This episode covers the terrifying examples of fire on board commercial airliners.

One of the first was the Imperial Airways Armstrong Argosy II incident in Dixmude Belgium in 1933 where a fire thought to have been started by a passenger attempting to commit suicide caused the plane to crash killing all 15 on board.

It was the deadliest accident at that point in the history of British civil aviation. It is also thought to be one of the first airliner ever lost due to sabotage.

When you hear the story, perhaps you’ll agree with the findings at the time during the investigation. Everything centred around one passenger, by the name of Albert Voss, who was seen to jump from the aircraft as it came down over the Belgian countryside.

Imperial's London–Brussels–Cologne route had been flown since 1928.

But on the 28th March 1933 the plane was travelling from Brussels to London taking it over the northern Flanders region before crossing the coast for the 50 mile flight across the English Channel.

It was delayed and eventually took off at 12.30 in the afternoon. While flying over Flanders, onlookers saw flames burst from the fuselage, before the aircraft lost altitude and plunged to the ground. As the Armstrong Argosy biplane slipped from the sky, a passenger was seen falling from the rear – someone had jumped.

Another example of an accident that was caused by crew actions combined with a design fault was the United Airlines Flight 608 Douglas DC-6 on 24 October 1947. The four engine plane, registration NC37510, was on a scheduled passenger flight from Los Angeles to Chicago when it crashed just before 12.30 in the afternoon southeast of Bryce Canyon Airport, Utah, United States.

5 crew and 47 passengers died – all on board. It was also the deadliest air crash in the United States aviation history at the time and caused by a fire on board.

Sometimes lateral thinking by pilots can be fatal if operating procedure is flouted.

One of these lateral thinkers was the pilot of Swissair Flight SR306, a Sud Aviation SE-210 Caravelle III, which was a scheduled international flight from Zürich to Rome, via Geneva. His decisions which flew in the face of standard operating procedure doomed his passengers and crew unfortunately.

The Sud-Aviation SE 210 crashed near Dürrenäsch, Aargau, on September 4, 1963, shortly after take-off, killing all 80 people on board.

Another example of crew error which led to a fire took place near Toronto, Canada, on the 7th May 1970 where an Air Canada McDonnell Douglas DC-8 exploded after leaking fuel ignited – 109 on board died.

This was an example of pilot error, but also a confused use of spoilers which are designed to slow an aircraft down rapidly. It was the misuse that led directly to a fire and explosions as you’ll hear.

Had the crew followed the check list this accident would not have happened, as is the case with so many disasters.

Captain Peter Hamilton and First Officer Donald Rowland had flown together before this terrible incident – but they seemed out of kilter when it came to exactly when to arm the spoilers. The check list indicated the spoilers should have been armed at the beginning of the final approach. Yet hoth agreed they’d arm the spoilers in the middle of the landing flare when the engines were throttled back and the plane was close to the runway.

The final example in this episode is of South African Airways flight 295 probably one of the more mysterious in-flight fires where the cause has never been identified.

It is known as the Helderberg disaster in South Africa.

In this episode we’ll look at in-air breakups of aeroplanes – caused by poor flying, poor design, or poor maintenance and bad weather. In some cases all four of these together.

However as with all things aviation, every accident leads to an equal and opposite reaction .. to misquote the great Sir Isaac Newton.

That reaction luckily for us, is called Aviation safety standards. The terrible truth is that people die and then safety improves.

So let’s start with the 32 year-old Charles Rolls. He was one half of the great Rolls-Royce engine company but his end was rather unfortunate.

Probably the most famous of all in-air break ups involved the notorious de Havilland Comet. It took three catastrophic failures all within a year before the airliner was grounded.

Launched by BOAC in 1952, the Comet was the world’s first jet airliner and was an attractive plane too. Aviation buffs swooned over its swept back look, the modern jet liner was born and it could fly right across the Atlantic without a stop.

However, it had a serious flaw. The windows and doors.

One of the most incredible in-air failures ended with almost everyone surviving. In April 1988, part of the fuselage of an Aloha 737 flying from Hilo to Honolulu shredded at 24,000ft.

A flight attendant was swept overboard – everyone else survived. Imagine sitting in the open air with nothing between them and the ocean except for a safety belt.

That may be so, but it took a 1991 accident to kick start a proper global culture of aviation safety.

The mid-air break up of the Continental Express Flight 2574 – an Embraer 120 Brasilia, was a scheduled domestic passenger airline flight operated by Britt Airways from Laredo International Airport in Laredo, Texas, to Houston Intercontinental Airport or IAH in Houston, Texas.

A break-up of a plane over Peru deserves special mention at this point. As you’ll hear in this series, there are many examples of a single person surviving a plane crash. And this is one of them.

Today we hear about the extraordinary story of Juliane Koepcke. She was 17 years old and sitting in the window seat next to her mother on board a Lansa Aircraft flight 508 from Lima in Peru to Pucallpa in the middle of the Amazon Rain Forest.

There’s another I have to mention and it involved something known as Clean Air Turbulence which led to an in-air breakup of a commercial airliner.

In the case of BOAC flight 911 callsign Speedbird 911, clean air turbulence produced an estimated 7.5Gs that caused the Boeing to disintegrate over Mount Fuji in Japan on 5th March 1966.

Clean Air turbulence will be covered in a future podcast, but needless to say there’s no warning.

All 113 passengers and 11 crew perished.

This week it’s the terrible crashes involving the Boeing 737 MAX 8 – one in October 2018 and the other in March 2019.

In both cases an automated trim called the Movement Characteristics Augmentation System is believed to have been behind the accidents.

The story is also a shocking failure by the Federal Aviation Authority in managing a crisis, as well as serious questions of governance at Boeing.

While the accident reports are awaited, there is enough information from both FAA and Boeing itself to cover this as an example of poor design, poor safety management, and poor oversight – particularly when it comes to risk analysis.

Since the accidents Boeing has announced a slew of changes to its quality control process, including the announcement in September that a new Safety Committee was being created led by Boeing veteran Beth Pasztor. Too little too late for 346 people.

Boeing has also split the role of CEO and chairman of the Board which is a bit like closing the barn door after the horse has bolted but at least its beginning to take action internally.

Boeing has built a name around allowing pilots to fly their planes, whereas competitor Airbus designs their planes around full fly-by-wire automation, but back in the mid 2000s something radical happened at the American plane manufacturer.

This podcast looks at a story that has saddened many in the aviation sector. The oldest aircraft manufacturer is now under pressure legally and ethically.

This episode features an air crash in 1985 is the deadliest single-aircraft plane crash in history where 520 of the 524 passengers and crew died. Remarkably, 4 survived - all women.

But this is also a story where the number of survivors could have been higher had the Japanese rescuers hit the ground earlier. As you’ll hear, authorities were alerted about the whereabouts of the crashed plane early by American military search and rescue, but then presumed all on board had died and delayed a rescue attempt until the next day.

Japan Airlines Flight 123 servided an unusual route, although using a Boeing 747SR – which means Short Range.

It was a domestic Japan Airlines passenger flight from Tokyo's Haneda Airport to Osaka International Airport, Japan. On August 12, 1985.

During the flight, the Boeing suffered a sudden decompression twelve minutes into the flight and then crashed later into the area near Mount Tagamagahara, around 100 kilometers from Tokyo.

A faulty repair by Being technicians was blamed and as we’ll see, a number of recommendations were made by the United States Federal Aviation Authority afterwards concerning Boeing’s maintenance and repairs.

Strap in this week, because its all about lightning.

We’re looking at one crash in particular, the Lovettsville Air Disaster which took place on August 31 1940 near the town of Lovettsville in Virginia, the United States.

There were 21 passengers and 4 crew on board and all 25 died in the accident, including U.S. Senator Ernest Lundeen from Minnesota.

As you’ll hear, his death was regarded as extremely sinister because he was under FBI investigation at the time. But we’ll get to that in a while.

The plane was a brand new Douglas DC-3A operated by Pennsylvania Central Airlines. It was flying through an intense thunderstorm at 6,000 feet en route from Washington to Detroit.

The journey for the doomed passengers and crew had started in Washington and there was a planned stopover in Pittsburgh but the plane took off late due to thunderstorm activity around Washington.

Numerous witnesses reported seeing a large flash of lightning shortly before it nosed over and plunged to earth in an alfalfa field. With limited accident investigation tools at the time, it was at first believed that the most likely cause was the plane flying into windshear, but the Civil Aeronautics Board report concluded that the probable cause was a lightning strike.

"Trip 19", as it was designated, was under the command of Captain Lowell V. Scroggins with First Officer J. Paul Moore. The pilot and copilot had over eleven thousand and six thousand hours experience respectively, although only a few hundred of those hours were on DC-3s.

A new airline employee was flying in the third seat between the two pilots called the jump seat. He’d only just been hired on August 26th.

It’s time for that terrible acronym – CFIT – which means Controlled Flight into Terrain. That’s where the pilot is unable to see the terrain for whatever reason, and believes that he or she is higher than they are, or somewhere else, or the equipment on board has failed and altitude readings are wrong. This often happens unfortunately when a let down is being flown – which is a technique that allows a pilot to pass hills and other obstructions before they are let down to a low altitude.

There are few other reasons for controlled flight into terrain, including suicide which was the case with the infamous German wings accident of 2015 where mentally unhinged First Officer locked the captain out of the cockpit and proceded to fly a packed Airbus A320-211 into a Swiss mountainside. All 144 passengers and crew were killed in what was not pilot error – it was pilot suicide.

One of the earliest examples that led to changes in training took place on 7th August 1946 on the Mistberget Mountain in Norway.

It involved British European Airways Flight 530, which was a Douglas C-47 Skytrain. Three of the five crew on board died, but 10 passengers survived.

It’s known as the Mistberget Accident.

A few months later another CFIT accident took place in Switzerland involving a C-53 Skytrooper passenger variant of the Douglas DC-3 on the 18h November 1946.

This is an important event and had multinational repercussions and also led to the turning point in alpine rescue.

I’m your host and pilot, Desmond Latham. Every week we tackle a different area of aviation and this week it’s the history of hijackings.

The first ever hijacking of a commercial plane took place on the 16th July 1948. It involved a Catalina Seaplane owned by Cathay Pacific and operated by subsidiary Macau Air Transport Company registered in Hong Kong. At that time Hong Kong was still a British Territory. And ironically the plane that took off from the sea was going to be affected by what was called piracy originally.

The struggle between the Nationalists and the Communists was in full flow – the civil war reverberated around the region and law and order had collapsed in many parts of China.

The Miss Macao, as the seaplane was called, was on a routine flight from Macau to Hong Kong. In 1948 Macao was a Portuguese territory.

But it never made it to the rapidly growing metropolis of Hong Kong.

The plane was hijacked a few minutes after take-off by four men, three armed with guns, one of whom demanded that the pilot surrender the controls. Just to add to the crazy scenario – he was from Mexico but was not Mexican.

The pilot, an American by the name of Dale Warren Cramer, refused to hand over control to the hijackers and at that moment his co-pilot attacked one of the intruders with a flag-post rod.

In the confusion, Cramer was shot dead, and collapsed onto the flight controls. The plane went into an uncontrolled dive and crashed into the sea. Miraculously one person survived by jumping out of the emergency exit as the plane hit the ocean.

Unfortunately it was one of the hijackers although in a sense some would say its fortunate that at least someone survived to tell the story.

Twenty-five of the twenty-six people aboard died in the crash. Through this series you’re going to hear how often one person survives – and its more often than you think.

This week we’ll feature two accidents from the early 1920s that changed rules. The first is a mid-air collision that took place in April 1922 over Picardie in France, and the second was the response to an investigation into a crash of a passenger plane flying between London and Manchester in England.

As we’ll hear, both led to new air regulations and rules that we still use today including a rule of keeping to the right, the introduction of air routes and the other allowing for transparency in reporting of accidents.

In the section at the end of this podcast The History of... I’ll cover the concepts of keep to the right, how air routes work, and transparency in aviation.

But first, let’s head back to 1922 and France. Flying was in its infancy after the first world war, and 1922 was an exciting time to be alive. Pilots were the astronauts of their age and were idolised and the rich and famous began to use these wonders of modern invention, the aeroplane.

Folks had survived the first world war and then the massive influenza epidemic afterwards that killed 17 million people so the second decade of the 20th century became known as the Roaring Twenties.

The music was effervescent and the parties were wild. Jazz and ragtime music was in the dance halls and the advent of radio and ready availability of phonograph records meant even those in remote locations were listening to the latest music, very much as they do today.

But in 1922 it was considered a unique time, openness, freedom, growth and technical developments like heavier than air machines. Aviators were trying to break new records every month and no one had flown across the Atlantic Ocean – yet.

Public dance halls, clubs, and tea rooms opened in the cities. Strangely named black dances inspired by African style dance moves, like the shimmy, turkey trot, buzzard lope, chicken scratch, monkey glide, and the bunny hug were adopted by the general public.

The cake walk, developed by slaves as a send-up of their masters' formal dress balls, became the rage. White audiences saw these dances first in vaudeville shows, then performed by exhibition dancers in the clubs. And of course, in France these gained traction quickly.

That’s what drew two of the passengers on board the French biplane involved in this terrible accident. American couple, Christopher Bruce Yule and the new Mrs. Mary Yule, were on their honeymoon and had travelled to France for a romantic holiday. They boarded the French aeroplane known as the Farman F.60 Goliath registration F-GEAD piloted by M Mire at Le Bourget and were looking forward to landing in Croydon airport near London.

Little did they know their special honeymoon flight would end in tragedy.

Every week we delve into the causes and repercussions of plane crashes across the world and how these have led to improved aviation safety over time. This week its the shooting down of Malaysian Airlines MH17 which was hit by a Russian Buk missile (SA-11) while flying at 33 000 feet over the eastern Ukraine in July 2014.

While Moscow has denied its air-to-ground missile systems were involved, an investigation by Dutch and independent journalists has found otherwise as I'll explain.

I have also used phone recordings made at the time where separatists discussed the fact they had mistaken the MH17 Boeing for an Antonov military aircraft.

The killing of 298 passengers and crew remains the most deadly crash of its type in history. But it also led to airlines taking a more active approach to the diversion of air routes. At the end of this week's podcast in our History Of section I'll track some of the incidents starting in 1938 where commercial planes were targeted.

This is the series that tracks air disasters through history and how each has led directly to the safety we almost take for granted every time we climb aboard an airliner.

Last week it was the story of the first recognized commercial air crash involving a dirigible over Chicago in July 1919 that killed 13 people, three on board and 10 on the ground. That led to new no-fly rules over city central business districts.

This week we have jumped forward to the crash of Air France 447 which took place in June 2009. Two hundred and twenty eight crew and passengers were on board.

None made it out alive.

A crucial piece of equipment malfunctioned leading to incorrect decisions being made by the air crew.

The piece of equipment is called the Pitot tube. At the end of this episode I’ll update the Short History of section with more details about the background to the PITOT tube.

Pitot tubes are amazingly simple yet vital hardware and you can find these on all aircraft, big or small. It’s linked to pressure-sensitive instruments and used to determine airspeed, altitude, and rate of climb or how fast a plane is climbing or sinking. Modern airliners have more than one, but that didn’t make any difference in the early morning hours of June 1st 2009.

Air Airbus A330-203 registration F-GZCP took off from Rio de Janeiro at on May 31st 2009 routing to Paris. Because the duration of the flight was more than 10 hours, there were 3 crew which meant each could take a break.

The flight's captain was Marc Dubois, while the co-pilots were Pierre-Cédric Bonin and David Robert.[12] There were 9 cabin crew onboard and 216 passengers.

Unfortunately for all on board, the first sign of poor aviating that night a severe chain of thunderstorms appeared in the inter tropical convergence zone, the area north and south of the equator which registers cumulo nimbus based storms that can rise to nearly 50 000 feet which is higher than any airliner flies.

No large commercial airliner can fly that high.