History Series / Mayday

** While the flight was... short, the passengers of American Airlines Flight 191 were the test audience for a new feature: a video screen in the cabin that let passengers see the view from the cockpit. Which meant they were able to watch as the plane lost control and plunged back to the ground.

** In "Borderline Tactics", when a DC-8 crashes on an airfield in Guantanamo, Cuba, the emergency vehicle scrambling for help has a clear marking "Boryspil" - an airfield over ''5000 miles away in Ukraine''. (And yes, the Cubans might use retired Soviet equipment, but the airfield and rescue crew are American.)

** 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.

** Another positive example in "Impossible Landing": Dennis Fitch, a senior pilot and DC-10 flight instructor, just happened to be aboard United 232 when the engine blew out and severed the hydraulic lines, and was able to help the flight crew. Apart from the matter of experience (since all the pilots were quite experienced themselves), just having someone who could sit right in front of the throttle levers and do nothing but manipulate them was a huge help to the pilots, who would otherwise have had to manipulate the throttles from the sides and split their attention between that and other tasks. By taking that load off the pilots, Fitch turned what may well have been an unsurvivable crash into some random field, if not some random ''building'', into a crash near a runway that 184 people survived.

** Another positive example in "Impossible Landing": Dennis Fitch, a senior pilot and DC-10 flight instructor, just happened to be aboard United 232 when the engine blew out and severed the hydraulic lines, and was able to help the flight crew. Apart from the matter of experience (since all the pilots were quite experienced themselves), just having someone who could sit right in front of the throttle levers and do nothing but manipulate them was a huge help to the pilots, who would otherwise have had to manipulate the throttles from the sides and split their attention between that and other tasks.

** By the time the pilots of Nigeria Airways Flight 2120 realized they needed to return to Jeddah, they were already too far from the airport to make it back in the time they had left. In fact, investigators ultimately concluded that the crash became inevitable almost immediately when the pilots, unaware that wheels had caught fire, retracted the landing gear.

** By the time the pilots of Nigeria Airways Flight 2120 realized they needed to return to Jeddah, they were already too far from the airport to make it back in the time they had left. In fact, investigators ultimately concluded that the crash became inevitable the moment the pilots, unaware that wheels had caught fire, retracted the landing gear--ten ''seconds'' after takeoff.

** With the Tenerife disaster, the reason the Pan Am and KLM flights were at Tenerife in the first place is because of a terrorist attack at Gran Canaria Airport earlier in the day by Canary Island separatists, who had planted a bomb there. The flights were diverted to Tenerife while the bomb threat at Gran Canaria could be assessed, as the phoned-in threat had specially mentioned bomb'''s''', meaning there could've been more than one. The terrorist group's single bomb injured just 8 people with no fatalities, but it indirectly set of the chain of events which led to the deadliest air accident in history.

** With the Tenerife disaster, the reason the Pan Am and KLM flights were at Tenerife in the first place is because of a terrorist attack at Gran Canaria Airport earlier in the day by Canary Island separatists, who had planted a bomb there. The flights were diverted to Tenerife while the bomb threat at Gran Canaria could be assessed. The bomb injured just 8 people with no fatalities, but it indirectly set of the chain of events which led to the deadliest air accident in history.

** A Helios technician forgot to set a pressurisation system back to automatic, resulting in Helios Flight 522 not pressurising and flying aimlessly around Athens until it ran out of fuel and crashed into mountains near Grammatiko, only avoiding crashing into Athens because of quick thinking by a flight attendant who managed to stay conscious and break into the cockpit.

** "Cutting Corners": An MD-83 suffered a catastrophic structural failure in its horizontal stabilizer 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 stabilizer which then caused accelerated wear of the acme nut that the jackscrew threads into until the threads of the nuts were sheared off. A couple of dollars worth of lubricating grease would have averted the accident.

** Similarly, Alaska Airlines 261. In that case, it was a ''screw'' thread -- most of the screw's threading had been sheared off due to insufficient lubrication, so it was only the few remaining threads preventing a catastrophic stabilizer failure; predictably, they're not up to the job and ultimately fail, causing the fatal plane crash.

** 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.

** "Cutting Corners": An MD-83 suffered a catastrophic structural failure in its horizontal stabilizer 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 stabilizer 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.

** After the elevator trim jackscrew assembly on Alaska Airlines Flight 261 peeled apart, the pilots kept it flying for about 10 minutes before the end nut snapped off.

* 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.

* DoubleMeaningTitle: The episode retelling the crash of Nigeria Airways Flight 2120 is titled "Under Pressure", which could refer both the plane's tires being under-inflated and the flight crew being "under pressure" to get to their destination as quickly as possible.

** PSA Flight 1771. After the pilots are shot dead by a disgruntled employee who then sends the plane into a dive, an off-duty pilot attempts to reach the cockpit and fly the plane. Unfortunately, the shooter kills him and the plane crashes.

%% ** The silence of a jet that has lost all engines.

* ContrivedCoincidence: Frequently a factor in accidents, where one or more seemingly minor details come together to cause disaster.

** In the crash of Korean Air 801, passenger Barry Smalls had taken his shoes off during the flight, and was bending down to put them on when the plane crashed on approach, essentially putting himself in an inadvertant brace position. One of his legs was also spared from injury by a carryon bag he'd placed under the seat in front of him, allowing him to escape the plane following the crash.
** Two simultanous red lights on a normaly busy road prevent any traffic from being in the path of Fine Air Flight 101 when it crashes just after takeoff. In the show, the then Inspector General for the US Department of Transportation at the time of the crash called it an eerie cooincidence.

* OneWomanWail: Happens in the closing soundtrack of "Ghost Plane", the episode that covers the Helios Airways Flight 522 disaster in Greece. Also overlaps with TearJerker as the narrator says the final lines of the episode:

*** 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.''

* ForWantOfANail: Frequently a factor in accidents, where one or more seemingly minor details come together to cause disaster.
** "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 KLM taking on 55 tonnes of extra fuel, two critical transmissions (either one of which would have alerted the KLM captain to the situation) cancelling each other out because of a flaw in the radio system, and both planes being just two of several widebody planes diverted to an airport that wasn't designed for them.
** 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 tire on a DC-8 leads directly to a horrific in-flight fire and death of all 261 onboard.
*** Investigators later determine that the reason the tyres didn't crap out earlier was because the conditions weren't just right before. Previously, it had taken off in cooler temperatures or from airports in Africa with smaller taxiways, but King Abdulaziz International has a ''gigantic'' taxiway, which led to an eleven minute taxi on a taxiway you could cook an egg on.
** "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. Noticing that the plane is slow to decelerate and fearing they won't be able to stop in time, the captain activates the emergency brake -- which overrides the anti-lock brakes, causing the wheels to lock up and skid down the runway with enough force to heat the water on the runway to steam, creating a hydroplane effect and leading to the very outcome the captain had hoped to prevent. If he hadn't done that, the plane would have stopped in time.
** "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 stabilizer 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 stabilizer 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 tail strike incident with poorly-done repairs that were falsely 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.
** In "The Plane That Flew Too High", the plane was on the verge of a stall, but the crew had already started descending to a lower altitude because of turbulence, and would have overcome the problem without ever realizing it was more than a few odd engine readings if not for a poorly timed gust of wind that altered the plane's attitude and pushed them past the stall threshold.
** "Nowhere To Land": The engine's ability to handle water intake was only tested with the engines at full power. When the crew reduced power for landing, the engines could no longer handle the volume of water they'd taken in and both failed almost immediately.
** "Fatal Climb": The captain collapsed at the exact moment when someone needed to be handling the throttles to counteract a known periodic malfunction. If he had collapsed at any other point in the flight, it probably wouldn't have resulted in a fatal crash.
** 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. Given that it took the three men, two of whom were former military, everything they had to overcome Calloway and get the plane onto the runway, it's likely that if the original crew had been flying that day, Calloway would have been able to overpower them and accomplish his objective.
** Another positive example in "Impossible Landing": Dennis Fitch, a senior pilot and DC-10 flight instructor, just happened to be aboard United 232 when the engine blew out and severed the hydraulic lines, and was able to help the flight crew. Apart from the matter of experience (since all the pilots were quite experienced themselves), just having someone who could sit right in front of the throttle levers and do nothing but manipulate them was a huge help to the pilots, who would otherwise have had to manipulate the throttles from the sides and split their attention between that and other tasks.
** Yet another positive example in "Deadly Pitch". Fine Air Flight 101 skidded across a major roadway at rush hour, but by pure chance, the area the plane crashed through had red lights at both intersections at that exact moment, so the spot they hit was clear of traffic, and as a result, there was only one ground fatality. If one or both of those lights had been green at the time of impact, it's likely the death toll would have been much higher.
** An investigation-related example happened in "Split Decision": Some members of the investigation team were sure that ice on the wings brought Arrow Air Flight 1285 down, while others felt equally certain it was an act of terrorism, resulting in a bitter controversy which ultimately spelled the end of the Canadian Aviation Safety Board. A cockpit voice recording, allowing investigators to get some level of detail on what the pilots were dealing with, would likely have preempted the dispute before it even started, but the CVR on Arrow Air 1285 was broken at the time of the accident, so there was no recording to settle the matter.
** "Panic on the Runway": The captain of British Airtours Flight 28M, thinking he had burst a tyre, instructed his first officer to not apply full braking to avoid damaging his plane, and had decided to pull off the runway. When a fire warning activated, the crew were already mentally committed to this decision and complete the maneuver, not having any way to know that a crosswind was present that would make the fire much worse (this only being studied during the course of the investigation). If they had stopped on the runway, the fire would have been much less severe, probably giving everyone enough time to evacuate. Which in turn would have likely delayed the major safety improvements that came out of the accident for years...
** "Choosing Sides": In the case of British Midland Flight 92, the captain and his first officer, after shutting down the wrong engine, had just started a review of their actions which may have led to them discovering the error. Unfortunately, ATC calls them at the worst possible moment, distracting them enough that they never completed the review.
** "Blind Spot": A bit of static over the radio meant the controller heard a different ''syllable'' (ATC heard "passing", the crew actually said "passed" and was meant as an implied question). This minor detail might have caused the controller to realise what was happening and prevent the accident.
** Another positive example: In "North Sea Nightmare", a random system glitch caused the autopilot to disengage and give the pilots total control over the plane allowing the pilots to get the plane out of a dive with seconds to spare.
** Yet another positive example in "Falling From the Sky." When the crew put on their oxygen masks, the first officer's was broken so Captain Moody made the decision to ''increase'' their rate of descent to a safer altitude for him to breathe. This caused the plane to descend out of the volcanic ash cloud that, unbeknownst to the crew, was responsible for shutting down their engines, allowing them to be restarted.

** "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]].

** 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 an attempt to climb back up. 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]].

* 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]].

** "Scratching the Surface": Hasty outside-the-book repairs and maintenance on aircraft that work in the short-term can have deadly consequences years or even decades later if not followed up with a proper and more permanent solution. In this case, a quick-fix doubler-plate repair on damage caused by a tailstrike in 1980 would eventually lead to a depressurization-induced mid-air disintegration that killed everyone onboard 32 years later because ''no one'' noticed the side effects for so long.

** Also in "Blind Spot", the livery on PSA Flight 182 was incorrect. The episode had it having an older livery the airline used that included a pink stripe on top of an orange and red stripes. In the footage shown of the actual crash site, the wreckage clearly shows that it had the last livery PSA used before its merger with USAir in 1988 which had orange, red-orange, and red stripe.

** Matthew Bell, the first officer of UPS Flight 6, during the final minutes of the stricken plane's flight; with its cargo set ablaze by spontaneously combusted lithium ion batteries, the fire is now raging just a few metres behind your seat; you last saw the captain stepping out of his seat in an attempt to fight the fire, but hasn't returned, as he has likely either burned to death or suffocated on the smoke. All the while, you're desperately trying to reach the airport, only to be unable to see the runway due to smoke blocking your vision... and your plane is still descending towards the ground...

** 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.

** In "Fire in the Hold", [=ValuJet=] Flight 592's PA system is mentioned to have just been fixed after crapping out on the way to Miami and the autopilot is still broken, showing that [=SabreTech=], [=ValuJet=]'s maintenance contractor, [[IncompetenceInc isn't particularly great at its job]]. Sure enough, the fire that brings Flight 592 down turns out to have been the result of [=SabreTech=] improperly packaging and mislabeling expired oxygen generators which were loaded onto the plane under the mistaken impression that they were empty oxygen canisters.

** A confusion between expired oxygen generators and empty oxygen canisters helped doom [=ValuJet=] 592. [[note]]In short, the crew believed the plane was carrying harmless, empty metal canisters - but what they were actually carrying were chemical oxygen generators which got very hot when they were activated, and at least one of them being activated caused a self-sustaining fire in the (airtight) cargo hold that got hot enough to melt away the cabin floor and all control lines. There was no fire detection equipment in the cargo hold because that class was supposed to cause fires to burn themselves out and nobody considered what would happen if [[FailsafeFailure oxidizers were involved]], meaning the crew only became aware of the fire when it was too late.[[/note]]

** Some idiot at [=SabreTech=] thought "expired" meant "empty" and labelled a box of expired oxygen generators as empty oxygen canisters, leading to 144 cans of an ''exothermic chemical reaction '''designed to create oxygen''''' being loaded onto [=ValuJet=] Flight 592 and burning the plane down in midair.

** In an intra-national example, it's mentioned that there was CultureClash in the case of Northwest AirLink Flight 5719, where an outspoken, abrasive, and ''very'' temperamental [[BrooklynRage New Yorker]] Captain clashed badly with his more understated [[MinnesotaNice Minnesotan]] first officer.

* 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. {{Justified|trope}} in that this is an exact quote from the CVR.

** The cause of the [[RunawayTrain San Bernardino]] crash was several poor communications pout together. The company ordering the shipment had not reported the weight of its cargo to one of the clerks, who couldn't contact them when this missing information was noticed. The clerk estimated the car weights to allow some forms to go through, but in a second instance of poor communication, this estimate was taken to be the actual weight by others involved in the trip. Finally, one of the helper locomotives at the back of the train did not have working dynamic brakes, but no one told the crew at the front this. Put together, it meant the train weighed more and had fewer brakes than the train crew realized, catching them by surprise on a downhill stretch of track and crashing. With correct communication, it is likely more breaking power would have been provided, if not, following operating rules would have prevented the train going down the mountain.

* DrivesLikeCrazy: With flying. For instance, the KLM captain in the Tenerife special is portrayed as this, and for good reason.
** Air Illinois Flight 710 captain Lester Smith was known to fly into storms and order first officers to disable the overspeed warnings, and ultimately met his end when he failed to return to base in response to a ''failed generator''. The worst part is, there was no pressure from Air Illinois to fly like a madman; it was all an ego-driven SelfImposedChallenge.