History Series / Mayday

* StopHelpingMe: Invoked by the actions of the crew aboard Air Astana Flight 1388, whom after figuring out that their plane's ailerons were crossed, switched their flight computer from NORMAL LAW to DIRECT LAW. This removed the flight envelope protections that NORMAL LAW provided, but gave the crew direct control of the ailerons, as well as decrease the chances of the flight spoilers deploying. The latter was crucial as while the ailerons were crossed, meaning the pilots had to, for example, turn the yoke left to roll right and vice-versa, the flight spoilers were electrically controlled and thus NOT crossed, meaning that if, for example, a bit too much yoke input input to the left for a right roll was applied, the left wing's flight spoiler would deploy and negate the effects of the ailerons, causing an upset.

** Problems with maintenance staff or other ground crew making mistakes due to improper or inadequete training, overwork (sometimes causing them to try and take shortcuts just to not fall behind), technical difficulty in doing things the proper way, or just plain poor oversight have contributed to an engine falling off during takeoff (American Airlines Flight 191), a plane running out of fuel during flight (Air Transat Flight 236 and Air Canada Flight 143), two instances of covered pitot/static tubes which lead to malfunctioning flight instruments (Aeroperu Flight 603 and Birgenair Flight 301), an improperly adjusted elevator control cable (Air Midwest Flight 5481), a rear cargo door falling off causing an explosive decompression (the 1975 US Air Force C-5 Galaxy crash), a missing row of screws causing an elevator to break off mid flight (Continental Express Flight 2574), a missing cotter pin causing the right side elevator to get jammed into the climb position (Emery Worldwide Flight 17), an onboard cargo fire caused by mislabeled cargo ([=ValuJet=] Flight 592), an airline using illegal aircraft parts (Partnair Flight 394), a takeoff with an improper stabiliser trim setting and back heavy cargo (Fine Air Flight 101), two instances of improper repair of damage from a tailstrike (Japan Airlines Flight 123 and China Airlines Flight 611), an entire wing falling off a seaplane (Chalks Ocean Airways Flight 101), a cockpit windscreen blowing off mid-flight (British Airways Flight 5390), and a bolt in a slat mechanism coming loose and puncturing a fuel tank (China Airlines Flight 120).

** "Target Is Destroyed": The crew had initially set their autopilot to HDG (Heading Select) when they were cleared by ATC shortly after takeoff to fly directly to the second of the ten waypoints they needed to pass through in the [=R20C=] flight path on their way to Seoul, with the intention of setting it back to INS mode as they got close enough to pick up the waypoint's radio beacon. For some reason, they neglected to switch it back to INS mode when the time came to do so. This led the aircraft to stray into Soviet airspace not once, but ''twice'', which ultimately provoked a deadly response from their airforce.

** The crew of British Midland Flight 92 (the flight involved in the Kegworth air disaster) didn't trust the vibration readings indicating that the left engine was shredding itself to bits because these were known to be unreliable in previous 737 models, and smoke entering the cockpit from the cabin indicated that it was the ''right'' engine that needed to be shut down because that supplied cabin air. Little did they know that, in the 737-400, ''both'' engines supplied air to the both the cockpit and cabin, and, more relevantly, ''the vibration detection instruments actually worked properly''; it ''was'' the left engine that had gone bad.

** The crew of Korean Air 007 chats with Korean Air 015, which is supposedly 3 minutes behind them, whose crew reports completely different wind conditions that those [=KAL007=] experiences. Since such dramatic change over a small distance is impossible at that altitude, this should alert the crew that they're somewhere they should not be... which is ''very'' bad when the "somewhere" happens to be '''Soviet airspace'''.

** The flight crew of Loganair Flight 6780, after the plane was struck by lighting, thought that autopilot had disengaged. They failed to noticed that the indicator for the autopilot on the display infront of them was still green which meant it was still on. If it was off, the indicator would be white. In addition, when they went to adjust the aircraft's trim, they failed to hear an alarm going off telling them that they needed to disengage the autopilot in order to adjust the trim.

** In "Pitch Battle", the manufacturers of the Beechcraft 1900 failed to notice that the maintenance manual depicted a key component of the stablizer trim system in the incorrect possition. When the mechanics of Colgan Air Flight 9446 discovered this and put the component in the correct way, the control cables were now crossed causing the trim system to work in the oppisite way the pilots would expect.

* WhatASenselessWasteOfHumanLife: While this can be said about most accidents which were inherently preventable, the disgust of the NTSB investgators in the remastered version of the Alaska Airlines Flight 261 crash ("Pacific Plunge") is pretty evident. 88 people died for a saving of a couple of dollars' worth of grease, with the maintenance team ignoring an instruction to replace a dangerously worn part after one mechanic did their job diligently, by claiming it was just within limits. The rest is history.

** In "Control Catastrophe", the mechanics, after replacing the aerilon control cables, didn't notice the aerlons were moving in the opposite direction they were commanded to when they tested the flight controls on the ground.
** In "Pitch Battle": The manufactor of the Beechcraft 1900 failed to notice that the maintence manual depited a key componit of the stablizer trim system in the incorrect possition. When the mechanics of Colgan Air Flight 9446 discovered this and put the componit in the correct way, the control cables were now crossed causing the trim system to work in the oppisite way the pilots would expect.

** "Target Is Destroyed": The crew forgot to put the autopilot into waypoint mode after takeoff and left it in magnetic compass mode. This led the aircraft to stray into Soviet airspace and provoked a deadly response from their airforce.

** The crew of Korean Air 007 chats with another Korean Air jet that is supposedly nearby, whose crew reports completely different wind conditions that those [=KAL007=] experiences. Since such dramatic change over a small distance is impossible at that altitude, this should alert the crew that they're somewhere they should not be... which is ''very'' bad when the "somewhere" happens to be '''Soviet airspace'''.

* SurprisinglyRealisticOutcome:
** As Chad Erickson in "Killer Attitude" learned the hard way, you can do all the prep work in the world for an upcoming job and still have a nasty surprise thrown hard at your face.
** "Ghost Plane": Being trained to fly a light aircraft will not prepare you for flying a commercial airliner like a 737, as Andreas Prodromou finds out when he tries to take control of Helios Flight 522 after the flight crew passes out.
** "Flight 574: Lost": The reason why airlines are expensive is because it costs a lot of money to keep up with and update the regular maintenance and training courses to fulfill safety regulations. When airlines skimp those costs in order to promote themselves as "cheap", the risks of something going horribly wrong increase accordingly. Even before the Flight 574 disaster (a crash caused by the double-whammy of known faulty equipment not given the proper maintenance and the pilots being under-trained to deal with system failures in-flight), Adam Air and various other inexpensive Indoensian airlines were plagued by multiple crashes and failures, with Flight 574 proving to be one of the straws that broke the camel's back prompting a massive restructuring of the entire Indonesian aviation business to either meet the expected standards or lose their licenses to fly, the latter the fate Adam Air would suffer.
** Almost OncePerEpisode: Even the best trained and most experienced professionals can make mistakes sometimes, and even the best designed and most reliable equipment can have problems sometimes.
** Also shown in a number of episodes: sometimes, a pilot faced with an emergency situation can do everything right and then some, and it still won't be enough to create an ideal outcome. For example, the pilots of United 232 performed a remarkable feat of airmanship in getting their crippled plane to a runway (and saved the lives of over half the people onboard), but despite their best efforts, it was simply not possible to land the plane safely; the damage was just too severe.

** In "A Wounded Bird", as the narrator mentions the flight attendant preparing the cabin for the emergency landing, the reenactment shows a moment where an exit row passenger says she doesn't want to be responsible for opening the door (or possibly feels she's unable to), and a man sitting further back offers to do it and switches seats with her. Though the incident isn't mentioned either by the narrators or any of the interviewees[[note]]none of the individuals directly involved were interviewed; the flight attendant declined to appear, and both passengers were killed in the disaster[[/note]], this is an accurate depiction of something that happened in the minutes leading up to the crash. Unfortunately, it's subverted a few minutes later when the same woman is seen standing outside the plane in an embrace with a man after the crash, both with no visible injuries and even their clothing intact: in reality, the woman in question, Lucille Burton, was horribly burned exiting the crashed plane; she would not have been able to stand, to say nothing of how she would have looked[[labelnote:*]]reports later stated she was burned over ''100% of her body'', and she died within hours of the crash[[/labelnote]]. Her husband Lonnie -- who would presumably be who the man was meant to be -- suffered a similar fate.

* LudicrousGibs: In cases where there's almost nothing left of the airplane, any recovered human remains are extremely fragmented, assuming they haven't been buried deep underground or completely burned to ashes. In two episodes ("Out of Sight" and "Behind Closed Doors"), this was invoked by people interviewed. In "Out of Sight", fireman and a woman lived in the area both said they didn't see any intact bodies. In "Behind Closed Doors", a journalist who went to the crash site shortly after it happened said you couldn't walk anywhere without the risk of stepping on what used to be part of a human being.

** One specific example is the crash that killed Emiliano Sala. The company hired to ferry him between Cardiff and Nantes was an illegal "grey charter" that hired pilots licensed for private, not commercial, flights; assigned a pilot, David Ibbotson, with no night rating for what turned out to be a night flight; and didn't carry out safety checks that would have been mandatory for any proper airline. All this ended in a dubious-at-best plane that Sala described as "look[ing] like [it was] about to fall to pieces" filling with carbon monoxide due to a leaky exhaust and ultimately smashing into the ocean.

* CuttingCorners: Several incidents were caused by airlines or manufacturers trying to cut costs and save money by [[TemptingFate skimping on safety]], with tragic results. In fact, the episode about the crash of Alaska Airlines Flight 261, in which this played a major role in the disaster, was named ''Cutting Corners''.[[note]]Though in the US, it was called "Fatal Error"[[/note]]

* AxCrazy: Or, in the case of Auburn Calloway on [=FedEx=] Flight 705 in "Fight for Your Life", [[DropTheHammer Hammer]]-and-Speargun Crazy.

* DropTheHammer: Justified in "Fight For Your Life". Auburn Calloway attacked the flight crew with hammers because he wanted to [[MakeItLookLikeAnAccident pass the plane crash off as accidental]], and hammers would inflict blunt force trauma that investigators would assume were caused by the crash.

** The crashes of Lionair 610 and Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 were caused by a system known as MCAS, which was supposed to pitch the nose downwards in a specific situation (flaps up, high angle of attack, manual flight) so that the 737 MAX would mimic the behaviour of the 737 NG, making simulator training unnecessary. Unfortunately, the system relied on a single Angle of Attack sensor and was mistakenly activated in both crashes by being fed erronous data from malfunctioning sensors. While the correct solution would have been to turn off the automatic trim system entirely, MCAS was not mentioned at all in the manuals or in training.

** In "Terror in San Francisco", as Asiana Flight 214 is shown flying over the south part of San Francisco Bay on aproach to SFO, the very large salt ponds in that part of the San Francisco Bay Area are absent. In their place are large fields. Large fields like that do not exist right up to the bay in that area. That part of the bay, where it is not borded with salt ponds, is borded by marshland.

* LudicrousGibs: In cases where there's almost nothing left of the airplane, any recovered human remains are extremely fragmented, assuming they haven't been buried deep underground or completely burned to ashes. In two episodes ("Out of Sight" and "Behind Closed Doors"), this was invoked by people interviewed. In "Out of Sight", fireman and a woman lived in the area both said they didn't see any intact bodies. In "Behind Closed Doors", a journalist who went to the crash site shortly after it happened said you couldn't walk anywhere without the risk of steping on what used to be part of a human being.

** The captain of AirAsia Flight 8501 just after he pulls two circuit breakers to silence a annoying alarm and the plane instantly starts going out of control.

** "Sight Unseen": the radio operator on Kazakhstan Airlines Flight 1907 notices that the plane has descended below its assigned altitude and informs the captain, who then puts the plane into a climb-right into the path of Saudia Flight 763.

** The captain of Flight 8501 just after he pulls two circuit breakers to silence a annoying alarm and the plane instantly starts going out of control.

* LudicrousGibs: In cases where there's almost nothing left of the airplane, any recovered human remains are extremely fragmented, assuming they haven't been buried deep underground or completely burned to ashes.

** Downplayed with one of the pilots of British Airways Flight 9. After making an emergency landing he says he needs a cold soda.

* INeedAFreakingDrink: The reaction of several passengers on Varig Flight 254 when told by the captain that due to a navigation malfunction, the plane is going to crash in the Amazon jungle.

** "Blind Spot": A bit of static over the radio meant the controller heard a different ''syllable'' (ATC heard "passing", the crew actually said "passed" and was meant as an implied question). This minor detail might have caused the controller to realise what was happening and prevent the accident.
** Another positive example: In "North Sea Nightmare", a random system glitch caused the autopilot to disengage and give the pilots total control over the plane allowing the pilots to get the plane out of a dive with seconds to spare.

** On Aeroperu Flight 603, pieces of duct tape covering the plane's static ports caused the flight instruments and onboard computer to behave erratically, causing contradictory alarms to sound off in the cockpit all at once. So when the pilots heard the ground proximity warning system ("TOO LOW TERRAIN") they assumed it was another malfunction, especially because the air traffic controller was telling them they were still at 10,000 feet[[note]]unbeknownst to either the pilots or the controller, the controller's altitude information was based on the plane's altimeter rather than being independently verified by radar, so the controller's altitude readings for the plane were based on the malfunctioning altimeter[[/note]]. It wasn't. Since [=GPWSes=] don't rely on static ports, the GPWS was one of the few things actually working.

** Somewhat justfied on Cathay Pacific Flight 780, where the GPWS went off during the landing approach and the pilots ignored the warning because they were actually making a controlled landing. However, since the fuel valve for their one remaining engine had been jammed open by a substance that shouldn't have been in the fuel system, they couldn't decelerate the plane before they touched down. Due to this, the computer didn't understand that they were trying to land since they were about a hundred miles per hour faster than they should have been and triggered the warning system.

* UnfinishedUntestedUsedAnyway: The Galloping Ghost was possibly the most heavely modified P-51 ever. The pilot flew the plane in the Reno Air Races without testing to see if the modifications were safe. Subverted, in that it wasn't the mods that led to the crash, but an ancient part that had been left on the aircraft for far longer than its design life, which ultimately suffered a fatigue failure.

** In "Head On Collision", a rail passenger with a view of the track in front of him realized that his passenger train is about to collide with a freight train head-on.

* RunawayTrain: The title of one [[FormulaBreakingEpisode Crash Scene Investigation]] episode, detailing the San Bernadino train wreck. A heavy freight train went down a steep downhill gradient with woefully inadequate brakes, causing it to lose control and derail into a sleepy neighborhood.

* TrueCompanions: In "Crash of the Century", the crew of Pan Am Flight 1736 are shown to be a pretty close bunch who clearly respect each other yet aren't afraid to throw jokes around in moments of levity and work well as a team. Contrast that to the crew of KLM Flight 4805, where [[{{Jerkass}} Captain van Zanten]] is a harsh taskmaster toward his fellow crewmbmers, giving them backhanded compliments ''at best''.

** The pilots of Swissair Flight 111 declared "pan pan" 10 minutes before the fire in the cockpit started destroying the flight systems.

** "Runaway Train", about the [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Bernardino_train_disaster San Bernardino train disaster]]. First, a runaway freight train derailed at a bend in the tracks and crashes into a residential neighborhood, killing four people. Then, about two weeks later, the gas pipeline alongside the tracks ruptured from damage received during cleanup, resulting in two more deaths.