This is episode 22 and we’re going to hear more about an accident in the skies over India that was the final push in the drive to deploy traffic collision avoidance systems known as TCAS.

Initially we need to go back to the days days of commercial aviation in 1922.

Unfortunately the first collision between aircraft took place almost immediately as commercial aviation launched in the same year as earlier aviators were ignorant about each other’s plans, altitude and track. They also spoke many different languages which also didn’t help.

It took another 70 years before a system was introduced to ensure separation that was automated and computerised. Before then systems were developed that relied on accurate flying using the semi-circular rules.

The basic tenet is that when flying a track between 0° and 179° or generally speaking, easterly, your flight level or altitude must be odd such as 030 or 050 and so on, but when you are on a track between 180° and 359° generally speaking .. westerly, your flight level or altitude must be even – for example 18000, 16000 feet and so on.

There are other rules associated with this and whether you’re flying IVR or on Instruments.

That is supposed to reduce the chances of planes colliding but it only works if the pilots are flying their planes at those levels. Sometimes pilots do break the levels – and at other times their instruments are faulty.

On 12 November 1996 a Saudi Arabian Airlines Boeing 747 which had just taken off from Delhi in India en route to Dhahran collided with a Kazakhstan Airlines Ilyushin Il-76 en route from Chimkent to Delhi.

The crash killed all 349 people on board both planes, making it the world's deadliest mid-air collision of all time and the deadliest aviation accident to take place in India.

This was an example of a system that was used in a confusing way.

This is episode 21 and we’re taking a close look at the Mount Erebus disaster where an Air New Zealand McDonald Douglas DC-10 crashed on 28th November 1979, killing all 257 passengers and crew.

At first it looked like straight pilot error - a CFIT or controlled Flight Into Terrain accident.

But that would change as inquiries led to court cases.

Of all the accidents I’ve described, this one has some of the most unfortunate set of circumstances and one of the most difficult recoveries afterwards of any aviation accident in history.

Mount Erebus is on Ross Island part of the Antarctic archipelago and as you’ll hear, a juddge eventually called some evidence presented by Air New Zealand as "an orchestrated litany of lies" and which took 30 years before anyone at the airline formally apologised for that deceit.

To say the court processes which took place were riven by bitterness and a distinct failure of leadership is pretty much an understatement.

In fact, the phrase ‘an orchestrated litany of lies’ entered the Kiwi lexicon for some time and by the end of this episode I hope you’ll see why.

The first aviation inquiry found pilot error caused the accident but then a Judge in a follow up investigation ruled the cause was incorrect data which had been knowingly left in a flight computer despite this error being reported.

When a judge uses a phrase like conspiracy by senior management, then something has gone seriously wrong in terms of governance.

But the legal wrangling didn’t end with the judge – there was an appeal then intervention by the privy council in London as New Zealand is a commonwealth state.

So let’s go over the facts that are not in dispute.

Flight 901 was marketed as a unique sightseeing experience where the passengers paid around $360 US Dollars each to be flown over Antarctica with an experienced guide who pointed out features and landmarks using the plane’s PA system.

Some big names had been involved for example Sir Edmund Hillary had acted as a guide on flights and was actually supposed to be on board 901 that day in November 1979, but cancelled because he had other bookings.

Unfortunately for long-time friend and climbing companion, Peter Mulgrew, he was available and stood in for the hero of Mount Everest. Mulgrew would never return from the Antarctic.

The flight plan was complex compared to a normal commercial route. After the 5,360 miles from Auckland to the frozen south, the pilots would put the DC-10 into a series of low-flying sweeps out to the sea of McMurdo Sound or over the Ross Ice Shelf or both depending on time and the weather, then return home.

There had been 13 previous flights which went off without serious incident and the whole concept had started two years earlier in 1977. It had become a great money-spinner for Air New Zealand, not to mention an excellent marketing tool. Come fly with Air New Zealand and see the world’s least visited Continent for a cool $359 New Zealand Dollars – which now set you back around $1300 US dollars.

The flight left Auckland International Airport 8am on the morning of the 28th November and was due back at 7 that night.

Usually flights would not be filled to capacity so that there would be space allowing passengers to walk about and get a better view of the incredible frozen continent from different places in the cabin.

Cocktails would be served for the travellers as they clicked away on their cameras, many of whom would be puffing away on cigars and cigarettes.

The aircraft that day was Air New Zealand’s McDonnell Douglas DC-10-30 trijet and the plane was registered ZK-NZP. It had logged more than 20,700 flight hours prior to the crash.

This is episode 20 and it’s all about helicopters. Thanks first of all to Martin Darlington who hosts History by Hollywood podcast and is a highly experienced helicopter pilot and instructor. He has agreed to help with the more technical aspects of helicopters as we probe two specific accidents and the improved safety that they helped bring about.

It sounds counter intuitive to talk in positive terms about accidents but it is also true to say that most commercial crashes that have been properly investigated have led to improvements in safety.

This episode will focus on two helicopter crashes.

The first took place on 6 November 1986 when Chinook returning workers from the Brent oilfield crashed on approach to land at Sumburgh Airport in the Shetland Islands.

Forty-three passengers and two crew members were killed in the crash; one passenger and one crew member survived with injuries – the captain.

The second was the Chinook crash in June 1994 that was carrying 25 senior intelligence experts which went down on the Mull of Kintyre on the west coast of Scotland.

Leading security personnel from the Royal Ulster Constabulary, MI5 and the Army died, alongside the crew. They had been travelling to a security conference in Inverness, just two months ahead of the 1994 IRA ceasefire. The fact that high level intelligence officers were involved including members who were involved in Ireland has intrigued investigators and conspiracy-mongers since then.

Our expert Martin has some good ideas about what happened there and we’ll tap his immense knowledge about helicopters to get more information in the second half of the podcast.

It was Australia that initiated the mandatory installation of cockpit voice recorders after an accident in 1960, while we’ll also probe a mid-air collision involving United Airlines and Trans World Airlines aircraft over New York in the same year. That led investigators to call for more information when accidents were being analysed.

So let’s find out more about how these two crucial bits of tech ended up in all commercial aeroplanes and helicopters.

The flight data recorder or (FDR) preserves the recent history of the flight through the recording of dozens of parameters collected several times per second; the cockpit voice recorder (CVR) preserves the recent history of the sounds in the cockpit, including the conversation of the pilots.

The two devices may be combined in a single unit. Together, the FDR and CVR objectively document the aircraft's flight history, which may assist in any later investigation if there is an accident.

They are built tough – capable of withstanding in impact of 3400 Gs and temperatures of over 1000 degrees centigrade. As I explained in the episode analysing the disappearance of MH370 there are now moves to have live streaming of data to the ground and an agreement to increase the battery life when a plane ends up lost over the ocean.

The first example of a Flight Data Recorder is actually pretty old, dating back to 1939 when Frenchman Franscois Hussenot built something called the TYPE HB flight recorder. IN his machine, photographic film was used which scrolled along recording the main flight information such as speed, altitude and position.

Another form of Flight Data Recorder was developed in the UK during the Second World War when Len Harrison and Vic Husband built a sturdy device that could withstand a crash and a fire and keep the data intact. In this case, they used copper foil as a recording system – a bit like the early phonographic recordings.

But it took a Finnish engineer by the name of Veijo Hietala to introduce his black box called Mata Hari in 1942. She was a famous spy during the first world war, naturally his machine collected intel in a way. This box was used in Fighter aircraft test production.

Voice recorders were first tried by the United States also during the Second World War. In August 1943 the United States Airforce use magnetic wire to capture the inter-phone conversations on board a B-17 bomber crew flying a mission over Nazi-occupied France. The broadcast was then fed back to the US by radio two days later.

So the idea was nothing new and yet aviation authorities did not move on the concept for another two decades after the Second World war. That’s despite a number of commercial aircraft going missing. Indulge me as I go through a list.

This episode we’ll probe the Tenerife disaster on 27 March 1977 which remains the most deadly aviation accident in history.

583 people died when two Boeing 747s collided on the Canary Island of Tenerife - one operated by KLM and the other by Pan Am.

This led to a major aviation safety initiative the known as Cockpit Resource Management or CRM which is now part of pilot training where combined crew input is encouraged and the captain can be questioned. It also led to other changes in communication methodology between planes waiting to take off and the tower as well as setting English as the language of aviation.

The problem with CRM is that it comes up against different cultures in the world, where the decisions by the strong man in charge are generally not contradicted. This is thought to be behind the accident in Pakistan during Covid-19 lockdown in May 2020 where authorities say not only was CRM ignored by the senior pilot, he also apparently tried to land an Airbus at 240 knots – well over its recommended landing speed.

Back to Tenerife 1977 – an incident which still shocks those who hear the details for the first time.

There were no survivors from the KLM aircraft and only 61 of the 396 passengers and crew on the Pan Am aircraft survived.

Pilot error was the primary cause, as the KLM captain began his take-off run without obtaining air traffic control clearance in extremely dense fog. But as you’ll hear, there is more to this story.

The conversation between PanAm, KLM and the ATC was peppered with confusing messages.

Other contributing factors were a terrorist incident at Gran Canaria Airport on a separate island that had caused many flights to be diverted to Los Rodeos, a small airport on the island of Tenerife not well equipped to handle aircraft of such size arriving together.

This increased the stress on the Air Traffic Controller and mistakes were bound to be made.

The Canary Islands are infamous among pilots for the extreme wind and weather conditions that spring up on this archipelago off the coast of Africa in the Atlantic Ocean. The weather was to play a major role in this catastrophe.

This episode explores an accident at a time of Covid-19 – which may be too recent to have a direct effect on civil aviation safety and yet the causes appear to be directly linked to poor Cockpit Resource Management otherwise known as crew resource management. It has caused many an incident and accident, unfortunately.

The Pakistan crash which took place in May in Karachi is also a warning about how airlines go about restarting their services after a lengthy shutdown. Flying is not like riding a bicycle.

It has also led to immediate suspension of Pakistan International Airlines landing rights in the EU after shocking details emerged about systematic Airline Transport Pilot License exam cheating along with other cases of corruption.

So the main point is an Airbus A320 crashed into heavily populated suburban area of Karachi in Pakistan on May 22nd 2020. Flight 8303 was a scheduled domestic flight from Allama Iqbal International Airport in Lahore to Jinnah International Airport in Karachi.

The plane went down in a residential area near the Airport a few days after Pakistan lifted restrictions imposed over the coronavirus pandemic and resumed domestic flights ahead of the major Muslim holiday of Eid al-Fitr.

Amazingly, two on board survived – both in Business class while at least one person on the ground died - a 13 year-old girl.

As I said, Crew Resource Management failures appear to be behind this crash at least from the initial reports published in Pakistan.

Crew Resource Management is also known as cockpit resource management.

One of my instructors used to chatter to me during important phases of flight and I had to say “sorry Russell, I need to report our position” or reset instruments and he would smile in a knowing way.

Cockpit resource management includes knowing when its time to shut up or shut you fellow pilot up and concentrate extra 100 percent on the job at hand.

Landing an aircraft is one of those crucial moments.

But when did Crew Resource Management start as a thing?

The first person to talk about human interaction on the flight deck was a BOAC captain David Beaty who was a former Royal Air Force pilot. He wrote a book - The Human Factor in Aircraft Accidents in the late 1950s.

It became part of the United Airlines pilot training handbook following the crash of a DC-8 in 1978 and eventually was recommended for all pilots by the National Transportation Safety Board.

That was after a United Airlines Flight 173 crashed in Portland Oregon on December 28th 1978.

This episode is fraught because we just don’t know what happened to Malaysian Flight MH370 and many pilots would say any sort of scientific conclusion is going to be a jump to a conclusion.

However, I am going to take you through this event again and describe what the likely scenario was on that terrible morning back in 2014. Part of what we do as aviators is to know the truth about risk, then act accordingly.

In this case, we have some truths and then, we have deception. Unfortunately I am going to explain how the deception involved aviation officials in Malaysia who treated both the Chinese and their own citizens shoddily after flight MH370 disappeared.

This compounded an already difficult situation.

As I have previously outlined, Malaysia’s aviation sector is a seething mass of government interference, full of patriarchs who appear to worry more about losing face than losing passengers.

Malaysia suffers from what we call cadre deployment, those ruling party-linked relatives of someone in power who is dropped into a scientific endeavour with not the first clue about how aeroplanes work, nor how they should apply themselves within the sector. Then when things go wrong they think shutting down the truth makes sense – which is the direct opposite of how to fix a broken system.

This is not aimed at citizens of the beautiful country of Malaysia, rather its aimed directly at ramshackle nature of how aviation has been managed in the country.

I will show you how in the case of MH370 a distinct lack of understanding about crucial issues like prompt action, search and rescue, technical descriptions about how aeroplanes work, was worsened by a fraternity of yes-men who basically preferred deliberate obfuscation when they were confronted by bereaved relatives .

This is episode 15 and its all about unusual accidents including one that most likely involved a crocodile.

But let’s start with what was called the first ever jetliner crash in 1953.That was an incident involving a de Havilland DH-106 Comet 1A registration CF-CUN operated by Canadian Pacific Airlines at Karachi-Mauripur RAF Station (OPMR) in Pakistan.

The plane was a scant two months old when it crashed on take-off carrying eleven people, five crew and 6 passengers.

The Comet aircraft was named "Empress of Hawaii" and was being delivered to Canadian Pacific Air Lines. The operator planned to use Comet to start a service between Sydney in Australia and Honolulu in Hawaii.

ON April 28th 1953 it was being flown to Sydney after the flight crew had completed Comet Jet conversion training in the United Kingdom. It’s next phase of the long haul was supposed to be a hop from Karachi to Singapore.

Another example of pilot error that has led to thousands of pages of legal documents changing hands was an accident on 27 August 2006 involving a CRJ-100ER jet

operating as a Delta Connection Comair Flight 5191 scheduled to fly between Lexington in Kentucky and Atlanta in Georgia.

The issue here was two runways side by side – but they are not parallel.

Runway 22 and Runway 26. What that means is that they face 220 degrees, which is South West, and 260 degrees – which is west south west. This had confused pilots before, and was particularly confusing at night.

The signage was also not satisfactory.

Finally one of the more bizarre accidents in 2010 at Bandundu in the Democratic Republic of the Congo which involved a crocodile.

The aircraft was a 1991-built Let L-410 Turbolet, registration 9Q-CCN.

On 25 August 2010, the jet Filair crashed on approach to Bandundu Airport in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, killing all but one of the 21 people on board.

The aircraft had been operated as a round-robin domestic flight from Kinshasa the DRC capital, and doing a milk run stopping at Kiri, Bokoro, Semendwa and finally Bandundu.

At 13:00 local time while on final approach to Bandundu Airport, the aircraft crashed into a house 1 kilometre short of the runway.

This is episode 14 and I was expecting to continue with the planned series but I’m afraid the world has changed in the last few weeks. Needless to say, if anything has to be done right now, it’s to understand what may happen to commercial aviation in the future.

Some airlines are close to bankruptcy, others are being bailed out. Most have cut back on operations and are considering their next moves. There is a lot of politics, a lot of economics and not a lot of physics happening other than gravity dragging the revenue curve sharply downwards.

Let’s see if we can make sense of what is going on internationally and in the next few minutes in this podcast, I’m going to make an effort not to inflate an already disastrous situation by too many adverbs or pronouns.

Words like catastrophe, apocalyptic or disastrous.

As aviation is all about numbers, we need to take a close look at the sector and understand just who may survive and who may not.

Because commercial aviation is literally the lifeblood of modern business, flying globally is going to continue after this virus has been defeated. However things are not going to be business as usual after the pandemic passes.

I’ve been attending webinars where IATA – the International Air Travel Association – has been briefing us about the latest in the Corona-virus affected aviation sector. I’ve been reading the professional pilots rumour network and receiving daily updates from various aviation sources, along with the Official Aviation Guide or OAG.

My own flying has been cut. I’m grounded as here in South Africa we are on a strictly enforced lockdown and most domestic flights have stopped, while all international flights in and out have been shut down entirely.

Unfortunately this week we have an example of where safety was improved over the decades – but the growing tension in the world appears to have reversed some of the gains made. This is largely because of trigger-happy military personnel.

Most passengers are blissfully unaware of just how close many commercial airliners have come to being shot down in the recent past, let alone during World Wars.

This week we deal with the relatively recent shooting down of Ukraine Airlines SR 752 by the Iranian military.

First a few examples of commercial airliners being shot out of the sky.

As I mentioned briefly in an earlier podcast, the first known example was on 24 August 1938 during the Second Sino-Japanese War when a DC-2 known as the Kweilin operated by China National Aviation Corporation (CNAC) was forced down by Japanese Aircraft inside Chinese territory just north of Hong Kong.

The DC-2 was carrying 18 passengers and crew. Apparently all survived the emergency water landing, but not the follow up strafing run by the Japanese pilots. Fifteen died.

The next reported commercial airliner shot down was the Kaleva OH-ALL incident on 14th June 1940- a civilian transport and passenger Junkers Ju 52-3/mge) operated by the Finnish carrier Aero O/Y.

This time is was shot down by two Soviet Ilyushin DB-3 bombers while en route from Tallinn, Estonia, to Helsinki, Finland. The Soviet Soviet DB-3s bombers opened fire with machine guns and badly damaged Kaleva, causing it to ditch in water a few kilometers northeast of Keri lighthouse.

All seven passengers and two crew members on board died.

In episode three of this series, I explained how Malaysian Airlines Flight MH17 was brought down by a Soviet-made Buk surface to air missile. All 283 passengers and 15 crew on board the Boeing 777-200 ER died when the missile hit the plane near Donetsk in the Eastern Ukraine. It was fired by separatist rebels who’d been using an older model Buk missile which was promptly wheeled back into Russia after the case of mistaken identity.

And that brings us directly to the 8th January 2020 Ukraine International Airlines flight 752 Boeing 737-800 that was shot down by Iran’s armed forces shortly after take-off from Tehran’s Imam Khomeini International Airport, killing all 176 people on board.

Initially, Iran denied responsibility suggesting an engine had blown up. Eventually on 11 January, three days after the incident, Iran said it unintentionally shot down the commercial airliner mistaking it for a hostile target.

For a start, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard was extremely jittery because they had fired dozens of missiles at American bases in Iraq only a few hours before. That was in response to General Qassim Suleimani being killed by an American Drone in Iraq in late 2019.