsor interruptions and with additional ridiculously interesting material in each new show sounds worth it to me. If you agree, you can find out more at Patreon. Dot com slash funeral Kazoo. You can reach out to us 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 wherever you found this one, and while you're there, please leave us a review and tell your friends. I want to thank my Patreon listeners. I appreciate you and I thank you so much for your support, and I will say that 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 few thousand of your friends could spare a buck or two, that would really help make that a possibility. But if you could spare the money and had to choose, we always ask you 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 three point six million people across seventy seven different countries. You can learn more and donate at globalmedic dot CA. On the next episode, it's always good advice to clear and manage any garbage you have around your property. It's the best way to prevent firm in and bugs and radioactive explosions. It's the Kershedim nuclear disaster of nineteen fifty seven. We'll talk soon. Safety goggles off and thanks for listening.