Mayday (2013) s17e01 Episode Script
Killer Attitude
In northern Minnesota, a commuter crash kills everyone on-board.
The deadliest US plane crash in more than 1.
5 years now.
Investigators face intense pressure to find the cause.
The tragedy that has occurred puts a real focus on what we need to do.
- One to go.
- 20-40.
The cockpit voice recording raises disturbing questions about an inexperienced pilot.
Why isn't the first officer making his altitude callouts? What had happened here? What was his role? But when investigators dig deeper - Wow.
- .
.
they uncover a darker truth.
I checked twice, Sir.
We don't have your authorisation.
I was amazed when I read that.
A deadly sequence of events that began months before the plane ever left the ground.
Mayday, mayday Northwest Airlink flight 5719 cruises across the skies of Minnesota.
First officer Chad Erickson is two months into his first airline job.
I'm sure that Chad was excited.
That was the first step in getting the job that would lead you to the big job, to fly the big iron at big airlines.
This is the first time he's flown a route with an overnight stay.
Do we get our own room? No.
You're gonna have to room with me.
And it's only a single bed so you'll have to curl up at my feet.
Course you get your own room.
You're on a contract now.
Erickson's captain is Marvin Falitz.
Well, the captain grew up in New York City.
He was described as having a personality that was somewhat at odds with a Midwestern personality.
It was a very outgoing personality and a sarcastic sense of humour.
Freakin' coffee tastes like piss.
The first officer had a different background and upbringing than the captain did.
He grew up around Minneapolis, and the Midwest sense of humour, I think, is perhaps more understated.
Oh, uh, see that falling star? Either that or a plane falling out of the sky.
Captain Falitz and First Officer Erickson are flying a Jetstream BA-3100, a small twin-engine turboprop.
The Jetstream was a handful to fly.
And we had to fly it by hand all the time.
Craig Railsback is a former Northwest Airlink pilot who also flew the BA-3100.
It was fairly unstable.
It was like balancing a beach ball on top of a Coke bottle.
The upside of flying an aeroplane like that was you were incredibly proficient.
I mean, we got to be really good at instrument flying and we flew in some really, really difficult, challenging conditions, which, you know, for a young guy was great fun.
It's the start of the Christmas season, and many of the 16 passengers are flying home to spend time with their families.
Flight 5719 took off from Minneapolis shortly before 7pm.
Its first destination is Hibbing, Minnesota, about an hour away.
After that, it's scheduled to continue on to a final stop in International Falls.
Twin City 719.
Hibbing weather - sky partially obscured.
Freezing drizzle.
Hibbing's a small airport.
It does not have a control tower.
At about the 20 miles from the airport, they'll clear you for the instrument approach if the weather is below visual limits.
And at that point, once you're cleared for the approach, you're pretty much on your own.
Expect vector for the ILS final approach course at Hibbing.
OK.
Thanks a lot.
Twin City 719.
We can't take the ILS-3-1.
- Because of the snow on the runway? - What? Because of the snow on the, uh the runway? I mean, that's why, right? Because you can't land on a tail wind with a snowy runway? I don't like to land with a tail wind anyway.
Tell them we'll take the localiser back course to 1-3.
The captain decides to approach Hibbing's runway from the other side.
This approach is not equipped with the instruments needed to fully guide the pilots to the runway.
It is known as a 'non-precision approach'.
We'd like to back course up to 1-3.
Roger.
Proceed, but you're on your own.
Non-precision approaches are, in fact, more demanding than the precision ones for the reason that you have to monitor the descent rate, the descent altitude, the navigation where you are laterally across the ground so there's actually quite a bit more going on.
We're cleared for the localiser back course approach.
Twin City 7-19.
Non-precision approaches are more challenging and, as a result, they have a higher rate of accidents than precision approaches.
Call the company and tell them we're gonna have to fuel up.
- Ops, 7-19 - Say 'Hibbing'.
- Hibbing.
Go ahead.
- Uh, yeah.
Uh, Hibbing, this is, uh, 7-19 in range.
We're gonna need some more fuel.
OK.
In range.
Positive fuel.
See you in a bit.
Ladies and gentlemen, we've begun our final descent for landing at Hibbing.
For passengers continuing on to International Falls, it will be a few minutes on the ground and we'll be off shortly.
Thanks.
OK.
In-range checklist.
OK.
Uh, pressurisationset.
The pilots make their final preparations for landing.
- Altimeter is 2-9er-8-6 set right.
- Set left.
The accuracy of altimeters is something that has to be checked very carefully.
If you believe you're at 1,000ft when, in fact, you're at 800ft, you're much closer to an obstacle or the ground than you anticipate and so there's a constant cross-check that goes on for a faulty altimeter.
Just before 7:50pm, flight 5719 starts descending into the clouds and the blowing snow of a cold Minnesota night.
- Gear down.
- Gear down.
Did you click the airport lights? An airport like Hibbing that does not have a lot of traffic, in an effort to save money, because the lightbulbs are very expensive, they are what's called pilot-controlled lighting.
- Did you click it? - Uh.
I, um The pilots, with a series of clicks from their radios, can turn the lights up and down.
- Uh - Clicked it seven times.
Uh, I got it now.
The runway lights are not what the pilots see next.
(OVER RADIO) 20 minutes pass.
Twin City 7-19, have you landed yet? By now, air traffic controllers should have received confirmation from flight 5719 that it has landed.
Twin City 7-19, please come in.
An hour later, emergency responders locate the crash site two miles northwest of the airport at Hibbing, Minnesota.
There are no survivors.
They just said that there had been a plane crash on Vic Powers Park and that one of our family members was on the plane.
Many of the passengers were from Hibbing, a town now devastated by grief.
The community is left desperate for answers.
In northern Minnesota tonight, investigators are looking into the cause of the deadliest US plane crash in more than 1.
5 years.
The fatal crash of flight 5719 mobilises experts from the National Transportation Safety Board.
Well, I got a call from the Comm Centre, and the plan was for the go team to mobilise in the early morning hours to arrive at the accident scene by dawn the next morning.
Systems investigator John DeLisi has been with the NTSB for just over a year.
The snowy hillside outside Hibbing is one of the most gruesome crash sites he's ever seen.
The wreckage was up on a hill so it was in a precarious position and some of the bodies had been ejected.
Many were still inside the fuselage.
It was the holiday season so many folks that were travelling had brought Christmas presents.
They were scattered in the debris.
There was blood in the snow.
It really was one of the most difficult accident sites I'd ever been to.
The task now is to figure out what brought down flight 5719 so that that the deadly crash is never repeated.
The tragedy that has occurred puts a real focus on what we need to do, bringing pieces of the puzzle together quickly.
The flight recorders should be back there.
Come on.
DeLisi searches for the plane's recording devices.
I was stepping over some of the victims to get to the aft cargo compartment.
He knows that on a plane of this size, he'll likely find only one of the black boxes, the cockpit voice recorder.
Here's the CVR.
At the time, a commuter aeroplane with 19 or less seats, only a requirement for a cockpit voice recorder, not a flight data recorder.
Like I thought.
No data recorder.
Alright.
Let's go.
With no FDR, the difficult job of understanding the crash just got harder.
An FDR is very helpful.
It can give you speeds and altitudes and all the flight controls.
You can check and see if anything malfunctioned by looking at the data.
When there's no flight data recorder, it puts us in a bit of an old-school type of investigation where the analysis of the physical evidence becomes so much more critical.
Alright.
Let's see what the data tells us.
As the team waits for the CVR, DeLisi turns to radar data from approach control.
He tracks flight 5719's descent path.
The radar data itself was very valuable for us.
It showed the profile, the flight path that the aeroplane took to get to the accident site.
So we quickly began to analyse that.
Right away, he spots something highly unusual.
Look at this rate of descent.
It's ridiculous.
The rate of descent was double what we'd normally see.
It should be about 1,000ft per minute.
Now, in this case, it was over 2,000ft, sometimes up at 2,200ft.
They're supposed to be over here but they're all the way up here.
What are they doing? A look at the approach chart for the back course into Hibbing reveals that the turboprop didn't fly the standard approach.
Instead of following a gradual step-down to the runway, flight 5719 remained level for five miles, then descended rapidly.
Why did they start their descent so late? A normal approach is gonna fly a relatively stable glide path with a slow and steady rate of descent to get to the runway.
But this aeroplane seemed to stay high for a long time and then have a very high rate of descent to the impact.
We need to hear what the pilots were saying.
Do we have the CVR yet? Me as a pilot, it does make you wonder, because the later you start the descent, the faster you're gonna have to descend to get down.
And the faster you descend, the harder it is to break that rate of descent.
One of the real tragic aspects about this accident was that some important new safety technology was coming online, the Ground Proximity Warning System.
It's just a shame that that system was not yet installed on this particular aeroplane.
The Ground Proximity Warning System uses an on-board computer that senses when the plane is too low and warns the pilots.
That technology was required by the FAA and it had to be in all commuter aeroplanes by April of the following year.
So this aeroplane was scheduled to come out of service for maintenance to get the Ground Proximity Warning System installed within a month or so of the accident.
Investigators know the Northwest Airlink pilots could not have heard a low altitude warning.
But they still don't understand why the plane was descending so rapidly.
They wonder if weather conditions may have played a role.
It was important to determine if there was anything atmospheric like a build-up of ice that might have contributed to this exceedingly high rate of descent.
They check the temperatures and the type of precipitation encountered by the turboprop.
They make an important discovery.
These are prime conditions for icing.
The plane would have descended right through it.
The build-up of ice, particularly on the wings of an aeroplane, can kill the lift that the wings are capable of generating.
So sometimes, an aeroplane with a rapid rate of descent might be indicative of an out-of-control motion caused by a build-up of ice.
DeLisi reviews the accident history of the Jetstream 3100 and makes a disturbing find about the aircraft's winter weather performance.
The Jetstream had been involved in some previous accidents, in which the build-up of ice contributed to a loss of control.
The Jetstream had a history of what they call tail plane icing problems, where you could actually end up in a position where you couldn't flare the aircraft for landing, which obviously would be important.
So, therefore, if there's any indication of icing, that does lead you towards looking into that in more detail.
Investigators need to know how bad the icing conditions were just before the crash.
I was just wondering if you have a couple of minutes.
They talk to other pilots who flew into Hibbing that night.
So you were aware of the potential for icing during your approach into Hibbing? The pilots tell DeLisi they faced moderate icing conditions.
But why would these two pilots start their descent so late? They also describe a common technique used to prevent ice accumulation.
Well, in talking to other pilots at Northwest, we began to learn about what they referred to as a 'slam dunk approach'.
A slam dunk approach was described as one in which, while you have to pass through an area of icing, crews want to minimise the time they spend there.
So they may hold their altitude close into the airport and then very rapidly do a steep descent to get through the altitudes in which there was icing, as quickly as possible.
That's not a standard technique.
But as we began to hear about it, it matched what we were seeing on the air traffic control radar.
It now seems the rapid descent was not due to a loss of control caused by icing.
Instead, it looks like it was part of a deliberate strategy to avoid icing.
It's something professional pilots deal with a lot and it requires a lot of skill in aircraft handling to get the aeroplane down quickly without having the speed go up to an unacceptably high level.
Marvin Falitz was an experienced captain Gear down.
.
.
who'd flown in winter weather conditions countless times.
He was more than capable of safely performing a slam dunk approach.
So what went wrong on flight 5719? While he waits to hear what the cockpit voice recorder will reveal, John DeLisi tries to figure out why the pilots of flight 5719 didn't slow their rapid descent into Hibbing.
They should have levelled off right here.
We've got to get our hands on those altimeters.
As some of the pieces began to develop in this accident, it fit into the category of what we refer to as CFIT - Controlled Flight into Terrain - a perfectly good aeroplane that hits the ground.
Very important for us in an accident like that to understand what altitude the crew believed the aeroplane was at.
The Jetstream BA-3100 has two cockpit altimeters.
Got it.
DeLisi wants them both checked for any sign of malfunction.
Put this altimeter with the other one.
Let's get them tested right away.
Had there been a malfunction of the altimeters, it might have indicated to the crew that the aeroplane was still well above the ground when, in fact, it wasn't.
Nothing other than impact damage, huh? Let's look at the pivot on this one.
So we did a thorough examination and teardown of both the captain's and the first officer's altimeter.
But the analysis turns up nothing.
There was no evidence of any malfunction.
Both altimeters seemed to be working just fine.
Let's see what the rest of the wreckage tells us.
Well, you look closely at the engines.
You wanna recover the engines.
You wanna do what testing you can.
Sometimes you're able to restart the engines, a lot of times not.
But you can see if there's any malfunctions that are obvious.
Definitely spinning when they hit the ground.
A loss of power could have led to a loss of control.
It might have contributed to a high rate of descent.
Thrust levers were functioning properly.
No sign of a jam.
Once again, they find no clues to the cause of the crash.
There was no evidence of engine malfunction.
Both engines appeared to be working just fine.
Are we ready with the CVR? Assemble the team.
I'll be there in a minute.
Finally, investigators get the evidence they've been waiting for - the cockpit voice recording.
Alright, everybody ready? Play the tape.
Uh, cancel on 127.
4.
We're cleared for the localiser back course approach.
Twin City 7-19.
They listen as Captain Falitz and first officer Erickson prepare to land in Hibbing.
OK.
What altitude can we go down to? - Uh, 2,040.
- OK.
Put it in there.
They soon hear a conversation that confirms their theory about the slam dunk approach.
So, you You're just gonna stay up here as long as you can? Yes.
They definitely knew what they were doing.
It's clear that the pilots were in the midst of a slam dunk approach when something went wrong.
But what was it? Investigators listen closely.
Localisers alive.
Final approach fix is at 14.
- Roger.
Gear down.
- Speed checks.
Gear down.
- What they hear is baffling.
- Flaps 20.
In the flight's final moments, there's no sign of trouble.
We didn't hear either crew member express any concern about the aeroplane.
There were no issues being raised.
There were no warning lights that they discussed.
There was no aircraft malfunction that they were addressing.
If they were in control of the plane, why the hell did they slam it into a hill? Did we miss something? Alright.
Rewind the tape.
Looks like I can't go lower than 2,040.
Here.
Take a look at it.
Minimum descent altitude is the lowest altitude that the pilot can descend to until they see the runway.
It's a critical altitude because that's as close to the ground as you can get and still be in the clouds.
Boost pumps are on.
The investigators listen carefully to the recording.
Before final checklist complete.
It's what is not said that alarms them the most.
Why isn't the first officer making his altitude call-outs? First Officer Erickson should be telling his captain how close they are to their minimum altitude and warning him when they descend past it.
But he does neither.
We didn't hear the regular call-outs about 2,000ft, 1,000ft, distance from the airport.
It seemed as if the first officer didn't really know what was going on in the approach.
Call-outs are very important, and the higher the rate of descent, the more important they are.
Gear down.
Flaps 20.
He never told the captain how close they were getting to the ground.
Captain Falitz has his hands full landing the plane.
He expects his first officer to keep an eye on their altitude.
Flaps 20.
In an airliner cockpit, there's a division of duties.
One person's going to physically fly the aeroplane.
The other one has several duties.
One is to monitor the way that the aeroplane is being flown.
But on this flight, the first officer never once reports the altitude as the plane speeds closer and closer to the ground.
Call-outs would have been standard, something that they would have rehearsed, practiced in the simulator.
And when we didn't hear them, those calls, we knew something wasn't progressing the way it was briefed.
The CVR leads investigators to wonder, "Did the loss of 18 lives in the Hibbing crash stem from the failings of an inexperienced young pilot?" He was the new guy.
Maybe he just wasn't aware.
Material released today in Washington, DC indicates that the NTSB is now focusing on the crew's performance.
Malcolm Brenner is an NTSB aviation psychologist.
My role in the investigation was to serve as human performance investigator.
So human performance, we look at human issues such as the background of the pilots, their training, their interaction, company pressures, any sort of issues that will give us a broader perspective.
1.
93.
Investigators need to learn all they can about the 25-year-old first officer who failed to make critical altitude call-outs during the flight's descent.
Well, we found out that the first officer was relatively new.
He had put himself through training.
He had no military background.
Do we get our own room? As a new pilot, you're overwhelmed with just the job itself and you're really struggling to keep up 'cause things are happening at a very fast pace.
- OK.
In-range checklist.
- OK.
Uh, pressurisation set.
There's nothing in Erickson's record that points to a pilot who was struggling with the pressures of the job.
In fact, it's quite the opposite.
This guy graduated number one in his class.
When he got the job with the airline, he said it was his dream job.
The first officer had prepared index cards with aviation data for every airport that the airline flew to.
This was above and beyond what was normally required.
He was doing special studying so he could be prepared and be a better pilot.
Everybody that flew with him thought he was an excellent pilot.
So that doesn't explain it.
No.
Wasn't the first officer.
So then you look for other.
"Why would he not make those call-outs? What would cause him not to make those?" So, what do we know about the captain? Then they expect you to work on your days off.
It's ridiculous.
Yeah, sure.
Get yourself to International Falls just so you can fly back to where you just came from and then rush to get another flight to god knows where.
You know, I think it's gonna take three hours before I'm sitting behind the wheel of my first flight of the day.
Man, oh, man.
What a life.
Huh? You first look at pilots that had either flown with him or knew of his flying capabilities.
Show me that file.
Was there anything that jumped out that indicated there was something not normal with him? The captain was described by his friends as being intelligent and an engaging personality.
Let me see his test records.
Captain Falitz was known as a skilled senior pilot.
But a deeper look reveals a man with a troubling record.
When we looked at the captain's training records, we began to understand that he had some previous issues in his flight training.
Boom.
Boom.
Boom.
Soon after he joined the company, he failed his oral exam.
He failed two more proficiency exams in his career.
That's unusual, for a professional pilot to fail that many times.
The problems hadn't been tracked by anybody in the organisation because they had failed at different locations.
So nobody put everything togetheruntil we did.
Some of the instructor pilots were noting that his cockpit resource management wasn't up to par and that he had a tendency to be domineering in the cockpit.
He had an issue with dealing with other people.
Are all of these formal complaints against Captain Falitz? Marvin was the first captain I flew with after my IOE, my initial operating experience, and he tended to be a little bit domineering and would berate you and was intolerant of mistakes and really not a particularly great instructor pilot.
Hmm.
Wow.
Perhaps the most disturbing complaint against Captain Falitz is that he once physically struck a colleague in anger.
For a professional pilot to physically have an altercation or attempt to, quote, 'discipline' a fellow employee is totally unacceptable.
I don't get it.
What was making this guy so angry? You gotta be freaking kidding me! According to people who knew him, Captain Falitz's morale took a big hit when Northwest Airlink instituted a new residence policy for their pilots.
About a year before, the company, for cost-saving purposes, started a new policy where they required the pilots to reside at their outstations.
These would be small towns outside of Minneapolis.
Why are we even doing this trip? I don't know.
Why are we? Maybe someone called in sick.
It was received very poorly by the pilot community because it meant they had to move while they had roots in Minneapolis and children going to school and spouses working and mortgages to pay.
On short notice, they had to move to these small outstations.
The relationship between the company and the pilots was poor, and some of us were extremely unhappy.
And I think Marvin was very unhappy with the company.
He'd gotten used to living in the Minneapolis area.
He had friends there.
He had a social life.
The captain fought very hard to remain in Minneapolis.
He did not want to move.
And the only way he could do it was by downgrading.
It meant a 12% cut in his salary.
What time were we out of the gate? Uh, 52.
According to your watch or the clock? Well, it's theit's the same.
II sync my watch to the clock.
He was a very intelligent man, but I think he was troubled in the sense that his life had not worked out maybe the way he wanted it to work out.
Investigators make another disturbing discovery.
Captain Falitz would sometimes be deliberately rough with the flight controls.
His way of getting revenge on the company was to sometimes take it out on the passengers.
I was amazed when I read that, to tell you the truth.
And I was amazed that a person would intentionally make a rough flight, to make people mad, because what good does that do? This guy, from what I understand, he did it because he wanted to punish the airline.
As more and more details about the captain's personality emerge, investigators are forced to consider a troubling question.
Could his anger somehow have caused this crash? They learn that one of the airline's customer service agents had a run-in with the captain shortly before he boarded the doomed flight.
We need to hear this woman's story.
I remember every word.
It's like it happened yesterday.
Hello, dear.
I'm deadheading this flight.
Marvin Falitz.
'Deadheading' is when the airline will position pilots and flight attendants at a different city so that they can then act and actively fly a flight later.
So you may go from point A to point B as a passenger and then, from there, then you will act as a flying crew member on a separate flight.
Sorry, but I don't see your name on the list.
Check again.
Marvin Falitz.
F-a-l-i-t-z.
I checked twice, Sir.
We don't have your authorisation.
The paperwork that the agent had did not include a deadheading clearance for the captain.
Look, it's not rocket science.
Pick up the phone and call dispatch.
I'm real busy.
So how about you call them? How do you live with yourself knowing that you are completely useless? He effectively refused.
He insisted that she should do it and stormed off.
I've never seen a pilot that angry before.
As a good professional pilot, he should be able to maintain professional performance even though he has things in his life or has these disturbances going on.
This captain did not.
There's mounting evidence that Captain Falitz had serious anger management issues.
What puzzles investigators is why a bright young pilot like First Officer Erickson didn't intervene if his captain was behaving recklessly.
Hello? They receive a phone call from a ramp service agent at Minneapolis Airport.
He claims to have important details regarding the pilots who flew flight 5719.
- Why isn't the exterior pre-flight done? - I was You didn't check the damn exterior lights! The service agent witnessed Captain Falitz berating First Officer Erickson over a pre-flight check.
Uh, I was gonna check the lights from inside the cockpit.
That's not how you do it! You have to go outside and see it with your own stupid eyes! Does Northwest even screen you guys anymore? You know what? Screw it.
- I'll do it myself.
- You know, I The captain was being very, very critical of the first officer, and the first officer was a relatively new pilot.
So, you know, you're gonna make mistakes.
So there was a better way to handle it.
And the captain did not take the better way.
If we're late for departure, it's on you! This happened immediately before the flight.
So it set the tone for the two of them working together, which was a bad way to do things.
Communication between flight crew members is an essential component of aviation safety.
We call it Crew Resource Management.
And it makes sure that everybody in the flight deck is agreeing with what the aeroplane's doing and what the intent is to do.
OK, thanks.
Let's get that CVR back in here.
We need to find out what was going on between those two pilots.
Alright.
Cue it up.
After uncovering stunning details about Captain Falitz's sometimes rude and even aggressive behaviour, investigators listen to the cockpit recording in a new light.
Call the company and tell them we need to fuel up.
In listening to the CVR, the captain makes a lot of corrections or directions to the first officer of very simple things.
- Ops 7-19 - Say 'Hibbing'.
- Hibbing, go ahead.
- Uh, Hibbing, uh He was intimidating and not constructive.
Positive fuel.
See you in a bit.
You can't just say 'Ops'.
You have to specify who's supposed to answer - Hibbing, Sioux City, Duluth.
Before I was an airline pilot, I was a flight instructor.
And one guaranteed way to have that guy shut down and not be able to perform was to berate them, humiliate them, embarrass them.
Uh, do we get our own room? No, you're gonna have to room with me.
And it's only a single bed.
So you'll just have to curl up at my feet.
The captain's tone was not very receptive and was aggressive and led to a breakdown in proper management with the first officer.
Umyou've got nine miles to the arc.
Just put it up in your clipboard and talk me through it when I need information, OK? So the captain was talking down to him.
No! This thing.
That's what this is for.
He was paralysed with fear.
That's why he didn't make his call-outs to the captain.
He washe was terrified of him.
The danger of an aggressive attitude is that it breaks down crew performance.
I'd be reluctant to speak up, too.
Investigators think they finally understand all the events and circumstances that sent a Northwest Airlink commuter plane speeding headlong into the ground near Hibbing, Minnesota.
It was disturbing to hear about the captain's background and his anger management issues.
How do you live with yourself, knowing that you are completely useless? You have to go outside and see it with your own stupid eyes! And when we pieced that together with the environment that we heard him set in the cockpit on the cockpit voice recorder, things began to add up.
You, uh you're just gonna stay up here as long as you can? Yes.
The captain had a plan but, because it wasn't the standard plan, the first officer didn't know what it was.
- Did you click the airport lights? - Uh While they were inside the final approach fix, with a rate of descent at over 2,000ft per minute - Click it.
You clicked it seven times.
- Uh, yeah.
I, uh .
.
the captain seems to be berating the first officer about clicking the radio button to turn on the runway lights.
OK.
I got it now.
He was afraid to do anything.
So that kind of explained why he was silent a lot of the time.
The first officer wasn't able to participate in monitoring the airspeed and altitude.
The first officer was really just along for the ride.
Flying, for the most part, the stakes are very high.
And when you see what happens in the aftermath of an accident, it brings home just how serious this job is and how serious everybody involved in the airline business needs to take it.
The crash of flight 5719 exposed deficiencies in Crew Resource Management training .
.
and highlighted the importance of interpersonal relationships in flying.
Airline flying's a team sport.
- Minimums.
- Got it.
It's important to have a team attitude.
Well, this accident, in many ways, has become a case study in just how valuable it is to empower either crew member to be assertive and to speak up when something isn't going right.
Pressurisation set.
A first officer, even though they may be new and very junior, is not only given permission but is encouraged to ask or question a very senior captain with they get uncomfortable.
"Ma'am," or, "Sir, I don't know why we're doing this.
I'm not comfortable here.
" Among the NTSB's recommendations is closer oversight of pilot training programs so that airlines can address potential issues before an accident occurs.
Do CRM training on a regular basis.
Make sure that they're monitored.
Go, you know, fly with your crews every once in a while, just to see what's going on.
There's a lot of things that can be done.
One way some airlines deal with a personality conflict is they have a 'no pairing' list.
In other words, if you have a personality conflict with a certain pilot, you can check off a box and they won't make you fly with that person.
It's one of those accidents that we learned a lot from, and it became a good means to show failures within the system that could be corrected.
So I would say that we learned from it and, as a result, the aviation industry is safer.
Captioned by Ai-Media ai-media.
tv
The deadliest US plane crash in more than 1.
5 years now.
Investigators face intense pressure to find the cause.
The tragedy that has occurred puts a real focus on what we need to do.
- One to go.
- 20-40.
The cockpit voice recording raises disturbing questions about an inexperienced pilot.
Why isn't the first officer making his altitude callouts? What had happened here? What was his role? But when investigators dig deeper - Wow.
- .
.
they uncover a darker truth.
I checked twice, Sir.
We don't have your authorisation.
I was amazed when I read that.
A deadly sequence of events that began months before the plane ever left the ground.
Mayday, mayday Northwest Airlink flight 5719 cruises across the skies of Minnesota.
First officer Chad Erickson is two months into his first airline job.
I'm sure that Chad was excited.
That was the first step in getting the job that would lead you to the big job, to fly the big iron at big airlines.
This is the first time he's flown a route with an overnight stay.
Do we get our own room? No.
You're gonna have to room with me.
And it's only a single bed so you'll have to curl up at my feet.
Course you get your own room.
You're on a contract now.
Erickson's captain is Marvin Falitz.
Well, the captain grew up in New York City.
He was described as having a personality that was somewhat at odds with a Midwestern personality.
It was a very outgoing personality and a sarcastic sense of humour.
Freakin' coffee tastes like piss.
The first officer had a different background and upbringing than the captain did.
He grew up around Minneapolis, and the Midwest sense of humour, I think, is perhaps more understated.
Oh, uh, see that falling star? Either that or a plane falling out of the sky.
Captain Falitz and First Officer Erickson are flying a Jetstream BA-3100, a small twin-engine turboprop.
The Jetstream was a handful to fly.
And we had to fly it by hand all the time.
Craig Railsback is a former Northwest Airlink pilot who also flew the BA-3100.
It was fairly unstable.
It was like balancing a beach ball on top of a Coke bottle.
The upside of flying an aeroplane like that was you were incredibly proficient.
I mean, we got to be really good at instrument flying and we flew in some really, really difficult, challenging conditions, which, you know, for a young guy was great fun.
It's the start of the Christmas season, and many of the 16 passengers are flying home to spend time with their families.
Flight 5719 took off from Minneapolis shortly before 7pm.
Its first destination is Hibbing, Minnesota, about an hour away.
After that, it's scheduled to continue on to a final stop in International Falls.
Twin City 719.
Hibbing weather - sky partially obscured.
Freezing drizzle.
Hibbing's a small airport.
It does not have a control tower.
At about the 20 miles from the airport, they'll clear you for the instrument approach if the weather is below visual limits.
And at that point, once you're cleared for the approach, you're pretty much on your own.
Expect vector for the ILS final approach course at Hibbing.
OK.
Thanks a lot.
Twin City 719.
We can't take the ILS-3-1.
- Because of the snow on the runway? - What? Because of the snow on the, uh the runway? I mean, that's why, right? Because you can't land on a tail wind with a snowy runway? I don't like to land with a tail wind anyway.
Tell them we'll take the localiser back course to 1-3.
The captain decides to approach Hibbing's runway from the other side.
This approach is not equipped with the instruments needed to fully guide the pilots to the runway.
It is known as a 'non-precision approach'.
We'd like to back course up to 1-3.
Roger.
Proceed, but you're on your own.
Non-precision approaches are, in fact, more demanding than the precision ones for the reason that you have to monitor the descent rate, the descent altitude, the navigation where you are laterally across the ground so there's actually quite a bit more going on.
We're cleared for the localiser back course approach.
Twin City 7-19.
Non-precision approaches are more challenging and, as a result, they have a higher rate of accidents than precision approaches.
Call the company and tell them we're gonna have to fuel up.
- Ops, 7-19 - Say 'Hibbing'.
- Hibbing.
Go ahead.
- Uh, yeah.
Uh, Hibbing, this is, uh, 7-19 in range.
We're gonna need some more fuel.
OK.
In range.
Positive fuel.
See you in a bit.
Ladies and gentlemen, we've begun our final descent for landing at Hibbing.
For passengers continuing on to International Falls, it will be a few minutes on the ground and we'll be off shortly.
Thanks.
OK.
In-range checklist.
OK.
Uh, pressurisationset.
The pilots make their final preparations for landing.
- Altimeter is 2-9er-8-6 set right.
- Set left.
The accuracy of altimeters is something that has to be checked very carefully.
If you believe you're at 1,000ft when, in fact, you're at 800ft, you're much closer to an obstacle or the ground than you anticipate and so there's a constant cross-check that goes on for a faulty altimeter.
Just before 7:50pm, flight 5719 starts descending into the clouds and the blowing snow of a cold Minnesota night.
- Gear down.
- Gear down.
Did you click the airport lights? An airport like Hibbing that does not have a lot of traffic, in an effort to save money, because the lightbulbs are very expensive, they are what's called pilot-controlled lighting.
- Did you click it? - Uh.
I, um The pilots, with a series of clicks from their radios, can turn the lights up and down.
- Uh - Clicked it seven times.
Uh, I got it now.
The runway lights are not what the pilots see next.
(OVER RADIO) 20 minutes pass.
Twin City 7-19, have you landed yet? By now, air traffic controllers should have received confirmation from flight 5719 that it has landed.
Twin City 7-19, please come in.
An hour later, emergency responders locate the crash site two miles northwest of the airport at Hibbing, Minnesota.
There are no survivors.
They just said that there had been a plane crash on Vic Powers Park and that one of our family members was on the plane.
Many of the passengers were from Hibbing, a town now devastated by grief.
The community is left desperate for answers.
In northern Minnesota tonight, investigators are looking into the cause of the deadliest US plane crash in more than 1.
5 years.
The fatal crash of flight 5719 mobilises experts from the National Transportation Safety Board.
Well, I got a call from the Comm Centre, and the plan was for the go team to mobilise in the early morning hours to arrive at the accident scene by dawn the next morning.
Systems investigator John DeLisi has been with the NTSB for just over a year.
The snowy hillside outside Hibbing is one of the most gruesome crash sites he's ever seen.
The wreckage was up on a hill so it was in a precarious position and some of the bodies had been ejected.
Many were still inside the fuselage.
It was the holiday season so many folks that were travelling had brought Christmas presents.
They were scattered in the debris.
There was blood in the snow.
It really was one of the most difficult accident sites I'd ever been to.
The task now is to figure out what brought down flight 5719 so that that the deadly crash is never repeated.
The tragedy that has occurred puts a real focus on what we need to do, bringing pieces of the puzzle together quickly.
The flight recorders should be back there.
Come on.
DeLisi searches for the plane's recording devices.
I was stepping over some of the victims to get to the aft cargo compartment.
He knows that on a plane of this size, he'll likely find only one of the black boxes, the cockpit voice recorder.
Here's the CVR.
At the time, a commuter aeroplane with 19 or less seats, only a requirement for a cockpit voice recorder, not a flight data recorder.
Like I thought.
No data recorder.
Alright.
Let's go.
With no FDR, the difficult job of understanding the crash just got harder.
An FDR is very helpful.
It can give you speeds and altitudes and all the flight controls.
You can check and see if anything malfunctioned by looking at the data.
When there's no flight data recorder, it puts us in a bit of an old-school type of investigation where the analysis of the physical evidence becomes so much more critical.
Alright.
Let's see what the data tells us.
As the team waits for the CVR, DeLisi turns to radar data from approach control.
He tracks flight 5719's descent path.
The radar data itself was very valuable for us.
It showed the profile, the flight path that the aeroplane took to get to the accident site.
So we quickly began to analyse that.
Right away, he spots something highly unusual.
Look at this rate of descent.
It's ridiculous.
The rate of descent was double what we'd normally see.
It should be about 1,000ft per minute.
Now, in this case, it was over 2,000ft, sometimes up at 2,200ft.
They're supposed to be over here but they're all the way up here.
What are they doing? A look at the approach chart for the back course into Hibbing reveals that the turboprop didn't fly the standard approach.
Instead of following a gradual step-down to the runway, flight 5719 remained level for five miles, then descended rapidly.
Why did they start their descent so late? A normal approach is gonna fly a relatively stable glide path with a slow and steady rate of descent to get to the runway.
But this aeroplane seemed to stay high for a long time and then have a very high rate of descent to the impact.
We need to hear what the pilots were saying.
Do we have the CVR yet? Me as a pilot, it does make you wonder, because the later you start the descent, the faster you're gonna have to descend to get down.
And the faster you descend, the harder it is to break that rate of descent.
One of the real tragic aspects about this accident was that some important new safety technology was coming online, the Ground Proximity Warning System.
It's just a shame that that system was not yet installed on this particular aeroplane.
The Ground Proximity Warning System uses an on-board computer that senses when the plane is too low and warns the pilots.
That technology was required by the FAA and it had to be in all commuter aeroplanes by April of the following year.
So this aeroplane was scheduled to come out of service for maintenance to get the Ground Proximity Warning System installed within a month or so of the accident.
Investigators know the Northwest Airlink pilots could not have heard a low altitude warning.
But they still don't understand why the plane was descending so rapidly.
They wonder if weather conditions may have played a role.
It was important to determine if there was anything atmospheric like a build-up of ice that might have contributed to this exceedingly high rate of descent.
They check the temperatures and the type of precipitation encountered by the turboprop.
They make an important discovery.
These are prime conditions for icing.
The plane would have descended right through it.
The build-up of ice, particularly on the wings of an aeroplane, can kill the lift that the wings are capable of generating.
So sometimes, an aeroplane with a rapid rate of descent might be indicative of an out-of-control motion caused by a build-up of ice.
DeLisi reviews the accident history of the Jetstream 3100 and makes a disturbing find about the aircraft's winter weather performance.
The Jetstream had been involved in some previous accidents, in which the build-up of ice contributed to a loss of control.
The Jetstream had a history of what they call tail plane icing problems, where you could actually end up in a position where you couldn't flare the aircraft for landing, which obviously would be important.
So, therefore, if there's any indication of icing, that does lead you towards looking into that in more detail.
Investigators need to know how bad the icing conditions were just before the crash.
I was just wondering if you have a couple of minutes.
They talk to other pilots who flew into Hibbing that night.
So you were aware of the potential for icing during your approach into Hibbing? The pilots tell DeLisi they faced moderate icing conditions.
But why would these two pilots start their descent so late? They also describe a common technique used to prevent ice accumulation.
Well, in talking to other pilots at Northwest, we began to learn about what they referred to as a 'slam dunk approach'.
A slam dunk approach was described as one in which, while you have to pass through an area of icing, crews want to minimise the time they spend there.
So they may hold their altitude close into the airport and then very rapidly do a steep descent to get through the altitudes in which there was icing, as quickly as possible.
That's not a standard technique.
But as we began to hear about it, it matched what we were seeing on the air traffic control radar.
It now seems the rapid descent was not due to a loss of control caused by icing.
Instead, it looks like it was part of a deliberate strategy to avoid icing.
It's something professional pilots deal with a lot and it requires a lot of skill in aircraft handling to get the aeroplane down quickly without having the speed go up to an unacceptably high level.
Marvin Falitz was an experienced captain Gear down.
.
.
who'd flown in winter weather conditions countless times.
He was more than capable of safely performing a slam dunk approach.
So what went wrong on flight 5719? While he waits to hear what the cockpit voice recorder will reveal, John DeLisi tries to figure out why the pilots of flight 5719 didn't slow their rapid descent into Hibbing.
They should have levelled off right here.
We've got to get our hands on those altimeters.
As some of the pieces began to develop in this accident, it fit into the category of what we refer to as CFIT - Controlled Flight into Terrain - a perfectly good aeroplane that hits the ground.
Very important for us in an accident like that to understand what altitude the crew believed the aeroplane was at.
The Jetstream BA-3100 has two cockpit altimeters.
Got it.
DeLisi wants them both checked for any sign of malfunction.
Put this altimeter with the other one.
Let's get them tested right away.
Had there been a malfunction of the altimeters, it might have indicated to the crew that the aeroplane was still well above the ground when, in fact, it wasn't.
Nothing other than impact damage, huh? Let's look at the pivot on this one.
So we did a thorough examination and teardown of both the captain's and the first officer's altimeter.
But the analysis turns up nothing.
There was no evidence of any malfunction.
Both altimeters seemed to be working just fine.
Let's see what the rest of the wreckage tells us.
Well, you look closely at the engines.
You wanna recover the engines.
You wanna do what testing you can.
Sometimes you're able to restart the engines, a lot of times not.
But you can see if there's any malfunctions that are obvious.
Definitely spinning when they hit the ground.
A loss of power could have led to a loss of control.
It might have contributed to a high rate of descent.
Thrust levers were functioning properly.
No sign of a jam.
Once again, they find no clues to the cause of the crash.
There was no evidence of engine malfunction.
Both engines appeared to be working just fine.
Are we ready with the CVR? Assemble the team.
I'll be there in a minute.
Finally, investigators get the evidence they've been waiting for - the cockpit voice recording.
Alright, everybody ready? Play the tape.
Uh, cancel on 127.
4.
We're cleared for the localiser back course approach.
Twin City 7-19.
They listen as Captain Falitz and first officer Erickson prepare to land in Hibbing.
OK.
What altitude can we go down to? - Uh, 2,040.
- OK.
Put it in there.
They soon hear a conversation that confirms their theory about the slam dunk approach.
So, you You're just gonna stay up here as long as you can? Yes.
They definitely knew what they were doing.
It's clear that the pilots were in the midst of a slam dunk approach when something went wrong.
But what was it? Investigators listen closely.
Localisers alive.
Final approach fix is at 14.
- Roger.
Gear down.
- Speed checks.
Gear down.
- What they hear is baffling.
- Flaps 20.
In the flight's final moments, there's no sign of trouble.
We didn't hear either crew member express any concern about the aeroplane.
There were no issues being raised.
There were no warning lights that they discussed.
There was no aircraft malfunction that they were addressing.
If they were in control of the plane, why the hell did they slam it into a hill? Did we miss something? Alright.
Rewind the tape.
Looks like I can't go lower than 2,040.
Here.
Take a look at it.
Minimum descent altitude is the lowest altitude that the pilot can descend to until they see the runway.
It's a critical altitude because that's as close to the ground as you can get and still be in the clouds.
Boost pumps are on.
The investigators listen carefully to the recording.
Before final checklist complete.
It's what is not said that alarms them the most.
Why isn't the first officer making his altitude call-outs? First Officer Erickson should be telling his captain how close they are to their minimum altitude and warning him when they descend past it.
But he does neither.
We didn't hear the regular call-outs about 2,000ft, 1,000ft, distance from the airport.
It seemed as if the first officer didn't really know what was going on in the approach.
Call-outs are very important, and the higher the rate of descent, the more important they are.
Gear down.
Flaps 20.
He never told the captain how close they were getting to the ground.
Captain Falitz has his hands full landing the plane.
He expects his first officer to keep an eye on their altitude.
Flaps 20.
In an airliner cockpit, there's a division of duties.
One person's going to physically fly the aeroplane.
The other one has several duties.
One is to monitor the way that the aeroplane is being flown.
But on this flight, the first officer never once reports the altitude as the plane speeds closer and closer to the ground.
Call-outs would have been standard, something that they would have rehearsed, practiced in the simulator.
And when we didn't hear them, those calls, we knew something wasn't progressing the way it was briefed.
The CVR leads investigators to wonder, "Did the loss of 18 lives in the Hibbing crash stem from the failings of an inexperienced young pilot?" He was the new guy.
Maybe he just wasn't aware.
Material released today in Washington, DC indicates that the NTSB is now focusing on the crew's performance.
Malcolm Brenner is an NTSB aviation psychologist.
My role in the investigation was to serve as human performance investigator.
So human performance, we look at human issues such as the background of the pilots, their training, their interaction, company pressures, any sort of issues that will give us a broader perspective.
1.
93.
Investigators need to learn all they can about the 25-year-old first officer who failed to make critical altitude call-outs during the flight's descent.
Well, we found out that the first officer was relatively new.
He had put himself through training.
He had no military background.
Do we get our own room? As a new pilot, you're overwhelmed with just the job itself and you're really struggling to keep up 'cause things are happening at a very fast pace.
- OK.
In-range checklist.
- OK.
Uh, pressurisation set.
There's nothing in Erickson's record that points to a pilot who was struggling with the pressures of the job.
In fact, it's quite the opposite.
This guy graduated number one in his class.
When he got the job with the airline, he said it was his dream job.
The first officer had prepared index cards with aviation data for every airport that the airline flew to.
This was above and beyond what was normally required.
He was doing special studying so he could be prepared and be a better pilot.
Everybody that flew with him thought he was an excellent pilot.
So that doesn't explain it.
No.
Wasn't the first officer.
So then you look for other.
"Why would he not make those call-outs? What would cause him not to make those?" So, what do we know about the captain? Then they expect you to work on your days off.
It's ridiculous.
Yeah, sure.
Get yourself to International Falls just so you can fly back to where you just came from and then rush to get another flight to god knows where.
You know, I think it's gonna take three hours before I'm sitting behind the wheel of my first flight of the day.
Man, oh, man.
What a life.
Huh? You first look at pilots that had either flown with him or knew of his flying capabilities.
Show me that file.
Was there anything that jumped out that indicated there was something not normal with him? The captain was described by his friends as being intelligent and an engaging personality.
Let me see his test records.
Captain Falitz was known as a skilled senior pilot.
But a deeper look reveals a man with a troubling record.
When we looked at the captain's training records, we began to understand that he had some previous issues in his flight training.
Boom.
Boom.
Boom.
Soon after he joined the company, he failed his oral exam.
He failed two more proficiency exams in his career.
That's unusual, for a professional pilot to fail that many times.
The problems hadn't been tracked by anybody in the organisation because they had failed at different locations.
So nobody put everything togetheruntil we did.
Some of the instructor pilots were noting that his cockpit resource management wasn't up to par and that he had a tendency to be domineering in the cockpit.
He had an issue with dealing with other people.
Are all of these formal complaints against Captain Falitz? Marvin was the first captain I flew with after my IOE, my initial operating experience, and he tended to be a little bit domineering and would berate you and was intolerant of mistakes and really not a particularly great instructor pilot.
Hmm.
Wow.
Perhaps the most disturbing complaint against Captain Falitz is that he once physically struck a colleague in anger.
For a professional pilot to physically have an altercation or attempt to, quote, 'discipline' a fellow employee is totally unacceptable.
I don't get it.
What was making this guy so angry? You gotta be freaking kidding me! According to people who knew him, Captain Falitz's morale took a big hit when Northwest Airlink instituted a new residence policy for their pilots.
About a year before, the company, for cost-saving purposes, started a new policy where they required the pilots to reside at their outstations.
These would be small towns outside of Minneapolis.
Why are we even doing this trip? I don't know.
Why are we? Maybe someone called in sick.
It was received very poorly by the pilot community because it meant they had to move while they had roots in Minneapolis and children going to school and spouses working and mortgages to pay.
On short notice, they had to move to these small outstations.
The relationship between the company and the pilots was poor, and some of us were extremely unhappy.
And I think Marvin was very unhappy with the company.
He'd gotten used to living in the Minneapolis area.
He had friends there.
He had a social life.
The captain fought very hard to remain in Minneapolis.
He did not want to move.
And the only way he could do it was by downgrading.
It meant a 12% cut in his salary.
What time were we out of the gate? Uh, 52.
According to your watch or the clock? Well, it's theit's the same.
II sync my watch to the clock.
He was a very intelligent man, but I think he was troubled in the sense that his life had not worked out maybe the way he wanted it to work out.
Investigators make another disturbing discovery.
Captain Falitz would sometimes be deliberately rough with the flight controls.
His way of getting revenge on the company was to sometimes take it out on the passengers.
I was amazed when I read that, to tell you the truth.
And I was amazed that a person would intentionally make a rough flight, to make people mad, because what good does that do? This guy, from what I understand, he did it because he wanted to punish the airline.
As more and more details about the captain's personality emerge, investigators are forced to consider a troubling question.
Could his anger somehow have caused this crash? They learn that one of the airline's customer service agents had a run-in with the captain shortly before he boarded the doomed flight.
We need to hear this woman's story.
I remember every word.
It's like it happened yesterday.
Hello, dear.
I'm deadheading this flight.
Marvin Falitz.
'Deadheading' is when the airline will position pilots and flight attendants at a different city so that they can then act and actively fly a flight later.
So you may go from point A to point B as a passenger and then, from there, then you will act as a flying crew member on a separate flight.
Sorry, but I don't see your name on the list.
Check again.
Marvin Falitz.
F-a-l-i-t-z.
I checked twice, Sir.
We don't have your authorisation.
The paperwork that the agent had did not include a deadheading clearance for the captain.
Look, it's not rocket science.
Pick up the phone and call dispatch.
I'm real busy.
So how about you call them? How do you live with yourself knowing that you are completely useless? He effectively refused.
He insisted that she should do it and stormed off.
I've never seen a pilot that angry before.
As a good professional pilot, he should be able to maintain professional performance even though he has things in his life or has these disturbances going on.
This captain did not.
There's mounting evidence that Captain Falitz had serious anger management issues.
What puzzles investigators is why a bright young pilot like First Officer Erickson didn't intervene if his captain was behaving recklessly.
Hello? They receive a phone call from a ramp service agent at Minneapolis Airport.
He claims to have important details regarding the pilots who flew flight 5719.
- Why isn't the exterior pre-flight done? - I was You didn't check the damn exterior lights! The service agent witnessed Captain Falitz berating First Officer Erickson over a pre-flight check.
Uh, I was gonna check the lights from inside the cockpit.
That's not how you do it! You have to go outside and see it with your own stupid eyes! Does Northwest even screen you guys anymore? You know what? Screw it.
- I'll do it myself.
- You know, I The captain was being very, very critical of the first officer, and the first officer was a relatively new pilot.
So, you know, you're gonna make mistakes.
So there was a better way to handle it.
And the captain did not take the better way.
If we're late for departure, it's on you! This happened immediately before the flight.
So it set the tone for the two of them working together, which was a bad way to do things.
Communication between flight crew members is an essential component of aviation safety.
We call it Crew Resource Management.
And it makes sure that everybody in the flight deck is agreeing with what the aeroplane's doing and what the intent is to do.
OK, thanks.
Let's get that CVR back in here.
We need to find out what was going on between those two pilots.
Alright.
Cue it up.
After uncovering stunning details about Captain Falitz's sometimes rude and even aggressive behaviour, investigators listen to the cockpit recording in a new light.
Call the company and tell them we need to fuel up.
In listening to the CVR, the captain makes a lot of corrections or directions to the first officer of very simple things.
- Ops 7-19 - Say 'Hibbing'.
- Hibbing, go ahead.
- Uh, Hibbing, uh He was intimidating and not constructive.
Positive fuel.
See you in a bit.
You can't just say 'Ops'.
You have to specify who's supposed to answer - Hibbing, Sioux City, Duluth.
Before I was an airline pilot, I was a flight instructor.
And one guaranteed way to have that guy shut down and not be able to perform was to berate them, humiliate them, embarrass them.
Uh, do we get our own room? No, you're gonna have to room with me.
And it's only a single bed.
So you'll just have to curl up at my feet.
The captain's tone was not very receptive and was aggressive and led to a breakdown in proper management with the first officer.
Umyou've got nine miles to the arc.
Just put it up in your clipboard and talk me through it when I need information, OK? So the captain was talking down to him.
No! This thing.
That's what this is for.
He was paralysed with fear.
That's why he didn't make his call-outs to the captain.
He washe was terrified of him.
The danger of an aggressive attitude is that it breaks down crew performance.
I'd be reluctant to speak up, too.
Investigators think they finally understand all the events and circumstances that sent a Northwest Airlink commuter plane speeding headlong into the ground near Hibbing, Minnesota.
It was disturbing to hear about the captain's background and his anger management issues.
How do you live with yourself, knowing that you are completely useless? You have to go outside and see it with your own stupid eyes! And when we pieced that together with the environment that we heard him set in the cockpit on the cockpit voice recorder, things began to add up.
You, uh you're just gonna stay up here as long as you can? Yes.
The captain had a plan but, because it wasn't the standard plan, the first officer didn't know what it was.
- Did you click the airport lights? - Uh While they were inside the final approach fix, with a rate of descent at over 2,000ft per minute - Click it.
You clicked it seven times.
- Uh, yeah.
I, uh .
.
the captain seems to be berating the first officer about clicking the radio button to turn on the runway lights.
OK.
I got it now.
He was afraid to do anything.
So that kind of explained why he was silent a lot of the time.
The first officer wasn't able to participate in monitoring the airspeed and altitude.
The first officer was really just along for the ride.
Flying, for the most part, the stakes are very high.
And when you see what happens in the aftermath of an accident, it brings home just how serious this job is and how serious everybody involved in the airline business needs to take it.
The crash of flight 5719 exposed deficiencies in Crew Resource Management training .
.
and highlighted the importance of interpersonal relationships in flying.
Airline flying's a team sport.
- Minimums.
- Got it.
It's important to have a team attitude.
Well, this accident, in many ways, has become a case study in just how valuable it is to empower either crew member to be assertive and to speak up when something isn't going right.
Pressurisation set.
A first officer, even though they may be new and very junior, is not only given permission but is encouraged to ask or question a very senior captain with they get uncomfortable.
"Ma'am," or, "Sir, I don't know why we're doing this.
I'm not comfortable here.
" Among the NTSB's recommendations is closer oversight of pilot training programs so that airlines can address potential issues before an accident occurs.
Do CRM training on a regular basis.
Make sure that they're monitored.
Go, you know, fly with your crews every once in a while, just to see what's going on.
There's a lot of things that can be done.
One way some airlines deal with a personality conflict is they have a 'no pairing' list.
In other words, if you have a personality conflict with a certain pilot, you can check off a box and they won't make you fly with that person.
It's one of those accidents that we learned a lot from, and it became a good means to show failures within the system that could be corrected.
So I would say that we learned from it and, as a result, the aviation industry is safer.
Captioned by Ai-Media ai-media.
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