Plane Crash Diaries

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.

This series called Plane Crash Diaries is really about how safe aviation has become. This sounds like a contradiction, but its through the experience of more than a century of commercial aviation that experts have been able to build an extremely safe sector in the 21st Century.

Decades of improving safety and regulations as well as operating procedures have led to a form of transport that is now regarded as crucial to the development of the world economy.

There are more than 2,000 airlines operating more than 23,000 aircraft at 3,700 airports around the world.

These airlines serve a total of more than 3.5 billion passengers a year or about 96,000 passengers a day. The commercial aircraft industry has been growing at 5% per year over the past 30 years and is expected to double over the next decade.

This is success in anyone’s book. With all those planes flying about, safety is paramount and has been since the early days of aviation. Consider how many aircraft are flying compared to the number of incidents and you’ll agree that aviation is surely one of the safest methods of getting around in the modern world.

But it wasn’t always like that. Each accident that has taken place since the first heavier than aircraft commercial aviation began after the First World War has led to improved standards.

So in this series we’ll track these accidents from across the one hundred years since the first was logged. That was on July 21st 1919 when a GoodYear blimp the Wingfoot Express, crashed into the Illinois Trust and Savings Building in Chicago. Thirteen people died – three of the five on board the dirigible and ten others on the ground.

The accident led to new regulations eventually about how high aircraft should fly above congested city centres. As a pilot I have to follow these to this day even here in South Africa where Air Law states that no Central Business District may be overflown without consent from the Civil Aviation Authority.