Mayday (2013) s09e01 Episode Script
Panic on the Runway
B Tours 28, you are clear for take-off.
80 knots.
- (CRASH!) - Stop! (WHEELS SCREECH) Don't hammer the brakes.
Don't hammer the brakes.
NARRATOR: 137 people are onboard this British Airtours flight.
Within minutes, nearly half of them will be dead.
Evacuate, evacuate.
MAN: The aircraft didn't even get airborne and it didn't run off the runway and yet still 55 people were killed.
In the end, they turned to a psychologist to help them figure out how a survivable emergency turned into one of British aviation's most horrific disasters.
It's just before 6:00 in the morning on August 22, 1985.
British Airtours Flight 28 is scheduled to take 131 passengers from Manchester to the Greek island of Corfu.
British Airtours is a division of British Airways, specialising in low-cost flights to vacation destinations.
It's a chilly morning.
A slight breeze is blowing.
Ideal flying weather.
Lindsay Davies is heading to Greece with her boyfriend, Charlie Thickson.
We'd been going out with each other for a year and that's one of the reasons we were so excited about it.
You know, it was our first holiday together.
Captain Peter Terrington is in command.
TERRINGTON: I was a senior training captain on the fleet.
First officer Brian Love is being trained by Terrington.
He was going to perform the take-off and landing .
.
as part of his training.
- Alright, captain? - Yep.
Briefing now, Brian - airfleet emergencies, you handling the aircraft.
- Mm-hm.
- What's the four things you stop for? Fire, failure, configuration warning or you shouting "Stop.
" OK, so you bring the thing to a stop, I'll take over the aircraft, leaving you to deal with the emergency.
I'll liaise with ATC.
OK? If you've talked about the possibility of emergency and talked over what you will do, then, if it actually happens, it's easier to recall those items.
OK, Brian, start 2.
Starting 2.
Oil pressure rising.
OK.
Go on.
The crew is flying a Boeing 737.
It takes just four minutes for the plane to reach the foot of the runway.
B Tours 28, you are clear for take-off.
The 737 has 3,000 metres to get to take-off speed.
The engines are pushed to high power.
- 80 knots.
- Check.
- (CRASH!) - PASSENGER: Oh my.
Captain Terrington needs to act fast.
Stop! And immediate reaction was to stop.
We were quite a few knots below our decision speed so I very quickly closed the throttles and applied reverse thrust.
We could feel the aircraft slowing down and Arthur said "Oh, I think we've blown a tyre" and I didn't know so we just waited to hear.
Don't hammer the brakes.
Don't hammer the brakes.
TERRINGTON: I thought the tyre, it might have gone and would cause damage to the undercarriage, if we brake too strongly.
Soon, passengers on the left side of the plane see the real problem.
I could see orange flames inside the back of the engine.
And at that point, I thought - it's obviously not a burst tyre, that wouldn't cause that.
This is perhaps something a bit more serious.
Let me by.
I'm not staying there.
But at that point, I knew that I wanted to get off the plane and I wasn't happy at all.
II knew that there was a fire and I just wanted to get away from the fire.
- Smoke is seeping into the cabin.
- Please sit down.
The nearest exit was at the back.
I didn't want to go to the back because the smoke was coming in there.
So I decided in my mind that I was going to go through the front.
I said to Charlie, "Come on, we're going.
" That's when I started going towards the front of the plane.
Stopping.
28 Mike, we are abandoning take-off.
(ALARM BUZZES) It looks like we have got a fire on number one.
Looks like there's a lot of fire.
Thank you.
Plane on fire, runway 24.
From where he's sitting, Captain Terrington can't see how bad the fire is.
He needs advice from the tower.
We have to get the passengers off.
I would do, by the starboard side.
Terrington decides to pull off the runway.
Evacuate to the starboard side please.
Fire drill.
Engine number 1.
Shutting down 2.
Evacuate.
Evacuate.
Please stay calm.
Before the flight crew leaves the cockpit, they must complete a 15-step checklist.
- Parking brake.
- Set.
- Speed brake lever.
- Down.
- (SIRENS WAIL) - But time is running out.
We have aan evacuation checklist but it was four pages long.
And the last item was to get the passengers off.
Engine and APU fire warning switches.
This didn't cover my problem at all.
On the 737, there are four cabin doors.
The two in the back are covered in flames and smoke leaving only two for 137 people.
Then, a mechanical problem eliminates one of those.
(PASSENGERS SCREAM) The back of the cabin is filling with smoke.
(SIRENS WAIL) It's making breathing difficult.
Passengers rush forward.
(PASSENGERS SCREAM, COUGH) It just seemed to go on for ever before they started evacuating.
And that's when I thought, "I'm not going to get off.
"It's going to blow up with all of us on it.
" Engine and APU fire warning switches.
Right now, all 137 people onboard are alive.
But with every second, their odds of surviving are decreasing.
Flight 28 is becoming a death trap.
The jammed door on the right side of British Airtours Flight 28 leaves the crew no choice.
(PASSENGERS COUGH) They must get the passengers out from the side of the plane that's burning.
TOFF: As soon as they opened the door, the fire service were already around shooting foam up the slide.
It came into the galley floor.
I wanted to start to evacuate the passengers but there was bit of a bottleneck and nobody was coming forward.
The aisle is quite narrow where the galley is and there were people pushing forward and I could see this boy that was really, sort of, pushed against the wall.
(PASSENGERS SCREAM, SHOUT) He couldn't get out so I pulled him by his T-shirt.
he had a yellow T-shirt on.
And he sort of tumbled forward and after that everybody sort of just tumbled in behind him We just directed them down the slide.
Jump.
Jump.
Jump.
In training, they tell you to, you know, bring people to the door and you tell them to, um, jump.
Jump.
Desperate to get people off the plane quickly, the purser returns to the jammed door.
After several attempts, he manages to force it open.
DAVIES: One thing I did see when I looked back was people going to the front - towards the front of the plane where the seats are and pushing the seats forward folding them down as they went along.
So people were try to rush forward from the back.
The chute was open and people were jumping straight on to the chute.
As I got to bottom, I didn't look back at all.
I was just wanting to get off.
Dozens of passengers have made it off the plane.
But there are still many more inside.
But it was smouldering and it was black, thick black smoke and Charlie had said that after you'd gone this black smoke came down.
He said and everybody was screaming and panicking.
He said "People are going to die in there.
" Standby power switch.
Captain Peter Terrington and his first officer, Brian Love, are still aboard the burning airplane and they still haven't completed the steps required to evacuate.
There was four tonnes of fuel coming out of that aircraft wing tank.
Go Brian, go Brian.
I could see quite a lot of flames.
Completing the check list would put their lives at risk.
We did as many items as we could and then we both went out of the flight deck window.
There are no more passengers at the exits.
So Joanna Toff decides to see if anyone else is left in the cabin.
The smoke wasyou could touch it.
It was so thick and you could taste It was awful, really.
Go.
(PANTS, GASPS) (COUGHS) There was a young girl, just a bit further down in the cabin.
But she was really disorientated.
I mean, I suppose we all were, really.
We just didn't have any idea what was going on.
I just brought her down to the slide.
She was taken off, then.
The fireman was telling me to come on out.
I was thinking, "Well, I've not finished.
We've not finished yet.
" - When Toff re-enters the cabin - (COUGHING) .
.
the thick smoke makes it as hard to see as it is to breathe.
It was really dark and quiet.
I've never seen anything like it.
I could see the light from the door anyway by then so I knew where the door was.
The smoke forces Toff to abandon her search.
Just minutes after pulling off the runway, British Airtours Flight 28 has been consumed by fire.
We got out of the flight deck which was relatively intact.
And when we turned around on the ground, we saw a complete wreck of an aircraft and it had happened in a matter of seconds.
It wasdreadful.
54 people are dead.
Another would die in hospital.
(SIRENS WAIL) There was nothing wrong, really, with us, we thought.
Nothing physical wrong with us.
But our lives changed, you know, just in those few hours.
I couldn't breathe.
I was virtually out the door.
And I couldn't breathe then.
The smoke was coming in and everybody just stood up and ran out.
It was just a mad panic getting out.
When the smoke came, you just couldn't see anything at all.
Couldn't see anybody.
It takes 125 firefighters more than two hours to put out the fire.
News of the disaster soon spreads around the world.
British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher flies to Manchester to visit the scene.
When we get a terrible air crash of this kind, everyone is appalled and shocked.
Every single aspect of this accident will be thoroughly investigated.
It has to be.
This is the fourth major commercial air disaster of the year.
In June of 1985, an Air India jet exploded over the Atlantic Ocean.
329 people were killed.
Weeks later, 137 people died when a Delta Airlines flight crashed at Dallas Fort Worth airport.
And just 10 days before the Manchester crash, the deadliest single aircraft accident in history.
Japan Airlines flight 123, a fully loaded 747, slammed into a mountain, killing 520 people.
British Air Tours flight 28 adds 55 new victims to the list of casualties.
1985 is now the deadliest year in the history of commercial aviation.
The flying public is getting nervous.
Britain's Air Accidents Investigation Branch sends a team to Manchester to unravel the events that led to the catastrophe.
Among them, Steven Moss.
He'll be inspecting the plane's engines.
MOSS: This should not really have happened.
The aircraft didn't even get airborne.
It didn't run off the runway, and yet, still, 55 people were killed.
Chris Protheroe is also on the team.
His focus is on the fire.
We were aware, from initial reports, that the fire had entered the aircraft very rapidly as the aircraft came to a halt.
And that was a focus for me.
It doesn't take too long for Stephen Moss to figure out where the trouble started.
Well, the first thing we noticed clearly was the hole in the underside of the wing.
And right next to it was a gaping hole in the side of the engine.
It seems that one had led to the other.
To get a plane loaded with passengers off the ground, you need to generate massive thrust.
That power is created when air travels through the front of the engine to a series of compressor fans.
It's then ignited and the exhaust pushes the plane forward.
Something had clearly gone very wrong with flight 28's left engine.
Investigators look for clues on the runway and in the cabin, hoping to discover why so many people died.
Entering the cabin for the first time, there was a As with all aircraft fires, there's an overwhelming pungent smell - burning plastic, burnt fuel.
Burning material had dropped down onto seats and so the aisles were filled up with the remains of overhead lockers, a scene ofof devastation.
The damage in the cabin is revealing.
It's almost completely charred up high.
But is relatively intact down low.
It was clear that there had not been a flashover in this case.
A flashover occurs when the gases in an enclosed space become so hot that they ignite, incinerating everything around them.
The way flight 28's cabin is charred, tells Protheroe about the nature of the fire.
Many of the seats' squab, cushions, even things like the emergency evacuation cards, which are just plastic-laminated cards, were pretty much undamaged.
You could have wiped them off and put them on another aircraft and nobody would have known they'd been in this accident.
Whereas, at the upper levels in the fuselage, there was a great deal of heat damage.
This is not a characteristic of a flashover.
The fire in the cabin had been severe, but should not have been catastrophic.
This leaves investigators with two questions.
Why did so many people die? And what caused the fire? The answer to the second question may be outside the plane, lying on the runway.
Investigators find a large piece of dome-shaped metal along the plane's path.
Stephen Moss can see it's from a piece of the engine called a combustor can.
There looked like there'd been a separation of the can from the front end, from the back end.
The combustion chamber of the 737's jet engines contains nine combustor cans.
It's where fuel and air are mixed and ignited.
So each can needs to withstand intense heat.
Moss suspects the fractured can somehow blew apart and destroyed the plane's left engine.
It had struck an under-wing fuel tank access panel and put a sizable hole in that, which directly led to the release of a vast quantity of fuel.
Proving the piece of the combustion can penetrated the wing is easy.
It fits neatly into the hole in the wing.
This was clearly, if you like, the root cause of the accident.
The engine on the plane is a Pratt and Whitney JT8D.
For Moss, that's of grave concern.
At the time, it was probably the most widely-used jet engine on commercial air transport, in the world.
And it was obviously pretty urgent that we try and find the cause of this one, in order to prevent other aircraft having the same problem.
There are tens of thousands of combustor cans in service around the world.
One of them erupted in Manchester.
Steven Moss needs to find out why it failed.
And fast.
Investigators looking into the deadly fire onboard British Air Tours flight 28 study the plane's maintenance log.
They discover the combustor can that ruptured had previously been repaired.
During a routine inspection, a year and a half earlier, mechanics had found small cracks in some of the combustor cans.
It was certainly not uncommon to find fatigue cracks in the cans.
They are operating in a high-temperature environment.
Investigators find mechanics repaired the cracks according to a procedure laid out in the engine repair manual.
They welded them closed.
But the crack on can number 9 was unusually long.
The overhaul manual did not give any limit on the length of crack that could be repaired, and it was a longer crack than had been experienced before.
It was still repaired.
After the repaired cans were put back in the engine, mechanics had no way of knowing the weld didn't effectively seal the crack.
That's because the cans can't be inspected while the engine is on the plane.
Since the repair, there were 11 reports of slow acceleration from the engine that exploded in Manchester.
A damaged combustor can could have been a reason for the problem.
But troubleshooting guides available to mechanics in Manchester didn't list that as a potential cause.
Instead, Pratt & Whitney offered other ways to fix the acceleration problem.
It didn't seem to ring any great alarm bells with them, if you like.
They'd seen it before and it had never turned out to be anything serious.
So mechanics in Manchester made minor adjustments to fix the plane's idle speed and kept the plane in operation.
Cockpit voice recordings reveal that the crew of Flight 28 was aware there was a problem with slow acceleration.
Slow acceleration on number one engine the day before yesterday.
- I was on the flight.
Yes, sir.
- Engineer signed off on it.
But the log entry led Captain Terrington to believe that the problem had been fixed.
A comment in the tech log for the flight before the last one, that the engine was slow in accelerating.
It wasn't apparent as a serious problem because the engineers had done some work and the aircraft had been flying the previous day with no problems.
The idle speed adjustments didn't fix the real problem - the cracked combustor can.
And it reached the breaking point on Flight 28.
(BANG!) Stopping.
28 Mike.
We are abandoning take-off.
If the airline had inspected the cans, I think there is no doubt that they would have seen the problem.
Investigators now know the origins of the Manchester disaster.
The welded crack in combustor can number 9 gave way as Flight 28 sped down the runway.
The front of the can was ejected from the engine and put a hole in the underside of the left wing.
That led to a huge fuel leak onto the damaged engine, which caused the fire.
Engine fires are not uncommon.
The body of a 737 is insulated with fire retardant material to protect the cabin.
Investigators still don't understand how a fire outside the plane spread into the cabin as quickly as it did.
Fire inspector Chris Protheroe finds part of the answer from viewing photographs of the plane as it sped down the runway.
It was clear from these photographs that there was a very dynamic phase to the fire whilst the aircraft was at speed on the runway, which produced this energetic, turbulent, sort of blowtorching type of fire visually, anyway, trailing behind the aircraft.
A press photo from the day of the crash leads Protheroe to a new theory.
The photographs of the aircraft that appeared in the press showed the left thrust reverser deployed.
The general impression that one got visually from that photograph was that the thrust reversers had effectively blowtorched fire against the side of the fuselage and that that, if you like, was the explanation as to why the fire had penetrated so quickly.
That photograph and the implications of it actually therefore loomed quite large.
Stop! There are several ways to bring a speeding jetliner to a halt.
One is with the brakes.
Don't hammer the brakes.
Another is with the engine's thrust reversers.
Thrust reversers redirect the exhaust from the jet engine forwards.
This helps slow the plane down.
It looked as though the thrust reversers had simply blown this big fire on the left of the aircraft againstdirectly onto the side of the aircraft, directly onto the rear fuselage.
It now seems possible that Captain Terrington made the fire worse by trying to slow his plane down.
But Protheroe has two good reasons to doubt his theory.
One is the location where charring from the burning exhaust gas, or efflux, was found.
The efflux impinges on the fuselage further up, closer to the roof - the crown skins of the aircraft.
So actually, the penetration that we had low down did not fit with that.
And the other reason is, by the time the thrust reversers were deployed, the left engine had already exploded.
But to act as a blowtorch, the engine would have needed considerable exhaust.
We did calculations to confirm that the residual thrust from that engine would not have had the energy to have this effect.
That confirmed that the thrust reversers couldn't actually have played any role or significant role, anyway, in the fire's severity.
Clearly, something other than the thrusters had caused the fire to spread so quickly.
Protheroe looks more closely at the data.
After examining weather reports from the day of the accident, he finds the answer.
The wind was the main factor that determined the severity of the fire in terms of its attack on the outside of the aircraft, how rapidly it penetrated the aircraft and it also affected the conditions inside the cabin.
Believing he had blown a tyre, Captain Terrington made a fateful decision.
Stopping.
28 Mike, we are abandoning take-off.
Well, when we heard the thud and we closed the throttles, it was my assumption that we were going to turn off the runway, clear the runway, ask air traffic for an engineer to come out and check the tyres.
Like a highway, an airport runway has a series of exits.
Captain Terrington, chose one called Link Delta.
When we got the additional information of a fire warning, the brain was already programmed to carry out the stop.
The crew had been aware that they had a fire but didn't really appreciate at the time that the nature of the fire, the severity of the fire, so they had turned off the runway.
Captain Terrington, turned his plane to the right and brought it to a stop.
He couldn't have realised that doing so would make the problem far worse.
There was a crosswind, a slight crosswind, from the left side of the aircraft and it carried that fire aft - rearwards - and took over and under the rear fuselage, in between the wing and the tail plane.
The wind wrapped the fire around the back of the plane .
.
and into the cabin.
If there'd been no wind at all, I think the situation would have been very much more benign.
Investigators have discovered how the fire started and the conditions that caused it to penetrate the cabin.
Now investigator Ed Trimble must solve the biggest mystery surrounding the Manchester accident.
- (BANG!) - Evacuate! Evacuate! Here we had an aircraft which had aborted the take-off for good reason.
It had taxied off and stopped in a taxiway in an expeditious manner and yet 55 people had lost their lives, so there was a big question as to precisely why that had occurred.
Investigators learned that most of the dead were not found in the worst burned parts of the plane.
Autopsies will point to the real killer on Flight 28.
Of the 54 people who died in the cabin, only 6 had suffered serious burns.
All the rest died from smoke inhalation.
(COUGHS) It seems the smoke in the cabin was particularly lethal.
Survivors tell investigators that the smoke was unbearable.
The smoke was really black and it was .
.
it was almost touching you.
It was really weird.
And they say the effect of that was shocking.
Immediately, you took one breath of the smoke, you began to feel debilitated.
And you knew that if you took another breath or two, you weren't going to make it.
At the time of the Manchester accident, the effects of fire on an aeroplane had been well studied and understood.
But the effects of smoke were not.
To figure out what made the smoke so toxic, Trimble decides to re-create the fire that burned on Flight 28.
We were trying to model not only the gasses which were produced but also the kind of threat levels which were produced.
The smoke that filled the plane was from materials burning inside the cabin.
The foam in the seats, the wool in the carpets and the plastic overhead bins all release poisonous fumes.
Those conditions are re-created by burning those same materials.
Trimble discovers the passengers on Flight 28 inhaled smoke that contained a deadly blend of poisonous gasses, including high levels of carbon monoxide and hydrogen cyanide.
Now he desperately needs to find out if there's anyway to protect airline passengers from that kind of smoke.
It seemed to be pretty clear that unless we could protect people's respiratory systems from the assault from such combustion gasses, there was little that we could do to improve survival chances from aircraft fires.
Over the course of five weeks, investigators run dozens of tests experimenting with different filters.
They burn nearly a quarter ton of material to create the necessary smoke.
Their dramatic conclusion - it may have been possible to save passengers' lives.
There was not the slightest doubt in my mind that in these situations, in an aircraft cabin, if it is being assaulted by combustion gases, your chances of survival are vastly improved if you have smokehood protection.
British Airtours Flight 28 had only enough smokehoods for the crew.
They were never used.
Trimble's research indicates that smokehoods for passengers could have saved lives.
There were hoods available, both of the filter type and a breathable gas type, which can provide a very high level of protection to in people in these circumstances.
(PASSENGERS SCREAM) Many of the passengers on Flight 28 would have survived with a few more minutes of breathing time.
(PASSENGERS SHOUT) TOFF: It was in a blink of an eye, you know, from the time, you know, we stopped on the runway, you know, just within a few minutes, it was all over, really.
(SIREN WAILS) A full Boeing 737 is designed to be evacuated in less than two minutes.
So even without additional time, more of the passengers on flight 28 should have been able to get off.
(SIREN WAILS) To discover why so many people never made it off the plane, investigators turned to an unlikely source for the answer.
By law, airplane manufacturers must prove their planes can be evacuated quickly and safety.
All public transport aircraft are certificated to the same criteria and that is that the total compliment of passengers must be capable of evacuating from the aircraft using half the exits in the aircraft - generally one side or the other - within a maximum of 90 seconds.
But 90 seconds after Flight 28 came to a stop, most of the passengers were still onboard.
(PASSENGERS SHOUT, COUGH) The reason why the evacuation in Manchester wasn't achieved in 90 seconds is because the conditions in a real fire evacuation are completely different from the certification conditions.
The certification evacuation is conducted in clear conditions, with no smoke that reduces vision and overwhelms passengers.
Within minutes of coming to a stop, Flight 28 filled with thick, black smoke.
As soon as the smoke began to spill into the rear cabin and then flow forwards, essentially that just immediate panic.
You can imagine, under these conditions, that people have got to get away from the smoke and people did this by basically clambering over the seats and other people in front of them.
In less than 5 minutes, what should have been a survivable accident, turned deadly.
Helen Muir is a psychologist and a leading expert on how aeroplane design can influence survival.
She's asked to study the behaviour of passengers on Flight 28 to figure out why so many died.
What we had to learn to do was to design the aircraft interior so even if we had what we might say was 'dysfunctional behaviour', in totality, we could accommodate the needs of individuals and their desperate rush to get out.
Muir configures a cabin to duplicate Flight 28 and fills it with volunteers.
Then, to have them act as though the plane is on fire, she offers money to the first ones off.
And that produced behaviour that was quite unbelievable.
People went over seats, they went round, past each other, all sorts of things and indeed, when survivors from the actual Manchester accident came and saw the videos, they said, "Yeah, that's how it was.
" (PASSENGERS SCREAM) Settle down.
Settle down.
The evacuation of Flight 28 was slowed by the fact that passengers became jammed in the bulkhead opening separating the main cabin from the galley.
(PASSENGERS SHOUT) Investigators discover the logjam was created by the design of the Boeing 737.
The bulkhead opening was 22.
5 inches wide, just enough for one person to fit through.
But what they wanted to know was how much wider would they have to make it for people not to get stopped and blocked.
Muir's tests show the narrow bulkhead opening created bottlenecks that flight attendants had to constantly clear.
Increasing the width to 30 inches greatly improved the movement of passengers.
MUIR: You would dramatically improve the speed at which people could get out and you'd reduce the likelihood of people falling and slipping and so on.
As a result of Helen Muir's work, a recommendation was made to increase the space between the bulkhead walls to 30 inches .
.
and introduce strip lighting to help guide passengers to exits, even when they are blinded by smoke.
Muir also found a way to improve cabin safety without redesigning the cabin.
Please sit down.
She conducted research on the behaviour of the cabin crew in emergencies .
.
and found that passengers get off a plane much faster with a highly assertive crew.
Take it easy! Mind your head! (PASSENGERS SHOUT) This way! Take it easy! It's because we don't want people really making their own decisions.
We want people to do exactly what the cabin crew or the procedures state.
And we don't want people hesitating, particularly at the door.
(PASSENGERS SCREAM) Helen Muir's research prompted manufacturers to redesign cabins to make them safer.
But one safety feature remains controversial - smokehoods.
Ed Trimble believes they should be mandatory on all commercial flights.
Without a doubt.
Without a doubt.
Helen Muir is less convinced.
She's studied how smokehoods affect passenger behaviour and is worried they would slow down the orderly evacuation of an airplane.
We know you've only got literally 1.
5 to 2 minutes for everybody to get out.
What we don't want to have is something which is difficult to put on so it slows people getting down.
The most important lesson of British Airtours Flight 28 is that seconds matter.
It's now universally accepted that it takes 90 seconds from the first sign of fire before it becomes unsurvivable.
The passengers on Flight 28 lost valuable time when the starboard-side door jammed.
The investigators determined that the slide mechanism deployed too early, preventing the door from opening.
There was a flaw that led the slide container's lid to jam if the door is opened too quickly.
After the Manchester accident, Boeing quickly redesigned the system so that couldn't happen.
The crash of an Air France jet in Toronto showed how much has changed since the Manchester accident.
All 309 people got off that plane in just 90 seconds.
No one died.
(PASSENGER SCREAMS) Some major changes to commercial airliners (GROANS) Alright, the door's open.
.
.
came about because of a flight that never left the ground.
That's the only way I can resolve it, with the death of 55 of my passengers - the fact that flying is now safer.
I can't imagine anybody, you know, doesn't wish that it hadn't happened.
You know, despite what has been learned and despite maybe the subsequent lives that have been changed, you know, you'd give anything for it not to have happened.
80 knots.
- (CRASH!) - Stop! (WHEELS SCREECH) Don't hammer the brakes.
Don't hammer the brakes.
NARRATOR: 137 people are onboard this British Airtours flight.
Within minutes, nearly half of them will be dead.
Evacuate, evacuate.
MAN: The aircraft didn't even get airborne and it didn't run off the runway and yet still 55 people were killed.
In the end, they turned to a psychologist to help them figure out how a survivable emergency turned into one of British aviation's most horrific disasters.
It's just before 6:00 in the morning on August 22, 1985.
British Airtours Flight 28 is scheduled to take 131 passengers from Manchester to the Greek island of Corfu.
British Airtours is a division of British Airways, specialising in low-cost flights to vacation destinations.
It's a chilly morning.
A slight breeze is blowing.
Ideal flying weather.
Lindsay Davies is heading to Greece with her boyfriend, Charlie Thickson.
We'd been going out with each other for a year and that's one of the reasons we were so excited about it.
You know, it was our first holiday together.
Captain Peter Terrington is in command.
TERRINGTON: I was a senior training captain on the fleet.
First officer Brian Love is being trained by Terrington.
He was going to perform the take-off and landing .
.
as part of his training.
- Alright, captain? - Yep.
Briefing now, Brian - airfleet emergencies, you handling the aircraft.
- Mm-hm.
- What's the four things you stop for? Fire, failure, configuration warning or you shouting "Stop.
" OK, so you bring the thing to a stop, I'll take over the aircraft, leaving you to deal with the emergency.
I'll liaise with ATC.
OK? If you've talked about the possibility of emergency and talked over what you will do, then, if it actually happens, it's easier to recall those items.
OK, Brian, start 2.
Starting 2.
Oil pressure rising.
OK.
Go on.
The crew is flying a Boeing 737.
It takes just four minutes for the plane to reach the foot of the runway.
B Tours 28, you are clear for take-off.
The 737 has 3,000 metres to get to take-off speed.
The engines are pushed to high power.
- 80 knots.
- Check.
- (CRASH!) - PASSENGER: Oh my.
Captain Terrington needs to act fast.
Stop! And immediate reaction was to stop.
We were quite a few knots below our decision speed so I very quickly closed the throttles and applied reverse thrust.
We could feel the aircraft slowing down and Arthur said "Oh, I think we've blown a tyre" and I didn't know so we just waited to hear.
Don't hammer the brakes.
Don't hammer the brakes.
TERRINGTON: I thought the tyre, it might have gone and would cause damage to the undercarriage, if we brake too strongly.
Soon, passengers on the left side of the plane see the real problem.
I could see orange flames inside the back of the engine.
And at that point, I thought - it's obviously not a burst tyre, that wouldn't cause that.
This is perhaps something a bit more serious.
Let me by.
I'm not staying there.
But at that point, I knew that I wanted to get off the plane and I wasn't happy at all.
II knew that there was a fire and I just wanted to get away from the fire.
- Smoke is seeping into the cabin.
- Please sit down.
The nearest exit was at the back.
I didn't want to go to the back because the smoke was coming in there.
So I decided in my mind that I was going to go through the front.
I said to Charlie, "Come on, we're going.
" That's when I started going towards the front of the plane.
Stopping.
28 Mike, we are abandoning take-off.
(ALARM BUZZES) It looks like we have got a fire on number one.
Looks like there's a lot of fire.
Thank you.
Plane on fire, runway 24.
From where he's sitting, Captain Terrington can't see how bad the fire is.
He needs advice from the tower.
We have to get the passengers off.
I would do, by the starboard side.
Terrington decides to pull off the runway.
Evacuate to the starboard side please.
Fire drill.
Engine number 1.
Shutting down 2.
Evacuate.
Evacuate.
Please stay calm.
Before the flight crew leaves the cockpit, they must complete a 15-step checklist.
- Parking brake.
- Set.
- Speed brake lever.
- Down.
- (SIRENS WAIL) - But time is running out.
We have aan evacuation checklist but it was four pages long.
And the last item was to get the passengers off.
Engine and APU fire warning switches.
This didn't cover my problem at all.
On the 737, there are four cabin doors.
The two in the back are covered in flames and smoke leaving only two for 137 people.
Then, a mechanical problem eliminates one of those.
(PASSENGERS SCREAM) The back of the cabin is filling with smoke.
(SIRENS WAIL) It's making breathing difficult.
Passengers rush forward.
(PASSENGERS SCREAM, COUGH) It just seemed to go on for ever before they started evacuating.
And that's when I thought, "I'm not going to get off.
"It's going to blow up with all of us on it.
" Engine and APU fire warning switches.
Right now, all 137 people onboard are alive.
But with every second, their odds of surviving are decreasing.
Flight 28 is becoming a death trap.
The jammed door on the right side of British Airtours Flight 28 leaves the crew no choice.
(PASSENGERS COUGH) They must get the passengers out from the side of the plane that's burning.
TOFF: As soon as they opened the door, the fire service were already around shooting foam up the slide.
It came into the galley floor.
I wanted to start to evacuate the passengers but there was bit of a bottleneck and nobody was coming forward.
The aisle is quite narrow where the galley is and there were people pushing forward and I could see this boy that was really, sort of, pushed against the wall.
(PASSENGERS SCREAM, SHOUT) He couldn't get out so I pulled him by his T-shirt.
he had a yellow T-shirt on.
And he sort of tumbled forward and after that everybody sort of just tumbled in behind him We just directed them down the slide.
Jump.
Jump.
Jump.
In training, they tell you to, you know, bring people to the door and you tell them to, um, jump.
Jump.
Desperate to get people off the plane quickly, the purser returns to the jammed door.
After several attempts, he manages to force it open.
DAVIES: One thing I did see when I looked back was people going to the front - towards the front of the plane where the seats are and pushing the seats forward folding them down as they went along.
So people were try to rush forward from the back.
The chute was open and people were jumping straight on to the chute.
As I got to bottom, I didn't look back at all.
I was just wanting to get off.
Dozens of passengers have made it off the plane.
But there are still many more inside.
But it was smouldering and it was black, thick black smoke and Charlie had said that after you'd gone this black smoke came down.
He said and everybody was screaming and panicking.
He said "People are going to die in there.
" Standby power switch.
Captain Peter Terrington and his first officer, Brian Love, are still aboard the burning airplane and they still haven't completed the steps required to evacuate.
There was four tonnes of fuel coming out of that aircraft wing tank.
Go Brian, go Brian.
I could see quite a lot of flames.
Completing the check list would put their lives at risk.
We did as many items as we could and then we both went out of the flight deck window.
There are no more passengers at the exits.
So Joanna Toff decides to see if anyone else is left in the cabin.
The smoke wasyou could touch it.
It was so thick and you could taste It was awful, really.
Go.
(PANTS, GASPS) (COUGHS) There was a young girl, just a bit further down in the cabin.
But she was really disorientated.
I mean, I suppose we all were, really.
We just didn't have any idea what was going on.
I just brought her down to the slide.
She was taken off, then.
The fireman was telling me to come on out.
I was thinking, "Well, I've not finished.
We've not finished yet.
" - When Toff re-enters the cabin - (COUGHING) .
.
the thick smoke makes it as hard to see as it is to breathe.
It was really dark and quiet.
I've never seen anything like it.
I could see the light from the door anyway by then so I knew where the door was.
The smoke forces Toff to abandon her search.
Just minutes after pulling off the runway, British Airtours Flight 28 has been consumed by fire.
We got out of the flight deck which was relatively intact.
And when we turned around on the ground, we saw a complete wreck of an aircraft and it had happened in a matter of seconds.
It wasdreadful.
54 people are dead.
Another would die in hospital.
(SIRENS WAIL) There was nothing wrong, really, with us, we thought.
Nothing physical wrong with us.
But our lives changed, you know, just in those few hours.
I couldn't breathe.
I was virtually out the door.
And I couldn't breathe then.
The smoke was coming in and everybody just stood up and ran out.
It was just a mad panic getting out.
When the smoke came, you just couldn't see anything at all.
Couldn't see anybody.
It takes 125 firefighters more than two hours to put out the fire.
News of the disaster soon spreads around the world.
British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher flies to Manchester to visit the scene.
When we get a terrible air crash of this kind, everyone is appalled and shocked.
Every single aspect of this accident will be thoroughly investigated.
It has to be.
This is the fourth major commercial air disaster of the year.
In June of 1985, an Air India jet exploded over the Atlantic Ocean.
329 people were killed.
Weeks later, 137 people died when a Delta Airlines flight crashed at Dallas Fort Worth airport.
And just 10 days before the Manchester crash, the deadliest single aircraft accident in history.
Japan Airlines flight 123, a fully loaded 747, slammed into a mountain, killing 520 people.
British Air Tours flight 28 adds 55 new victims to the list of casualties.
1985 is now the deadliest year in the history of commercial aviation.
The flying public is getting nervous.
Britain's Air Accidents Investigation Branch sends a team to Manchester to unravel the events that led to the catastrophe.
Among them, Steven Moss.
He'll be inspecting the plane's engines.
MOSS: This should not really have happened.
The aircraft didn't even get airborne.
It didn't run off the runway, and yet, still, 55 people were killed.
Chris Protheroe is also on the team.
His focus is on the fire.
We were aware, from initial reports, that the fire had entered the aircraft very rapidly as the aircraft came to a halt.
And that was a focus for me.
It doesn't take too long for Stephen Moss to figure out where the trouble started.
Well, the first thing we noticed clearly was the hole in the underside of the wing.
And right next to it was a gaping hole in the side of the engine.
It seems that one had led to the other.
To get a plane loaded with passengers off the ground, you need to generate massive thrust.
That power is created when air travels through the front of the engine to a series of compressor fans.
It's then ignited and the exhaust pushes the plane forward.
Something had clearly gone very wrong with flight 28's left engine.
Investigators look for clues on the runway and in the cabin, hoping to discover why so many people died.
Entering the cabin for the first time, there was a As with all aircraft fires, there's an overwhelming pungent smell - burning plastic, burnt fuel.
Burning material had dropped down onto seats and so the aisles were filled up with the remains of overhead lockers, a scene ofof devastation.
The damage in the cabin is revealing.
It's almost completely charred up high.
But is relatively intact down low.
It was clear that there had not been a flashover in this case.
A flashover occurs when the gases in an enclosed space become so hot that they ignite, incinerating everything around them.
The way flight 28's cabin is charred, tells Protheroe about the nature of the fire.
Many of the seats' squab, cushions, even things like the emergency evacuation cards, which are just plastic-laminated cards, were pretty much undamaged.
You could have wiped them off and put them on another aircraft and nobody would have known they'd been in this accident.
Whereas, at the upper levels in the fuselage, there was a great deal of heat damage.
This is not a characteristic of a flashover.
The fire in the cabin had been severe, but should not have been catastrophic.
This leaves investigators with two questions.
Why did so many people die? And what caused the fire? The answer to the second question may be outside the plane, lying on the runway.
Investigators find a large piece of dome-shaped metal along the plane's path.
Stephen Moss can see it's from a piece of the engine called a combustor can.
There looked like there'd been a separation of the can from the front end, from the back end.
The combustion chamber of the 737's jet engines contains nine combustor cans.
It's where fuel and air are mixed and ignited.
So each can needs to withstand intense heat.
Moss suspects the fractured can somehow blew apart and destroyed the plane's left engine.
It had struck an under-wing fuel tank access panel and put a sizable hole in that, which directly led to the release of a vast quantity of fuel.
Proving the piece of the combustion can penetrated the wing is easy.
It fits neatly into the hole in the wing.
This was clearly, if you like, the root cause of the accident.
The engine on the plane is a Pratt and Whitney JT8D.
For Moss, that's of grave concern.
At the time, it was probably the most widely-used jet engine on commercial air transport, in the world.
And it was obviously pretty urgent that we try and find the cause of this one, in order to prevent other aircraft having the same problem.
There are tens of thousands of combustor cans in service around the world.
One of them erupted in Manchester.
Steven Moss needs to find out why it failed.
And fast.
Investigators looking into the deadly fire onboard British Air Tours flight 28 study the plane's maintenance log.
They discover the combustor can that ruptured had previously been repaired.
During a routine inspection, a year and a half earlier, mechanics had found small cracks in some of the combustor cans.
It was certainly not uncommon to find fatigue cracks in the cans.
They are operating in a high-temperature environment.
Investigators find mechanics repaired the cracks according to a procedure laid out in the engine repair manual.
They welded them closed.
But the crack on can number 9 was unusually long.
The overhaul manual did not give any limit on the length of crack that could be repaired, and it was a longer crack than had been experienced before.
It was still repaired.
After the repaired cans were put back in the engine, mechanics had no way of knowing the weld didn't effectively seal the crack.
That's because the cans can't be inspected while the engine is on the plane.
Since the repair, there were 11 reports of slow acceleration from the engine that exploded in Manchester.
A damaged combustor can could have been a reason for the problem.
But troubleshooting guides available to mechanics in Manchester didn't list that as a potential cause.
Instead, Pratt & Whitney offered other ways to fix the acceleration problem.
It didn't seem to ring any great alarm bells with them, if you like.
They'd seen it before and it had never turned out to be anything serious.
So mechanics in Manchester made minor adjustments to fix the plane's idle speed and kept the plane in operation.
Cockpit voice recordings reveal that the crew of Flight 28 was aware there was a problem with slow acceleration.
Slow acceleration on number one engine the day before yesterday.
- I was on the flight.
Yes, sir.
- Engineer signed off on it.
But the log entry led Captain Terrington to believe that the problem had been fixed.
A comment in the tech log for the flight before the last one, that the engine was slow in accelerating.
It wasn't apparent as a serious problem because the engineers had done some work and the aircraft had been flying the previous day with no problems.
The idle speed adjustments didn't fix the real problem - the cracked combustor can.
And it reached the breaking point on Flight 28.
(BANG!) Stopping.
28 Mike.
We are abandoning take-off.
If the airline had inspected the cans, I think there is no doubt that they would have seen the problem.
Investigators now know the origins of the Manchester disaster.
The welded crack in combustor can number 9 gave way as Flight 28 sped down the runway.
The front of the can was ejected from the engine and put a hole in the underside of the left wing.
That led to a huge fuel leak onto the damaged engine, which caused the fire.
Engine fires are not uncommon.
The body of a 737 is insulated with fire retardant material to protect the cabin.
Investigators still don't understand how a fire outside the plane spread into the cabin as quickly as it did.
Fire inspector Chris Protheroe finds part of the answer from viewing photographs of the plane as it sped down the runway.
It was clear from these photographs that there was a very dynamic phase to the fire whilst the aircraft was at speed on the runway, which produced this energetic, turbulent, sort of blowtorching type of fire visually, anyway, trailing behind the aircraft.
A press photo from the day of the crash leads Protheroe to a new theory.
The photographs of the aircraft that appeared in the press showed the left thrust reverser deployed.
The general impression that one got visually from that photograph was that the thrust reversers had effectively blowtorched fire against the side of the fuselage and that that, if you like, was the explanation as to why the fire had penetrated so quickly.
That photograph and the implications of it actually therefore loomed quite large.
Stop! There are several ways to bring a speeding jetliner to a halt.
One is with the brakes.
Don't hammer the brakes.
Another is with the engine's thrust reversers.
Thrust reversers redirect the exhaust from the jet engine forwards.
This helps slow the plane down.
It looked as though the thrust reversers had simply blown this big fire on the left of the aircraft againstdirectly onto the side of the aircraft, directly onto the rear fuselage.
It now seems possible that Captain Terrington made the fire worse by trying to slow his plane down.
But Protheroe has two good reasons to doubt his theory.
One is the location where charring from the burning exhaust gas, or efflux, was found.
The efflux impinges on the fuselage further up, closer to the roof - the crown skins of the aircraft.
So actually, the penetration that we had low down did not fit with that.
And the other reason is, by the time the thrust reversers were deployed, the left engine had already exploded.
But to act as a blowtorch, the engine would have needed considerable exhaust.
We did calculations to confirm that the residual thrust from that engine would not have had the energy to have this effect.
That confirmed that the thrust reversers couldn't actually have played any role or significant role, anyway, in the fire's severity.
Clearly, something other than the thrusters had caused the fire to spread so quickly.
Protheroe looks more closely at the data.
After examining weather reports from the day of the accident, he finds the answer.
The wind was the main factor that determined the severity of the fire in terms of its attack on the outside of the aircraft, how rapidly it penetrated the aircraft and it also affected the conditions inside the cabin.
Believing he had blown a tyre, Captain Terrington made a fateful decision.
Stopping.
28 Mike, we are abandoning take-off.
Well, when we heard the thud and we closed the throttles, it was my assumption that we were going to turn off the runway, clear the runway, ask air traffic for an engineer to come out and check the tyres.
Like a highway, an airport runway has a series of exits.
Captain Terrington, chose one called Link Delta.
When we got the additional information of a fire warning, the brain was already programmed to carry out the stop.
The crew had been aware that they had a fire but didn't really appreciate at the time that the nature of the fire, the severity of the fire, so they had turned off the runway.
Captain Terrington, turned his plane to the right and brought it to a stop.
He couldn't have realised that doing so would make the problem far worse.
There was a crosswind, a slight crosswind, from the left side of the aircraft and it carried that fire aft - rearwards - and took over and under the rear fuselage, in between the wing and the tail plane.
The wind wrapped the fire around the back of the plane .
.
and into the cabin.
If there'd been no wind at all, I think the situation would have been very much more benign.
Investigators have discovered how the fire started and the conditions that caused it to penetrate the cabin.
Now investigator Ed Trimble must solve the biggest mystery surrounding the Manchester accident.
- (BANG!) - Evacuate! Evacuate! Here we had an aircraft which had aborted the take-off for good reason.
It had taxied off and stopped in a taxiway in an expeditious manner and yet 55 people had lost their lives, so there was a big question as to precisely why that had occurred.
Investigators learned that most of the dead were not found in the worst burned parts of the plane.
Autopsies will point to the real killer on Flight 28.
Of the 54 people who died in the cabin, only 6 had suffered serious burns.
All the rest died from smoke inhalation.
(COUGHS) It seems the smoke in the cabin was particularly lethal.
Survivors tell investigators that the smoke was unbearable.
The smoke was really black and it was .
.
it was almost touching you.
It was really weird.
And they say the effect of that was shocking.
Immediately, you took one breath of the smoke, you began to feel debilitated.
And you knew that if you took another breath or two, you weren't going to make it.
At the time of the Manchester accident, the effects of fire on an aeroplane had been well studied and understood.
But the effects of smoke were not.
To figure out what made the smoke so toxic, Trimble decides to re-create the fire that burned on Flight 28.
We were trying to model not only the gasses which were produced but also the kind of threat levels which were produced.
The smoke that filled the plane was from materials burning inside the cabin.
The foam in the seats, the wool in the carpets and the plastic overhead bins all release poisonous fumes.
Those conditions are re-created by burning those same materials.
Trimble discovers the passengers on Flight 28 inhaled smoke that contained a deadly blend of poisonous gasses, including high levels of carbon monoxide and hydrogen cyanide.
Now he desperately needs to find out if there's anyway to protect airline passengers from that kind of smoke.
It seemed to be pretty clear that unless we could protect people's respiratory systems from the assault from such combustion gasses, there was little that we could do to improve survival chances from aircraft fires.
Over the course of five weeks, investigators run dozens of tests experimenting with different filters.
They burn nearly a quarter ton of material to create the necessary smoke.
Their dramatic conclusion - it may have been possible to save passengers' lives.
There was not the slightest doubt in my mind that in these situations, in an aircraft cabin, if it is being assaulted by combustion gases, your chances of survival are vastly improved if you have smokehood protection.
British Airtours Flight 28 had only enough smokehoods for the crew.
They were never used.
Trimble's research indicates that smokehoods for passengers could have saved lives.
There were hoods available, both of the filter type and a breathable gas type, which can provide a very high level of protection to in people in these circumstances.
(PASSENGERS SCREAM) Many of the passengers on Flight 28 would have survived with a few more minutes of breathing time.
(PASSENGERS SHOUT) TOFF: It was in a blink of an eye, you know, from the time, you know, we stopped on the runway, you know, just within a few minutes, it was all over, really.
(SIREN WAILS) A full Boeing 737 is designed to be evacuated in less than two minutes.
So even without additional time, more of the passengers on flight 28 should have been able to get off.
(SIREN WAILS) To discover why so many people never made it off the plane, investigators turned to an unlikely source for the answer.
By law, airplane manufacturers must prove their planes can be evacuated quickly and safety.
All public transport aircraft are certificated to the same criteria and that is that the total compliment of passengers must be capable of evacuating from the aircraft using half the exits in the aircraft - generally one side or the other - within a maximum of 90 seconds.
But 90 seconds after Flight 28 came to a stop, most of the passengers were still onboard.
(PASSENGERS SHOUT, COUGH) The reason why the evacuation in Manchester wasn't achieved in 90 seconds is because the conditions in a real fire evacuation are completely different from the certification conditions.
The certification evacuation is conducted in clear conditions, with no smoke that reduces vision and overwhelms passengers.
Within minutes of coming to a stop, Flight 28 filled with thick, black smoke.
As soon as the smoke began to spill into the rear cabin and then flow forwards, essentially that just immediate panic.
You can imagine, under these conditions, that people have got to get away from the smoke and people did this by basically clambering over the seats and other people in front of them.
In less than 5 minutes, what should have been a survivable accident, turned deadly.
Helen Muir is a psychologist and a leading expert on how aeroplane design can influence survival.
She's asked to study the behaviour of passengers on Flight 28 to figure out why so many died.
What we had to learn to do was to design the aircraft interior so even if we had what we might say was 'dysfunctional behaviour', in totality, we could accommodate the needs of individuals and their desperate rush to get out.
Muir configures a cabin to duplicate Flight 28 and fills it with volunteers.
Then, to have them act as though the plane is on fire, she offers money to the first ones off.
And that produced behaviour that was quite unbelievable.
People went over seats, they went round, past each other, all sorts of things and indeed, when survivors from the actual Manchester accident came and saw the videos, they said, "Yeah, that's how it was.
" (PASSENGERS SCREAM) Settle down.
Settle down.
The evacuation of Flight 28 was slowed by the fact that passengers became jammed in the bulkhead opening separating the main cabin from the galley.
(PASSENGERS SHOUT) Investigators discover the logjam was created by the design of the Boeing 737.
The bulkhead opening was 22.
5 inches wide, just enough for one person to fit through.
But what they wanted to know was how much wider would they have to make it for people not to get stopped and blocked.
Muir's tests show the narrow bulkhead opening created bottlenecks that flight attendants had to constantly clear.
Increasing the width to 30 inches greatly improved the movement of passengers.
MUIR: You would dramatically improve the speed at which people could get out and you'd reduce the likelihood of people falling and slipping and so on.
As a result of Helen Muir's work, a recommendation was made to increase the space between the bulkhead walls to 30 inches .
.
and introduce strip lighting to help guide passengers to exits, even when they are blinded by smoke.
Muir also found a way to improve cabin safety without redesigning the cabin.
Please sit down.
She conducted research on the behaviour of the cabin crew in emergencies .
.
and found that passengers get off a plane much faster with a highly assertive crew.
Take it easy! Mind your head! (PASSENGERS SHOUT) This way! Take it easy! It's because we don't want people really making their own decisions.
We want people to do exactly what the cabin crew or the procedures state.
And we don't want people hesitating, particularly at the door.
(PASSENGERS SCREAM) Helen Muir's research prompted manufacturers to redesign cabins to make them safer.
But one safety feature remains controversial - smokehoods.
Ed Trimble believes they should be mandatory on all commercial flights.
Without a doubt.
Without a doubt.
Helen Muir is less convinced.
She's studied how smokehoods affect passenger behaviour and is worried they would slow down the orderly evacuation of an airplane.
We know you've only got literally 1.
5 to 2 minutes for everybody to get out.
What we don't want to have is something which is difficult to put on so it slows people getting down.
The most important lesson of British Airtours Flight 28 is that seconds matter.
It's now universally accepted that it takes 90 seconds from the first sign of fire before it becomes unsurvivable.
The passengers on Flight 28 lost valuable time when the starboard-side door jammed.
The investigators determined that the slide mechanism deployed too early, preventing the door from opening.
There was a flaw that led the slide container's lid to jam if the door is opened too quickly.
After the Manchester accident, Boeing quickly redesigned the system so that couldn't happen.
The crash of an Air France jet in Toronto showed how much has changed since the Manchester accident.
All 309 people got off that plane in just 90 seconds.
No one died.
(PASSENGER SCREAMS) Some major changes to commercial airliners (GROANS) Alright, the door's open.
.
.
came about because of a flight that never left the ground.
That's the only way I can resolve it, with the death of 55 of my passengers - the fact that flying is now safer.
I can't imagine anybody, you know, doesn't wish that it hadn't happened.
You know, despite what has been learned and despite maybe the subsequent lives that have been changed, you know, you'd give anything for it not to have happened.