History Series / AirCrashInvestigation

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''Mayday'', also known as ''Air Emergency'' and ''Air Disasters'' in the United States and ''Air Crash Investigation'' in the UK and Australia, is a Canadian documentary series about aircraft accidents and incidents.

Episodes usually start InMediasRes while the disaster is underway, following them with a sequence of the disaster and the following investigation, and at the end a re-enaction of how the disaster occurred and of how measures were taken to prevent the disaster from happening again.

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!!This series provides examples of:

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* AcePilot:
** Deconstructed in the Tenerife disaster. Captain Van Zanten was KLM's most experienced and decorated pilot, and was regarded with such esteem that he served as KLM's spokesman and appeared in KLM's print adverts. It was this preceding reputation -- as well as the fact that he was the pilot who had certified his first officer on the Tenerife flight -- that probably factored into the crew's reluctance to stop him from impatiently taking off from the crowded, foggy airport, without permission from the tower. This resulted in the destruction of two jumbo jets, the loss of 500+ lives, and the worst aviation disaster in history. When KLM found out that one of their jets crashed in Tenerife, they tried to contact Captain Van Zanten to have him clean up the PR mess. They then realized that ''he was the pilot involved in the crash''.
** Other accidents like United Airlines Flight 173 and Flash Airlines Flight 604 also show how having an ace pilot can be a liability instead of an asset. Flight crews are [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crew_resource_management trained to work together as a team]], to prevent accidents like these.
** {{Reconstruction}}s happen in a few episodes, such as Captain Sullenberger and the Flight 1549 crew. Considering the panicky reactions we have seen from even the ''blameless'' flight crews so far in the series, the DangerDeadpan demeanor with which the 1549 pilots handled their situation is almost ''surreal''.
** The Captain of British Airways Flight 38 made a split second decision to reduce the flap setting when the jet suddenly lost engine thrust seconds before reaching the runway at Heathrow airport. Doing so reduced lift, which would almost certainly prevent a safe landing, however it would also reduce drag and allow the plane to clear a busy motorway. The counter-intuitive action allow the aircraft to make a semi-controlled crash on the airfield instead of stalling and dropping onto the highway.
* AcousticLicense: During the KLM Cityhopper 433 investigation, when the cockpit voice recording is played, the operator is asked to fast-forward the recording, but he actually rewinds it, as anyone familiar with tape or cassette players clearly sees. (The spools are moving anti-clockwise when played, then move clockwise when rewound, then anti-clockwise again when played.)
** In the LAPA 3142 episode, the conversations in the cockpit during the fateful roll are shown as normal with no unusual background sounds... but the final sequence shows that a loud alert horn was sounding all the time, even partially muting the voices on the CVR.
* AddictionDisplacement: Implied. The air traffic controller handling Metrojet Flight 9268 is seen eating sunflower seeds and discarding the shells in an ashtray.
* AesopAmnesia / IgnoredAesop: Unfortunately, there are many lessons learned from one or more accidents that aren't learned, are forgotten, or are ignored which then leads to another accident, maybe worse than the last.
** Pilots engaged in conversations not relevant to the flight at inappropriate times (preparing for take off or landing) have contributed to a mid-air collision (PSA Flight 182), two takeoffs with retracted flaps resulting in crashes (Delta Air Lines Flight 1141 and LAPA Flight 3142), an unrecoverable stall on approach (Colgan Air Flight 3407) and a demonstration flight crashing into a mountain (the 2012 Mount Salak Sukhoi Superjet crash).
** Pilots skipping, rushing or not reviewing flight checklists during important moments in the flight have also contributed to two takeoffs with retracted flaps (Spanair Flight 5022 and Northwest Airlines Flight 255), a plane crashing into a mountain (Santa Barbara Airlines Flight 518), a stall that lead to the plane crashing into a river (Air Florida Flight 90) and a landing with no spoilers during bad weather (American Airlines Flight 1420).
** Target fixation, poor situational awareness and poor crew resource management with the rest of the crew have been contributing factors to two improper landing approaches ending with the plane crashing into terrain (Korean Air Flight 801 and First Air Flight 6560), two instances where fixation with a minor fault lead to a crash (Eastern Air Lines Flight 401 and United Airlines Flight 173), a non stabilised approach and resulting hard landing on a runway (Garuda Indonesia Flight 200), a unrecoverable bank to the left after taking off (Korean Air Cargo Flight 8501), a plane crashing into construction equipment on a closed runway (Singapore Airlines Flight 006) and the infamous Tenerife Disaster (KLM Flight 4805 and Pan Am Flight 1736).
** Improper, mishandled or shoddy maintenance on aircraft has contributed to a engine falling off during takeoff (American Airlines Flight 191), the elevator jack-screw assembly failing during flight (Alaska Airlines Flight 261), a plane running out of fuel during flight (Air Transat Flight 236), two instances of covered pilot/static tubes which lead to malfunctioning flight instruments (Aeroperu Flight 603 and Birgenair Flight 301), a improperly adjusted elevator control cable (Air Midwest Flight 5481), tail strike damage causing metal fatigue over 22 years (China Airlines Flight 611), a rear cargo door falling off causing an explosive decompression (the 1975 US Air Force C-5 Galaxy crash), underinflated tyres starting a catastrophic fire during takeoff (Nigeria Airways Flight 2120), a missing row of screws causing the elevator to break off mid flight (Continental Express Flight 2574), and a missing cotter pin causing the right side elevator to get jammed into the climb position (Emery Worldwide Flight 17).
** Airlines taking the easy way out on important procedures such as repairs, training and maintenance in return compromising safety has proved to be factors contributing to an on board cargo fire ([=ValuJet=] Flight 592), a plane's IRS system failing and the crew failing to respond appropriately (Adam Air Flight 574), an airline using illegal aircraft parts (Partnair Flight 394), a plane conducting a IFR approach with a inadequate pairing of flight crew with limited experience ([=Manx2=] Flight 7100), a faulty maintenance policy that lead a cargo plane to crash into a salvage yard (Emery Worldwide Flight 17), a rear bulkhead failure (Japan Airlines Flight 123), an entire wing falling of a seaplane (Chalks Ocean Airways Flight 101), a cockpit windscreen blowing off mid-flight (British Airways Flight 5390).
** The two [=FedEx=] MD-11 crashes are another example. Land the plane too hard and let them bounce, and it might flip over because of the shift of gravity. Despite this being hypothesised in the first non-fatal accident's investigation, it happened again a few years later, and this time the crew of the MD-11 were not as lucky.
** No fewer than seven accidents covered by the show involved substandard, inexperienced or badly trained pilots being employed by a rapidly growing airline or company. Derrick White with United Express Flight 6291 in 1994, Gustavo Weigel and Luis Etcheverry with LAPA Flight 3142 in 1999, Pavel Gruzin/Rastislav Kolesár with Crossair Flight 498 in 2000 and Hans Lutz with Crossair Flight 3597 in 2001, Martín Olíva/Álvaro Sánchez with Learjet XC-VMC in 2008, Jordi Lopez and Andrew Cantle for [=Manx2=] Flight 7100 in 2011 and Liu Tze-chung with [=TransAsia=] Flight 235 in 2015. Respective death tolls are 5, 65, 10, 24, 9, 6 and 43 in that order.
** A more prominent example is the episode "Behind Closed Doors." American Airlines 96 was a brand new DC-10 that had its cargo door blown out while climbing. Investigators found a significant flaw with the cargo door that enabled it to be [[AchillesHeel closed but not locked]]. Problem solved, right? [[spoiler: Wrong. Turkish 981 crashes in France two years after the American Airlines incident, for the exact same reason, and this time, it's a fatal disaster that kills 346 people]]. Only then does the FAA act, and by this time, the DC-10's reputation was down the gutter hole.
* AIIsACrapshoot: Basically what happens on Qantas Flight 72, as the faulty ADIRU basically causes the plane's automated systems to go haywire, with contradictory warnings, various ECAM warnings and the PFD going into a state of confusion, as well as the AOA sensors going crazy, causing the plane to pitch down.
* AlcoholInducedIdiocy: In "Lethal Limits", the captain was found to have consumed alcohol before the flight, which impaired his ability to react when things went wrong.
* AlliterativeTitle: A few episodes:
** ''Deadly Detail''
** ''Deadly Delay''
** ''Deadly Distraction''
** ''Fire Flight''
* AnachronismStew:
** Count the number of times that they had episodes covering plane crashes in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s where you can see cars from the 2000s. One particularly egregious case is the Pan Am Flight 103 episode, as the opening segment documenting a German police bust on two terrorists working for the PFLP that happened two months before the Lockerbie bombing shows 21st century cars.
** In the episode about the Tenerife jumbo jet collision, which takes place in 1977, the air traffic controllers have, of all things, a modern personal computer in their office.
** In many episodes, the passengers tend to be shown in generic modern clothes and hair rather than in obvious contemporary fashions. May be somewhat justified in that given that this is an ongoing show with a limited budget that requires many actors and extras, they would not only need to provide a lot of period clothing but also do many contemporary hairstyles/wigs. Notably averted in a few episodes, such as "Munich Air Disaster" and "Grand Canyon Disaster", as the clothing is of the appropriate era (which is the 1950s).
** A subtle one occurs in the Grand Canyon episode: in 1956, the controller uses a modern "taxi into position and hold" command. Moreover, the first officer repeats his command as he heard it; this was introduced after the Tenerife disaster. In the 1950s, the ATC commands were acknowledged with simply "OK" or "Roger". A more obvious one in the same episode is where, despite it being 1956, the ATC tower has a functional computer monitor in the tower, similar to the anachronism found in the Tenerife jumbo jet collision episode.
** In the Garuda Flight 421 episode, during the waterborne evacuation, one of the cabin walls near the exit doors displays the Garuda Indonesia logo. However the logo displayed is incorrect, since it is the current one, [[http://vignette2.wikia.nocookie.net/logopedia/images/d/d2/Logo_Garuda_Indonesia.jpg/revision/latest?cb=20150813112548 distinguishable by its unique font]]. In 2002 (the year Flight 421 actually crashed), Garuda Indonesia were using [[https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/originals/fc/4d/23/fc4d234a73163bca2fd7acaa034fd76f.gif an different logo]] that was adopted in the mid 1980s, and only transferred to the current logo in 2009 as part of a re-branding. This error also appears in the Garuda Flight 152 episode.
** The same type of logo error happens in the Air Canada 797 episode, as although the plane is in the 1965-1993 livery, the logo on the headrest covers in the cabin are of the 2005-2017 variant.
** A common anachronism in the series is the "airliner placeholder", where either defunct airlines or airlines that did not exist until later are used to fill out the background at airports.
*** In "Titanic in the Sky", when Qantas Flight 32 was backing away from the gate at Singapore Changi Airport, several aircraft can be seen parked at the gates around the Airbus A380. However, the aircraft parked range from airlines that fly to Changi in real life but with a completely wrong aircraft type (three Air France aircraft are seen in the scene, one of which is a Airbus A320; in reality, Air France operates only one flight to Singapore from Paris, not with a Airbus A320 but with a Boeing 777) and airlines that never flew from Singapore and went out of existence way before the date of the accident (multiple Pacific Southwest Airlines aircraft, mostly Boeing 737-200s are seen; FYI, PSA never even flew out of the continental United States during its operational life span and the airline went out of service in ''1988''.)
*** This also happens in "Speed Trap", where when Flight 706 is on the ground, out of the cockpit window you could see a plane's tail with the Air China logo on it. This is a very obvious anachronism since back in 1971 (a year the episode explicitly stated the accident occurred), Air China didn't even exist as it was founded in 1988.
*** Yet again, also appears in "Fatal Delay", as when Spanair 5022 was taxing on the apron, you can see a PSA 737 and a [=AirWest=] DC-9 in the background.
** A minor anachronism, but many of the Boeing documentation in the past (such as repair manuals, logbooks, documents and such), especially in episodes set before 1997, display the post-1997 Boeing logo which included the sphere and ring logo of [=McDonnell=] Douglas after the latter merged with the former.
* AndIMustScream: Andreas Prodromou, the flight attendant aboard Helios 522. Imagine being in a plane, when everyone else falls unconscious, or worse, dead from hypoxia. You stagger towards the cockpit, taking gasps of oxygen from your personal tank, hoping beyond hope that the pilots are still awake. ''They aren't''. You see two fighter jets trying to communicate with you, but you can't talk to them; you don't know where to tune the radio. You try to pilot the 737 towards Athens, but can't, as you only know how to fly light aircraft. All you can do is wait, and slowly die from hypoxia, as the plane continues burning through the last of its fuel...
* ArtisticLicenseGeography:
** In "Death of The President", Polish investigators have identification tags in dark red with a thin white horizontal stripe through the middle... which is the flag of Latvia. The Polish flag is white-bright red.
** In "Dead Weight", the destination airport of Air Midwest Flight 5481 is Greenville-Spartanburg Airport, but the narrator mistakenly says it is located in North Carolina. The airport is actually in ''South Carolina''.
* ArtisticLicenseHistory:
** There was no Cockpit Voice Recorder (CVR) on BEA 548, only the communications with air traffic control were recorded, so the cockpit chatter is entirely conjectural. Same for American Airlines 191 (where the CVR stopped working), Arrow Air 1285 (where the CVR turned out to be faulty and didn't record anything), the Grand Canyon disaster and the Munich disaster (where the aircraft involved did not have a CVR), Chalks Ocean Airways 101 (where CVR audio from multiple flights was jumbled together), Hughes Airwest 706 (where the CVR was recovered, but the tape was destroyed in the post-crash fire) plus the USMC F-4B Phantom II [=BuNo=] 151458 that hit it (the plane never had a CVR in the first place), Swissair 111, Air France 358, and First Air 6560 (where the CVR transcript is sealed under Canadian law), El Al 1862 (where the CVR was never recovered and believed to have been destroyed during the fire), China Airlines 006 (where the the events of the dive were automatically taped over by the CVR itself), Partnair 394 (where the CVR cutoff before takeoff) and Copa Airlines 201 (where the CVR broke a week before the accident). Also to a lesser extent in cases where the CVR failed mid-flight, such as Nigeria Airways Flight 2120 (where the CVR stopped recording shortly after the co-pilot's controls crapped out and as the captain was taking over) or National Airways Flight 120 (where the recorders were in the path of the inadequately restrained armoured car that smashed into the back).\\
In any episode in which there was no CVR recording, or parts of it are missing, the reactions of the pilots are dramatized to be as accurate as the situation demands. For instance, we don't know if Nigeria Airways Flight 2120 captain William Allan uttered the words "I've lost elevators. ''[[OhCrap Christ, I have no control!]]''", but the accident report does note that the plane only seemed to become fully uncontrollable just before the crash, so this would be a conceivable reaction to losing control at the last moment.
** In cases where nobody survived, what was happening in the cabin is also conjecturally dramatized, as there's no such thing as a cabin voice recorder.
** The episode covering Malaysian Flight 370 shows dramatizations of each of the theories regarding its disappearance. Since the black boxes have not been recovered (nor has the crash site itself been located) and the crash is unlikely to be solved anytime soon, all of the dramatizations are also conjectural.
** In "Death of The President", it is said that about 20,000 Polish officers were executed in the Katyń Massacre. Actually, about 6,000 died in Katyń; 22,000 is the general number of Polish officers murdered by the NKVD at various sites in Russia in 1940-41.
* ArtisticLicensePhysics: In the AA 587 episode, an overhead shots shows the A300 falling onto the suburban houses... which remain motionless in relation to the plane, meaning it is falling straight down, without any forward movement. This would be more or less correct if the aircraft had stalled (there would still likely be some forward motion anyway, except in a high altitude stall where the aircraft was already falling through several thousand feet, gradually losing its momentum in the process), but AA 587 did not.
* AskAStupidQuestion: The [[EstablishingCharacterMoment opening exchange]] between the pilots of Northwest Airlink Flight 5719:
-->'''[[NaiveNewcomer Copilot]]''': Do we get our own [hotel] room?\\
({{Beat}})\\
'''[[HairTriggerTemper Pilot]]''': [[SarcasmMode No, you're gonna have the room with me. And it's only a single bed, so you'll just have to curl up at my feet.]] Of course you'll get your own room; you're under contract now.
* AxCrazy: Or, in the case of Auburn Calloway on [=FedEx=] Flight 705 in "Fight for Your Life", [[DropTheHammer Hammer]]-and-Speargun Crazy.
* BaldOfEvil: David Burke, the man who crashes PSA 1771 to get back at his employers. It's inaccurate, though, as David Burke actually had [[https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0c/David_A._Burke.png a full head of hair]]. The mustache appears to be accurate.
* BigNo: Yelled by the crew of [=USAir=] Flight 427 just before their plane hits the ground.
* BigOMG:
** One of the passengers in the Hinton rail disaster yells one when he realizes his train is about to collide head-on with a freight train.
** The copilot of United Airlines Flight 585 gets a triple share of this during the plunge down to Earth.
** The captain of TAM Flight 3054 shouts this as his plane skids off the runway.
* BittersweetEnding:
** "Pilot Betrayed": Captain Stefan G. Rasmussen is lauded as a hero for performing the emergency landing of Scandinavian Airlines Flight 751 with no loss of life. But he is so deeply traumatized by the incident, and his "trust" in the aircraft is so badly shaken (as the crash was partly caused by a new safety feature that he was not aware of), that he chooses not to fly again.
** "Fight for Your Life": Though the crew of [=FedEx=] Flight 705 are able to stop Auburn Calloway from carrying out his murder-suicide plan, they are unable to return to duty because of the effects of the injuries they sustained during the struggle.
** "Runaway Train": Frank Holland, the engineer of the train that crashed, was absolved of all blame and continued to work as an engineer, but he was never able to take another train down the Cajon Pass.
* BlandNameProduct: In the Metrojet Flight 9268 episode, "Terror over Egypt", the search engine that the investigators use to search information about terrorist groups is named "searchforit.com", clearly standing in for Google.
* TheBlindLeadingTheBlind: In "Kid in the Cockpit", the captain of Aeroflot Flight 593 lets his teenage son operate the controls of an aircraft he has little experience with himself. [[KillEmAll You can guess what happens next.]]
* CaffeineFailure:
** Because they lost so much sleep flying into Newark, the pilots of Colgan Air Flight 3407 don't get even slightly awakened by a cup of coffee in-universe.
** Another in-universe example is the captain of Trans-Colorado Flight 2286; the coffee he drank before takeoff did nothing to ward off the effects of his cocaine withdrawal.
* CallBack: There are instances where accidents that happened before the one being analyzed are referenced, either to show how a theory being analyzed had happened before or to explain something that had an influence on the current investigation.
* CallForward: In some cases, accidents are mentioned that don't (or didn't) have their own episode. (e.g. Season 1's episode on Aeroperu 603 mentioning Birgenair 301, which got its episode in Season 5) There have even been cases where episodes mention accidents that already had an episode about them but happened ''after'' the accident at the center of the episode. (e.g. The episode about the 1978 crash of United 173 talking about the 2008 crash of British Airways Flight 38 as an example of how landing gear failure is a fairly minor problem.)
* CanadaEh: Mostly averted except once during the Nationair 2120 episode. As the aircraft was accelerating for takeoff, the captain asked the first officer "You're not leaning on the brakes, eh?" after one of the tires blew.
* CaptainCrash: Captain Lutz of Crossair Flight 3597 was almost literally this before his fatal accident, and yet his airline continued to let him fly.
* CaptainObvious: Sometimes done in-universe.
** The glaring example occurs in the Air France 447 episode, when one of the investigators detailedly explains what a stall is and how the Airbus behave after stalling, using cutouts and diagrams. While the audience in front of the [=TVs=] may not know this, in-universe he explains this to a group of ''avation experts and aviation journalists'' who certainly know what an aerodynamic stall is...
** One interviewee in the episode on PSA Flight 1771 stated that "it wouldn't take much knowledge or experience on a passenger's part to know that they were in deep, deep trouble."
** In the United 173 episode, after the investigators hear on the CVR that the plane exhausted all fuel, one of the guys states: "The engines didn't have any fuel!" Ya think, buddy?...
** "28 degrees... That's cold enough for water to freeze." Indeed it is, as anyone who attended elementary school knows full well.
* ChekhovsGun
** If the narrator makes note of a passenger changing seats, you can bet that this will turn out to be a factor in their survival or death.
** "Who's At The Controls": The captain slightly bumps his control column while turning to speak to the flight engineer. It caused the descent leading to a crash.
** "Cockpit Chaos": One of the shots is of a tripped circuit breaker. Later we find out that caused an alarm not to sound and contributed to the crash.
** "Heathrow Crash Landing": Just before landing, the plane hits a turbulence and the autothrottle increases speed, which both pilots comment on. This actually triggered the whole incident.
** "Who's In Control": The pilots are constantly bugged by a faulty radio altimeter, which, as it turns out, was a direct cause of the crash.
** "Fire In The Hold": The company materials that are loaded onto a plane are given some attention. Not without reason, it turns out later.
** "Caution To The Wind": When an aircraft is accelerating down the runway, cockpit instruments are shown. One of the indicators is moved to the extremely left position. Later it turns out this was a warning to the crew something is not right, but was ignored.
** "Death Of The President": The pilot resetting his baro altimeter and the navigator reading altitude from the radio altimeter seem right; later we found those were both serious errors.
** "Ocean Landing": The narration at the start of the episode informs viewers that Ethiopian Airlines Flight 961 will be making a series of short hops across Africa with just enough fuel to get to their first stop, where they intend to take on more. Cue three hijackers storming the flight deck, demanding to be flown to Australia, and refusing to believe the captain when he tells them that they don't have nearly enough fuel aboard.
** "Fatal Transmission": As the pilots on a commuter plane are coming in to land, they hear a transmission that has some interference mixed in. It later turns out this interference led the pilots to think another plane was waiting, when it was in fact taking off.
** "Fatal Delivery": The captain's tuning of the radio to Bahrain area control after takeoff from Dubai is given special attention. When the cockpit of UPS 6 becomes filled with smoke from a cargo hold fire, the copilot is unable to see the radio controls, preventing him from tuning to the Dubai frequency and forcing him to use a long chain of radio relays to communicate, contributing to the eventual crash.
** "Deadly Detail": We are explicitly told that the pilots deployed their flaps and slats before landing. That shouldn't be noteworthy, as it's what all pilots are supposed to do before landing a plane. (Though the crash of Garuda Indonesia Flight 200 involved the flaps and slats not being fully extended.) As it turns out, that was relevant information: the fuel tank was punctured by a bolt that got loose as the slats were deployed.
** "Afghan Nightmare": A close-up of the plane as it approaches a stall reveals that only two parts of the landing gear have retracted. This is a sign that the hydraulics have failed, having been breached by an improperly secured MRAP vehicle in the cargo hold.
** "Explosive Proof": In the cabin, the lights are constantly flickering on and off. It's later found that the wiring was in a horrid state, which turned out to be a cause of the accident.
** In both "Cockpit Chaos" and "Fatal Delay", if one knows just where to look, it's clear that the flaps are fully retracted as the plane tries to take off.
** "Killer Attitude": The narration makes the personality differences between the pilot and first officer evident early on. It was the abrasive personality of the pilot that led to the breakdown of cockpit communication which caused the crash.
** "Deadly Discussion": At the start of the episode, an interviewed passenger mentioned that the cockpit door was left wide open, and there was no safety card in the seat pouch. Both hint at the pilots' cavalier attitude and the state of the company respectively.
** "Nuts and Bolts": In a blink-and-you-missed-it moment, the plane starts to gain altitude ''before'' the captain calls rotation speed; the elevator was jammed in the up position by a loose crankshaft because of improper maintenance.
** "Fatal Climb": In another blink-and-you-missed-it moment, you can see the captain's hands are not on his control column while the plane is in a steep dive; the captain was unconscious after experiencing a heart attack.
** "Lethal Limits": The captain repeatedly fumbles over his words and is shown lulling his head continuously. Evidence that he's under the influence of alcohol.
* ChekhovsSkill:
** The captain of the "Gimli Glider" happened to be an experienced glider pilot and pulled off some gliding maneuvers to land the plane after it ran out of fuel.
** One of the pilots on [=FedEx=] Flight 705 used to fly jet fighters in the Navy, and used his instincts from that area to maneuver the plane to keep hijacker Auburn Calloway off-balance.
** Flight instructor Dennis E. Fitch [[IsThereADoctorInTheHouse offered his services]] to the crew of the crippled United Airlines Flight 232, which had lost the use of all flight controls due to an engine explosion severing the hydraulic systems. He had previously studied the case of Japan Air Flight 123 that had also lost all of its primary flight controls and devised strategies of using engine thrust as an alternate means of control.
* CigaretteOfAnxiety: After escaping the wreck of KLM Cityhopper 433, a passenger starts smoking a cigarette in spite of protests from a rescuer on the scene.
* ClipShow: The "Science of Disaster" episodes can be counted as this, as it's usually half a recap of air disasters centering around a theme (ATC, bad weather, pilot errors, deferred maintenance, hidden defects, etc.) and half an explanation about the theme itself and how to prevent similar disasters in the future.
* ClusterFBomb: The captain of American Airlines Flight 965 uses the F-word several times after losing track of where the plane is going.
* ColdHam: Happens rather frequently in the re-enactments, usually when investigators make an alarming discovery that provides a major clue if not the biggest clue to the whole mystery.
* CompositeCharacter: "Missing over New York" and "America's Deadliest" state as much in the opening disclaimer.
* CoolPlane: As to be expected from a series revolving around aviation. A combination of StockFootage and ConspicuousCGI for airplanes such as the Boeing 707, Boeing 747, Douglas DC-7, and Lockheed Constellation.
* CryingWolf:
** On Aeroperu Flight 603, pieces of duct tape covering the plane's static ports caused the flight instruments and onboard computer to behave erratically, causing contradictory alarms to sound off in the cockpit all at once. So when the pilots heard the ground proximity warning system ("TOO LOW TERRAIN") they assumed it was another malfunction. It wasn't. Since [=GPWSes=] don't rely on static ports, the GPWS was one of the few things actually working.
** Most MD-80 pilots often taxied with only one engine doing all the work, while the other is left at idle. As this would require the throttle for the taxiing engine to be advanced past the point where the circuit for the takeoff configuration warning would be closed, said warning would constantly go off until the flaps/slats were properly configured for takeoff. As takeoff configuration usually isn't set until shortly before take-off, MD-80 pilots often pulled a circuit breaker to silence the alarm. In the case of Northwest Flight 255, however, the plane's flaps were configured improperly prior to takeoff, and with the breaker pulled, the pilots never knew this was the case until they inevitably crashed.
** In the PSA Flight 182 midair collision, Lindbergh Field's new radar system attempted to detect possible mid-air collisions, but constantly malfunctioned, indicating an imminent collision when there was none. When the plane crossed into the path of a Cessna, the alarm sounded again, but the controllers assumed it was another malfunction.
** The 2010 Polish Tu-154 crash. The crew, surprisingly, ignores the "PULL UP" command from the TAWS systems; as the investigators found out, the pilots frequently landed on a small military or ex-military airports and the TAWS always went off [[note]]The TAWS has a database of major airports and does not alert the crew when they are simply about to land, but the rural military airfields were not in the database[[/note]], so they gradually learned to ignore the alerts during approach and landing. This time it was a fatal error.
*** The pilots demonstrating the Sukhoi 100 in Indonesia made the exact same mistake with their TAWS system. Justified, as their navigation charts didn't show the mountains in the area, and they thought they were flying in the other direction.
** The crew of British Midland Flight 92 (the flight involved in the Kegworth air disaster) didn't trust the vibration readings indicating that the left engine was shredding itself to bits because these were known to be unreliable in previous 737 models, and smoke in the cockpit indicated that it was the ''right'' engine that needed to be shut down because that supplied cockpit air. Little did they know that, in the 737-400, ''both'' engines supplied air to the cockpit and, more relevantly, ''the vibration detection instruments actually worked properly''; it ''was'' the left engine that had gone bad.
* CrypticallyUnhelpfulAnswer: In the Tenerife disaster, when the Pan American crew ask for clarification on which exit to take, the ATC simply responds, "The third one." This doesn't help the crew, since they don't know if that means the third exit from the start of the runway or the third one from their current position.
* CultureClash:
** Since so many of the accidents involved American aircraft (mainly from Boeing or [=McDonnell=] Douglas) and/or an aircraft component that gets major attention from investigators is American-made (such as a flight recorder), then American investigators were often sent to assist investigations. These investigators often ran into problems in countries where [[PoliceState the police force or military]] have greater powers over the investigation, or countries with an ObstructiveBureaucrat or two. Sometimes, they were more cooperative, like the in-flight breakup of China Airlines Flight 611.
** Brought to the fore in the [=EgyptAir=] and [=SilkAir=] investigations, both of which were most likely acts of mass murder-suicide committed by the pilots. The disasters occurred in Egypt and Indonesia respectively, and since both countries are predominantly Muslim and have serious taboos about suicide, it is hinted that their investigators were pressured into blaming other causes.
** The Colombian Avianca crew did not use "emergency" to describe their dangerously low fuel supply, instead using "priority". This caused the air traffic controller to not understand how grave the fuel situation was on the plane. One interviewee described how "prioridad" in Spanish has a much greater sense of urgency than the English "priority".
** A common theme in the series is the culture clash between military aviation and civilian aviation, and many crashes have occurred due to strict military culture from former air force pilots interfering with civilian aviation rules.
* CurseCutShort: The captain of Delta 191 shouts out "Hang onto the son of a--!" before the scene switches to a shot of the plane closing in on the ground.
* CuttingCorners: Several incidents were caused by airlines or manufacturers trying to cut costs and save money by [[TemptingFate skimping on safety]], with tragic results.
* DamnYouMuscleMemory:
** The pilots of COPA Flight 201 flipped the gyro switch the wrong way when the captain's altitude indicator malfunctioned because the controls didn't match those of the simulator they were trained in.
** The pilots of Spanair Flight 5022 skipped the final flap check on their checklist by reciting the final items from memory.
** In the hurried takeoff preparations, the pilots of Air Florida Flight 90 leave the engine deicing off, as they always did in the warm Florida climate. In the Washington snowstorm, this proves fatal.
** The first officer of the Lokomotiv Yaroslav Yak-42 plane had his foot on the brake because he was more accustomed to the Yak-40, which has a different design for the brake pedal (in the Yak-40 one has to press the top part of the pedal to engage brakes; in the Yak-42 the pedal can be pressed anywhere along its length).
** The captain of Garuda Indonesia Flight 152 made a wrong turn for the turn to base because the standard approach pattern involved a left turn, not a right turn as they needed to make on this flight.
** The first officer of Delta Airlines Flight 1141 recited what the flap setting should be during the checklist out of habit but didn't verify the flaps were in the correct setting. They weren't.
* DangerDeadpan:
** Captain Sullenberger and the US Airways Flight 1549 crew.
** Also the crew of British Airways Flight 9:
---> "Ladies and Gentlemen, this is your Captain speaking. We have a small problem. All four engines have stopped. We are doing our damnedest to get them going again. I trust you are not in too much distress."
* DeadpanSnarker: Captain Alfred C. Haynes on United Airlines Flight 232 while getting ready to land without functioning flight controls.
-->'''Sioux City Approach''': You're cleared to land on any runway.\\
'''Haynes''': You want to be particular and make it a runway, huh?
* DeathFromAbove:
** For 11 residents of Lockerbie, when Pan Am Flight 103 was blown up passing over them.
** Also happens to 15 residents of Cerritos in "Out of Sight", and seven residents of San Diego in "Blind Spot".
* DeathInTheClouds: The show's approach to terrorist attacks and hijackings.
* DeliberatelyMonochrome:
** Done usually during flashbacks when the investigators are piecing together the events leading up to the incident.
** One first-responder to an especially grisly crash of an airliner onto a suburb recounted that in his mind's eye he sees everything in muted brown shades (which his counselor told him was a coping mechanism). Shots from his perspective are rendered in sepia tones.
* {{Determinator}}: The crew of [=FedEx=] Flight 705 in "Fight For Your Life", and how they kept Auburn Calloway from succeeding in his goals. Let us count the ways:
** James Tucker, an ex-Navy pilot who not only flew the plane with a hole in his skull and half of his body suffering paralysis, but did extreme aerial maneuvers with said ''jumbo cargo plane'' (including insane barrel rolls, sharp turns, and a dive so steep that ''the plane nearly went supersonic'') to throw the attempted hijacker off-balance as the man fought with the two other crew members in the galley, eventually trading places with David Sanders to restrain Calloway. ''With half of his body paralyzed and a hole in his skull.''
** David Sanders, who was ''also'' an ex-Navy pilot, was also hit in the head with a hammer and suffered gashes to his head (requiring doctors to sew his right ear back into place), and not only managed to land the extremely weighed-down aircraft successfully, but pulled off sharp turns normally near-impossible with said plane to land it...with his glasses missing and blood flowing into his eyes...''manually''.
** Andrew Peterson, the crew's flight engineer, who also got hit in the head multiple times with a hammer and had his temporal artery severed, but managed to fight back despite massive blood loss, eventually helping to beat the shit out of and restrain the would-be hijacker. [[ForWantOfANail Also, he was thorough enough in his pre-flight check that he noticed that the cockpit recorder had been shut off by the hijacker in an attempt to cover his tracks beforehand.]] ''Twice.''
** One final plug has to go to the final star of the show: The DC-10 itself. The aircraft was built for nice, leisurely long distance flights that would not require more then maybe a few turns to line up for the destination runway. It did quite a bit more that day. The maneuvers that Tucker and Sanders put that plane through would've made a test-pilot [[BringMyBrownPants fill their shorts.]] To top it all off, the aircraft it self suffered significant damage because of the maneuvers, and then on landing (which it was too heavy for to begin with). [=FedEx=] eventually repaired the aircraft, and returned it to service.
* DirtyOldMan: The first officer of [=EgyptAir=] Flight 990, Gameel Al-Batouti, was caught sexually harassing female employees at the hotel at which he and the other Egyptair crew and management had been staying. This got him in trouble with [=EgyptAir=] management, who told him he'd be demoted after returning from JFK to Egypt... which may have led him to [[DisproportionateRetribution crash his plane in revenge]].
* DisasterDominoes: It's basically one long sequence of these. For example, "Crash of the Century"/"Disaster at Tenerife", which covers the Tenerife runway collision between two Boeing 747s, has the dominoes from lack of ground radar, an overloaded airport (the result of the two planes being diverted from their destination by a bombing at that airport), bad communication, foggy weather and a captain too eager to take off.
* DisneyDeath:
** The captain of British Airways Flight 5390 spends the entire emergency [[OutsideRide dangling from the cockpit window by his legs]] exposed to super cold, super fast winds, and the episode itself leads the viewer to believe he's been killed. Yet somehow, at the end of it all, he not only survives, but makes a full recovery and goes back to flying once out of the hospital.
** The fact that most of the survivors of Air China Flight 129 were seated in the rear of the airplane could easily lead the viewer to assume that the entire flight crew was killed. But it turns out the captain was the sole survivor of the flight crew.
** Rescue crews didn't expect to find survivors from the crash of American International Airways Flight 808. To their surprise, all three people onboard survived because the cockpit broke off and slid away from the main wreckage.
* DisproportionateRetribution:
** Auburn Calloway wanted to hijack a [=FedEx=] DC-10 and crash it for insurance fraud because he had been laid off from his job.
** Gameel Al-Batouti may have slammed his aircraft into the Atlantic Ocean for supposedly being outed for harassing female [=EgyptAir=] employees.
** David Burke killed everyone on a plane because he had been fired for theft and his ex-manager refused to help him get rehired by the company.
* DistantPrologue:
** The China Airlines Flight 611 episode starts with the tailstrike accident in 1980 that eventually led to the plane's breakup in 2002.
** A brief summary of [=FedEx=] Express Flight 14 is presented before the start of the story of [=FedEx=] Express Flight 80.
* DoesThisRemindYouOfAnything:
** Auburn Calloway in "Fight for Your Life" and the Air France Flight 8969 hijackers both ultimately wanted to kamikaze their planes into buildings; Calloway targeted [=FedEx=]'s headquarters in Memphis while the Air France hijackers planned to gun for the Eiffel Tower. The parallels to the 9/11 attacks are not ignored.
** The in-flight icing tests on the ATR-72 as part of the investigation of American Eagle Flight 4184 used supercooled water mixed with yellow dye for enhanced visibility on the aircraft surfaces. Justified, as the color is dark enough to stand out, while still light enough to maintain visibility through the windows.
* DramaticDrop: A flight attendant drops a tray of snacks when she sees [[spoiler:a ghost from the crew of Eastern Airlines Flight 401 walking by]].
* DrivenToSuicide:
** The NTSB report on [=SilkAir=] Flight 185 concludes that the captain, plagued by debts caused by bad investments and problems at work (including a demotion for reckless flying), intentionally crashed his plane. The fact that the crash occurred on the anniversary of a training flight of which he was the sole survivor [[SurvivorGuilt (his plane was forced to turn back due to mechanical issues, while three of his comrades were killed when their planes crashed in bad weather)]] can't have been good for his mental state either.
** Also happened with [=EgyptAir=] Flight 990 (according to the NTSB) and Germanwings Flight 9525.
** Discussed in the case of Crossair Flight 498. Interviews and narrator dialogue make mention of the captain's emotional difficulties as a commuter pilot in a distant country whose native languages were beyond his knowledge or unusable outside his job requirements, and it's briefly hinted that he deliberately took one of his tranquilizer pills shortly before the flight; however, the traces found in his system weren't able to support this theory.
* DrivesLikeCrazy: With flying. For instance, the KLM captain in the Tenerife special is portrayed as this, and for good reason.
* DroppedABridgeOnHim: Discussed in an interview in the episode covering the death of Dag Hammarskjold:
-->'''Bob Macintosh''': Certain people believed that it was just not possible that Dag Hammarskjold was killed in a common accident; it had to be something more.
* DrugsAreBad:
** Double subverted and played for drama. The first officer of Trans-Colorado Airlines Flight 2286 was briefly suspected of being drunk before the crash, but toxicology tests showed he was not drinking before the flight. But the captain failed to notice the mistakes made by his first officer; further tests revealed he had been using cocaine the night before and was suffering from withdrawal.
** Implied with the captain of Crossair Flight 498; traces of a tranquilizer medication were found in his system, but there was no definitive answer as to whether this had an effect on his flying.
* DrunkDriver: Subverted. A passenger on Trans-Colorado Airlines Flight 2286 thought she smelled alcohol on the first officer, and a background check turned up evidence of the first officer having a history with alcohol; but lab tests revealed that he had not been drinking before the flight.
** Played straight with the captain of Aeroflot Nord Flight 821.
* EjectEjectEject: Used frequently during the reenactments with standard alarms or, in more recent incidents, mechanical voice warnings of "PULL UP! PULL UP!"
* EmpathyDollShot: A teddy bear was found wedged in a piece of wreckage from Germanwings Flight 9525.
* EvenEvilHasStandards: Exploited. The hijackers of Air France 8969 decide to spare the Algerian passengers from being killed in their plot to blow up the Eiffel Tower, and order the Algerian passengers to de-board; the Algerians refuse to leave, a move that saves the lives of those who weren't executed in Algeria.
* EverybodyLives: A major accident from which there are no fatalities is shown about once or twice a season. [[RealityIsUnrealistic It's not as uncommon as one might think]].
** The fact that 309 people were able to evacuate from Air France Flight 358 (Season 4) before it was consumed by fire was all the more remarkable considering that similar accidents involving fire like British Airtours Flight 28M (Season 9) and Air Canada Flight 797 (Season 4), resulted in fatality rates of about 50%. The show on Flight 28M explains how safety improvements made after that event made such an improvement possible.
** A seriously incredible (and improbable) version occurred with BA 5390. While the passengers' survival was more than likely once copilot Atchison got control of the plane, pretty much everyone was sure the ''Captain'' was dead, given that he was sucked most of the way out of the plane at over 20,000 feet. But, to everyone's shock, as paramedics were removing the "body", he actually began to come around. His injuries, as it turned out, were remarkably minor, and (probably because he was unconscious for most of the ordeal) he actually seemed to be less traumatized by the incident than the flight attendants (especially the three who were holding onto him).
* EverythingsBetterWithRainbows: American Eagle Flight 4184 hit the ground at the end of a rainbow.
* EvilGloating: In "I'm the Problem", David Burke wrote a taunting note on an airsickness bag, which investigators assumed was given to Ray Thomson shortly before shooting him and sending the plane into the ground.
* ExactlyWhatItSaysOnTheTin: What else would a show called "Air Crash Investigation" be about?
* FaceDeathWithDignity: The last words of the captain of Alaska Airlines Flight 261 were "Ah, here we go."
* FailedASpotCheck: Many of the accidents happen because of the flight crew not paying attention to something they should.
** "Flying Blind": Aeroperu Flight 603 crashes because no one notices a piece of duct tape covering the plane's static port.
** "Fatal Distraction": The pilots of Eastern Airlines Flight 401 focused on a burned-out light and fail to monitor their altitude, causing the plane to literally fly into the Everglades.
** "Ghost Plane": A technician inspecting the Boeing 737 that would fly as Helios Airways 522 forgets to switch back the cabin pressurization panel from manual to automatic. The pilots don't notice the position of the selector switch ''even when another ground technician tells them to check it''. Somewhat [[JustifiedTrope justified]] that they would miss it once things started going wrong, given that hypoxia would have been setting in by that point, but they should never have taken off without checking that in the first place
** "Dead Tired": The flight crew of Colgan Air Flight 3407 overlooked their airspeed indicators and their reference speed switch and allowed their plane to slow to the point of stalling.
** "Lost In Translation": The pilots of Crossair Flight 498, unfamiliar with the western style of attitude indicators[[note]](On the Soviet-built aircraft they were familiar with the attitude indicator consists of a static horizon and a moving aircraft symbol, whereas Western-built aircraft have a moving horizon and a stationary aircraft symbol.)[[/note]], don't realize their plane is banking dangerously to the right, causing it to nosedive into the ground.
** In "Blowout", a ground crew technician attempted to match the replacement screws by eye, rather than checking them from the inventory. Working in the dark, he failed to notice that the screws were one size too small for the windscreen they were to be fitted into, causing the seal to fail on the next morning's flight.
** "Focused On Failure": Similar to "Fatal Distraction", the captain of United Airlines Flight 173 to Portland was so focused on a landing gear light problem that he missed both what his fuel gauge and his flight engineer was telling him. The plane ran out of fuel while holding over Portland, although he managed to steer it to a landing in a wooded area with a loss of only ten lives. Later interviews with him would reveal that he thought he had enough fuel left.
** "Catastrophe At O'Hare": When the investigator interviews the ATC controller who witnessed Flight 191's takeoff and crash, he is surprised when the controller tells him that an engine fell off the aircraft during the takeoff roll. A large General Electric jet engine lying in plain view just by the runway should not be too difficult to spot...
** "Deadly Delay": The co-pilot of Spanair Flight 5022 recites the checklist from memory instead of reading it from the manual. He forgets the "flaps" three times, resulting in the accident.
** The takeoff warning sounded when the pilots of LAPA 3142 tried to take off, but they ignored the warning.
** The crew of Korean Air 007 chats with another Korean Air jet that is supposedly nearby, whose crew reports completely different wind conditions that those [=KAL007=] experiences. Since such dramatic change over a small distance is impossible at that altitude, this should alert the crew that they're somewhere they should not be.
** The first officer of TAROM Flight 371 failed to notice the autothrottle had malfunctioned causing one engine to be at idle while the other was at climb power. [[JustifiedTrope Understandable]] since his attention was split between flying the airplane and the captain who was having a heart attack.
* FailsafeFailure: A number of crashes have been caused by this.
** Japan Airlines 123 and United Airlines 232. Both flights suffered a total loss of hydraulics after a tail component ruptured.
** Exaggerated with TAM 402. The thrust reversers can only be activated when the plane's wheels are on the ground. Even when a reverser deploys, the power on that engine cuts itself to idle. And the cable can withstand over 900 pounds of force, more than any pilot can apply. WhatCouldPossiblyGoWrong
** Lampshaded in-universe with ASA Flight 2311. The design of the propeller blade pitch controller passed the failsafe test on the ground, but not in the air.
** Class D cargo holds were supposed to extinguish fires by allowing them to exhaust the oxygen, but as everyone involved with [=ValuJet=] Flight 592 found out, that doesn't work when the source of the fire produces oxygen. Needless to say, the crash of Flight 592 led to this class of cargo hold being phased out because its design was too easily defeated.
** Sealed the fate of Garuda Indonesia Flight 152 and all 234 onboard. Due to [[PoorCommunicationKills a series of communication snafus between the crew and the ATC]], the A300 is heading into mountainous woodlands in a haze, which prevents the pilots from seeing anything. The GPWS should have warned them early enough... but it turns out it was not working properly when over certain types of mountainous terrain, such as in this case.
** The takeoff warning horn should have warned the crew of Delta 1141 that they were trying to take off with their flaps and slats retracted, but due to a faulty design, it does not get triggered properly when the crew and passengers need it most. This is similar to the case of Spanair 5022, where an electrical fault causes the alarm to remain silent.
** The GPWS is designed not to sound an alert when the navigation system registers a glide slope signal, which contributed to the crash of Alitalia 404, due to the aircraft being equipped with a faulty ILS receiver.
** [[ConversationalTroping Explored]] in the [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hinton_train_collision Hinton train collision]]. Averted in the case of the signal lights: The investigators wonder if they might have been green instead of red due to a mechanical fault, but an electrical engineer notes that "a fault does not give a positive green light to any situation … if there was a fault … it would have forced everything to go to red." Sadly played straight with the dead man's pedal: It was common practice for CN crew to keep the pedal depressed with a heavy object so they didn't need to keep their feet on it, thus defeating the whole purpose of the mechanism. This, combined with the crewman possibly being incapacitated (and thus unable to disengage the pedal), is believed to have contributed to the accident.
* FinaglesLaw: "Eye of the Storm": After an engine on a Hurricane Hunter catches fire, an investigation reveals it was caused by a faulty fuel sensor, which fed too much fuel to the engine causing the fire. The investigator notes it could have failed at any point in the flight, but just happened to occur in the worst part of the hurricane on a mission that required them to fly much lower than usual. Then one of their prop de-icing boots comes loose and threatens to damage the engine.
* FireForgedFriends: The passengers and crew of British Airways Flight 9 started their own club after their strange and nightmarish ordeal. They name it the "Galunggung Glider Club".
* FlatWhat: An investigator into Comair 3272 lets one loose when he sees the discrepancy in the airline's and manufacturer's manuals over the use of the aircraft's de-icing boots.
* FiveSecondForeshadowing: The in-flight entertainment system on Swissair 111 is mentioned to have been "the source of controversy to come" immediately before the pilots notice an odd smell from the air conditioner panel. Any viewer can readily make the connection at that point.
* ForegoneConclusion:
** If someone who was on the plane is interviewed, they survived whatever ordeal happened in the episode.
** Similarly, if every single interview is with a friend or relative of a passenger rather than survivors themselves, it's likely that the incident in question left no survivors.
** Averted once in a while by deliberately not showing a particular interview until after the person's survival has been revealed. The first example of this usage involves Tim Lancaster in "Blowout".
** If the aircraft involved is a Qantas jet airliner, you can be sure everyone survived, because Qantas has never had a jet airliner fatality.
* ForeignCussWord:
** In "Pilot vs. Plane", the pilot of Air France Flight 296 audibly shouts "Merde!" right before he crashes his plane into a forest.
** Also happens in "The Final Blow," though the pronunciation is somewhat mangled.
** The first officer of Lauda Air Flight 004 lets out a hushed cry of "Sheiße" when the reverser isolation valve warning starts flashing.
* ForWantOfANail: Frequently a factor in accidents.
** "Crash of the Century"/"Disaster at Tenerife": The Tenerife disaster had several, but the most prominent are; informal terminology used by the ATC staff, the Pan Am not taking the right exit off the runway, and the KLM taking on 55 tonnes of extra fuel.
** The Air Inter crash: A momentary gust of turbulence activated a feature of the autopilot that made the plane - already descending too fast due to an erroneous autopilot input - descend more quickly into the path of the mountain.
** "Desert Inferno": A slightly under-inflated tyre on a DC-8 leads directly to a horrific in-flight fire and death of all 261 onboard.
** "Blowout": An incorrectly chosen set of windshield screws caused the windscreen to come loose, resulting in an ExplosiveDecompression that partially sucked the pilot out of the plane.
** "Vanishing Act": An erroneous compass heading sends Varig Flight 254 off-course, resulting in the plane running out of fuel and crashing into the Amazon. The aircraft was supposed to fly a course slightly east of North (27.0 degrees) but due to confusion over the flight plan documentation and the compass settings in older versus newer jets (the former accept only integers while the latter could take increments of .1 degrees) led to the plane flying due west (270 degrees) instead. [[FailedASpotCheck None of the flight crew noticed that they were flying directly into the sunset...]]
** "Deadly Delay": A faulty electronic relay causes a temperature sensor to stop working, delaying takeoff. When the flight crew finally does take off, that same relay causes the take-off warning configuration alarm to not sound. Consequently, the plane takes off in an improper configuration and stalls.
** "Edge of Disaster": The pilots of Atlantic Airways Flight 670 decide to make a straight-in landing at Stord Airport, where rain has caused the short, un-grooved, hilltop-mounted runway to collect water and become slick. The straight-in approach means the pilots are landing in a tailwind, and after touchdown, the spoilers fail to deploy. The plane would've come to a safe stop on the runway if the captain didn't activate the emergency brakes.
** "Deadly Silence": An improper checklist and the pilots' subsequent delay in donning their oxygen masks caused the eventual crash of the Learjet carrying pro golfer Payne Stewart, killing all on board.
** "Deadly Detail": A missing washer allowed the slat downstop assembly to become loose, fall out, and puncture the fuel tank when the slats were retracted -- causing fuel to leak and land right on the engine's hot tailpipe, starting a fire.
** "Target Is Destroyed": The crew forgot to put the autopilot into waypoint mode after takeoff and left it in magnetic compass mode. This led the aircraft to stray into Soviet airspace and provoked a deadly response from their airforce.
** "Cutting Corners": An MD-83 suffered a catastrophic structural failure in its horizontal stabiliser which plunged it into the ocean and killed everybody on board. The root cause turned out to be inadequate maintenance checks resulting in insufficient lubrication on the jackscrew that drove the horizontal stabiliser which then underwent accelerated wear until the threads of the screw were sheared off. A couple of dollars worth of lubricating grease would have averted the accident.
** "River Runway": Downplayed. While not an immediate cause of the accident, a single faulty cell in the plane's battery prevented the pilots from being able to start the APU after both engines flamed out and two attempts were made to restart them while the plane was in the storm. If the APU had been successfully started, the engines could've started running again once the plane left the storm clouds, and the accident would not have happened.
** "Deadly Solution": A cracked soldering joint in the plane's rudder travel limiter unit caused it to send a series of alerts to the cockpit that the pilots responded to incorrectly, causing the plane to stall and fall into the ocean.
** Double subverted in "Afghan Nightmare". The pilots discussing a broken fastener in the cargo hold gives the initial impression that a single broken fastener caused one of the MRAP vehicles in the cargo hold to break loose and smash through the bulkhead, crippling the plane and putting it into an unrecoverable stall. As it turned out, the airline's manual on installing fasteners didn't specify that the straps had to be tied at a specific angle to properly restrain the cargo. As a result, none of the fasteners were able to hold the vehicles in place; the single broken fastener was an ignored canary in the coal mine.
** "Scratching The Surface": A tailstrike incident with poorly-done repairs that were falsibly reported as completed ultimately led to the aircraft tearing apart in mid-flight a little over 20 years later. From there, nicotine stains caused by smoking[[note]]smoking was allowed on China Airlines flights until 1995[[/note]] formed around the doubler plate used in the repair, and had ''any'' engineer noticed the stains during routine maintenance, it's quite likely that the in-flight breakup would've never happened.
** A positive example in "Fight For Your Life": Auburn Calloway and his flight crew had exceeded their maximum flying hours by just one minute the day before [=FedEx=] Flight 705 and were replaced by a new crew. The original crew that Calloway would've been up against if he wasn't replaced would've been two pilots (Calloway himself would have been the third crew member), one of whom was female. Going up against a three-man crew was more than he could manage; he was overpowered, and the plane was landed back at Memphis with no fatalities.
* FromBadToWorse:
** "Runaway Train", about the [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Bernardino_train_disaster San Bernardino train disaster]]. First, a runaway freight train derailed at a bend in the tracks and crashes into a residential neighborhood, killing nine people. Then, about two weeks later, the gas pipeline alongside the tracks ruptured from damage received during cleanup.
** "Attack Over Baghdad", about a DHL cargo plane that was hit with a surface-to-air missile by Iraqi insurgents. The crew managed to safely land the plane...only to learn that they may have landed in a mine field.
** Once again, "Crash of the Century"/"Disaster at Tenerife". First a terrorist bomb closed the airport in Las Palmas, forcing all inbound traffic to be relocated to Los Rodeos airport on Tenerife, which was not equipped to handle this many planes, including two Boeing 747s (one Pan Am, one KLM). The airport got so crowded in fact that the only way to leave was to taxi down the sole runway and then do a 180 degree turn (called a backtaxi) and take off. Then as Las Palmas reopened a fog dropped in on Los Rodeos, causing the weather conditions to deteriorate rapidly. Then the ATC crew had to get two 747s out of the airport. The Pan Am got lost in the fog and couldn't find the exit to leave the runway, and the KLM was piloted by an impatient captain who was trying to complete his flight before his duty time limits are up. The KLM was starting to take off while the Pan Am was still trying to get off the runway. And the rest, as they say, is history.
* GhostShip: Or rather, ghost planes:
** Helios Airways Flight 522 lost contact with air-traffic controllers and was intercepted by Greek fighter jets, which found that everyone on the plane except a male flight attendant was unconscious. The plane ran out of fuel and crashed. It was determined that an incorrect setting on the cabin pressurization panel caused the pilots and passengers to succumb to hypoxia.
** Several years prior, in the episode "Deadly Silence", a Learjet 35 operated by Sunjet Aviation was flying from Orlando to Dallas when communication was lost shortly after takeoff. The plane veered hundreds of miles off course and crashed [[spoiler: in a hayfield in South Dakota, killing golfer Payne Stewart and everyone else on board. However, the plane had long since succumbed to depressurization for unknown reasons. The pilots also did not don their oxygen masks in time to issue an emergency descent]].
* GhostStory: What follows the crash of Eastern Air Lines Flight 401.
* GlassesPull: A few investigators in the re-enactments have removed their glasses after confronting a major shocker in an investigation.
* GoneHorriblyWrong: A number of times an action by the pilots or ground crew results in this.
** "Deadly Solution": The captain pulls two circuit breakers to silence an annoying alert and everything goes hell in a handbasket almost instantly.
** "Deadly Detour": A change of flight plan to get the passengers an opportunity to see a luxury ship closer ends in a fatal midair collision.
** "Fatal Transmission": A rookie pilot steps in the conversation between two planes, trying to clear the confusion, and as a result causes the fatal misunderstanding leading to a runway collision.
* GoodSmokingEvilSmoking:
** Gameel al-Batouti, the pilot suspected of deliberately crashing [=EgyptAir=] Flight 990, was portrayed as a smoker.
** Oftentimes, investigators are seen smoking cigarettes while they're working.
* {{Gorn}}:
** The interior of the Fed-Ex cargo plane following Auburn Calloway's attempted hijacking.
** The aftermath of the Aeromexico 498 crash. Limbs ripped off and burned bodies are shown, and the Piper Cherokee's interior is splattered with blood. [[OffWithHisHead We are thankfully spared the information how the Piper's pilot and passengers died.]]
* GoshDangItToHeck: Zig-zagged in "28 Seconds to Survive"; the pilots of Santa Barbara Airlines Flight 518 use words that are somewhat milder than the CVR transcript.
* TheGuardsMustBeCrazy: Interviews in the Metrojet episode lend weight to the idea that this trope likely contributed to an airliner bombing [[EpicFail in 2015]].
* HairTriggerTemper: The captain of Northwest Airlink Flight 5719 had this in spades. [[MisplacedRetribution He took out his frustration about a company policy requiring pilots to relocate by flying aggressively]], and he continuously chewed out fellow crew members, one of whom claimed to have actually been physically struck by the captain.
* HalfTheManHeUsedToBe: When the bomb goes off aboard Philippine Airlines Flight 434, the attendants try to help the passenger under whose seat the bomb was located... and realize the lower half of his body is missing.
* HandicappedBadass:
** The Captain of TACA Flight 110 was missing an eye but still managed to land his crippled plane. On a levee no less.
** Nikki Lauda, former three-time [=Formula1=] world champion, survived a horrific crash at the Nürburgring in 1976 that badly burned his face, all but destroyed one of his ears and seared his lungs with toxic combustion products that nearly killed him. As mentioned in the episode concerning his airline it's mentioned that he was back on the race track a mere six weeks after his near-fatal crash. He also absolutely refused to be whitewashed by Boeing when the true cause of the Lauda Air crash started to become apparent, and held their metaphorical feet in the fire until they admitted culpability and updated the design of the 767 trust reversers to ensure the same accident couldn't be repeated. He also went to extraordinary lengths to keep Lauda Air in business in spite of the loss of a quarter of its fleet with the loss of the 767, and stated that he would have immediately resigned had it been found that his airline was in any way at fault.
** The crew of [=FedEx=] Flight 705, despite being brutally injured by Auburn Calloway and becoming partially paralysed and in shock from blood loss, managed to take a fully-loaded DC-10 cargo plane and fly it in ways that had previously been thought impossible.
* HarsherInHindsight: An in-universe example in Northwest Airlink 5719 episode. The opening banter seems harsh on the side of the captain, but it can be assumed to be an example of CultureClash between an outspoken NYC captain and the quiet Minnesota first officer. Later in the episode, it gets far darker and shows the captain's aggressive and unfriendly nature.
* HellIsThatNoise:
** The burning oxygen generators in the fire test for the [=ValuJet=] 592 investigation produce a horrific metallic wailing sound that disturbs even the investigators.
** Many of the verbal GPWS and TCAS warnings that tend to occur during an incident, partly because of the creepy, forceful text-to-speech voice, and partly because of what they portend — these are often among the last things the crew hears before impact:
*** ''[WHOOP WHOOP]'' "PULL '''UP.'''"
*** "TERRAIN, TERRAIN." / "CAUTION, TERRAIN." / "TOO LOW – TERRAIN." / "TERRAIN AHEAD."
*** "OBSTACLE, OBSTACLE." / "CAUTION, OBSTACLE." / "OBSTACLE AHEAD."
*** "CLIMB, CLIMB." / "DESCEND, DESCEND." / "''CLIMB'', '''CLIMB NOW.'''" / "''DESCEND'', '''DESCEND NOW.'''"
*** "TRAFFIC, TRAFFIC."
*** "STALL, STALL."
* HeroicBystander: [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenny_Skutnik Lenny Skutnik]], an employee at the Congressional Budget Office, who dove into icy cold water to rescue one of the survivors of Air Florida 90, and was honored by President Ronald Reagan at the State of the Union address, seen in "Disaster on the Potomac".
* HeroicSacrifice:
** Arland D. Williams Jr., one of the most famous RealLife examples of the trope, survived the initial crash of Air Florida Flight 90 but insisted on passing over the rescue line to other passengers. His body being entangled with the wreckage, he sinks below the icy Potomac and drowns.
** The actions and death of Ed Gannaway, the captain of Atlantic Southeast Airlines Flight 529, are regarded as this.
** Famous photojournalist Mohamed Amin spent his last moments trying to rally passengers against the hijackers of Ethiopian Airlines Flight 961. He is killed when the plane is ditched in the Indian Ocean.
** Folk music legend Stan Rogers was last seen alive trying to help other passengers out of Air Canada Flight 797 while fire engulfed the cabin, as recounted in the episode "Fire Flight".
*** This very nearly happens to the captain of the same flight. After doing an excellent job at getting the stricken DC-9 to perform a successful landing, the pilot is too exhausted to move, and slumps against his seat as the fire begins to rage through the cabin and into the entrance of the cockpit just behind him. Had the co-pilot not noticed and ordered the fire department to douse him with water to help shock him into being able to climb out through the cockpit window, he would have died only seconds later when a devastating flash fire ripped through the cabin.
* HoistByHisOwnPetard: The crew of [=FedEx=] Flight 705 were able to use Auburn Calloway's own weapons against him.
* HollywoodHeartAttack: Invoked in "Fight to the Death"-Captain Stanley Key's autopsy revealed he was suffering from heart disease, leading investigators to suspect he may have suffering from an incipient heart attack during the flight.
** In "Fatal Climb", Captain Batanoiu is believed to have suffered one of these, as the CVR picks up him saying he feels sick before he loses consciousness. His first officer is so preoccupied with trying to wake him that he fails to correct the rapid left bank until it's too late.
* HopeSpot:
** Air Canada Flight 797 managed to safely land after a severe on-board fire, and it seemed that the passengers would all make it off the plane... [[spoiler:until the plane's doors were opened and a flashover occurred, which incinerated the interior and killed 23 people]].
** Nigeria Airways Flight 2120 was two miles from the runway and seemed like it would just about safely land... [[spoiler:then the plane became uncontrollable and slammed into the ground, killing anyone on board who somehow wasn't dead yet.]]
* HowWeGotHere:
** The episode on Korean Air Cargo Flight 8509 starts with a family witnessing the plane nosedive into the woods and carrying out a fruitless search for survivors, after which the scene switches to two hours earlier.
** This happens again with TANS Peru Flight 204: survivors scramble out of the wrecked remains of the aircraft and watch as fire consumes their would-be tomb, after which the scene switches to one hour earlier, when they were boarding the flight.
** The episode focusing on USAir Flight 1493 starts with the post-crash fire, then goes back 15 minutes to the 737's approach to Los Angeles International Airport.
** Valujet 592 opens at a press conference six months after the crash. Family members are seen outraged over the FAA's failures to implement regulations that could have prevented the disaster before cutting to the boarding of the doomed flight.
* IAmTheNoun: David Burke's FamousLastWords were "I'm the problem" as he shot the pilots of Pacific Southwest Airlines Flight 1771 to cause a crash. This was also the name of the episode in some locations.
* IdiotBall: Exemplified in some of the pilot error cases.
** The crew of Eastern Air Lines Flight 401 become so distracted by a minor problem with the landing gear that they fail to check where and how low they are flying. United Airlines Flight 173 suffers the same fate, and for the same reason, though the latter actually ran out of fuel.
** The captain of Aeroflot Flight 593 decides to show off the brand new Airbus A310 by letting his teenaged son take the controls of an aircraft that neither he nor his crew are familiar with themselves. The teenager pulls the yoke to the left, disengaging the autopilot. He continues to pull on the yoke, making the plane enter a dive. The actual crew don't notice what's happening until it's too late.
*** He actually let an even ''younger'' child (his daughter) sit in the pilot's seat as well, but she didn't touch anything hard enough to register as a command. Not that it mattered in the end.
** The pilots and the ground crew in the "Gimli Glider" incident both fail to double-check whether the plane's fuel supply has been measured by pounds or kilograms.
** The hijackers of Ethiopian Airlines Flight 961 read in the in-flight magazine that the plane can fly to Australia, and do not believe the captain when he says the plane does not have enough fuel to get there. When the plane has to be ditched, not only do the hijackers not sit and fasten their seatbelts, but one of them takes the co-pilot's seat and wrestles with the controls while the captain is trying to ditch without loss of life. Not surprisingly, none of the hijackers survive.
** The captain of Garuda Indonesia Flight 200 heard ''fifteen cockpit alarms and two pleas for a go-around from the co-pilot'' because they were approaching the airport too quickly. His response? [[spoiler: Asking if the landing checklist is complete or not. Unsuprisingly, the plane bounces several times and overshoots the runway, killing 21 people. The captain would have been sentenced to prison for negligence...had the Indonesian Government not quashed the prosecution]].
* ImpactSilhouette: In a mid-air collision where one of the planes is reconstructed, the outline of the other plane involved (or at least a part of the other plane) can be seen on the side of the reconstructed fuselage.
* ImprobablePilotingSkills: Many episodes have pilots managing to keep their planes from crashing despite overwhelming odds.
* ImprobableWeaponUser: Lampshaded and justified with Auburn Calloway on [=FedEx=] Flight 705. His plan was to kill the flight crew with hammers and a spear gun to take control of the plane and crash it into the [=FedEx=] headquarters in Memphis, while making the attack look like the whole thing was an accident.
* INeedAFreakingDrink: The reaction of several passengers on Varig Flight 254 when told by the captain that due to a navigation malfunction, the plane is going to crash in the Amazon jungle.
* InfantImmortality: Played with in many episodes:
** "Alarming Silence": The sole survivor of Northwest Airlines Flight 255 is a 4-year-old girl.
** "Lost": A 4-year-old girl was among the 4 survivors of American Airlines Flight 965. (Her brother survived the impact, but died in the hospital.)
** "Missing Over New York": Six of the seven babies on the plane survived the crash.
** "Operation Babylift": All the infants aboard the C-5 Galaxy were seated in the cabin, which saved their lives when the plane crashed.
** For many episodes, the trope is largely averted.
* InnocenceLost: Two-year-old Felix Schenk's last moments were crying over the impending crash of Germanwings Flight 9525 as his mother comforts him. He clearly knew he was about to die.
* InterchangeableAsianCultures: The captains of Japan Airlines Flight 123, Korean Air Flight 007 and Korean Air Cargo Flight 8509 are all portrayed by Japanese-Canadian actor [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denis_Akiyama Denis Akiyama]].
* ItSeemedLikeAGoodIdeaAtTheTime: The root cause of some of the disasters caused by pilot error.
** "Kid in the Cockpit" concerned a famous Russian case where a senior airline pilot allowed his teenaged son to take the controls of a brand new Airbus A310. The teen inadvertently disabled the plane's autopilot and the flight crew, unfamiliar with the state-of-the-art aircraft, failed to bring it back under control. [[HilarityEnsues Tragic hilarity ensued]]. An especially needless tragedy given that the investigators found that everything would have been fine if [[ForWantOfANail they had just let go of the control column]].
** "Deadly Detour" detailed Proteus Airlines Flight 706 deviating from their assigned route because a passenger wanted to fly over a famous French ocean liner, the SS France. There were a number of private planes swarming toward the ship, and when the pilots decided to do a 360 around the ship after canceling Instrument Flight Rules and going to Visual Flight Rules, a collision with one of the other sightseeing planes was bound to occur.
** The captain of Indonesia [=AirAsia Flight=] 8501 got fed up with a recurring alarm concerning the rudder travel limiter unit, so he used a trick a ground mechanic had shown him and pulled the breakers on the flight computer. Unknowingly to him, this caused the autopilot and all protection systems to switch off; it did not matter on the ground because those systems would be activated during pre-flight checks anyway, but in the air, the crew would have to turn them all back on, but they were too confused and the situation developed too quickly. This directly led to the plane going out of control and crashing.
** The co-pilot of [=SpaceShip=] Two, having unlocked the feathers too late in a simulator, decided to unlock the feathers early during an actual flight with disastrous results.
** The captain of American International Airways Flight 808 decided to try go for the difficult to land on runway 10 rather then the easier runway 28 at Guantánamo Bay just for the heck of it. He ended up crashing the plane trying to make a too sharp of a turn to line up with the runway. Fortunately nobody died but the Captain sustained career ending injuries.
* ItsProbablyNothing: Said by a passenger on British Airtours Flight 28M before the reason for the aborted takeoff becomes apparent.
* ItsPronouncedTropay: The British narrator pronounces the word "debris" as "DAY-bree", and "hurricane" as "hariken".
* {{Jerkass}}:
** Captain Van Zanten is portrayed as this in "Crash of the Century", leading him to trigger the Tenerife disaster. Downplayed in the Season 16 episode covering the same accident, where Van Zanten is merely depicted as impatient and stressed out due to flight hour concerns.
** The captain of the Air Inter plane is worryingly angry with his copilot and ATC. (Not without a reason - he's going to perform a landing which, as we later learn, he did not train in a modern, very sophisticated aircraft he has little familiarity with, in heavy winds and snowfall.)
** The abrasive attitudes of Captains Key (BEA Flight 548) and Falitz (Northwest Airlink Flight 5719) negatively affect crew coordination and contribute to their fatal crashes.
* JustPlaneWrong: Several examples, surprisingly enough:
** One example is in the episode "Bomb on Board", which recycles the same clip for taking off and landing with the thrust reversers deployed.
** "Crash of the Century": Another episode about the Tenerife disaster, which involved a collision between two 747s, Pan Am and KLM, introduces the KLM plane with a shot of it in flight...with winglets, identifying it as a 747-400, which at the time of the disaster (1977) would not be put into production for another 11 years. It's possible that they may not have been able to find a Boeing 747-200 that could be re-dressed as a KLM plane.
** In one episode, it is clear that the people making the show believe that any wide-body twin-jet in an American Airlines livery must be an A300. Averted in the episode about the crash of American Airlines Flight 587, which actually was an A300.
** In the episode about American Airlines Flight 587 the plane simply pitches downward when the vertical stabilizer separates. In RealLife, losing the vertical stabilizer causes uncontrollable movements in the yaw axis. This part is especially baffling since the episode on the Uberlingen disaster correctly portrayed the effects of vertical stabilizer separation.
*** Oddly enough, this trope was a factor in the accident itself. American Airlines' then-current training program, which the co-pilot was trained using, exaggerated the effect of wake turbulence to a degree that would cause experts in aerodynamics to headdesk to the point of drawing blood - wake turbulence cannot cause a plane as big as an A300 to bank as badly as the co-pilot was taught it could, and the bank was extreme enough that the only countermeasure was massive rudder deflections that Airbus had specifically warned against in flight. In short, the co-pilot pounded the rudder like a punching bag to counteract a nonexistent severe bank because whoever wrote the training materials (most likely the training department at American Airlines) didn't fully understand how large planes worked.
** In the episode "Behind Closed Doors", in the part about American Airlines Flight 96, they used a clip of an MD-11 taking off to show Flight 96's take off. Flight 96 was a DC-10.
** In "Fire on Board", which was about Swissair Flight 111, when the narrator mentions the first officer shutting down the number two engine, a shot of the right-wing engine shutting down is shown. In reality, on the MD-11 and other trijets, the middle engine is designated as number two.
** In "Death At Narita", when discussing autothrottle control, the MD-11 is shown to have four throttle levers, even though it has only three engines. In the shots showing the pilot controlling the thrust manually, the number of levers is correct.
*** Subverted in another part of the episode. The crash site shows remnants of cabin windows in the wreckage, which seems unusual, considering that the crash was a cargo plane. Actually, the plane was originally built as a passenger plane, which was then converted into a cargo plane when it was bought by [=FedEx=].
** In the TAM 3054 episode, when the A320 cruises towards its destination, the thrust levers in the cockpit are in the full forward position (maximum thrust). Such setting is used when the plane is rapidly accelerating; in cruise flight, at a stable airspeed, the levers would be anywhere between 1/2 and 3/4 forward position, never fully forward.
** In "Crash of the Century", Captain Van Zanten scolds his first officer for reviewing his approach plate at a latter stage of their flight. Actually, the crew (especially the pilot flying, the copilot in this instance) is expected to refer to their approach plates and procedures during the approach and landing; flying an approach without referring to the approach plate is considered a gross negligence.
** A common example in the series is Just ATC Wrong. In real life, a flight passes through several different controllers (Ground Control is responsible for the taxiways, Tower Control clears the flight for take-off, Approach & Terminal Control handles the ATC of a climbing aircraft within the airport's radar coverage, then various Area Control Centers handle the aircraft as it cruises from one area to another); in the series it's common to have one controller handling all the flight. A glaring example is in the Kegworth crash episode, where a bearded controller with a bespectacled colleague clears the flight to takeoff from Heathrow, then, when the crew declares an engine fire, the very same controller with the same colleague handles their emergency descent, even though they are now in the area of an entirely different airport, East Midlands.
** Also, a controller who lost a plane is immediately replaced by a colleague, as he's now too distressed to ensure a safe handling of his duties. This is correctly presented in the US 1549 episode, but in others (TACA 110 for example), a controller who had a plane under his control disappear from radar is still at his post.
** In the El Al 1862 episode, when the Master Warning light comes on, one can see a "Sidestick Priority" label just next to it. A sidestick is an Airbus feature (except the A300/310), while El Al 1862 was a 747. (El Al has a 100% Boeing fleet.)
** Two instances in the TACA 110 episode. When the flight attendant opens the door, it does so outward. Doors on the aircraft are of the plug-door variety, and they always open inwards (as you can see correctly in just the very next shot). Also, both pilots have their shoulder harnesses on during the emergency, but the third pilot on the flight deck never does.
** In the China Airlines 006 episode, several shots of the plane are seen at cruising altitude. However, the plane in the episode has the dimensions and looks of a 747-200. While correct for the airline, as China Airlines had operated the 747-200 (including China Airlines Flight 611), the real incident aircraft was a completely different 747 variant, the [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_747SP 747SP]].
** In the Cathay Pacific 780 episode, when one looks at the aircraft's ECAM display, the FOB indication is constantly displaying 20400. FOB stands for Fuel On Board, and with one engine operating, it should be decreasing in value.
** In the KLM 433 episode, as the emergency vehicles are deployed at Schiphol, an aircraft with a distinctive Delta logo on its tail is visible. Delta does fly to Schiphol, but the aircraft visible has a T-tail, meaning it is either an MD-88, MD-90 or a Boeing 717 - neither of them having a range demanded for a transatlantic flight.
* KilledMidSentence:
** The cockpit voice recorder of Air India 182 ends during a discussion amongst the cockpit crew about customs seals.
** Enforced in the episode on TWA 800; after the fuel tank ruptured and the CVR stopped working, the re-enactment in the cockpit has the pilots conscious just long enough for the captain to get the attention of the flight engineer before being consumed by fire as the nose breaks off.
* LifesavingMisfortune: A tour guide whose group was on Air China Flight 129 had to return to a hotel to retrieve his passport; while the group made it onto the plane, the entire group ended up seated toward the rear of the plane. [[ConversationalTroping As explained by the narrator]], this mistake proved to work in his favor when the plane crashed; he and most of his tour group were among those who survived.
* LiteralMetaphor: The people aboard Air Moorea Flight 1121 were literally hanging by a thread. Lampshaded in-universe by one of the investigators.
* LoadsAndLoadsOfLoading: The flight data recorder from TAM 402. Lampshaded in-universe by the Brazilian investigator. Justified, as the device was a solid state recorder which, at the time of the accident, was not very common.
* LoopholeAbuse: How David Burke smuggled a gun on board PSA Flight 1771 to take revenge on the boss who fired him and the airline. At the time airline cabin crew could circumvent the X-ray machines as nobody thought to consider that the airline's own employees could be a security risk. Burke was actually an ''ex''-employee but the airline hadn't removed his credentials when he was fired. Not surprisingly, ever since the incident, [[ObviousRulePatch cabin crew and pilots go through the same security checks as passengers do and all ID badges are immediately removed when an employee leaves or is fired]].
* LostInTransmission: This is a critical cause of the Tenerife disaster. Critical warning messages from the ATC and the Pan American plane end up cancelling each other out, and neither is heard by the KLM plane. To make things worse, the KLM crew had announced they were taking off, and the ATC initially responds, "Okay-" before the interference occurs. This reinforces the KLM crew's belief that they had been given takeoff clearance.
* LudicrousGibs: In cases where there's almost nothing left of the airplane, any recovered human remains are extremely fragmented, assuming they haven't been buried deep underground or completely burned to ashes.
* MacGyvering:
** In the Varig Flight 254 episode, when the aircraft crashes in the jungle, the crew know that the black boxes emit locating signals when submerged by water, but they have too little water. Thus, the captain urinates over the black boxes, and ''it actually works''.
** In an event similar to the Japan Air 123 incident, United Airlines Flight 232 also loses all flight controls due to an engine explosion, but both pilots and a flight instructor who just happened to be on board managed to bring the plane in for a crash landing in which a majority of the passengers and crew survived.
* MassOhCrap: Any shot of the passenger cabin just before impact will usually lead to this.
* MidAirCollision: There's also runway collisions (e.g. "Crash of the Century").
* MilitaryAlphabet: [[JustifiedTrope To be expected]] in a docudrama series about airplane accidents.
* AMillionIsAStatistic: Zig-zagged between episodes. Some episodes go out of the way to make the audience cry at the loss of life; others focus solely on the investigation into the accident. And there are episodes that occupy the middle ground between the two.
* MisplacedADecimalPoint: What brought down Varig Flight 254 and killed 13 people.
* MoodWhiplash: The pilots of Atlantic Airways Flight 670 are quite jovial and relaxed during the flight and approach to Stord Airport. But shortly after touchdown, they quickly fall into panic.
-->'''Copilot''': (after touchdown) ...and spoilers.\\
(Captain activates the spoiler lever)\\
({{Beat}})\\
([[StealthPun Spoiler alert]])\\
'''Copilot''': No spoilers!\\
'''Pilot''': Full brakes!
* MyGodWhatHaveIDone:
** The air traffic controller in "Deadly Crossroads" has this reaction when he realizes he's just caused two planes to collide.
** After landing British Airways Flight 9, the crew pores over the flight records thinking they made a near-catastrophic mistake. Fortunately for them, they are not at fault.
** The captain of Flight 8501 just after he pulls two circuit breakers to silence a nuisant alarm and the plane instantly starts going out of control.
** The captain of [=TransAsia=] Airways Flight 235 as he realizes he shut down the wrong engine.
[[/folder]]
[[folder:N-Z]]
* NaiveNewcomer:
** Chad Erickson, the newly hired first officer of Northwest Airlink Flight 5719, was scared stiff by his overly aggressive captain, which led him to not make the necessary altitude callouts on approach due to his fear of angering his captain. He was also thrown in a loop by the captain deviating from the established approach path in an effort to combat icy conditions, and being berated, humiliated and talked down to did not help one bit.
** A number of times, the less-experienced co-pilots diagnose the emergency correctly, but either do not intervene out of respect for their captains, are turned down by them or are intimidated one way or another: Flash 604, Birgenair 301, TANS Peru 204, West Caribbean 708, First Air 6560, Crossair 3597, Alitalia 404, and Korean Air 801 and 8509.
* NakedInMink: Implied in one scene of the [=EgyptAir=] 990 episode, where the relief first officer, who's wearing a robe, calls two girls across the courtyard, who look out the window and are stated to see him exposing himself to them.
* {{Nepotism}}: The captain of TACA Flight 110 is the airline owner's son. [[TropesAreNotBad When the crisis unfolds, he proves to be an excellent pilot and a skilled commander.]] (Also, [[BenevolentBoss he is getting along real well with his crew]] before they get into trouble.)
* NiceJobBreakingItHero: Some of the accidents involving human error:
** In the crash of United Express Flight 5925, the Cherokee pilot's muddled attempt to explain the King Air's takeoff causes the two aircraft to collide.
** "Sight Unseen": the radio operator on Kazakhstan Airlines Flight 1907 notices that the plane has descended below its assigned altitude and informs the captain, who then puts the plane into a climb-right into the path of Saudia Flight 763.
** "Deadly Solution": the captain of Indonesia [=AirAsia=] Flight 8501 decides to deviate from procedure and reset a circuit breaker during flight, setting off a chain of events leading to the stall of the aircraft.
* NoNameGiven: The pilots of Proteus Airlines Flight 706 are never once referred to by name, either during their introduction or during the credits.
* NoodleIncident: It's never established how the captain of Trans-Colorado 2286 was able to get an aircraft in and out of an airport in just 7 minutes.%%Noodle Incidents in the context of this show are when accident reports state that investigators were unable to obtain details on a particular event.
* NoOneCouldSurviveThat:
** "Gimli Glider" was about a Boeing 767 that ran out of fuel over Canada because of improper calculations involving pounds vs kilograms. The pilot managed to miraculously pull off a dead stick landing that couldn't be replicated by any subsequent pilot that attempted the scenario in a simulator. The pilots in the simulated flight always ended up crashing the plane.
*** The same thing happened with UA 232. Unlike the Gimli Glider incident, the UA 232 pilots were unable to save everyone, but the repeated simulator failures showed that it was a miracle anyone at all had survived, let alone over half the passengers and most of the crew.
** "Falling from the Sky" concerns a British jumbo jet that saw all four of its engines fail after accidentally flying into a cloud of volcanic ash over Indonesia. After managing to restart the engines, the flight crew managed to land the plane despite the windscreen having been sandblasted opaque, relying entirely on instruments.
** "Blowout" concerns a captain who was partially sucked out of his own cockpit thanks to faulty maintenance of the windscreen, his body subsequently subjected to a freezing 500mph slipstream over 17,000 feet above England. Despite overwhelming physical odds, the captain survived the ordeal with only frostbite and a few bone fractures. And he continues to fly.
** Japan Airlines 123 lost its vertical stabilizer and the hydraulic systems that powered its flight controls, and the flight crew managed to keep it flying for a whopping ''32 minutes'' afterwards. Four passengers from the rear of the plane survived the crash[[note]] More passengers survived the initial impact, but died from their injuries due to delayed rescue operations.[[/note]] although tragically the flight crew didn't survive. When recreating the accident in simulators, not only was it impossible to produce an outcome where the plane could've landed safely, but ''no one'' kept it in the air as long as the real crew did.
* NoOSHACompliance: When building [=SpaceShip=] Two, Scaled Composites assumed the pilots would never unlock the feathers too early during a flight and thus didn't have a fail-safe mechanism to prevent an uncommanded deployment of the feathers if they were unlocked early. Scaled Composites also never warned its test pilots of the dangers of unlocking the feathers early.
* NotEvenBotheringWithTheAccent: This tends to be a common trend in re-enactments, particularly when portraying Scandinavians and New Zealanders.
* NothingIsScarier: The final seconds of the [=ValuJet=] 592 CVR are complete and total silence.
* ObviousRulePatch: There are times when the audience can guess at the rules introduced following an investigation to prevent future accidents.
* OfficialPresidentialTransport: "Death of the President" deals with the crash of the Tu-154 carrying the president of Poland, as well as a former president and several other officials.
* OhCrap: Expressed by various pilots, passengers, and/or air traffic controllers just before the bad stuff goes down.
** Perhaps seen most effectively in "Crash of the Century"/"Disaster at Tenerife", which covers the Tenerife disaster. The First Officer of the Pan-Am flight is positively horrified as he sees the KLM jumbo barreling down the runway towards his plane, as is the Dutch captain seeing the Pan-Am plane directly in front of him.
---> '''Captain Grubbs:''' God damn, that son of a bitch is coming STRAIGHT AT US!
** In "Head On Collision", a rail passenger with a view of the track in front of him realized that his passenger train is about to collide with a freight train head-on.
** In "Deadly Crossroads", when the pilots of the Bashkirian Airlines flight realize that the DHL plane is heading ''straight for them,'' they panic and desperately try to climb. Unfortunately, it's too late.
** In a similar vein, in "Sight Unseen", the Kazakh pilots push their aircraft to full power upon realizing that they've descended too far. In a truly sorrowful twist of fate, had they not realized that they were too far below their assigned altitude, and kept descending, [[ForWantOfANail they would have descended below the Saudi jet and it would have been a near miss rather than a fatal collision.]]
** In "Hudson River Runway", the pilots are shocked when the birds get sucked into the engine.
** In "Air France 447: Vanished", the captain has this reaction when he realizes that his co-pilots' diverging inputs to the side-stick controls are leading the plane into a stall.
** In "Breakup Over Texas" [[spoiler: Shift Inspector Anderson]] has it during his interrogation, when he realizes his actions have GoneHorriblyWrong and caused the fatal crash.
** In "The Final Blow", the A-320 pilots get a very nasty surprise when, in the middle of what they think is a landing approach, they emerge from a cloud bank and there's suddenly a forested mountain ''right in front of them'', with barely enough time to say a [[ForeignCussWord single word]] before impact.
** The captain of [=AirAsia=] Flight 8501, when the pulling of two circuit breakers resulted instantly in the plane going out of control.
* OhNoNotAgain: In "Falling from the Sky" (British Airways Flight 9), the crew manages to get their four failed engines working again, but barely get a chance to celebrate when one of them starts surging again. One of the passengers can be heard crying out "Not again!"
* OneDialogueTwoConversations: This is a major contributing factor in the Tenerife crash. When the KLM pilot is about to take off, the co-pilot tells him that they can't do so without ATC clearance (which only specifies the route that they're to take). When the controller then gives it, the crew thinks that they have been cleared for takeoff. To make things worse, the KLM co-pilot then tells the tower, "We are now at take-off," and the ATC misinterprets this to mean that they are in takeoff position, not in the actual process of taking off.
* OneLinerNameOneLiner: Two survivors from First Air 6560:
---> '''Gabrielle:''' [[ChildrenAreInnocent This is my first plane crash.]]\\
'''Nicole:''' Me too, sweetie. Me too.
* OneWordTitle: The ''Mayday'' title, as it's a phrase signalling an emergency in an airplane, and the show is about air crash investigation.
* OohMeAccentsSlipping: Some of the actors playing multiple and/or recurring roles in the reenactments fall into this as the series progresses.
%%** Inverted with Jorge Molina, the actor who played the first officer of Birgenair Flight 301, the lead investigator into TANS Peru Flight 204, and the captain of Spanair Flight 5022.
%%** Played straight with the actor playing BEA investigator Alain Bouillard.
* OutlivingOnesOffspring: Implied if not stated outright in many if not almost every accident with fatalities.
** Definitely true with United 811, which was investigated by the parents of victim Lee Campbell.
** Exaggerated with the Uberlingen mid-air collision, where most of the passengers were children.
** One of the narrators for Germanwings Flight 9525 is Klaus Radner, whose daughter and grandson are among the murder victims.
* OutsideRide: The captain of British Airways Flight 5390 went through this when a blown-out windshield got him sucked out of the cockpit and pinned to the fuselage.
* PaintingTheMedium: In an interview with expert Jeff Wise, the camera zooms in on his face as he explains that "[the] ability [of the crew of Singapore Airlines Flight 006] to deal with multiple streams of information is becoming narrower and narrower".
* PerfectlyCromulentWord: David Burke's airsickness bag note contained the word "ironical".
* PersonalEffectsReveal: As to be expected from a disaster docudrama series.
** The wreck of Arrow Air Flight 1285 yielded T-shirts saying "I survived Gander, Newfoundland". {{Irony}} at its finest.
** A notable inversion is in the case of Northwest Airlink Flight 5719. A singed wallet is found in what's left of the airplane with a woman's photo inside; it's later revealed to have belonged to the first officer.
* PoorCommunicationKills:
** In "Deadly Delay" miscommunications about Avianca Flight 52's fuel status led to it being kept in a holding pattern instead of given immediate clearance to land. The crew used the word "priority" several times ("We're low on fuel and need priority") but never once used the word "emergency" or issued a mayday. The crew were apparently unaware that in English "priority" can be relative whereas "emergency" is absolute; an interview with a surviving passenger lends weight to this idea.
** American Airlines Flight 965 was a similar case, just with reversed roles. The air traffic controller in Cali, Colombia cleared the crew to fly "direct" to Cali, which the pilots interpreted to mean "without flying over any other waypoints", even though the controller meant "without delay". After continuous requests to report reaching the first skipped waypoint[[note]]the radar at Cali had been destroyed, and a new one had not been installed[[/note]], coupled with confusion over "Rozo"[[note]]the name of the landing approach vs. the name of the last waypoint before the runway[[/note]], the pilots ended up flying off course and crashing into a mountain.
** An uncoordinated flight crew in "Fatal Focus" led to [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garuda_Indonesia_Flight_200 Garuda Indonesia Flight 200]] landing hard and crashing in Yogyakarta.
** A confusion between oxygen generators and oxygen canisters helped doom [=ValuJet=] 592.
** Poor communication between mechanics led to a missing row of screws going unnoticed by everyone present, which led to the leading edge on the horizontal stabilizer to break off Continental Express Flight 2574, killing 14 people.
** A double one occurs in the [=AirAsia=] 8501 episode. The captain mistakenly tells his copilot to "pull down" - you either pull up or push down the nose - so the first officer pulls the stick back, resulting in a fatal stall. Earlier, when the captain was preparing for a different flight, he had the very same problem as on the fatal Flight 8501 - the rudder travel limiter failure alert - this time on the ground. The mechanic used the proper procedure to turn it off, but when the alarm returned, he pulled two circuit breakers to calm it down permanently. The captain asked if he can do the same and the mechanic agreed - not realizing (and the captain not specified that) he means ''in flight'', which instantly resulted in autopilot switching off and the aircraft banking, leading to the fatal crash.
** The Tenerife disaster may as well be called "The Poor Communication Kills crash." When the captain of the KLM aircraft hears the controller give the crew directions on what to do after takeoff, he interprets it to mean "you are cleared for takeoff." Since he can't see the Pan Am jet that's still on the runway, guess what he decides to do next? This is why current regulations only allow ATC to say "takeoff" when clearing an aircraft for takeoff or cancelling an aircraft's takeoff clearance, [[InsistentTerminology otherwise they must use the term "departure" instead]].
** Poor communication was suspected as a factor in the crash of Nigeria Airways Flight 2120; the ATC mistook the Nationair/Nigeria Airways flight for a Saudia flight he was also talking to because the Nationair captain [[DamnYouMuscleMemory used the wrong callsign]] and the Saudia was reporting the exact same problem[[note]]the pressurisation failure was the only problem the Nationair crew knew about at that point[[/note]], and only realised the ''Nationair'' flight was the one requesting an emergency landing when they were the ''other side of Jeddah'' and about to turn left. Subverted, as it turned out they would have crashed even without being mistaken for another plane.
* PopCultureOsmosis: The episode "Massacre Over the Mediterranean" ultimately agrees with the conclusion of the third and final technical investigation, which determined that a bomb brought down Aerolinee Itavia Flight 870. However, conspiracy theories about a NATO missile had become so widespread in Italy that the government and the public refused to consider these findings.
* PowerWalk: The crew of Reeve Aleutian Flight 8 after successfully landing the plane.
* PrecisionFStrike: The first officer of DHL 611 mere seconds before colliding with Bashkirian Airlines 2937 over Uberlingen.
* ProperlyParanoid:
** The first officer of American Eagle Flight 4184 was said to have predicted his own fate on account of the problematic design of the ATR aircraft's de-icing system.
** Sometimes, passengers can tell when disaster is imminent, such as Joe Stiley on Air Florida Flight 90 and Michael Quinlan on Garuda Indonesia Flight 200, and take a brace position before impact.
* PunctuatedForEmphasis: Happens in a handful of interviews:
** The nephew of Egypt Air 990's relief first officer: "This! Is! A simple! Plane! Crash!"
** Journalist Paul Eddy: "...if an Airworthiness Directive had been issued as it should have been after Windsor, Paris. Would not. Have happened; it was an entirely. Avoidable. Accident."
** Aviation expert David Learmount: "Frank Taylor's team didn't. Reach. Any. Conclusions. Except... ones which were based on hard. Physical. Evidence."
* ReadingsAreOffTheScale:
** In the fire-test for the oxygen generators in the [=ValuJet=] 592 episode, the resulting inferno becomes so hot, it ends up exceeding the facilities' measuring equipment and in fact almost destroyed the facility itself as well.
** In "Fight for Your Life", during a dive, the plane's air speed indicator maxed out.
* RealityEnsues: As Chad Erickson in "Killer Attitude" learned the hard way, you can do all the prep work in the world for an upcoming job and still have a nasty surprise thrown hard at your face.
** "Ghost Plane": Being trained to fly a light aircraft will not prepare you for flying a 737, as Andreas Prodromou finds out when he tries to take control of Helios Flight 522 after the flight crew passes out.
* TheReasonYouSuckSpeech: The captain of BEA Flight 548 chews out a younger pilot for supporting an approaching strike shortly before boarding his flight to Brussels, which investigators consider to be a possible factor in the eventual crash of the flight.
* RetiredBadass: Some of the pilots have pasts in various air forces.
* {{Retirony}}:
** The pilots of Partnair Flight 394 were both a few months from retirement.
** Subverted with David Cronin of United Airlines 811, who was also close to retirement, but survived.
** Possibly invoked by the relief first officer of [=EgyptAir=] Flight 990, who was only months from retirement but on the verge of being terminated on return to Cairo.
** Inverted with the junior flight attendant of American Eagle Flight 4184, who was killed on her ''first'' day on the job.
** The flight engineer of El Al Flight 1862 was close to retirement.
* SanitySlippage: With the new residence policy for the pilots of Northwest Airlink, the captain of Flight 5719 grows increasingly aggravated and prone to outbursts, both verbally and even physically, which proves to be his undoing when his first officer is too intimidated to provide the altitude callouts for the approach into Hibbing.
* ScareChord: Discordant strings, horns, and pianos, such as the music ten minutes into "[[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nigeria_Airways_Flight_2120 Under Pressure]]".
* SelfFulfillingProphecy: The difficulties faced by pilots landing at Congonhas Airport led the captain of TAM Airlines Flight 3054 to carry out an outdated landing procedure out of fear of not coming to a quick enough stop with the current procedure. With the stresses piled on top of him, he ended up making the same mistake that led to the old procedure being abandoned in the first place.
* SenselessViolins: Auburn Calloway used a guitar case to get his weapons onto [=FedEx=] Flight 705.
* SentimentalMusicCue: It usually plays this trope straight at emotional scenes (victim funerals, photos of the plane wreckages, the last few seconds when there's no hope, the first few seconds after the crash, etc).
* SerendipitousSurvival:
** In some accidents, passengers change seats during the flight, which ends up saving their lives when the plane crashes.
** Cerritos resident Teresa Estrada leaves for the grocery store, and returns to find her house destroyed by Aeromexico Flight 498 and her youngest son being the only survivor.
** Also happens with two flight attendants on West Caribbean Airways 708, who had to stay in Panama City because there were too many passengers on board.
** Deconstructed with Crossair Flight 3597; several passengers never showed up for the flight, causing a delay that ended up contributing to the accident taking place, as the pilots were not able to reach Zurich before the intended runway was shut down for the night. Reconstructed in the same episode; because there were so many empty seats on the plane, some passengers were able to change seats, which proved to be a lifesaver when the plane crashed.
** Inverted with the captains of American Airlines Flight 191 and BEA Flight 548, who were scheduled to have the day off on their respective fatal flights.
** With Air China Flight 129, a tour guide leaving his passport and baggage at the airport saves nearly his entire tour group, since they got shifted to the back, where the most survivors were found.
** In the Tenerife airport disaster, one passenger chooses to stay behind at Tenerife instead of continuing on to Las Palmas because she lives in Tenerife anyway and wants to see her boyfriend; going to Las Palmas and then back would just be impractical and tiring given how badly the flight had been delayed due to a terrorist attack at her final destination. Despite being warned by a flight attendant that declining to re-board is against regulations, she decides to sneak out anyway when it came time to board. She ended up being the only passenger of KLM Flight 4805 to survive.
** One journalist who was flying as a passenger on the Sukhoi 100 demonstration flight stayed behind to film the next takeoff. He never got to see the plane land.
* SesquipedalianLoquaciousness: A recurring interviewee on the show, aviation expert John Nance, has a tendency to use complex words when he speaks; this is most evident in his interview in the episode on Turkish Airlines Flight 1951.
* ShapedLikeItself: A surviving stewardess from Air Ontario Flight 1363 described the takeoff as "slow and sluggish like a slow, sluggish person running up a hill".
* ShootTheShaggyDog: The darkest example imaginable in "Out of Control". Almost 2/3rd of the episode featured the frantic efforts of the crew of Japan Airlines Flight 123 to control their 747 after an explosive decompression. Their efforts were doomed from the start. The rear pressure bulkhead, improperly repaired years ago, had destroyed itself and taken the entire vertical stabilizer with it. A crash was inevitable, and when it happened it killed the vast majority of 524 passengers and crew. To make matters worse, rescuers failed to arrive in time, causing all but four of those who survived the initial impact to die from injuries and exposure, making a total of 520 casualties.
* ShoutOut:
** Defied in the Concorde episode: "The return fare costs more than 9,000 dollars."
** The same shout-out is numerically downplayed in the TAM 402 episode during the safety cable test: "Then, at over 900 pounds of force,... [cable breaks] ...it can take no more."
** Another downplayed shout-out in the TAM 402 episode is when investigators examine the flap setting: "[[Film/TheBigLebowski Mark it down; eight degrees]]."
** Played somewhat straighter in the Metrojet episode with the air traffic controller [[Literature/{{Holes}} discarding sunflower seed shells]] [[Film/AceVentura in an ashtray]].
* ShownTheirWork: In "Deadly Crossroads", the Bashkirian pilots are shown looking toward their right side for the DHL, which is actually approaching from the left. In the uncensored version (you can see it in the censored version too, it's just less clear), it is clearly seen that all the heads in the cockpit turn when a flight crew member yells "There on the left!" The reason for this (which wasn't said in the episode) was that Peter Nielsen (the controller) had actually reported the position of the DHL mistakenly at the Bashkirian's 2 o'clock position when in reality it was at their 10 o'clock. It was probably omitted to keep the sympathy level for Nielsen higher among the viewers, [[spoiler:as if him getting murdered by Vitaly Kaloyev, who was hailed as a hero in his hometown, wasn't enough.]]
* SkewedPriorities: The investigation of the Tenerife crash discovered that the air traffic controllers were listening to a soccer match on the radio and may not have been paying full attention to what was going on. In fact, they had it turned up so loud that the sounds of the game can be heard on the transmissions from both planes.
** A passenger on KLM Cityhopper 433 scolds her adult daughter for swearing in response to the aircraft suddenly rolling to the right.
* SmashToBlack: Used in a few episodes, most notably ''9/11: The Pentagon Attack'' with a shot of the passenger cabin just before impact.
* SnipeHunt: It is suggested that [=SilkAir=] Flight 185's captain may have found an excuse to get his first officer out of the cockpit, then locked him out, disabled the flight recorders, and intentionally crashed his plane.
** Implied in an almost identical playout with Germanwings Flight 9525. The first officer suggests that the captain take a bathroom break, which the captain proceeds to do. As soon as the cockpit door is sealed behind the captain, so is the plane's fate.
* SoundEffectBleep: Noticeable in "Flying On Empty".
* SpoiledByTheFormat: If the episode is less than 30 or so minutes in, whatever lead the investigation is currently following is probably going to be a dead end, or at best will be only part of the puzzle.
* SternTeacher: The Northwest Airlink 5719 captain is very demanding in regard to his first officers, and does not tolerate any mistakes or omissions, no matter how small. In and of itself, this is not bad - after all, there was a number of episodes showing how the tolerance of minor errors and complacency in a pilot's performance ended up in a tragedy (Crossair 3597 for example) - but in combination with extreme HairTriggerTemper this ends up fatal.
* StiffUpperLip:
** British Airways Flight 38, a 777, is on final approach to Heathrow, when the engines stop providing necessary thrust. The aircraft, carrying 152 souls and a significant fuel reserve, is on the verge of stalling and crashing into the densely populated suburb, while flying low, which means essentially no margin for any emergency stall recovery procedure. Despite the extreme severity of the situation, the first officer sounds at best mildly annoyed about his plane's lack of proper response.
-->'''Captain Peter Burkill''': [Is the aircraft/approach] Stable?\\
'''First Officer John Coward''': Well, sort of. I can't get any power from the engines.\\
''(and later)'':\\
'''First Officer''': Looks like we have a double engine failure.
** The [=BA38=] crew, however, can't hold a candle to the crew of British Airways Flight 9.
---> '''Captain Eric Moody''': Ladies and gentlemen, this is your captain speaking. We have a small problem. All four engines have stopped. We are doing our damnedest to get them going again. I trust you are not in too much distress.
** Subverted by Alastair Atchinson, first officer of British Airways Flight 5390. He keeps his nerves and his plane under control as his captain hangs halfway outside the windshield just a few feet away from him, and even has the presence of mind to use "please" and "thank you" while communicating with the ATC. But as soon as the plane is safe on the ground, he [[PostVictoryCollapse collapses into hysterical sobbing]].
* StoppedClock:
** The clock stopped when the ferry sank in Express Samina.
** The watches in the cargo hold of South African Airways Flight 295 stopped when the plane crashed. More specifically, one of the three salvaged watches had stopped; the other two were still running and set to Taiwan time. So, the investigators were able to extrapolate an approximate time of impact based on the assumption that a) the stopped watch was also on Taiwan time, and b) it stopped on impact.
** The watches worn by the people on Dag Hammarskjold's flight to Ndola stopped when the plane crashed.
* StupidCrooks: The hijackers of Ethiopian Airlines Flight 961 in "Ocean Landing", who thought their aircraft could make the trip to Australia since they read it in the in-flight magazines, and refused to believe the captain when he said they didn't have enough fuel.
* SuspiciouslySpecificDenial: In "Alarming Silence," documenting Northwest Airlines Flight 255, one pilot demonstrated how to disable the MD-80's takeoff warning system by pulling a circuit breaker, ''without looking'', though he claimed he'd never done it himself. Possibly averted in that the circuit breaker was mentioned to have been used routinely by a number of pilots, and was therefore covered in oil from fingerprints, making the breaker distinguishable by touch.
* TakeAThirdOption: The captain of Air Canada Flight 143 ends up in a difficult spot approaching Gimli after the plane runs out of fuel. He's too high to make the runway, and diving toward the threshold would make the plane too fast to stop on the runway safely; at the same time, he doesn't have enough altitude to be able to make a 360-degree turn and land on the runway. He ends up putting the plane into a sideslip to get the plane down faster without increasing the plane's speed, and it works.
* TakeThisJobAndShoveIt: The pilot interviewed for the episode on Chalk's Ocean Airways Flight 101 quit his job due to the constantly increasing safety issues in the years leading up to the accident.
* ThisCannotBe: Said by the captain of Aeromexico 498 after the collision with the Piper Cherokee.
* ThisIsWrongOnSoManyLevels: Nearly everyone interviewed in the episode on Trans-Colorado Flight 2286 went out of the way to criticize the captain's cocaine usage at least once.
* TitleDrop: Some episodes have the episode title spoken by either the narrator, in a re-enactment, or (very rarely) in an interview. Zig-zagged, as episode titles vary by region. And then there's the almost OncePerEpisode TitleDrop of the series names, with the crew calling out "Mayday" once they realize the situation.
* TooCleverByHalf: Captain Falitz in "Killer Attitude" makes it clear that he thinks he knows everything in terms of procedure, reprimanding the first officer for minor mistakes. This backfires when he goes for an unorthodox landing approach, without fully explaining to the first officer what's going on. The first officer isn't sure what's expected of him, so he doesn't say anything for fear of angering the captain. This ends in a fatal crash when the captain descends too quickly.
* TooDumbToLive:
** The hijackers in "Ocean Landing". Not only do they demand a destination based solely on information found in the airline's in-flight magazine, they repeatedly overrule the captain's warnings that they'll run out of fuel, and when they do one of them gets in the copilot's seat when they're seconds from a crash landing and starts wrestling with the controls while the captain's trying to get them down in one piece. [[KarmicDeath None of the hijackers survived]].
** The pilots involved in the 2008 Mexico City [=LearJet=] Crash qualify. As the investigators find out, both falsified their flight records and certifications, ending up flying a sophisticated jet they had little idea how to control, performing a complex approach in heavy traffic. [[KarmicDeath The crash was inevitable.]]
** In the same vein as the Mexico City crash, the crew of the Lokomotiv Yaroslavl plane falsified their flight records (which consisted of flying a similar yet different plane while only being permitted to fly a older type) and ended up behind the controls of a plane they had little experience with just so they could have the privilege of transporting their favorite hockey team. Also, the first officer was hiding a neurological condition that would have disqualified him from flying. [[KarmicDeath They died too.]]
** Adam Air, [=ValuJet=], and [=Manx2=] each went to insanely dangerous lengths to cut corners at the expense of flight safety. All three of these airlines were sold off and/or liquidated after their respective disasters[[note]][=ValuJet=] survived under a different name for several years. After its name was irrevocably tainted by the Flight 592 disaster in 1996, they executed a "reverse merger", bought up a competitor ([=AirTran=]), and continued operations under that name in 1997 before being acquired by Southwest in 2014[[/note]].
* TrailersAlwaysSpoil: In the Birgenair 301 episode, the crash sequence is played in an especially dramatic way, with the narrator stating that "the fate of the flight depends on the crew getting their answers right". This ''could'' have worked - many viewers watch the show without checking the info on the presented accident first and could not know whether the plane crashed or not - if not for the opening sequence, where an aviation expert states that "this was the first major crash of a 757". [[note]]For the record, it was not: the first occurred seven weeks earlier when an American Airlines 757 crashed into a mountain in Colombia, killing 159. Curiously, this very incident was a subject of an earlier episode. Although the actual quote was that it was the first major crash of a 757 at sea, and is the biggest accident involving a 757, tying scores with American Airlines Flight 77.[[/note]]
* ATragedyOfImpulsiveness:
** Nigeria Airways Flight 2120. The project manager had the opportunity to get the tires topped off if he wasn't so adamant that the flight remain on schedule and take off with the tires under-inflated.
** Santa Barbara Airlines Flight 518. The whole accident would've been completely avoided if the pilots hadn't gotten caught up in their time in the terminal, and then rushed to get the plane in the air on schedule without properly setting up the flight computers.
** What put the nail in the coffin in Tenerife. While many other factors piled up to set the scene, the KLM captain's impatient decision to begin the takeoff roll despite uncertainty about their clearance (and whether the Pan Am plane was off the runway yet) was the final link in the chain.
* TranslationConvention: In-cockpit discussion and passenger dialog is in English, even when it's not the persons' first language. Lampshaded in Season 12 episode "Death of the President". The cockpit crew has to use Russian in radio communication with the military airport (in civilian airline communication, English is the official language), and the first words are spoken in Russian. Then there's a moment of radio static and the language changes to English. The investigators examining a crash also talk and write all their notes in English, even when English is not their native language.
* TurbineBlender: In the episode on United Airlines Flight 811, it's mentioned that human remains were found in the right inboard engine.
* UltimateJobSecurity:
** Captain Lutz was allowed to stay with Crossair despite multiple foul-ups on the job simply because they needed all the manpower they could get.
** Same story with the captain of [=TransAsia=] Flight 235.
** And again with the captain of LAPA Flight 3142.
* {{Understatement}}:
** The captain of British Airways Flight 9 certainly qualifies.
--->'''Eric Moody:''' Ladies and gentlemen, this is your captain speaking. We have a small problem. All four engines have stopped. We are doing our damnedest to get them going again. I trust you are not in too much distress.
** Flight Attendant Deborah Neil, aboard Pacific Southwest Airlines 1771:
--->'''Neil:''' ''(opens cockpit)'' We have a problem! ''(is shot in head)''
* UngratefulBastard: The captain of BEA Flight 548 accuses a junior pilot of being such during his TheReasonYouSuckSpeech to him just before boarding his flight to Brussels.
* UniversalDriversLicense: Averted in "Ghost Plane". The lone conscious flight attendant was licensed to fly light piston aircraft, but his training proves insufficient to operate a 737.
* UnluckilyLucky: Conversed when episodes touch on the subject of crash survival. Although crash survivors managed to make it out alive, they still had the misfortune of being in an accident in the first place.
* TheUnreveal: In some cases:
** It is known that South African Airways Flight 295, the subject of "Fanning the Flames", was brought down by an on-board fire. But whether it was accidental or the result of [[UsefulNotes/TheApartheidEra Apartheid Era]] espionage remains unknown.
** Subverted with "Death and Denial", about Egypt-Air Flight 990. The episode presents the case that the plane was deliberately brought down by the First Officer, and that the Egyptian government's official explanation of mechanical failure was made because of suicide being extremely taboo in Arab culture. Therefore, the cause of the crash is known, yet cannot be officially determined because of the differing politics and social mores between the U.S. and Egypt.
** Subverted again with "Pushed to the Limit", about [=SilkAir=] Flight 185. Like in "Death and Denial", this episode presents the case that the plane was deliberately brought down by a crew member (this time, the Captain), and that the Indonesian government's official explanation of mechanical failure was made because the entire Boeing 737 line, at the time of the incident, was susceptible to [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_737_rudder_issues a mechanical issue with the rudder's control unit]] that had previously caused the crash of two other 737s (which themselves were profiled in the episode "Hidden Dangers"). Again, known cause of crash, no official determination. This explanation was offered because of a similar suicide taboo due to Indonesia's large Muslim population.
** Averted like a ton of bricks in "Murder in the Alps" about the Germanwings 9525 crash. Evidence pointed to the crash being caused deliberately by the copilot; this time, no one attempted to challenge this conclusion. Only after this accident (the only one out of five total crashes suspected to be cases of pilot suicide to be undisputed as a pilot suicide) were recommendations passed to mandate the presence of at least two crew members on the flight deck at all times during the flight.
** "Massacre Over The Mediterranean"; the original report concludes that Aerolinee Itavia Flight 870 was shot down by a missile fired from an unknown second plane. Soon after, two of the investigators withdraw their names from the report. A few years later, another inquiry produces a second report which determines that the first conclusion was wrongly based on an assumption that there was a hole in the side of the plane near the front. The third and more complete investigation shows compelling forensic evidence for a bomb placed under the wash basin in the rear toilet, however the report is ignored by Italian authorities still pursuing the missile theory. The episode seems to side with the bomb theory, ending with the conclusion that the Italian legal system is not the best system for investigating crashes.
** With the disappearance of Malaysian Airlines Flight 370 unresolved at the time of airing, the episode about this flight puts forth the theory that the plane was intentionally flown off-course (and that the Captain was in the best position to do so) but doesn't definitively say who did it.
** "Deadly Silence": While the investigators know that the crash was caused by the plane losing cabin pressure, they are unable to determine how the depressurization happened, as the plane had no flight data recorder, the cockpit voice recorder only recorded the final 30 minutes of the flight, and the wreckage was too fragmented to provide any clues.
** Also "Turning Point" with Northwest Airlines Flight 85. While the NTSB did determine that the cause of the rudder hard-over was metal fatigue, they were never able to ascertain what caused the metal fatigue itself, which means they don't know what set off the disaster.
** Discussed in "Explosive Proof" about TWA 800; although the NTSB concluded that the accident was a fuel tank explosion, some continue to believe that the plane was shot down.
** In "Free Fall", the investigators were never able to figure out what triggered the malfunction that caused Qantas Flight 72 to go into a nose drive twice.
* UnusualEuphemism: One of the racers at the abandoned Gimli air base cries out "Holy crow!" when he sees Air Canada 143 barreling down toward the racing strip.
* UnwittingInstigatorOfDoom:
** In the Charkhi Dadri mid-air collision, the radio operator of Kazakhstan Airlines Flight 1907 notices that the flight is below its assigned altitude and tells the captain to climb just moments before the collision. Had the Kazakh plane not climbed, they would've passed harmlessly under the Saudi plane.
** Nigeria Airways Flight 2120's project manager simply didn't have training that would have positively influenced his judgment, yet Nationair gave him authority to override the decisions of people that did have that training. In his decisions regarding the underinflated tyres that he could never have understood the implications of, he unknowingly pressured maintenance crews into releasing an unsafe plane ([[TooDumbToLive that he was on]]) and not telling the cockpit crew about it for fear of causing a delay. The result was a horrific in-flight fire that killed everyone on board. Had he allowed the tyres to be topped up on the day, the flight would have made it to Sokoto safely, and Nationair wouldn't have collapsed two years later.
** Peter Nielsen for the Uberlingen disaster. If he had said nothing, the Russian pilots would almost certainly have obeyed their TCAS system and climbed to avoid the other plane. To make matters worse, even if the Russian crew hadn't listened to TCAS and had done ''nothing'', the DHL plane, which was descending in accordance with their own TCAS, would have passed harmlessly underneath the passenger plane. In an attempt to prevent a collision, Nielsen inadvertently ordered the Russians to do the one thing that kept them in the cargo plane's flight path.
* WhatAPieceOfJunk: What the captain of Santa Barbara Airlines Flight 518 says of his plane as he and his copilot are taxiing to the runway. True to the trope, the massive equipment malfunction that sent it into a mountain was caused by the pilots' rushed startup; [[ForWantOfANail all they had to do was wait 28 more seconds than they did before moving, and there would've been no problems with the flight]].
* WhosOnFirst: Double subverted with Garuda Indonesia Flight 152. Another plane that had been in the area had the same flight number as Garuda 152. While the mix-up was quickly resolved, it still contributed to the accident by leaving the pilots with an incorrect idea of which approach was going to be performed.
* WilhelmScream:
** One is heard in the Proteus Airlines 706 episode.
** Another is heard in the Northwest Airlink 5719 episode.
** Yet another is heard in the Comair 3272 episode.
** Several are heard in the TWA 800 episode.
* WritersCannotDoMath: The American version of "Death of the President" makes a fundamental error regarding the comparison of altitudes achieved by the aircraft, claiming that 300 feet (the aircraft's minimum descent altitude for the trial approach) is "more than 10 times [the] height" of 36 feet (the height of the first tree clipped by the aircraft). [[DepartmentOfRedundancyDepartment The obvious math error is obvious]].
* XanatosGambit: Implied with David Burke by the fact that he shot Ray Thomson first. Even if he didn't succeed in storming the cockpit of PSA 1771, he still got his primary target picked off.
* YouAnsweredYourOwnQuestion: Inverted in the TAM 402 episode. The Brazilian investigator's first reaction to seeing the FDR's evidence of a reverser deploying in flight is "This shouldn't even be possible!". Later, when he looks into why the pilots were confused by the aircraft's safety system to prevent a deployed reverser from causing a crash, he discovers that the extreme unlikelihood of a reverser deploying in flight led to the associated training being deemed unnecessary by the manufacturer.
* YouCanPanicNow: The deadly fire on British Airtours Flight 28M showed how aircraft cabins and flight crew need to facilitate an evacuation in under 90 seconds even in the face of "dysfunctional behaviour in totality" on the part of the passengers. To replicate the effects of a fire in evacuation studies, passengers were offered money if they were the first ones off.
* YouHaveGotToBeKiddingMe:
** The Northwest Airlink 5719 captain's reaction to the airline's new residence policy.
** Imagine what it must have been like for the pilots of TWA 800. They were waiting for a missing passenger whose bags were in the cargo hold, and after an hour, they get a message from the tower that the missing passenger ''was on board the whole time''. Their reaction fell under this trope.
* YouHaveToBelieveMe: One survivor of Air Inter Flight 148 went out in search of help and ran into two journalists looking for the plane, who didn't believe he was a survivor until they followed him back to the crash site, bring the rest of the rescuers back with them.
[[/folder]]
----

** No fewer than six accidents covered by the show involved substandard, inexperienced or badly trained pilots being employed by a rapidly growing airline or company. Derrick White with United Express Flight 6291 in 1994, Gustavo Weigel and Luis Etcheverry with LAPA Flight 3142 in 1999, Pavel Gruzin/Rastislav Kolesár with Crossair Flight 498 in 2000 and Hans Lutz with Crossair Flight 3597 in 2001, Martín Olíva/Álvaro Sánchez with Learjet XC-VMC in 2008, Jordi Lopez and Andrew Cantle for [=Manx2=] Flight 7100 in 2011 and Liu Tze-chung with [=TransAsia=] Flight 235 in 2015. Respective death tolls are 5, 65, 10, 24, 9, 6 and 43 in that order.

** No fewer than six accidents covered by the show involved substandard, inexperienced or badly trained pilots being employed by a rapidly growing airline or company. Gustavo Weigel and Luis Etcheverry with LAPA Flight 3142 in 1999, Pavel Gruzin/Rastislav Kolesár with Crossair Flight 498 in 2000 and Hans Lutz with Crossair Flight 3597 in 2001, Martín Olíva/Álvaro Sánchez with Learjet XC-VMC in 2008, Jordi Lopez and Andrew Cantle for [=Manx2=] Flight 7100 in 2011 and Liu Tze-chung with [=TransAsia=] Flight 235 in 2015. Respective death tolls are 65, 10, 24, 9, 6 and 43 in that order.

** A positive example in "Fight For Your Life": Auburn Calloway and his flight crew had exceeded their maximum flying hours by just one minute the day before [=FedEx=] Flight 705 and were replaced by a new crew. The original crew that Calloway would've been up against if he wasn't replaced would've been two pilots, one of whom was female. Going up against a three-man crew was more than he could manage; he was overpowered, and the plane was landed back at Memphis with no fatalities.

** "Ghost Plane": A technician inspecting the Boeing 737 that would fly as Helios Airways 522 forgets to switch back the cabin pressurization panel from manual to automatic. The pilots don't notice the position of the selector switch ''even when another ground technician tells them to check it''. In this case, it's a JustifiedTrope as the pilots' faculties are already being affected by hypoxia. Eventually the whole flight crew and passengers succumb to the lack of oxygen and the plane crashes.

** A seriously incredible (and improbable) version occurred with BA 5390. While the passengers' survival was more than likely once copilot Atchison got control of the plane, pretty much everyone was sure the ''Captain'' was dead, given that he was sucked most of the way out of the plane at over 20,000 feet. But, to everyone's shock, as paramedics were removing the "body", he actually began to come around. His injuries, as it turned out, were remarkably minor, and (probably because he was unconscious for most of the ordeal) he actually had an easier time dealing with the incident than the flight attendants.

** A seriously incredible (and improbable) version occurred with BA 5390. While the passengers' survival was more than likely once copilot Atchison got control of the plane, pretty much everyone was sure the ''Captain'' was dead, given that he was sucked most of the way out of the plane at over 20,000 feet. But, to everyone's shock, as paramedics were removing the "body", he actually began to come around. His injuries, as it turned out, were remarkably minor, and (probably because he was unconscious for most of the ordeal) he was actually ''less'' traumatized by the incident than the flight attendants, three of whom resigned altogether, while the fourth began working long-haul flights because he couldn't handle being on the type of plane that had been in the accident.

** In the fire-test for the oxygen generators in the [=ValuJet=] 592 episode, the resulting inferno becomes so hot it ends up exceeding the facilities' measuring equipment and in fact almost destroyed the facility itself as well.

** In Cathay Pacific 780 episode, when one looks at the aircraft's ECAM display, the FOB indication is constantly displaying 20400. FOB stands for Fuel On Board, and with one engine operating, it should be decreasing in value.

* HarsherInHindsight: An in-universe example in Northwest Airlink 5719 episode. The opening banter seems harsh on the side of the captain, but it can be assumed to be an example of CultureClash between an outspoken NYC captain and the quiet Minnesota first officer. Later in the episode it gets far darker and shows captain's aggressive and unfriendly nature.

** The captain of Indonesia [=AirAsia Flight=] 8501 got fed up with a recurring alarm concerning the rudder travel limiter unit, so he used a trick a ground mechanic had shown him and pulled the breakers on the flight computer. This directly led to the plane going out of control and crashing.

** Auburn Calloway wanted to hijack a [=FedEx=] DC-10 and crash it for insurance fraud because he was laid off from his job.

** Improper, mishandled or shoddy maintenance on aircraft has contributed to a engine falling off during takeoff (American Airlines Flight 191), the elevator jack-screw assembly failing during flight (Alaska Airlines Flight 261), a plane running out of fuel during flight (Air Transat Flight 236), two instances of covered pilot/static tubes which lead to malfunctioning flight instruments (Aeroperu Flight 603 and Birgenair Flight 301), a improperly adjusted elevator control cable (Air Midwest Flight 5481), tail strike damage causing metal fatigue over 22 years (China Airlines Flight 611), a rear cargo door falling off causing an explosive decompression (the 1975 US Air Force C-5 Galaxy crash), underinflated tyres starting a catastrophic fire during takeoff (Nigeria Airways Flight 2120), a missing row of screws causing the elevator to break off mid flight (Continental Express Flight 2574), and a missing carter pin causing the right side elevator to get jammed into the climb position (Emery Worldwide Flight 17).

* AcousticLicense: During the KLM Cityhopper 433 investigation, when the cockpit voice recording is played, the operator is asked to fast-forward the recording, but he actually rewinds it, as anyone familiar with tape or cassette players clearly sees. (The spools are moving anti-clockwise when played, then move clockwise when rewound, then anti-clockwise again when played.)

** One of the narrators for Germanwings Flight 9525 is Klaus Radner, who's daughter and grandson are among the murder victims.

* IAmTheNoun: The Pacific Southwest Airlines Flight 1771 hijacker's FamousLastWords were "I'm the problem", which was also the name of the episode in some locations.

** The first officer of TAROM Flight 371 failed to notice the autothrottle had malfunctioned causing one engine to be at idle while the other was at climb power. [[JustifiedTrope Understandable]] his attention was split between flying the airplane and the captain who was having a heart attack.

** A passenger on KLM Cityhopper 433 scolds her daughter for swearing in response to the aircraft suddenly rolling to the right.

** No fewer than six accidents covered by the show involved substandard, inexperienced or badly trained pilots being employed by a rapidly growing airline or company. Gustavo Weigel and Luis Etcheverry with LAPA Flight 3142 in 1999, Pavel Gruzin/Rastislav Kolesár with Crossair Flight 498 in 2000 and Hans Lutz with Crossair Flight 3597 in 2001, Martín Olíva/Álvaro Sánchez with Learjet XC-VMC in 2008, Jordi Lopez and Andrew Cantle for Manx2 Flight 7100 in 2011 and Liu Tze-chung with [=TransAsia=] Flight 235 in 2015. Respective death tolls are 65, 10, 24, 9, 6 and 43 in that order.

*** Yet again, also appears in "Fatal Delay", as when Spanair 5022 was taxing on the apron, you can see a PSA 737 and a AirWest DC-9 in the background.