Anvilicious: There's hardly a more reinforcing way to learn lessons than the loss of dozens, or even hundreds, of lives all at once. And airplane crashes just may be the poster child of this trope. This series, as scary as it may be, can also serve as this to anyone afraid of flying; as much as these accidents may be unnerving, or straight up terrifying, they occur only very rarely, and the lessons learned from them have made air travel far and away the safest way to get around the globe.
Big-Lipped Alligator Moment: At one point during the approach into LAX, the captain of USAir Flight 1493 randomly sings a line from an unknown song. While it does appear on the CVR transcript, it has no effect on the events that transpire afterward.
Crosses the Line Twice: Some accidents are so ludicrous that it's hard not to laugh at the sheer absurdity of the situation:
The sheer scale of the LAPA 3142 pilots' behavior is truly to be admired in terms of just how callous they were as crew members handling a fully-loaded passenger plane.
The Mexico City Learjet crash. It takes a special kind of idiocy to fake your own flying credentials in order to be able to fly government officials. And a special kind of idiocy squared to not get a complete and detailed background check on the people who fly your politicians. Especially in a country at war with powerful drug lords.
Choosing to fly a challenging approach when an easier option is available just for the heck of it. Yeah, that's just brilliant.
The Gimli Glider’s reason for running out of fuel: it happened not due to a leak or anything of the sort, but because a number of people mixed up pounds and kilograms and the plane took off with roughly half of the necessary amount of fuel.
Captain Eric Moody of British Airways Flight 9 reporting that there's a small problem with the plane. The "small problem" being that all four engines have stopped. A classic example of the British Stiff Upper Lip.
The Malaysia 370 episode - first aired on 8 March 2015, the first anniversary - presents a theory that a pilot hijacked and crashed his plane in a murder-suicide act, and an aviation expert notes the industry has no way to prevent such things from happening. Just over two weeks later... Furthermore, as of 2016, Pilot Suicide seems to be a likely case, if the pilot's personal flight simulator is anything to go by...
A plane hijacking in Africa results in a situation in which the hijackers don't particularly care about dying, even if it means that the plane crashes in the middle of the ocean. The investigators for the incident strongly recommend that the cockpit door be reinforced and locked at all times outside of what is necessary. However, the FAA and airlines don't enforce such a recommendation, because it would cost money. Years later, 9/11 happens, in which terrorists hijack several planes by storming the unfortified and open cockpits and deliberately fly them into skyscrapers, killing thousands of people.
This is also explicitly mentioned in the crash of PSA 1771. While there were some improvements made in security after that crash, the episode notes that some concerns raised in the investigation, including the same cockpit door, were not addressed at the time; if they had been, 9/11 might have been prevented.
On the other hand, the closed doors policy was reinforced after 9/11 and cockpit doors were specifically reinforced to prevent hijacking... which was used to terrifying effect in the case of Germanwings 9525 where the locked door was too sturdy for the emergency axe on board.
The Tenerife disaster's status as the "deadliest aviation disaster ever" nearly got one-upped in July 2017 when an incorrectly-aligned Air Canada Flight 759 at San Francisco International Airport not only almost landed on a taxiway, but a taxiway with four passenger jets carrying about 1,000 people total on it. Had the pilot not performed a last-second go-around (Lifting back up and circling for another approach attempt), Tenerife would've been replicatednote Both incidents happened near a runway, both incidents involved multiple planes, both incidents involved understaffed towers. on an even worse scale.
An even more direct parallel to this one would be the 1991 Los Angeles runway disaster. In that incident, a landing US Air 737 collided with a small commuter plane waiting to take offnote in this case, none of the pilots were at fault; the fatal error was made by an air traffic controller. All 12 people on the commuter plane were killed on impact, and there were 23 fatalities (out of 89 passengers and crew) aboard the 737, many of them from a post-crash fire. Now, keep in mind the force involved, and add in the fact that, rather than rolling over a smaller plane (which is probably the only reason there weren't more casualties on the US Air 737), the Air Canada plane would have hit something a lot bigger with a lot more mass, capable of causing as much damage to the Air Canada plane as the Air Canada plane would cause to it. And that's not even accounting for the other three planes on the runway.
The DC-10 was launched with a problematic cargo door design that was evident while the plane was in development, and a single crash caused by the cargo door's flaw killed 346 people. The next fatal crash, which was caused by unsafe maintenance practices in the airline industry, led to the DC-10 being grounded for a period of time and permanently damaged its reputation. Flash forward a few decades, the 737 MAX gets grounded after two crashes that killed a total of 346 people attributed to a problematic design flaw that was apparent when the aircraft was being developed.
In the 2009 episode on the crash of Adam Air 574, the narrator notes that "the plane could have flown hundreds of kilometers after [the final radar] signal was received". It turns out that didn't happen with Adam Air — but that is pretty much what happened with Malaysia 370 four years after the episode aired. In the same episode, just moments later in fact, one of the interviewees notes that, "In this day and age, nobody expects an aircraft to go missing". The Adam Air plane wasn't actually missing for long (wreckage was found a week after the crash), but Malaysia 370 on the other hand...
In several cases, people who've survived a plane crash and escaped will go back to the wreckage, putting their own lives in danger, in order to save the lives of people still trapped. Notable examples include Jerry Schimmel on United 232 and David McCorkell on ASA 529.
Matt Warmerdam (the co-pilot on ASA 529) and Denny Fitch (assisted the flight crew on United 232) each survived a horrific crash, but their injuries were severe enough that it was unclear if they would be able to remain pilots. At the end of their respective episodes, both Warmerdam and Fitch reveal that they were able to resume their piloting careers. The emotion in their voices as they describe flying again almost edges these bits into Tear Jerker territory.
Hilarious in Hindsight: As Qantas Flight 32 is preparing to taxi, the first officer tells the captain, "I'm happy, just, uh, don't crash." Well, they didn't crash, but...
For a plane that's lost all engines, the sound of an engine revving back up is a huge relief.
Whenever a plane is still flyable, but crippled such that its ability to land safely is in doubt, the sound of its wheels finally touching down is lovely, because it usually means the ordeal is over.
When a crippled plane lands safely, or a life-threatening problem with the plane is fixed, the applause and laughter of the relieved passengers is infectious.
TWA Flight 800's breakup would be Nightmare Fuel... if the audio didn't clearly repeat the same silly-sounding stock scream 7 times during the scene.
The situation with Pacific Southwest Airlines Flight 1771 was horrific, but the way an air stewardess falls straight backwards after being shot in the back of the head is very difficult to take seriously.
Nightmare Retardant: Aircraft accidents are becoming increasingly rare as more and more investigations into accidents iron out problems that contribute to accidents, making the industry safer with each passing year. Which may be the point...
Paranoia Fuel: Oh so much in the case of planes that are fatefully damaged and/or badly maintained some time in the past (China Airlines 611, Japan Air 123), or fall victim to an undetected fault or design flaw (United 232, TWA 800), and keep flying without obvious problems until one day, without any warning, they simply fall to pieces in mid-air.
Stephen Bogaert, the actor who played the first officer of AA 1420 and the captain of the TWA flight in the Grand Canyon crash (and narrates the original Canadian broadcast of the show) is Bev's dad in It (2017).
Future Shang Chi star Simu Liu was the Narita air traffic controller in "The Final Push".
The CGI quality varies between "extremely lifelike", and "1990s PlayStation game" depending on the episode. The varying quality is more obvious during the earlier seasons.
The cockpit mockups use display screens or other effects to simulate the analog dials of older aircraft. This unfortunately has a similar appearance to modern "glass cockpit" displays which would be anachronistic for many of the planes shown. (Of course it's much cheaper and faster than having a detailed mockup of, say, a DC-7 reconstructed, as no functional simulator of such aircraft probably exists anymore. While looking anachronistic, it's an Artistic License.)
A particularly glaring example is the China Airlines 006 episode. Watch the display screens carefully, and you can see a mouse pointer arrow inside the speed indicator...
In "Fight For Your Life", the flight engineer has blood on his scalp during the scene where Calloway first walks into the cockpit before any blows are dealt.
Spoiled by the Format: If the episode is less than 30 or so minutes in, whatever lead the investigation is currently following is probably going to be a dead end, or at best will be only part of the puzzle.
Overlapping with Foregone Conclusion, if someone who was on the plane is interviewed, they obviously survived whatever ordeal happened in the episode. In most cases it's not that big a deal, but there are a few occasions where the show tries to set up some form of suspense or cliffhanger, but either the presence of a specific survivor or the mere fact that there are survivors already indicates the outcome. For example, in "A Wounded Bird", the narration sets up a Commercial Break Cliffhanger by asking, "Will rescue crews arrive in time to save Matt Warmerdam [the plane's first officer, who was trapped in the burning cockpit]?" Well, given that Warmerdam was interviewed for the episode, it's pretty safe to say we know the answer to that one.
If the pilots are interviewed during the episode, it's a pretty safe bet that the accident was not caused by pilot error, or it played a very minor role at worst (such as "Fire Fight" where the NTSB alleged that Cameron could have made some decisions better, which was contested).
Values Dissonance: In the episode on United Express Flight 5925, the captain's exclamation of "Oh, Christ!" is censored in the Canadian version, but not the British version.
Visual Effects of Awesome: Most of the time, the CGI is very well-done, often showing how nightmarish some of the flights-gone-wrong were, with the crashes (when they happen) looking appropriately cataclysmic.
Due to the psychological trauma, any survivor of a plane crash or incident can either becomes this or an Iron Woobie, especially if they lost relatives in the same incident as well.
Any relative of somebody who died in a plane crash inevitably becomes this, the worst offenders might be the parents of the children who died in the Überlingen collision, you just want to cry with them.
ATC controller Peter Nielsen, also from the Uberlingen, is treated this way. The episode goes into great detail just how bad a situation he was put in that night, from being one of only two operators available that night (and the only one on duty at the time) to all the technical issues from repairs and renovations going on in the controller room that night. Even the one mistake he made (leaving the two planes on the same flight level) is treated as a simple error that anyone could make, and one that was appropriately corrected for when the automated alerts warned him. The determination for the ultimate cause of the crash was a lack of clarity in training with the automated collision warning system, meaning the pilots followed his instructions when they should have followed the automated warning, as they coordinate both planes to head in opposing directions, whereas ATC is only instructed to provide corrections to one. All of this is bad enough, but then one of the parents who is stricken with grief had a mental breakdown, travels to Switzerland to find him, and ends up taking his life. For many viewers, more than a few tears are shed when the flower that was put in the controller room in his honour is displayed at the end of the episode.
Lee Burmeister in "No Where to Land". She went to go on a vacation in Central America and ended up coming down with appendicitis and had to have surgery. Still sore from the surgery, she takes TACA Flight 110 back home to the US. The plane ended up having to make an emergency landing on a levee near New Orleans resulting in her being taking to a hospital for observation.
Furthermore, as of 2016, Pilot Suicide seems to be a likely case, if the pilot's personal flight simulator is anything to go by...