Nightmare Fuel / Mayday

The deadliest disaster in aviation history, and they weren't even 100 feet off the ground.

"By this time, it's pandemonium inside the cabin. Passengers are being engulfed by flames, and bodies are starting to fall from the aircraft fuselage. [...] Bodies were falling from the aircraft eleven miles from the airport."

—Andrew McIntosh, on Nigeria Airways Flight 2120

Thanks to evolving safety regulations in the aerospace industry, you are in fact more likely to end up in an accident on your daily work or school commute than you are to end up in a disaster 35,000 feet in the air in an airplane that's the only bit of pressurized air for many miles. But that only makes it all the more scary when bad things do happen, and when such things happen, they can go From Bad to Worse in minutes or even seconds. Air Crash Investigation is dedicated to covering these grisly air disasters, featuring dramatized reactions of horrified crew and passengers and morbid depictions of millions-of-dollars jets getting destroyed both in the air and on the ground.

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• As the show demonstrates, in a large number of accidents, it's a chain of errors and failures that all combine to result in disaster. How many accidents came very close to happening but were avoided at the last minute by one last safeguard — including on flights you yourself may have taken? For example, runway incursions are surprisingly common, and have caused some of the worst accidents in aviation history as you can see below.
• Imagine what it has to be like to be the pilots in some of these cases. You are at the controls of a large aircraft, carrying anywhere from 20, to over 300 passengers and crew. ALL of them depend on YOU to get them to their destination safely. Suddenly, something goes horribly wrong. The cockpit starts screaming at you. Alarms blare all over the cockpit telling you there is something wrong with your plane. Your mind races to find a safe place to put the plane down and get everyone off, only to get it jolted as the plane noses over and goes into an unrecoverable dive. It's a horrifying prospect, and it's no wonder that some pilots have a problem getting back in the saddle after crashes even where everyone survives.
  • And a mention for the cabin crew; you don't even get the distracting effect of trying to fly the plane. You aren't in control but you have to maintain a calm demeanor and prepare the passengers for evacuation all the time being terrified that you might be about to die. And even in the cases where the plane lands and people do survive, you have to live with crippling and irrational guilt for the deaths of the people who don't escape a crash landing or fire.
  • Imagine how it must have felt for the pilot of Aeroflot Flight 593 in this situation, except it's his fifteen year old son at the controls and neither of them can do anything.
  • UPS Flight 6: the cabin is filled with smoke, and the captain's oxygen mask fails, so he leaves his seat to retrieve another one. Almost immediately after he goes off-camera, there's a loud "THUD" sound as he collapses from the smoke and heat, leaving the first officer to fly a rapidly deteriorating aircraft alone.
  • Ionel Stoi, the First Officer of TAROM Flight 371, had to watch as Liviu Bătănoiu, the Captain, died of a heart attack while auto-throttle was malfunctioning, causing it to make a hard left turn into the ground. Stoi was so focused on trying to wake Bătănoiu that he failed to notice that the the plane was going into a dive. It crashes, destroying Bătănoiu's body and killing all 59 remaining people onboard.
• The descriptions of what happens to the passengers and crew when the plane hits the ground or water at high speed. Most of the time, the bodies are severely mutilated or fragmented. In "Out of Sight", there's even a brief shot of a headless corpse still strapped into a seat.
  • In one episode a woman working in the emergency services searches through the burning wreckage of a just-crashed aircraft (US Airways Express Flight 5481) and wonders what "all these mannequins" strewn throughout the crash site were doing on board, only to realise in the next moment that the "mannequins" are actually the bodies of the passengers.
• The utter silence that ensues when a plane's engines stop working. Passengers and flight staff in interviews will often describe the horribly eerie feeling of falling from the sky in dead quiet.
• Any accident where the root cause is never found. You have no way to know for certain it won't happen again...
  • Or worse yet, investigators disagree on the cause of a crash, preventing any new safety measures being implemented in spite of evidence to support a particular scenario.
• Aeroperú Flight 603 — imagine having every possible alarm go off, some contradicting each other, and you've no idea which are true and which are false until it's too late, and all of this happening with the plane surrounded by complete darkness.
• The fate of the passengers and crew of Alaska Airlines Flight 261 in the first season episode "Cutting Corners". The aircraft was fully inverted and the screaming of the unfortunate passengers could be heard on the cockpit voice recorder.
  • The pilots were continuously attempting to regain control up to the moment of the crash, to the point that they attempted to fly the plane upside-down when they couldn't raise the nose. That they were desperate enough to try and do so just shows how awful the situation was.
  • And the infuriating thing about all this? The cost saved on maintenance was minimal. Less than a cup of coffee back in those days. What caused the crash? Inadequate lubrication because the mechanic couldn't tell how much grease they added and follow up repairs continued to be put off. Also the warning about a badly worn nut was ignored because the mechanic that warned about it was overridden because other mechanics said it was within minimum working order. 88 people died for something that cost less than a cup of coffee!
• "A Wounded Bird" is practically made of this trope. While the aircraft is critically damaged, it struggles along for almost 10 minutes. While this gives the flight attendant a chance to prepare the passengers for impact, it also means the passengers have almost 10 minutes to contemplate their situation and anticipate what's going to happen, hoping to reach an airport but knowing they probably won't. Then there's the crash itself, which is so violent that the aircraft is torn apart on impact. And when, by some miracle, they all survive that, it turns out the ordeal is just beginning, as a deadly post-crash fire quickly blocks the only escape route forcing survivors to run through the raging fire in order to have any hope of survival, and the result is as horrific as you'd expect. And if that's not bad enough, other accounts of the accident suggest the episode actually held back a bit in depicting/describing the scene that unfolded as passengers exited the wreckage. As bad as the situation shown in the episode is, the reality was even worse.
  • The co-pilot's situation is particularly horrifying. Unlike the passengers, he doesn't even have the option to get out, even by a dangerous route; instead, he's trapped in the cockpit as the fire begins to consume it. He and a passenger who runs to his aid try desperately to get him out through the cockpit window, but the glass is resilient and the crash ax, the only tool they have on hand, is flimsy, making it impossible to do more than chip it away a tiny bit at a time.^note Following this incident, the crash axes were replaced with a sturdier and more effective model. Trapped in an inferno, suffering increasingly severe burns with each passing minute, there's nothing the copilot can do but wait and hope that he'll be able to escape in time. (He is ultimately rescued and survives, but that does nothing to diminish the physical and mental horror he endured.)
• The second season episode's depiction of the 2002 Überlingen mid-air collision, in which a Tupolev Tu-154 carrying Russian schoolchildren was sliced in half by a DHL cargo plane, leaving no survivors. The front half of the Tupolev is seen careening towards the ground as a few bodies — possibly those of children — are seen being helplessly sucked out of the wreckage and into open air. That the G-forces were such that everyone aboard the nose section probably blacked out before impact is a small mercy at best.
  • The situation on the DHL plane, which was crippled by the loss of its tail fin, was arguably even worse. For all the horror that occurred on the Tupolev, at least it was probably over for them in a matter of seconds (when they blacked out); the DHL pilots would have been conscious up to the point of impact, fighting to save the plane even though it would likely have been clear that their efforts were futile.
  • The re-enactment of the crash only underscores the horror of the situation. The pilots of the Tu-154 see the DHL coming at them from the left. The captain immediately starts yelling "Climb! Climb!" while the DHL tries to descend under them. Out of the passenger window a little girl also turns and sees the oncoming plane. But it's too late. The two planes collide, ripping the Tu-154 apart. The crippled 757, now missing its tail fin and haemorrhaging hydraulic fluid, is last seen gliding through the clouds to its inevitable destruction far below. In the re-enactment, there's a moment after the collision where the DHL captain and first officer share a look; no words are spoken, but it's clear that they both recognize that they're going to die and there's nothing they can do to prevent it.
  • The wreckage of the collision is scattered over 130 square miles. This includes the bodies of children.
  • There was another incident showcased briefly in this episode, the 2001 Japan Airlines Midair Incident. This was a near miss one year earlier in nearly the exact same circumstances, this time the pilots saw each other and took evasive action narrowly avoiding the collision by a mere 135 meters! The worst part? Had the collision actually occurred, the total number of fatalities would've been 677. Yes, worse than the Tenerife airport disaster!
    • Though this was technically a little bit more of a Moment of Awesome as the crisis was averted in the nick of time, but still....
• Aloha Airlines Flight 243, covered in "Hanging By a Thread". Imagine the very skin of the airplane, the only thing separating you from the high-speed winds outside and the threat of falling out, suddenly disappearing, leaving you completely at the mercy of the elements, and your seatbelt the only reason you're not plummeting towards the ocean.
• "Ghost Plane" Helios Airways Flight 522, the fate of the flight attendant who remained conscious, Andreas Prodromou, is pretty terrifying to consider, and presents a truly grim variation of the typical Disaster Dominoes series of events.
  • Fortunate enough to have access to a portable oxygen supply, Andreas is one of only two people on the plane^note An aspect of the incident which is inexplicably omitted from most reconstructions - including Mayday's episode on the incident - is that, contrary to popular belief, he was not the only person still conscious; his girlfriend, Haris Charalambous, also remained awake, and was reported by the F-16 pilots to be attempting to help him control the plane that didn't fall unconscious as the aircraft slowly depressurized and climbed to cruising altitude, which allowed him to survive after everyone else's oxygen supplies dwindled away to zero.
  • Eventually, he gains the strength to walk towards the cockpit. The plane is deathly quiet; by now, many of the passengers, as well as his colleagues, are already dead. Helios Flight 522 is now a flying coffin.
  • Opening the door, he finds the flight crew slumped over their controls, by now likely dead as well, and two F-16s of the Hellenic Air Force in formation. Andreas is a pilot, but doesn't know how to control an aircraft as large as a Boeing 737, having only been certified to fly general aviation.
  • Moving the most likely-dead pilot out of his seat, Andreas sits down and takes hold of the control column anyway, in an attempt to control the aircraft. The F-16s attempt to make contact, but the radio isn't tuned to their frequency.
  • Not knowing the correct frequency to contact the jets, Andreas is now powerless to resolve the situation. All he can do is wave weakly towards one of the F-16s. At the same time, almost as soon as he opened the door to the cockpit, the first engine flames out and runs out of fuel.
  • The cockpit voice recorder picks up five instances of Andreas attempting to call for help, giving the mayday procedure word each time; he receives no answer.
  • The second engine dies out, and the plane begins to spiral towards the ground where it crashes into a hill and explodes. The only reason it didn't crash into Athens, and thus the only reason there were no ground casualties, is because Andreas managed to steer the plane off its flight path.
• "Scratching the Surface", which covers China Airlines Flight 611. You're just enjoying a routine flight from Taiwan to Hong Kong (one of the most traveled air routes in the world, by the way) when, with no warning, the plane tears itself apart. The reason this happened? About 20 years before, the aircraft suffered a tailstrike during a landing and the repairs performed on the damaged section of the hull were not done properly. The repaired section would weaken over time, going entirely unnoticed for two decades until China Airlines and the 206 unsuspecting passengers on board learned the very hard way. The lesson of the story for airlines: Do your damn repairs correctly and log them correctly.
  • Japan Airlines Flight 123 was a similar situation, where a badly-done repair of a bulkhead caused a blowout that severed all hydraulic systems.
    • This one has a second Nightmare Fuel component as well. Believing that all the passengers were dead, Japanese officials chose not to rush to the scene. When they finally arrived, they not only found (four) survivors, they also found that other passengers had survived the crash and could have been saved if rescue operations had been prompt, as they died not of their injuries, but from the freezing temperatures in the night. One of the remaining survivors described hearing screams and moans from the other victims until they slowly succumbed.
• The beginning of the episode covering the Lockerbie Disaster. It's Christmas season, and we're treated to a beautiful scene of the mid-night town of Lockerbie, Scotland, while a choir softly sings "Silent Night". The choir continues, gradually being joined by the sounds of raging flames and jet engines at full blast as we cut to the sight of the pieces of the bomb-destroyed aircraft plummeting from the sky, only to be abruptly cut off as the largest piece of flaming wreckage slams into the heart of the town like a meteor.
• "Target is Destroyed", the fate of Korean Air Flight 007. A Korean Airlines 747 is flying off-course, and strays into Soviet airspace over Sakhalin, and a fighter jet is sent to chase after it. The pilot fires warning shots at the plane, but the crew, focusing on trying to correct their course, don't notice. The plane leaves the area, but re-enters not long-after. Using the justification that he believed the plane was a spy aircraft taking evasive manoeuvres to avoid him, the fighter pilot immediately shoots it down, condemning 269 people to death without any remorse. Disabled, the plane spirals towards the waters just off the coast of Moneron Island and crashes, killing everyone inside instantly. The Soviets fish out the black box from the debris, and keep what happened under complete wraps until the dissipation of the USSR, while the fighter pilot remained confident for the rest of his life that he had done nothing wrong.
  • Even worse in this regard was the fate of Iran Air Flight 655, as shown in "Mistaken Identity". Whereas the shootdown of the Korean Air jet was at least somewhat understandable as it was legitimately somewhere it was not supposed to be and was flying over sensitive military installations (not to mention that its radar return got crossed with the return from an actual spy plane the Soviets had been monitoring), the Iran Air plane was operating well within its approved airspace, meaning there was little to no reason to mistake it for a hostile aircraft. But because the commander of the USS Vincennes had an itchy trigger finger, he ordered it shot down anyway, resulting in the deaths of 290 people.
• Saudia Flight 163, covered in the episode "Under Fire", presents the absolute worst-case scenario that can occur with an in-flight fire. Due to the sheer incompetence of the crew, a cargo fire has breached the floor of the cabin, rapidly filling it up with smoke and flames. As passengers begin to choke to death, one of the flight attendants reaches the crew and asks for a course of action, only to be told not to prepare the cabin for evacuation. Miraculously, the plane lands, but the crew's inaction meant the fire had disabled the plane's braking system, meaning that it was forced to coast at high speeds down to a stop, leaving the fire trucks at Old Riyadh Airport racing to catch up. And then, the plane sits... and sits... and sits, motionless on the tarmac for 23 minutes, all while the fire could clearly be seen through the plane's windows. No attempt was made by anyone inside the plane to open the doors; in perhaps the grimmest possible outcome, this is likely because everyone inside was already dead.
• Nigeria Airways Flight 2120, though far from the deadliest since "only" 261 people were unlucky enough to be trapped in there, is among the most horrifying aviation accidents in history. An onboard fire, fierce enough to be visible from outside the plane, weakens the cabin structure of the DC-8 causing rows of burning passengers to drop through the floor of the aircraft still strapped to their seats. Not enough? The plane drops its load of flaming people while flying over a city. And investigator Ron Coleman was so horrified recalling the condition of the resulting corpses that he refused to describe them and simply ended his train of thought there with "very bad injuries; let's just leave it at that". How bad must they have been to cause a seasoned investigator to suffer a Heroic BSoD simply remembering them?
  Ron Coleman: We knew that parts of the airplane had melted and that parts of the cabin had burned away underneath the passengers. We know that aluminum melts at 1100°C, approximately. So this thing would have been like a torch!
  • Nobody knows what exactly it was like on the plane since everyone on board died, but the dramatisation gives a pretty good idea. The plane increasingly turns into a giant smokehouse, panicked passengers rush forward because the smoke is heaviest in the back, and we see the same flight attendant who rushed into the cockpit to tell the cockpit crew about the smoke futilely spray a fire extinguisher onto what is likely by this point a magnesium or even fuel fire and later have to stop passengers from trying to open a door in a desperate, futile attempt to get breathable air^note the latter is likely based on the wreckage surveyors finding some doors unlocked, only one instance of which couldn't be explained by crash damage. The sizzling corpses who fell out and the people who suffocated were the lucky ones, as their horrific experience ended early; anyone who managed to survive until the actual crash had to suffer for the full time, waiting for an evacuation that, thanks to where the fire was, simply wasn't happening, all because the moron handling the Nigerian Airways wet-lease nixed maintenance on two tyres.
    "In the cabin, it's becoming almost impossible to breathe... and Jeddah is still nineteen kilometres away. The odds on making it back to the airport are getting slimmer."
  • That being said, it's almost certain some of the people who fell from the plane were still alive; for about 30 seconds or so, in unimaginable pain, these living people fell, unable to do anything but perhaps cast a glimpse of the ground rapidly approaching them...
  • There's no evidence the cockpit was affected by the fire, but that's small comfort for the pilots, who had to deal with the plane's warning system bombarding them with complete nonsense because the fire was short-circuiting everything, be told by a flight attendant that there was smoke in the cabin, have the first officer's controls crap out and force the captain to take over, and then have to wonder if this plane full of fire, smoke, and choking, panicked passengers would be controllable for long enough to get it on the ground and get whoever had survived out of this tube of hellfire.
    William Allan: Okay, sir, we're having trouble turning. We are having flight control problems. We will try to turn left. We. Are. Having. Flight. Control. Problems.
    William Fowler: From the situation, it would've made certainly controlling the aircraft for an approach and landing very, very difficult.
• The PSA 1771 episode, chilling for the psychotic ruthlessness of the hijacker, David Burke, who kills his boss for firing him, executes the two pilots at point blank range and crashes the plane. None of the reconstruction is conjecture - it was all captured on the CVR tape, including the killer's calm "I'm the problem" statement. And the boss did absolutely nothing wrong - he fired somebody who had been stealing, boarded his flight home, had an incredibly creepy threatening message dropped in his lap by a man who passed him on the plane before all hell broke loose.
  "One man’s rage meant two minutes of pure terror for forty-two people."
• You think having a passenger crash your plane is bad enough? Imagine the pilot deciding to crash the plane, as shown by the episodes on EgyptAir 990, LAM Mozambique Airlines 470, Germanwings 9525, and SilkAir 185. Even worse is the petty reason in the former: The first officer had been caught sexually harassing hotel employees and was told he would no longer be allowed to fly on international flights after returning home, so in a disturbingly calculated form of rage, he decides to crash the plane and kill everyone else alongside him to get back at his employers. It's basically a "You can't fire me, I quit!" situation, except instead of quitting, he crashes his plane and murders 216 people. And speaking of which....
  • "Crash in the Alps"/"Murder in the Skies" and Germanwings Flight 9525, full stop. Can you imagine flying with a suicidal pilot that planned to commit suicide not by himself, but crashing a passenger plane? And keep in mind, out of five confirmed commercial incidents that involved pilot suicide, Flight 9525 is the only incident in that list to be confirmed as pilot suicide unanimously, by both the general public and the investigators.^note In the case of EgyptAir and SilkAir, investigators were pressured into naming other causes, as suicide, much less murder-suicide, is extremely taboo in Islam; had the suicide theory been accepted, it would have shamed the pilot's families as well as the airlines themselves.
  • Special mention goes to the captain, who was locked out of the flight deck by his co-pilot. In a mixture of disbelief, despair and sheer unbridled horror, he alternates between furiously and uselessly slamming the crash axe into the door and sobbing profusely as he desperately demands that his colleague open the door, only to be met with horrific silence.
  • It doesn't help that (at least in the dramatization) as the plane nears the Alps, everyone (including a toddler) knows that they're about to die, and there's nothing that they can do. Even the father of one of the passengers on Flight 9525 outright states that thinking about the final moments of the flight is pure Nightmare Fuel at its finest.
    • What makes that case nightmarish in general is the relatively slow speed at which the plane descended. A lot of the other incidents involved forced dives, which are scary in their own way, but because of the slower descent and the lack of extreme physical stresses occupying their attention, the passengers on the Germanwings plane would have had a much better chance of fully realizing what was going to happen.
  • Perhaps the most horrifying thing about Flight 990 is that the first officer, who is wholly responsible for the crash despite what the Egyptian government claims, repeats "I rely on God" over and over again as he begins to cause the plane to dive.
• The sound caused by the air generators on ValuJet Flight 592 was not a quiet hiss as one might expect, but a loud hellish shriek that startled even the investigators. And then there is of course the blaze they generated as well, which was so ferocious that recreating it nearly destroyed the test facility. And as evidenced by the shouts of "fire!" heard on the CVR, that got into the cabin...
  Friend or relative: An inferno! What a hell those people went through!
  • Just the entire concept of ValuJet. Sure, you're getting a killer deal on a flight, but is it really worth the safety-reducing measures taken to get to the price point?
• Joe Stiley's description of his experience in the final minutes of Air Florida Flight 90. The whole idea of knowing that something bad is about to happen to you but being completely helpless to do anything about it...
• The aftermath of "Queen's Catastrophe" when American Airlines Flight 587 comes down in the middle of a neighbourhood. Residents Michael Morley and Lois Shorr hurry home at the news to find their houses flattened.
• "What Happened to Malaysian 370?" covers Malaysian Airlines Flight 370. The jet goes off-radar and all communications from the aircraft just straight up cease at some point for no clear reason. Since the aircraft and its passengers and crew have never been found save for a few pieces of debris, one can only imagine the horrors aboard the aircraft that led to what is heavily implied to be a fatal dive into the ocean.
• In "Fatal Transmission", all twelve people on board United Express Flight 5925 survived the runway collision, only to die in the ensuing fire because no one could get the main door open and the passengers were ignorant of the emergency exits^note Aircraft with a passenger capacity of less than 20 are not required to have cabin crew, which in this case meant nobody was there to give a pre-flight safety briefing or direct an evacuation. To make it worse, one of the fellow pilots that rushed to try to rescue people realized partway through that he had met the captain of the United Express flight, and she was begging him for help through the open cockpit window. When he couldn't get the door open, he left to get more help; he stated in his interview that at that point, he felt they both knew she wasn't going to be saved. Not two minutes later, he saw the plane explode in the distance. To top it all off, moments before the explosion, the re-enactment has the captain retreat from the window and gaze helplessly around the blazing cockpit, crying as she comes to the realization that she's going to die.
• Pictured above is "Crash of the Century" and "Disaster at Tenerife", which cover the Tenerife airport disaster of 1977. Thanks to a combination of rerouted planes crowding the taxiways, thick fog that makes it hard to see anything (like, say, another 747 coming straight at you), sheer impatience in the cockpits, and communication error (there was no ground radar unlike at major airports actually designed for big passenger jets), KLM Flight 4805 attempts to take off while Pan Am Flight 1736 is still on the runway, prompting the latter's pilot to panic ("God damn, that son of a bitch is coming straight at us!") and try to get his plane off the runway while the former's pilot makes a desparate attempt to prematurely lift off of the runway. End result: Two flaming wrecks, 583 fatalities out of 644 passengers and crew from both planes including everyone who was aboard the KLM jet, and the biggest disaster in aviation history. What truly sells it is, as the pilots realize what is about to happen, all professionalism goes out the window and is replaced by pure desperation as both are fighting in vain to try and avert the thing that is now inevitable.
• "Explosive Proof", the explosion of TWA Flight 800. Like China Airlines Flight 611, but much, much worse. Without warning, the front section of the plane broke off. What happened next, all passengers were exposed to 300 km/h winds and the fire that engulfed the fuselage, all while the plane is still flying. Only a few moments later, it went down breaking up in pieces. In the timeframe of less than a minute, the passengers experienced all of the ordeal.
• Qantas Flight 72 - imagine flying a plane when, without warning, it goes into a dive. You try to pull the plane out of the dive but, because of the malfunction that sent the plane into the dive, the plane's automation thinks what you are trying to do to save the plane is going to cause a crash so it overrides your command to pull up. In short, the computer has decided that you are the problem, and its solution is to do absolutely everything it can to ensure not only your death, but everyone else on the plane.
• The GPWS repeating the same warning over and over again on Cathay Pacific Flight 780. ^note The pilots had to ignore it because they were actually landing the plane. They were travelling a hundred miles an hour faster than usual but were unable to decrease their speed, which is why the GPWS sounded out.
  GPWS: Too low. Terrain. Pull up! Too low. Terrain. Pull up!
• The moment when a window blows out on British Airways Flight 5390. There's just a flash of alarms blaring, the cockpit door bursting out of its frame and a scream from the captain as his body lifts from his seat.

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