Controlled Pod Into Terrain episode 2: Paninternational 114

Re-upload of episode 2. this one has some very, very sketchy germans and the invention of the before-burner.

as always, Controlled Pod Into Terrain comprises Kyra, the aviation writer who investigates plane crashes, Ariadne, the aviation business expert, and J, who is some kind of engineer.

Episode Transcript

(00:00):
Hello, and welcome to Control Pod into Terrain.

(00:02):
We are a multimedia podcast about air and space mishaps,
putting them in the broader context of how and why things
went wrong.
Just as a note for those of you that were with us in episode
one, we've added some new and defined sections,
which we'll call out as we go along.
So we're just trying things out until we find a good structure
that works for us.
Now, to introduce myself and my co-hosts,

(00:23):
my name is Ariadne, and my pronouns are they and them.
J?
I'm J, International Them of Mystery,
and I do the science stuff and engineering.
And my pronouns are, as I said, they and them.
And I'm Kira Dempsey, better known as Admiral Cloudberg.
My pronouns are she and her.
All right, today we're here to talk about this, which was,

(00:45):
was, at one point, Pant International 112.
This is a completely ridiculous story involving
every kind of fraud, incompetence, tax evasion, bribery,
espionage.
This was a wild ride for us to research,
because we just kept uncovering crazier and crazier things.

(01:06):
But first, we have to do some sort of news thing.
I still love that this is our official news slide.
And it will continue to be until we find something better.
How could you beat this, though?
Yeah.
OK, all right.
Our first news item.

(01:26):
Our first news item.
Yes, Baby Lockheed's first day out.
A, an F-35 pilot ejected from the plane
while landing in South Carolina and did not
know where the plane went.
And in fact, it was missing for quite a long time,
long enough that the military was like,

(01:50):
hey, if you have seen it, please let us know.
Which spawned, obviously, you can make a lot of jokes
about this, including this slide, which
is was the stable diffusion's attempt
to illustrate an F-35 departing with no one in it.
It's a highly advanced, AI-based reconstruction

(02:14):
of the event.
I think what astonishes me most about this
is that the distance between where
the last known position of the aircraft for the pilot
ejected and the debris field, I think,
was something like 50 miles or like 80 kilometers.
Like, it was not a very long distance.
And I just, was it in hover mode?

(02:36):
Did it just kind of gradually drift away from him?
Or did it fly in little circles?
The idea of it being in hover mode, just slowly drifting away,
is really funny.
Just the world's most expensive hot air balloon,
just this stealth diamond kind of just
gradually going wherever the wind pushes it.
Yeah, and obviously, our first joke was, well, of course,

(02:59):
they can't find it, it's stealth.
But then it's like, actually, that may be not even a joke.
Oh, no, no, I think this is 100%.
It presumably flies without ADS-B as well.
It was difficult to track it on radar.
Yeah, well, I mean, the thing is that when you eject,
it intentionally scrambles the IFF system on these planes.

(03:19):
And that's what the transponder is built into.
So it would have had no transponder.
And yeah, it's a stealth plane.
It doesn't make very much of a radar echo.
So yeah, they just couldn't find it.
And I think that's sort of, obviously,
J, I will defer to you when we start to get into the subject,

(03:40):
because you are the RF engineer and expert.
But they're not invisible.
They might return a radar signal in a different direction
you were expecting, or in a different frequency
than you were expecting.
So if you know where to look for it,
you can kind of find these.
And the fact that even we couldn't find it

(04:01):
means that stealth is very impressive.
And the guys in Marriott had a really great job designing this.
Well, I mean, it's possible that actually they couldn't find it,
because it might have been at quite a low altitude.
And with planes at low altitude, you
have to actually do a lot of decluttering on the radar

(04:22):
signal that's coming back.
And one of these stealth planes, because it returns so small
of a radar return, they're coated in material
that absorbs microwaves.
And you have all of that.
It means that this clutter reduction
that you have to do when you're scanning close to the horizon

(04:45):
might just make it impossible to see this thing.
It might just not have been possible for them to see where it was.
Yeah, and the sort of low frequency
adionics that are necessary to find an aircraft like this
don't work well with a look down, shoot down radar.
So an AWACS probably would not have helped.
Yeah, I have no doubt.

(05:06):
I mean, they definitely have radars that can find these things.
But that's usually when it's moving very quickly.
They become much easier to find if they're moving very quickly,
because ground clutter doesn't move quickly.
It's kind of its defining property.
Whereas with a plane that's moving very quickly,

(05:27):
you have a lot of Doppler effects.
So you can actually pick it out from the background that way.
But if this wasn't moving very quickly,
by all accounts, it was coming in for a landing.
So it would have been moving quite slowly.
It just might not have been showing up on any of their instruments.

(05:47):
Well, we choose to believe that it was hovering.
Yeah, obviously.
And I also choose to believe that there were like marines
with like a butterfly net just chasing after it,
but it was just out of reach.
Yeah, I think that's what it tried to illustrate on the right here.
I think that's what stable diffusion was getting at.
Well, this flipper creature over here, I think, has the right idea,

(06:12):
because he is running for his life.
And that is what I would be doing.
So why don't we go to the next slide and next news item?
OK, all right.
So our next news item is, as you could see,
that three sort of queer people on a podcast
were going to have strong opinions about gender reveal parties.
But that is not the subject of this slide.

(06:33):
Yes, as many of you probably heard a couple of weeks back,
there was an accident involving a plane that was attempting to drop pink,
some, I don't know, gender juice on a gender reveal party in Mexico.
But pulling up sharply while dropping the load
puts a lot of stress on the wings and the wing fell off

(06:56):
and the plane crashed and the pilot unfortunately died,
not the first pilot to die during a gender reveal.
We're not even talking about first person to die during gender reveal.
Multiple pilots have died doing these things.
It's really silly.
These are very specially built airplanes.
They can handle high G loads, but it's usually a constant high G load.

(07:16):
Right? So what happened in this appears to be the pilot saw terrain,
tried to go full throttle and haul back on the stick
at the same moment he was releasing.
Now, these things hold 1,200 pounds of fluid.
Right? So that's, you're basically dropping the weight of three
Honda Fireblade motorcycles instantaneously at the same time
you're loading up the wings.

(07:37):
And if these things are corroded or, you know, the maintenance was not done well,
I think it's very easy to see why something like this just kind of folds in half.
Yeah, you're going from the wing being loaded in one direction
to the wing being loaded in the other direction.
And that is inherently a lot of movement for the thing to do.
This kind of thing happens to water bombing planes a lot.

(08:00):
The smoke jumpers have these planes which are fitted out to be tankers.
And, you know, they sometimes do this thing where they actually sort of swoop
down on the surface of a body of water and just skim up a whole bunch of water.
And sometimes they will crash pulling up at the end of that

(08:22):
because the wings have come off.
Well, more likely is when doing a run on an actual fire
and they often try to go downhill during the drop.
And so they drop everything out and they have to pull out at the bottom of the hill.
And that's what gets them.
It's, yeah, I don't know of major wing failures involving purpose-built water bombers

(08:47):
that scoop up directly from lakes.
Yeah, it's always old modified like Lockheed Electros
or like that famous C-130.
And in a lot of these cases, there's pre-existing maintenance issues.
We don't know if there are pre-existing maintenance issues
in this particular gender reveal accident.
There's speculation that there could be,
but there probably don't need to be any pre-existing issues for this to happen.

(09:13):
A bunch of news stories called this thing a jet.
I don't know why.
I mean, you can see the actual propeller at the front there.
This is a PA-25, Piper PA-25,
which is a pretty much purpose-built crop-dusting plane.
They're almost all used for crop-dusting and apparently gender-reviews.
What do you mean you don't need a crop-dusting jet?

(09:36):
Well, you don't need a crop-dusting jet,
but this plane doesn't even have a turbo.
There weren't even any turbo-turbo-turbo.
There are people out there who know so little about planes
that jet just means airplane to them.
Either that or they just found out what a turboprop is
because they saw a Cessna caravan or Pilatus PC-12 and they went,
oh, I thought all those planes had engines,

(09:57):
but it turns out they all have jets too.
I will not inquire further.
I mean, on the other hand, we are talking about the kind of people
who would have a gender reveal party.
People, babies don't have a gender that develops later.
Okay? Just let's get clear on this.
Right, gender, our policy is you can only do a gender reveal

(10:20):
for yourself as an adult.
Okay, all right. Shall we move on?
Yes, next slide, please.
Our third and final news item was, yeah,
so the best way to get a cheap and free Ural Airlines A320
is to just have a field and wait
because what do you know, it happened again

(10:43):
after the 2019 incident or an Ural Airlines A321,
actually in that case, landed in a field outside Moscow
after ingesting birds into both engines.
I wrote an article about that this month.
They did it again this time because they ran out of fuel
very awkwardly.

(11:05):
So allegedly what happened is this flight was approaching
Omsk when it diverted for at the moment unclear reasons
and either just before or during the go around,
they suffered a hydraulic failure that affected their
their braking systems and for some reason,

(11:27):
we don't fully understand the logic on this
and it doesn't make a ton of sense.
The pilots decided that the runway in Omsk wasn't long enough
and they wanted to go to the slightly longer runway
in Novus-Sibirsk
and they thought they would have enough fuel to get there
but because of the hydraulic issue, the landing gear doors
did not close.
The drag from this and the headwind was somehow not properly

(11:51):
factored in and they realized halfway between Omsk and Novus-Sibirsk
that they weren't going to have enough fuel to make it
so they just landed in a field before actually running out of fuel.
They landed with about five minutes of fuel left on the plane.
So we should get a couple things out of the way.
One, this is still a fairly impressive landing.
It's always impressive to not quite dead stick

(12:13):
but to land an aircraft that has some sort of hydraulic failure
in a field.
Is it landing an aircraft anywhere that isn't a runway
and if it's not an aircraft that's designed to land other places besides
runway is impressive.
Not flying into Omsk makes total sense.
I have an X from there, I wouldn't want to fly there either.
Maybe she was there and they decided to turn around.

(12:33):
I don't know, they filled a whole plane with people who wanted to go to Omsk.
I mean...
I guess, yeah, no, I mean, I don't understand it either.
But here's my question, Kira.
So you obviously understand the Russian subcontinent better than a lot of us.
How far are those two places apart?
They are around...

(12:55):
Shoot, I can't remember whether it was 600 kilometers or 600 miles.
I think it's their 600 kilometers apart about...
Okay, so we're talking about hours of flying.
Yeah, yeah, we are.
And there aren't a lot of cities out there.
We're talking about Siberia here.
Novicevirsk is probably the nearest airport to Omsk.
It has a longer runway than Omsk does.

(13:16):
But you know, that is a serious diversion.
You've got to be really sure you have plenty of fuel if you're going to do that.
Especially if your landing gear doors are hanging down there causing all this drag.
And we looked it up so that the Omsk airport has...
It has a main concrete runway that's like...
I think we looked it up, it was 75 or 8,500 feet long.

(13:37):
So it's a full length runway.
They also have a grass strip next to it that is more than a kilometer long.
And clearly these guys knew how to land in grass, so they still was within their grass.
By next to it, we mean off the end of the runway.
They have a 1,000 meter runway overrun area.
But it's like, you know, you could overrun for days.
It was not going to matter.
And doing it there is probably safer than trying to land in a field.

(14:02):
Which, great, the outcome was perfect here.
But you know, what if there was a ditch?
You know, it's not better to land in a field than it is to run slightly off the end of a very long runway.
What if the nose gear collapse?
I mean, you can end up cartwheeling that plane across the field really easily trying to land on a...

(14:22):
I would say, I mean, I think the nose gear collapsing is probably not as much of a risk.
Because if it collapses, the worst that's going to happen is it's going to drop the nose in,
and you're going to rip the nose open and rip the avionics out.
Which is very expensive, but you probably already have a pretty totaled airplane anyway.
Well, you've also totaled the engines.
Yeah, the bigger risk is exactly, is if you're landing in a field, if you hook an engine wrong,

(14:47):
this thing can vary quickly, carwheel.
In the previous Ural Airlines field landing, they did hit a ditch,
and they did land on the engines ripping them off, but actually everyone was fine in that case too.
However, I mean, they got lucky that time as well.
Yeah, these guys just keep rolling 20s. I think that's the problem.

(15:09):
Well, it's like they'll get themselves, they keep getting themselves into these situations.
I don't know, it's so funny that this airline would land two A320s in fields within the space of four years.
And it's like, every time they're like, it's a miracle.
Can we expect any sort of investigation from the Russian government on this one?

(15:32):
Hopefully. I haven't checked recently whether the Interstate Aviation Committee is investigating this.
If not, then, because so the thing in Russia is that the Interstate Aviation Committee,
an international body, investigates major incidents and accidents.
However, if there is not substantial damage to an aircraft, it will typically be investigated by

(15:52):
Rosavjátsia, which is Russia's equivalent of the FAA, and they are completely untrustworthy.
So it, there may be, I don't know whether this will be investigated by the Interstate Aviation Committee,
who are relatively trustworthy, or the Rosavjátsia, in which case,
if it's them, we will probably never really know the truth about this incident.
Realistically, I think there are three aviation experts in this podcast who can look at that and go,

(16:14):
yeah, there's substantial damage to that aircraft.
Apparently, there's really not very much damage to it, other than some dirt that went into the,
went through the thrust reversers and some minor damage to the landing gear. That's what I've heard anyway.
They are apparently planning on flying it out?
They are, and I don't think they've done it yet, but that's the plan.
I mean, the alternative is that Rosavjátsia might take this as an opportunity to put the boot into Airbus,

(16:42):
because, you know, obviously, they're kind of in a bad situation for Airbus service and parts right now.
And they might say, well, you know, this wouldn't have happened if you hadn't sanctioned us to death.
Yeah, this is one of the airplanes that was illegally seized from lessors in other countries,

(17:04):
and re-registered on the Russian register. So this is one of those planes.
They can't take this plane out of the country because it will be seized.
And it's also hard to find parts for these. So whether that has anything to do with the accident,
I don't know if I'll ever know for sure.
We'll get into this in the future, but I think just listeners, slash viewers,

(17:29):
most aircraft are not necessarily fixed by the airline that's painted on the tail.
So you have, in a lot of cases, you have the huge major airlines, right?
So your domestic Big Three, like Southwest, these guys will have their own maintenance crews.
But for a smaller airline, especially maybe even a regional airline or a low-cost airline,
large heavy maintenance is almost always going to be done subcontracted out to one of the bigger airlines.

(17:54):
So Delta has Delta tech ops, which does maintenance for a ton of other airlines and cargo operations
because they have the infrastructure to do a full aircraft tear down, to pull engines off.
So that, I would probably assume that Ural is using Luton's Technic, who kind of dominates that market.
I mean, they have their own, like, Ural Technic thing, but I don't know the extent to which they can do heavy maintenance.

(18:22):
And so obviously they're finding someone to do, well, maybe they're not finding anyone to do this heavy maintenance.
I think there's reports that some Russian airlines are just not doing it.
We're probably presumably...
Basically, before the war, Russian airlines overwhelmingly got their heavy maintenance done in Europe,
especially with Luton's Technic, and now they can't do that anymore,

(18:45):
and it remains to be seen what the consequences of that will be.
And I've flown Aeroflot. I know it's their airline.
I've also flown Aeroflot, yeah.
But I have no idea what their sort of depot-level maintenance capabilities are, especially since these are not...
I don't know either. I just know there are very few.
I don't think there is zero, but that's pretty close to zero,
is the number of heavy maintenance facilities in Russia approved to perform heavy maintenance on Airbus and Boeing aircraft.

(19:15):
And what I will say is, I think there was some sort of expectation when the sanctions first hit,
that pretty soon either they were going to have to stop flying planes completely,
or the planes were going to start falling out of the sky.
And that is not the case.
They will continue to get counterfeit spares through China.
They can get black market spares that are flowing through places like India and the Middle East.

(19:40):
And they can also just kind of forge their own parts, right?
So obviously Russia has not recently, but they have a long history of aviation.
So there are ways of kind of stretching this out,
not to mention that a lot of these aircraft have so many different redundant systems,
that it's going to be a while before the aircraft becomes genuinely unflyable.

(20:01):
Yeah, but it's going to be a slow degradation of safety levels over time.
And I wouldn't be surprised if we saw an accident that was eventually connected to this.
This accident could be connected to these changes, but I don't know if we'll ever know.
No, mostly I think I want the CVR, because I want to know the conversation that went on in this cockpit.

(20:26):
The decision tree was fascinating.
What was behind the decision to go to Novosevirsk?
And what were the fuel calculations that they made?
So the pilots basically claimed that they were halfway between Almsk and Novosevirsk,
when suddenly their fuel levels dropped substantially and continued to drop rapidly until they landed.

(20:47):
But I use that excuse a lot when sometimes you have a bike and sometimes a third of a tank on a bike is actually a quarter of a tank,
and sometimes it's empty and sometimes it's a third.
That excuse works, but that's not a used Honda CBR 600R.
Did you at least try the World War II trick where you tap on the gauge to see if it comes up?

(21:11):
I don't know how much tapping does in a completely fly-by-wire glass cockpit.
Maybe you have to actually go into the avionics bay and tap it there, maybe?
Oh yeah, slap it on top like it's on CRT monitor.
Okay, alright. Anybody got anything else to say on Urult?
I think let's go to the next slide.

(21:32):
Okay.
Which is basically corrections, things we didn't mention or said last episode that were wrong.
Yes, so we're calling this no tap, this is noticed to all podcasters.
Okay, so last episode we said that Alba covers all airline pilots in the US.
It does not.
It covers most of them.
Some of them are non-unions.
Some of them have their own separate unions for their particular airline.

(21:59):
As far as the Alaska Airlines incident at Santa Ana Airport in California,
we did not mention that it is a likely failure of something called a trunnion pin,
which is a part of the landing gear.
This is a known defect in the 737 that these can go and this exact failure mode will happen.
Yeah, and people were speculating about this.

(22:21):
At the time we recorded that episode, we didn't mention it.
And it turns out, based on the NTSB preliminary report, this actually was a trunnion pin failure.
The landing was conducted within the G-Force limits, but the gear collapsed anyway,
and the trunnion pin was found broken.
So yeah, it turns out that is probably what happened.
Yeah, okay.

(22:42):
Oh, go ahead, J.
I was going to say that's a very expensive metal pin.
Yeah, no kidding.
Yeah, I think we, I'm still curious.
Well, I've checked the tail number on that aircraft.
It has not moved from Santa Ana.
So we'll keep an eye on it and we will report back if that aircraft ever flies again.
But I do not think it will.

(23:03):
And the last thing is we had a lot of comments wondering about our audio quality and to that I say,
we've never done this before and we're working on it.
Yeah, we're working on the RSS issue.
So, you know, we can try and get the audio podcast going.
We've got a lot of requests for that.
We do obviously want to remind people we have a lot of slides.
So the visual component is not required, but it does certainly provide the full experience that we're building up.

(23:29):
Yeah.
Okay, so why don't we move to our next section?
Oh, we have a title slide.
What is this? I don't even.
Yes.
So this is, this is what is this? I don't even.
So what are we talking about?
What is what is today going to be about?
So today we're going to be talking about September 6th, 1971.
We are going to be talking about a flight called Pan International 112, which was on a BAC 111.

(23:53):
We've got a lot of weird repeating numbers in this, in this episode.
So our first, very first question.
What is West Germany?
So, Kira, you speak German, right?
No, I speak Russian.
Oh, okay. So you speak East German?
Yeah, I'm pretty sure that's how it works.
Okay. This happened in West Germany, so that's useless, but the good news is I did Duolingo for about three and a half years.

(24:19):
So you speak German, Ari?
Oh, no, God, no, not a word.
You speak German, especially German, but trust German.
Good job. I don't know what that means.
So, all right, next slide.
Okay. So we are going to talk a little bit about European charter operations.
So the reason we're doing this, okay, so, so I'll take a step back listeners.

(24:40):
So this is going to be a little different because the actual accident sequence in this crash is very, very short.
It's also very simple.
There's not a lot to sort of explain during the accident sequence, and that will make sense as we start to do it.
But it does require a lot of context.
So I promise you this is going to go to some wild places, but it will all start to make sense as we start putting the dominoes down on the table.

(25:02):
Okay. So J, can you give us sort of a brief explanation of how the EU Charter system works, why they all go to the same six places, and none of them have noticed how God damn pretty their own countries are.
Okay. So every year there is this period in usually August.
It depends which country you're actually from, but there it's sometimes called the European August rotation where the Germans visit France, the French go to Italy and Spain, the Italians go to Spain as well.

(25:33):
Nobody goes to Switzerland because it's not wintertime.
Some go to Latin and South America.
This is not colonialism, honest, but particularly in the 70s there was a lot of sort of these package holidays that would be offered by travel agencies because those used to be a thing that actually existed.

(25:57):
So you would book your summer vacation with some travel agency, Carlson wagon lit or Thompson was another one.
And it would be one price. It would include chartered flights there and back.
It would include a hotel at your destination. Sometimes it even included a rental car when you got there.

(26:22):
Not though. But yeah, so there were a lot of these little charter airlines flying weird little planes full of weird little people all over Europe.
Weird little people, otherwise known as Europeans.
Yeah, absolutely.
You can see on the slide here that these these trips were definitely not on a hub and spoke model. At that time, there weren't quite so many airports as there are now.

(26:53):
But yeah, there was a lot of towing and throwing and it was mostly on these these charter airlines, which were usually pretty small.
Yeah, so like, you know, you'd call a travel agency number from an advertisement in a magazine and they'd and they'd book everything for you.
You wouldn't even necessarily have no or have to have heard of the airline that is going to be carrying you on these.

(27:18):
And you almost certainly wouldn't.
Yeah, you know, you happen to see the name on the side of the plane as you're boarding is what I mean, you know, but other than that, no.
Can we talk a little about tax cams?
Yeah, next slide please.
Okay, so, Kira, would you like to walk us through the infinite money tax scam that these guys found?
So sometime in the mid 1960s, mid to late 1960s in West Germany, the government wanted to support the local shipbuilding industry by making it easier for people to buy ships.

(27:52):
And so under paragraph 82f of the income tax implementation ordinance, it became possible for a West German corporation to receive a tax write off equal in value to 240% of the depreciation on a newly acquired means of transport.
So the idea was you provide special depreciation and then it became and then you people can invest money into buying ships as basically a way of sheltering their money from taxes.

(28:26):
And this is this is kind of this the way, you know, various things have been funded sort of sort of like this, where investing in a certain type of in of industry or type of project allows that that money to be to go tax free.
But the this was especially lucrative because of the 240% special depreciation.

(28:49):
I mean, normally normally a big asset like this would be depreciated over five years.
So being able to claim 240% of the depreciation actually means that you can claim more tax against the depreciation than you would actually have been paying for the thing in the first place.

(29:10):
So you can, yeah, and you can take that excess revenue and you can just kind of keep reinvesting it into more and more of these scams and it just kind of becomes very easy arbitrage.
Yeah, so basically, in sometime in the late 1960s, the German shipping magnate was began doing this basically said financing a new ship by so they they suit you by selling limited shares in the in the ship itself.

(29:39):
So basically the way that this the way this works is you buy a limited share in the ship and your money goes toward buying the ship. You don't get a percentage of profits.
Instead, you get access to the the 240% special depreciation.
So if you have if you have to pay a lot of taxes, you can spend that you can spend a whole bunch of money buying limited shares in this guy's ships.

(30:10):
And then his accountants will declare that the value of the ship has decreased in value or that the ship has decreased in value.
And enough so that 240% of the depreciation of your share comes out to more than you spent on the share.
And so you have a net saving in terms of taxes not paid.

(30:32):
And yeah, as as I said, it's basically it's basically free money.
It sounds it now it kind of it almost sounds like a Ponzi scheme. That's not right because it's there there is actual, I'm going to say legitimate business technically.
But but what the way it is similar to a Ponzi scheme is that this sort of it constantly requires infusions of cash to keep buying new airliners right because you can only depreciate something down to zero once.

(31:02):
Yeah, basically, you you do this once and then you know that you've depreciated all the depreciation that is going to depreciate.
So then what do you do you buy another means of transport, right?
You finance another one you get a bunch more people with more money than cents.

(31:23):
So we're talking basically highly paid professionals who have a lot of money but not all are not very investment literate are the kinds of people who are getting into these projects.
So let's go to the next slide.
So pan international our airline in this accident was founded using this scheme.

(31:44):
So in fact the pan international was the first of quite a few airlines in the aforementioned vacation charter industry that decided to take advantage of this tax scheme to start airlines with zero starting capital.
So and some of these airlines never even intended to fly passengers all they had to do is finance a plane and claim the tax write off and everybody would make money.

(32:08):
So that's sort of the ideal right because you you if the the ideal business has no employees and no customers and no product right the ideal airline is one in which you never have to sit in the airplane airplane never has to move and you don't have to fix the thing.
Yeah, and obviously this was intended to support the builders of means of transport specifically Hamburg ship builders, but it didn't say that you couldn't do this with an airplane.

(32:35):
So people did it with airplanes and it didn't support anything to do with the German industry because the planes they were buying were not built in Germany.
But this was technically legal under the way that the ordinance was worded.
So technically legal is the best kind of legal.
I think you'll find exactly.
And some of these airlines quote unquote never intended to fly passengers but let's meet our anti heroes of this story.

(33:05):
The chemist Tassilo Trommar who is shown at left and his his business partner, a young businessman named Jürgen Botzenhart, who owned the Pan Europa travel agency, which is a small West German travel agency.
And they wanted to vertically integrate their operations by starting an airline that they could put their own passengers onto.

(33:31):
Right.
And you know, and they saw the tax loophole as a great way to do this with virtually no capital.
So so they decided they wanted to use this this scheme to become an actual airline.
I mean, as ideas go, it's not the worst.
I mean, it, it, it makes some kind of sense, right?
Okay, but here's why it is the worst.

(33:53):
J, because the three of us are aviation experts who have studied this for the most of our lives.
And if I said to you, do you all want to start an airline with me tonight?
What would you say?
Yeah, definitely not.
No, exactly.
You'd say, no, that's a stupid idea.
Yeah, then someone said, if someone came along and said, what if you could get people to finance a plane for you using this tax write off loophole and we wouldn't have to put down any money toward this airplane.

(34:20):
I'm still saying no.
I mean, that's stupid.
I'm sorry.
I mean, one of the, one of the big problems with this is that you're not leasing the plane, you own it.
And so therefore you have to actually figure out how to operate the thing.
You have to have to have all of this stuff.
So that's a really good point.
So I'm going to hop in here and say that, okay.
So for those of you that this sort of don't necessarily know the business side of airlines, there are a couple of different ways that an airline can come into an aircraft.

(34:49):
They can finance or lease it through a company like GE Capital or Udvar Housay's company name, name escape somewhere right now.
And basically this, this is either a, a sort of pay to own eventually or a lease where at the end of the lease that the aircraft becomes the less source problem.

(35:10):
There are wet leases, dry leases.
But the most important thing is that if you finance an aircraft, you are required by the bank to use their approved maintainers, right?
You can, you can hire your own, but they're going to say you have to meet these standards.
They have to have these certifications, right?
You have to, they typically go above and beyond what somebody like the FAA or the modern EUSA will require.

(35:35):
Now, for this scheme to work, the International has to buy these planes outright.
So there are no requirements as for, from a, from a lessor or a financier.
Yeah. Also, they are buying these planes.
They are going to buy their planes brand new because obviously you get the most depreciation out of a plane that is new becoming a plane that is used, right?

(35:58):
So they're buying brand new off the lot from major manufacturers.
Tessie Lothromer and Jürgen Botzenhart founded in 1969 Pan-International and using this, using this scheme,
Botzenhart put down only 8,000 Deutschmarks of his own money, which is not a lot of money toward this plane.
Everything else was financed by selling limited shares.

(36:22):
Incidentally, that's about, that's about $1,000.
So they were the first, but a lot of other airlines quickly followed after this.
I think in total there was something like 30, and these became to be called dentist airlines because they were financed by moderately rich but financially illiterate dentists.
It was basically the idea.

(36:44):
And these airlines were ridiculously unsafe.
So the International Air Transport Association called the people who were founding these airlines, quote,
unscrupulous entrepreneurs whose only goal is to make a quick profit without regard for travelers.
Which is still technically true.
I think that's libelous. I think I might have to edit that out.

(37:07):
Okay.
So Pan-International was one of the first and as it turned out, one of the worst.
They quickly became known as Panic International and we're going to learn a little bit about why in just a moment.
Basically, the way Pan-International worked is they got an exclusive contract with the travel agency belonging to former Olympic equestrian, Joseph Neckerman,

(37:31):
which left them contractually obligated to undercut the prices offered by Condor Fluctinst by 10%.
So they were, it was literally whatever Condor charges to take chartered travelers somewhere, Pan-International was required to do it for 10% less money.

(37:55):
So obviously they were operating on a shoestring budget.
And then to make matters worse, at the end of 1970, the tax loophole was closed.
So after, keep that in mind, that after that it was specifically illegal to claim special depreciation on a holiday charter jet.
They literally put wording into the law that said these planes are excluded because of these guys.

(38:23):
So let's go to the next slide.
We have a timeline of events in the brief life of Pan-International.
So we began with an in May 1969, which is when the airline was being set up.
And so Traumer and Watson Hart at this point began selling seats on aircraft chartered from other airlines because they didn't have their own air operator certificate yet.

(38:49):
So they couldn't, they could not yet fly the plane that they had just financed, but that wasn't going to stop them.
In the meantime, in order to get an air operator certificate, they are getting reviewed by the Luftfahrt Bundesamt or the Federal Aviation Office, or LBA as I'm going to call them.
And so on June 30th, 1969, the LBA finds that Pan-International doesn't have a single pilot qualified to act as pilot in command.

(39:17):
And you would think that this is kind of disqualifying.
But the very next day on July 1st, 1969, the Ministry of Transport issued them an air operator certificate.
They began flying to various holiday destinations, especially like lesser known holiday destinations, including in Africa.

(39:38):
So December 1969, the LBA inspects Pan-International and finds that their flights to Africa are over the maximum takeoff weight.
The crews haven't been instructed on safety equipment, the flight operations manual is sloppy, and this report says it would be inadvisable to approve fleet expansions for this airline.

(39:59):
The press gets wind of this, and by January 1970, the Ministry of Transport becomes concerned about press coverage of Pan-International damaging the reputation of the industry.
So they ask the LBA to draw up a report on its plans for surveilling this airline.
In February 1970, the LBA issues its report, which says that the airline, quote, gives cause for concern and possesses defects that pose, quote, a danger to traffic safety.

(40:26):
So, but nothing, nothing happens.
So in April 1970, the Ministry of Transport orders the LBA to conduct a special inspection to Pan-International again.
Because things are still bad, but one day after that, the same Ministry of Transport approves Pan-International to acquire a second BAC-111.

(40:48):
So again, the first plane that they purchased with this was a BAC-111.
We're going to talk about that plane in detail later.
But so now they have a second one.
And on April 29, 1970, the Airlines Director of Flight Operations tells the LBA that, quote, under the current circumstances, we are unable to maintain safe flight operations.

(41:09):
And so obviously this is the end.
No, I'm just kidding. Nothing happened.
So on May 15, 1970, the Ministry of Transport approved their acquisition of a third BAC-111.
And sometime in summer 1970, the Director of Flight Operations was dismissed.
So we don't know that it was because he said they were unable to maintain safe flight operations, but that's kind of the implication.

(41:32):
During the summer of 1970, things continue to go south.
On July 11, the Deputy Director of Flight Operations and the Chief Pilot wrote to management that their pilots are unqualified on African routes.
They have insufficient knowledge of and skills.
Their flights to Djibouti, I don't know why they're flying to Djibouti, but they are, are too long.

(41:55):
The planes are landing with less than minimum fuel.
And they wrote, quote, do the limited partners really know what happens to their money?
Do we have to wait until something happens?
Let's put a pin in that one.
Of course, the limited partners don't care because this is all just a tax write-off for them, right?
Yeah, it is for now.

(42:16):
Obviously they get they end up being left-hank holding the bag in the end because the loophole got closed.
But for now, it's they don't care.
So anyway, August 14, 1970, the LBA inspectors write to the Ministry of Transport to state that the airline's pilot training was completely inadequate.
And so the ministry suspends the certificates of 17 Pan-International pilots.

(42:41):
But also in August 1970, Pan-International applies to add Boeing 707s to its fleet for long-range flights and gets this approved by saying pinky promising that they will fix the problems.
Obviously that doesn't happen.
In November 1970, an LBA inspector found that the airline's Düsseldorf maintenance facility was, quote, completely inadequate for the maintenance of commercial aircraft.

(43:11):
We will be revisiting this facility later. Keep that in mind.
And the inspector wrote a letter threatening that Pan-International would be shut down.
But the LBA director told him not to send it because that was not the position of the agency.
So Pan-International continues flying.
And in January 1971, the LBA finds that Pan-International has again failed to carry out any corrective actions.

(43:37):
An inspector finds that quote, the airline, quote, lacked the prerequisites for orderly and safe flight operations.
And this finding is not transmitted to the Ministry of Transport. They don't want to hear it.
And in fact, in February 1971, the Ministry of Transport approved the acquisition of a fourth BAC-111.
And in March 1971, they approved two Boeing 707s.

(44:01):
And around that same time, possibly as a condition of approving the 707s, they hired the former LBA examiner, Joachim Kunal, as director of flight operations.
So Kunal gets in there and he immediately finds this airline is a mess.
So he writes a letter to the chief pilot complaining of various problems.

(44:24):
He says a 707 had to abort after a mechanical lock was left on the fuel control linkage.
A 707 lost two engines because of uncleaned fuel filters.
A literal scrap metal was being installed on aircraft, among other problems.
That was on June 20, 1971. And on July 6, 1971, Kunal is suspended from his position without notice.

(44:48):
Which is clearly retaliatory. This is less than two, this is two weeks later.
So the very next day, July 7, Kunal goes to the Ministry of Transport with his concerns and urges the Ministry to immediately shut down Pan-International.
But the Ministry of Transport is like, no, we're going to order more inspections.

(45:11):
We need to learn more before we just believe this guy's allegations, right?
So they order another inspection.
Nothing comes of that except that the LBA demands that the airline fill the post of Director of Flight Operations by either August 1 or 15.

(45:34):
Sources don't totally agree on that date.
But sometime in August they were supposed to have hired a new Director of Flight Operations.
But they just didn't. They just ignored this totally and never hired another Director of Flight Operations.
And September rolls around and when we're going to pick up the story of this accident, they still do not have a Director of Flight Operations.

(46:00):
Which obviously leads us to ask the question, why?
Why?
So next slide, yes. Okay, we have a picture of a man. Tell me who this is.
Our big question here is how does this airline keep flying? How is this possible? And you're looking at the answer.
Traumer is bribing his personal friend, the SPD Parliamentary Secretary, Carl Wienand.

(46:25):
So this guy is basically the equivalent of the chief whip for the Social Democratic Party of West Germany.
Yeah, yeah. So they had paid him 162,500 Deutschmarks in 12,500 Deutschmark monthly instalments for...
I need to do scare quotes here. Consulting. Wienand initially tried to claim that this was actually a repayment of a personal loan,

(46:53):
but he eventually admitted that no, it was for a consulting.
The Minister of Transport testified that Wienand had told him that he would approve a personnel increase for the LBA if Pan International was granted landing rights in Brazil.
Yeah, so this was the whole thing. The Pan International wanted to contract with a company called Hotel Plan to do charter flights to Brazil,

(47:19):
and they ran into issues with the...
The authorities did not think that their Director of Flight Operations was experienced enough to handle such an operation,
because their Director of Flight Operations at that time was like a ticket agent. That was his qualification.
In comes Carl Wienand to resolve the mess, right? So Tassilo Trommer allegedly told, or was it...

(47:44):
It may have been Watson Hart told Hotel Plan that it was like, oh yeah, this will be resolved, because I've got my man Wienand on it.
The way he decided to resolve this issue was promising to bribe the Minister of Transport.
Just fantastic. And then Wienand allegedly paid off a whistleblower who had threatened to expose these flight...

(48:05):
these massive flight safety problems in the air charter industry.
And I should point out that Pan International was far from the only company that was doing this.
There were many others that were very heavily under-regulated.
The difference in this case is that Wienand actually paid off this whistleblower allegedly using money that he'd gotten from Trommer.

(48:33):
Yes.
Yes. And so then we get to this. So the LBA had issued this ultimatum to hire a new Director of Flight Operations, right?
So whatever happened to that? The ultimatum didn't turn out to be very ultimatomy, because they kept flying without one,
long after the proposed deadline. So allegedly what happened is when Wienand got wind that his friend's airline was going to be shut down,

(49:00):
he came in and said, no, you're not going to do it, and that's why they kept flying past the deadline.
We don't technically have a paper trail that proves this, but people testified that this is what happened.
I see no reason not to believe it. I mean, looking at this guy's history,
even outside of this affair, he was absolutely, fabulously corrupt.

(49:23):
The only thing he loved more than himself was money.
If corruption was chess, this guy would be a grandmaster.
And I don't mean like a small grandmaster.
I mean the kind that beats IBM's computers at chess or corruption, rather.
So here's the thing, Vera, is West Germany at this point was only a couple of decades old as a country, right?

(49:49):
The sort of very concept of Germany is still relatively new.
They're trying to build a country, build a government. They're trying to hold a country together with both hands.
At the same time, they have three different Allied powers that are all sort of constantly vying for some sort of backhanded control.
There was a lot of ways for guys like Vinand to get themselves another house in the Baltic.

(50:12):
And there's also sort of these weird loopholes where a lot of times he did it legally because at a certain level,
legitimate business becomes totally indistinguishable from organized crime.
Yeah, and actually what they got him for with being bribed by Pan-International was not that he was bribed,
it's that he didn't pay taxes on the bribes, literally.

(50:34):
Oh, yeah, it's the Al Capone method.
Yeah, it's the Al Capone thing.
The other thing is that because West Germany was such a new state, the administrative state hadn't really gotten itself set up yet.
A lot of their regulations were very porous.
And as a consequence, there weren't really these strong institutions that in a more developed state might have picked this up sooner than it did.

(51:01):
Yeah, so apparently the Pan-International affair, as it was known at the time, was one of the first big publicly known corruption events involving Vinand.
But there were a lot of others.
He doesn't have an English Wikipedia page, but he does have one in German,
and it's like a long list of corruption affairs that he was involved in.
At one point he was involved in a...

(51:25):
Which one of you was it who knows about the industrial facility?
Oh, yeah.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So, okay, so he was supposed to be involved in some way in the approval of an incinerator plant, a garbage incinerator plant.
And it turned out that he actually, through his political party, the SPD, he took more than two million Deutschmarks in bribes,

(51:57):
relating to the construction and operation and approval of this one incinerator plant.
He got caught doing this in about 1999.
He actually got caught a lot.
I mean, obviously we really only know about the things where he did get caught.
Yeah.
And including...
He got caught repeatedly, and he just grifted harder.

(52:20):
I mean, you really have to admire that kind of commitment to the bit.
But...
I was going to say you have to hand it to him, but in fact we don't have to hand it to him.
We do not have to.
Yeah, it turns out you do not have to hand it to Carl Vinand.
Because who did it turn out was also paying Erwinand?
Oh, yeah, the East German government.
They had paid him a million Deutschmarks to spy for them.

(52:44):
He got sentenced to prison but didn't serve any time.
I don't even know.
Yeah, this only came out after unification.
It was like, wow, this dude was a spy the whole time.
Nobody is shocked that he decided to do this for money.
I mean, he was a spy for money.

(53:06):
Because as I said, the only thing he loved more than himself was money.
You could pay him to do anything.
It's not clear that he ever actually did any spying, but it is very clear that he did take the million Deutschmarks.
Yes.
So, you know, there's that.
Okay, anything else on Carl Vinand?
Yeah, so what you really need to know is Pan-International stayed in business by paying this guy.

(53:33):
That is known.
That is a fact.
Yeah, this one specific guy.
We know this is how they stayed in business.
Yeah, so this is the guy who is taking all the red flags and shoving them in a drawer.
Yeah, so next slide.
Next section.
Our next section is flying to the side of the crash.
So, J, you kind of come up with the name of this section.
So, can you give us a rundown on what this phrase means?

(53:55):
Not in this particular case exactly, but in many of these air crashes that we're interested in,
flying to the scene of the crash is about the confluence of circumstances that led us to the point where the accident could actually happen.
If any of you have heard about normal accident theory, Charles Perot's thing,

(54:16):
you know that in these systems there are many layers of safety, multiple checks at every level,
all of which have to fail for something terrible to happen.
And this section is about how we get here from there, but in this case, not so much.
The number of checks that had to fail was not very many because as we just established,

(54:40):
this airline's relationship to safety was virtually non-existent.
Indeed.
Okay, so let's talk about the 111.
This is the wrong 111, isn't it?
This is not the right.
Yeah, this is definitely the wrong 111.
Okay, well, this is my favorite plane. So can we talk about this one instead?
No.
I'm afraid not.
Okay, let's talk about this dumpy little heap.

(55:02):
Yeah, here we go. Here's the correct slide.
Okay, so this is Delta Alpha Lima, Alfa Romeo.
This is the specific aircraft that was involved in the incident we're going to be talking about today.
So the BAC 111 is, like I said, it's a weird, dumpy little airline.
It's very low to the ground because it was designed to be loaded straight from the tarmac.

(55:23):
This is not a glamorous aircraft that's going to be taking you to far-flung regions of the world.
You said we're a dumpy little airline.
A dumpy little aircraft.
Airliner, yeah.
Yeah, it's a dumpy little airline.
It's all by British Aerospace Corporation. It's a British aircraft corporation, sorry.
Yes.
It carries about 100 passengers, has two rear-mounted engines and a T-tail.

(55:46):
It kind of looks like a DC-9, but slightly stupider.
Yeah, it's also significantly less powerful than the DC-9, and that will become relevant very soon.
Yeah, we're going to get into that.
This in particular is actually the 500 series, which will also become relevant.
Yeah, so these aircraft, despite what you might think at the end of this episode,

(56:10):
these actually turned out to be fairly sturdy, fairly reliable aircraft.
Northrop Grumman was still using two of these as test-bed aircraft,
basically where they mount fighter jet noses to the front and then test the avionics until 2019.
So at that point, these aircraft were from the early 60s.
So these ended up being tough little birds if you knew how to maintain them right.

(56:34):
Yeah, they needed careful operation, really.
For our audio-only listeners, what is on screen is a picture of a B-52 and a Aluncia rally car.
Yeah, it's a Group B rally car.
You know, the ones they banned because they were too fast.
And they also kept killing people.

(56:55):
J, what do these two things have in common?
Is it a body count?
Nope, not that one.
They both really need new engines.
Not quite.
Both of them have done enormous amounts of damage to the UK countryside.
Nope, the other thing.
They both trail black smoke when set to full power.
No, the other thing.
Oh, they both use water injection.
Yes, that's it.
Yes, water injection.

(57:17):
Okay, now what the fuck is that?
Okay, so water injection is when you've got air being compressed very heavily,
like in your turbocharged engine or in your turbojet that the B-52 here has 8 of for some reason.
It gets hot because of boils gas laws and if you want to keep doing this and not melt the turbine wheel,

(57:43):
then you need to actually cool it down.
So you inject water and that boosts your mass flow rate and it cools the incoming charge
because water has this enormous specific heat capacity.
So basically, I think we could say water injection.
So it's a little confusing and J, you will get into it, I think when we get into the chemistry side.

(58:04):
Yeah, a little bit more.
People think about you spray water on a fire and put the fire out and that is true
because what water does is it removes heat energy from the fire.
But I will say the inside of a jet turbine, especially at full throttle,
is quite a bit hotter than your stove.
One would hope.

(58:25):
So water injected is going to behave very differently than it would that you would normally be used to.
So basically what we're talking about is plain NOS.
This is as brought to us by Sir Vincent of Dieselberg.
Vin Diesel, yeah.
Next slide.
J, would you like to talk about some chemistry?
Oh, I get to use the word stoichiometry.

(58:47):
Okay, so imagine all of these molecules here. These are your basic hydrocarbons and jet fuel,
just like gasoline is a mixture of all of these except imagine all of these, but with between nine and 16 carbon atoms.
Jet fuel is mostly N-alkanes, which is the straight wiggly one on the left hand side there.

(59:14):
You get your energy from turning those hydrogens into water and those carbons into carbon dioxide,
and you do this by adding oxygen, which is conveniently available all around us, or at least right now.
A jet engine actually controls how much heat it makes inside of its engine

(59:35):
because an engine, any kind of engine really is a heat engine. It works on heat.
A jet engine controls how much heat it's making, and so therefore how much power it's making by injecting more or less fuel.
Car engines and piston reciprocating engines that you may be used to in light plane applications

(01:00:00):
actually work with a throttle that controls how much air can go into the engine,
and you can see a throttle body at the top of this slide here.
But you can't really do that with jet engines because the throttle body would have to be as big as the jet engine,
which is kind of a problem.
And so as a consequence, the way they work is by injecting more or less fuel.

(01:00:26):
So jet engines always work very, very lean, very heavy on air and very light on fuel.
It's fuel that you meter to control how fast this engine runs and how hot it gets.
And this is actually really important, as we will see very shortly.
So water is this relatively light species. It's an oxygen atom and two hydrogen atoms, which is very light.

(01:00:52):
And because it's very light, it means that at a given temperature it has a very high velocity,
which means it exerts a lot of pressure. As a consequence, if you can increase the amount of water that's in the gas in your combustor,
then you will get actually more pressure and therefore more work out of your turbine at the same temperature.

(01:01:19):
So by injecting water, you cool down the mixture so you can add more fuel without cooking the turbine.
But also, the water boiling in the combustor increases mass flow rate because water expands 1700 times when it turns into steam.
And moreover, by shifting the balance of molecules from being sort of some CO2 and some water into quite a lot of water and some CO2,

(01:01:49):
the water is actually lighter and so therefore you get more work, more mechanical work out of the same temperature,
the same thermodynamic temperature. And that means that you can actually get more power out of your jet engines.
Just a little bit, but it is more power.

(01:02:10):
Yes, next slide. Okay, yes.
Okay.
Let me talk about the Rolls-Royce spay.
Okay, okay. We're going to say a number of bad things about the Rolls-Royce spay.
It's actually a great engine. It's a really reliable low bypass turbofan engine.
It's been used...

(01:02:31):
We're going to shit talk a very specific off-shoot, a very specific model of the spay.
Okay, so yes, we are going to shit talk a specific model of the spay,
which is actually not the model of the spay that you can see here on the screen.
This is actually the Model 230, which is the one that was fitted to the Royal Navy's version of the F4,

(01:02:56):
which is a fine fighter jet.
The sort of pedals here at the back for the reheat, I think, are the dead giveaway.
Yeah, this one is fitted with an afterburner.
So jet engines, especially ones like this, which are quite old, run very close to their limits.

(01:03:19):
You can see in this table here that this is actually a table from the document you can see on the top right here.
We actually found the operating instructions for the Rolls-Royce spay Model 511,
which was used in the Model 400 BAC 111, which is not quite the same for reasons that we'll go into a bit more shortly.

(01:03:46):
And you can...
We have sort of a thermodynamic coffin corner, I want to point out,
which is that the difference between expected temperature at takeoff and over temperature,
where I assume the metal actually starts to become plastic, is 10 degrees.
Yeah, it's 10 degrees C, which is...
I mean, that's room temperature differences, right?

(01:04:10):
It has to be very, very tightly controlled,
especially when you're at this max takeoff thrust, where you are actually right up to that edge.
Normally at cruise, the turbine gas temperature, which is what TGT stands for, was 560 degrees.

(01:04:33):
So it's really not that far off.
That's only 30 degrees of difference between your cruising just fine and you've melted your engine.
So the BAC 111 500 was fitted with water injection because it was a stretched upgrade of an already underpowered plane.
I think, Ari, you found that...

(01:04:55):
Yeah, well, I found that...
So I compared the thrust produced by the BAC 111 500 at its two Rolls-Royce SPAE engines versus the DC9 at its JT8Ds.
So a comparable DC9 in terms of passenger capacity has 20% more thrust than the BAC 111 500.

(01:05:21):
So this plane is underpowered.
It was underpowered in the base model, and then when they decided to stretch it to the Dash 500 model, it became even more underpowered.
And it was stretched what, 13 or 14 feet?
Yeah, it was a pretty good stretch.

(01:05:42):
It was a big stretch.
It was going from about 80 passengers to about 112.
The maximum takeoff weight went from 78,500 pounds to 104,500 pounds, which is what, 26,000 pounds?
Yeah.
A little bit less than 13 tons?

(01:06:04):
Wow.
They upgraded the engines. They did upgrade the engines from 11,400 pounds of thrust to a dry takeoff thrust of 12,000.
A slight upgrade?
Yeah, it was a very slight upgrade, but it wouldn't have given them acceptable climb performance, and it definitely wouldn't have given them acceptable engine outclimb performance.

(01:06:33):
It would have been impossible.
So they added an extra feature.
They added this water injection system, which increased the maximum takeoff thrust, which you could maintain actually for less than the five minutes, it says here, to 12,550 pounds.

(01:06:56):
And it was still really marginal. The climb rate with two good engines dropped to only 2,200 feet per minute, which is, that's barely certifiable.
But this is not a spay with injection. This is one from an F4, which is a much better plane.
With the reheat turned on, it makes a little over 20,000 pounds of thrust.

(01:07:22):
Interestingly, if they had actually fitted this one to the BAC-111, there would be two airliners that have afterburners, and both of them would be made by BAC.
Yeah, and the BAC-111 would have just been a better plane.
It would.
Yeah, they needed an afterburner.

(01:07:44):
Like listeners, I think if you're picturing an aircraft able to stand on its tail like an F-15 can, this is not going to give it the ability to do top gun maverick shit.
This would have made it barely acceptable as a tail mounted airliner.
Okay, let's go on to the next slide.
So water injection was added to the BAC-111-500 series because it was not powerful enough to carry the stretched version of the plane into the air without it.

(01:08:14):
And as far as we can tell, this was like a slap-dash job that was put on it at the last minute by BAC.
Yeah, listeners, so we did pretty extensive research. As you saw, J was able to acquire an original user manual for one of these things. We reached out to museums that still have surviving copies of this aircraft to see.

(01:08:37):
We cannot find documentation on this system anywhere.
We did extensive research and nobody seems to have diagrams or checklists or maintenance procedures.
So it looks like this very well. This was just sort of a hacked together system, presumably between Rolls-Royce and BAC.
Yeah, we were completely unable to find any documentation of any Rolls-Royce spay that was fitted with this.

(01:09:05):
And, you know, okay, so some of that is because this is an old engine and, you know, a lot of those records haven't been digitized, but these engines and their descendants are still in use today.
They are literally everywhere, mostly in applications where it doesn't matter how loud they are because it is a very low bypass turbofan engine.

(01:09:28):
So it sounds like ripping silk. It's really, really loud and obtrusive.
It's made a decent career for itself, actually, believe it or not, as a marine engine.
Yeah, yeah, they're actually very good engines. And you can see here, actually, this is a simplified diagram of a similar engine.

(01:09:52):
There's two spools. It's a two spool engine so the high pressure turbine runs the high pressure compressor and the low pressure turbine runs the fan.
Those two things are actually running at different speeds and they can vary independently, which allows the blades on the high pressure compressor to be more efficient at the high pressure regime that they're operating in.

(01:10:19):
If you can see the label there that says low pressure shaft and the arrow that is pointing inwards, that is actually approximately the spot at which the water is apparently injected.
But again, we can't find any information about this. We've really tried really hard and we could not find any Rolls-Royce documentation.

(01:10:43):
Or even anyone saying that these planes had this system because...
We do know that these planes did have water injection because I was digging around in like P-Proon forum posts from 2001 and there were former BAC-111 pilots in there talking about the water injection system.
But that's about as far as the documentation goes.

(01:11:08):
Yeah, I actually spent some time looking for BAC-111 manuals, not necessarily BAC-111 SPA operating manuals, but the manuals that the airlines would have used.
And I actually couldn't find any that were digitized. I did try, but we can't find any official documentation that explains how the pilots were supposed to use this system

(01:11:34):
or how the maintenance crews were supposed to maintain it more to the point.
Well, we don't know how it was supposed to happen, but if we go to the next slide, we will find out how it did happen.
Yes, we have to talk about the barrels.
So I'm going to drop a date. It is currently September 5th, 1971, one day before the accident.

(01:11:57):
So we are at the Dusseldorf maintenance facility belonging to Pan International, and one of Pan International's Boeing 707s is in for maintenance on what I think is a fuel pump.
And to do this, they have to drain all of the fuel out of the fuel tanks.
Shift maintenance leader Eric Duvenhorst is on duty, and he has to answer the question, where are we going to put the fuel that we're taking out of the Boeing 707?

(01:12:27):
So he sent someone into the storage area at the facility, which is full of random crap, and they find some plastic 60 liters.
Was it 60 liters?
Yeah, 60 liter barrels.
Yeah, some plastic 60 liter barrels, which are completely unlabeled. These are not marked in any way.

(01:12:54):
And he thinks, those will be perfect.
So they drain the fuel out of the 707, so they can defuel using a defueling system up to a point.
You know, after pulling everything out that way, there's still about 100 liters of fuel left in the bottom of the tank that's unusable and just in there permanently.

(01:13:18):
And you have to take that out by opening the sump drain, and so they were draining that out of the tank into these barrels.
And nobody knew what these barrels were for. They were just there, so they used them.
Well, people did know why they were there.
Yeah, but these people didn't.
You see, Pan International 707s didn't have water injection. Some 707s did, but the ones that Pan International did not have water injection.

(01:13:45):
So they were unaware that there was this use for the barrels.
Yeah, so these were 707 maintenance guys. They didn't know anything about water injection.
They didn't know that what Pan International used these barrels for was to store demineralized water for the water injected BAC111s.
And the reason they did this is because demineralized water wasn't available on demand at all airports.

(01:14:10):
So they had to tanker it to the airports where it was needed on board the plane in these barrels stored in the cargo hold.
Yeah, but the Pan International 707 maintenance crew did not know this.
And so they filled these barrels with kerosene jet fuel that they had drained out of the 707.

(01:14:33):
It would have been trivial to label these barrels.
Literally, Sharpies were invented in 1964, so it was the better technology to prevent this.
I mean, also, apparently, some guy thought that kerosene and water smelled the same.
So yes, so that is, we've got a couple of instances of people not being able to tell.

(01:14:54):
So we have these barrels have been filled with fuel, and now there's a shift change, and the next shift supervisor, Dieter Brockerhoff, shows up at the scene.
And Eric Duvenhorst is still there because he's working past his shift.
And now both of these guys, and sometime while both of these guys were there, someone told the maintenance crew to take these barrels and full of kerosene and put them back where they found them.

(01:15:23):
And we don't know who, we don't know which supervisor did this because they both said the other was responsible for that, for recent, for obvious reasons.
What we do know is that these barrels were taken back to the storage facility and put with all of the empty barrels.
So now fast forward to the next day, September 6, 1971, and an order comes down to fill five of the 60 liter barrels with demineralized water to carry on board Delta Alpha Lima Alpha Romeo in order to supply the water injection system on a later takeoff that day that was expected to be near the maximum takeoff weight.

(01:16:08):
So the company tells them a maintenance guy burnt seafert to go get five barrels of demineralized water.
So he goes to the storage facility and he gets, he's picking up his five barrels and he goes, wow, you know, two of these barrels already have water in them.

(01:16:31):
Convenient.
And this is, this is where, yeah, where what you were saying is that this guy apparently thinks kerosene and water smell the same.
And we don't really know why he didn't notice this.
But, but one of these barrels is full to the brim with 60 liters of kerosene and the other in theory has 40 liters of kerosene in it.

(01:16:52):
It's a little bit, it's a little bit unclear exactly, you know, what the distribution was.
But what we do know is that he thought these barrels had water.
He did not check for whatever reason he did not sense an overwhelming smell of kerosene when he looked at these barrels.
And he took, he took, so he took all of the barrels to the demineralized water tap and he filled the, and he filled the remainder, including the one that was presumably the one that was partially full of kerosene.

(01:17:23):
He added, added demineralized water to those and then loaded them into the cargo hold of Delta Alpha Lima, Alpha Romeo.
Job done.
Quality, quality workmanship. Absolutely.
Yeah, so I should also, I should note that this water was necessary that they would, they would have had to offload passengers on that later flight, which we are going to get to if they did not have water injection.

(01:17:52):
But they also, they ordered him to fill up 300 liters of water, but that was the wrong amount.
According to calculations later, they actually needed 386 liters for takeoff.
And they were just like, we're going to do 300 liters instead. And seemingly nobody questioned this.

(01:18:14):
So I guess the red flags are building here. So later, later that day with the Delta Alpha Lima Alpha Romeo flies around a few cities in Germany and Spain on that morning and early afternoon before arriving in Hamburg.
And this is the takeoff where they are going to need water injection because they have a full load of passengers headed to Malaga on the coast of Spain.

(01:18:45):
And so they are parked on the apron preparing the plane for takeoff.
Before the flight, they take out the barrels of demineralized water and the third pilot, I'm going to, I'm going to talk about all the pilots later, but the third pilot who is an observer pilot was, was outside the plane pumping the quote unquote

(01:19:09):
demineralized water into the water injection tank. And a ramp guy comes over and allegedly says, Hey, this really smells like fuel.
And the third pilot allegedly replied, Everything stinks of fuel here. And he kept pumping.
It was completely so. So what has happened now is that they have pumped 200 liters of water and 100 liters of kerosene into the water injection system.

(01:19:42):
So, so at some point here, the water injection system is going to inject kerosene instead.
And so injecting kerosene directly into an engine is actually very useful. This is this is what you would call a reheat or an afterburner. This this one's working fine.
Yeah, but the Rolls Royce space is not designed to have pre heat, aka, I guess a before burner. So this is pioneering engine research they're doing here.

(01:20:09):
Oh, yeah.
On this dumpy little BAC 111.
Okay, so let's talk about this.
Let's talk about the pie in the pioneering engine research that is about to be done.
Right. So as you probably know, kerosene being a form of oil is less dense than water. And because gravity is is helpful, the water injection pump intake in the for the

(01:20:36):
demineralized water tank is at the bottom of the tank. So after they pump all of in all of the kerosene and water mixture, it separates out with the water on the bottom and the kerosene on top, so that the water will be drawn in first and then the kerosene.
So so you basically what we've done is we've we've sort of lit a time bomb right like a real acme time bomb with a big long fuse.

(01:20:59):
If we were going to do a clickbait title for this podcast, it would be something about a time bomb, I'm sure for for this particular incident.
Yeah, so.
And the other thing is, is what one of the things we discovered in sort of our research is that there did not seem to be any sort of controller feedback mechanism for the tank because obviously putting fuel in the in the water tank was not a feel your

(01:21:22):
mode anybody had anticipated whatever happened.
So there wasn't. Yeah, so the system, the system, it the only indication it would give to the crew is, okay, how much substance is in the tank, it can't tell whether that substance is actually water.
The other thing is so so basically they have they have no way of knowing that this time bomb is there.
And secondly, because the water is going to be injected first, and there's enough water in there to get the plane off the ground that they are not going to discover that this has happened until the plane is already in the air.

(01:21:56):
This would have gone much better if this had only been fuel in the tank.
Yeah, because the engines would have melted, you know, would have melted down as soon as they advanced the thrust levers for take off, right, and they would have just stopped on the runway.
Yeah, shooting shooting flaming parts of your engine out the back will get towers attention.
That's true. Oh, and incidentally, the engines didn't have any way of knowing that this was happening, because obviously it would appear that it was never designed to have this system in the first place.

(01:22:22):
So, you know, it had no sort of checks and balances on what was actually getting injected.
When we did our research, we found that in the report, they they sort of made a guess that had they had the additional 68 liters of water, bringing them up to the 368 necessary or 386.

(01:22:43):
Yeah, 3S.
Sorry, 386.
The accident would not have happened until a few seconds later, and most importantly, a few hundred feet higher than it actually did.
And you'll see very quickly why that why that is a very, very serious problem.
Let's meet the crew of Pan International Flight 112 to Malaga.
So in command, we have Captain, we have Captain Reinhold Hülse, who is he has about 4000 flight hours.

(01:23:13):
So that's that was not a lot for a captain in 1971.
But there was a there was a big shortage of well, panic.
Well, Pan International had recently ditched 17 of its pilots, if you recall, and was kind of scrounging around to find anyone who was qualified, especially because they had just read West Germany had just recently raised the qualification level required to be an airline pilot.

(01:23:38):
So he so he was not, I mean, he was he was decently experienced, but again, pretty low for a captain in 1971.
And the first officer was Elizabeth Friska, who is notable for being the first woman to fly a passenger jet in West Germany.
At this time, she was still very new to aviation.

(01:24:01):
She had about 1000 total flying hours, but she only had 85 hours on the BAC 111, which she was just training up on.
She was still flying under the supervision of an observer pilot, who was Manfred Rode, who was also a first officer at Pan International, and he was the guy who was pumping in the the pumping in the alleged water, who and said everything stinks of kerosene here.

(01:24:29):
Now, he had only 975 total flight hours, but because he had 487 hours on the BAC 111, that was considered enough to supervise the probationary first officer, Elizabeth Friska.
And I got to say, I've researched a lot of accidents, and I've seen a lot of different, I've read a lot about a lot of different pilots.

(01:24:50):
I have never seen a supervisory pilot with that few flight hours.
Yeah, this is just coincidentally our second accident in a row that needed a third person and a cockpit.
So that's not relevant to the story, it's just interesting that it happened twice in a row.
Yeah, actually, this flight crew did nothing wrong. I mean, apart from not loading enough water.

(01:25:14):
Yeah, we're barely going to talk about them, because there was nothing they could do.
But yeah, so they had a completely full load of 115 passengers on board and six crew including the three pilots, three flight attendants.
So that's a total of 121 people on board who are about to take part in the pioneering before-burner test.

(01:25:40):
I feel awful for laughing at that, really.
Yeah, but okay, so basically, the permissible takeoff weight without this very full load of passengers without water injection would have been 45,800 kilograms.
But they actually weighed 46,553 kilograms, so they had to use water injection in order to achieve the desired climb performance.

(01:26:13):
They arm the water injection system, taxi to the runway, and are cleared for takeoff.
At which point, the plane's fate has already been sealed.
Okay, let's take this to our next section. Let's talk about the actual accident sequence, which did not take...
So listeners, we will be discussing the sequence of events in this accident for probably ten times longer than it actually took.

(01:26:36):
It was less than a minute and a half.
Yeah, I think it was 100 seconds or something from ignition to impact.
The entire flight is going to last 91 seconds from takeoff to touchdown.
Yeah, so it's obviously going to take us a lot longer than that to tell this story.
They receive takeoff clearance, they advance the thrust levers, they engage the water injection system, and it begins injecting water.

(01:27:03):
So the engines spool up to their extra high power setting. Everything appears to be working just fine, so they're off down the runway.
And takeoff is normal. They get into the air. The water injection system is...
It's a liter per second, so it's dumping quite a lot of dynamic fluid into the combustion chamber.

(01:27:26):
Yeah, we did some sort of back of the envelope math on this, and the one liter per second per engine water injection rate was probably not less than 50% of the fuel flow rate.
So this was quite a lot of water that was being injected, just relative to the amount of fuel.
And that's obviously about to become very significant because they get to a height of about 800 feet above the ground.

(01:27:54):
When the water runs out and the water injection system begins injecting kerosene.
And this system is an on-off system. It doesn't have any flow control. There's no monitoring for it. It's either on or it's off, and when it's on, it's going at full speed.
Yeah, so just listeners, the first indication that the crew would have had that there was fuel in the water tank was when the engines exploded.

(01:28:23):
Yeah, so basically the water injection system began injecting 95% pure kerosene directly into the combustion chamber at a rate of a one liter per second per engine, which was, again, at least 50% of the existing fuel flow rate.
So we're talking about engines that are already at max power suddenly being given at least 50% if not 100% increase in fuel flow rate. This should never happen.

(01:28:52):
In fact, a calculation of the total thrust actually showed a brief, a very brief increase in thrust from about 22,500 pounds to about 26,500 pounds within 12 seconds at the end of the climb, and then a steep drop to a maximum of about 1,500,

(01:29:13):
which was probably precipitated by what you can see on the screen here. That used to be a turbine desk.
It did. It did. It used to be a turbine. So the engine overheated because with so much fuel suddenly being injected into the combustion chamber, the engine overheated in a matter of seconds.
In fact, the kerosene coming out of the water injection nozzles burned molten trenches through the combustor cans. It was destructive.

(01:29:40):
Yeah, it's a bit like that old meme about how Chernobyl met the Soviet Union's entire annual power production goal in 10 microseconds.
Right. Yeah, it's kind of like that. So within seconds, the combustion chamber experienced a heat-related overpressure event. Both engines surged catastrophically. Air forced its way back through the compressor section.

(01:30:05):
The turbines ripped themselves to shred. As you can see, this high-pressure turbine was supposed to have blades that reach out to the dashed line, but they have all been chopped off just below 50% of their span by...
I'm pretty sure that the high-pressure turbine wheel works better when its blades have not been melted, sheared off, and then ejected out of the back of the engine through the low-pressure turbine wheels.

(01:30:31):
Yeah, jet engines are not... These are engineered with such incredible precision and adjusted the limits of, at the time, known material science.
Now, physical limits on the materials themselves. We're very, very closely approaching these limits. So these are the environments that these machines operate in.
So yeah, when you start to introduce extra fuel, you now have an engine-rich environment.

(01:30:57):
Yeah, well, the ground behind the airplane is about to become an engine-rich environment.
Yes, exactly. There's all of the pieces that are being spewed out of the engine.
There really is no way for a jet engine to fail, gentlemen. If something goes wrong, the entire engine comes apart very, very quickly.
Right, so yeah, the engine is basically disintegrated. And so witnesses on the ground recalled looking up and seeing, you know, black smoke trailing from both engines of this plane.

(01:31:25):
There was a lot of banging and sounds of explosions that were heard on board. The pilots immediately noticed their power dropping to virtually zero.
And so they're now in a certified, oh shit.
Yeah, they would have seen their TGT, sort of the exit gas temperature, spike completely off the scale.

(01:31:50):
And then dropped to zero because the thermocouple has melted.
So because the spea is a two-spool engine, this means that the high-pressure compressor is no longer driven, because the high-pressure turbine drives the high-pressure compressor.
So it stalls. It's no longer driven. It stalls. And you hear a bang, bang, bang, as the unbelievably hot burning mixture of fuel and air actually goes out of both ends of the engine.

(01:32:19):
Yeah, and I mean, that probably voids the engine warranty, I have to think.
I imagine it's probably against Rolls Royce's warranty, yeah.
So now the crew of Pan International Flight 112 are in a situation where they have climbed to a maximum height above the ground of not more than 900 feet, and they have no engines.

(01:32:43):
So the captain immediately radios air traffic control and says they have an emergency and would like to turn back to the airport, which they're given permission to do, but they don't do because of something that is known as the impossible turn.
So when you have an engine failure on initial climb, there's this idea that it's theoretically possible to make a 180-degree loop and come back without engine power and land on the same runway you took off from in the other direction.

(01:33:14):
But it's called the impossible turn because people think they can pull this off, but usually they actually stall the airplane and crash.
Yeah, you have a descending wing stall or a bank stall, which is a very frightening and very, very deadly.
Yeah, and there's no way to recover if you've stalled during the impossible turn with no engine power.

(01:33:37):
So the crew very, very wisely decide not to attempt the impossible turn, despite having received permission to attempt it, and look for a site for a forced landing somewhere ahead.
And there are a lot of trees and fields out here.
You know, I think they could have made the impossible turn if they'd had Jato bottles fitted.
Hmm, you know, perhaps.

(01:33:59):
If they'd followed my advice to put reheat on them.
Every accident we're ever going to talk about could have been prevented with Jato bottles.
But since they didn't have Jato bottles...
So we're landing on De Ottobon.
They decide that the best place to land is going to be on the A7 Autobahn in the village of Haslow, just outside Hamburg, which is a newly opened stretch of Autobahn.

(01:34:24):
Just opened that year.
And it's not entirely straight and it's got power lines and it's got bridges and there are road signs and it has cars on it.
Yes, it has a bridge, which we're about to get into.
It has this right here.
This item will become very important.
It's not really an ideal landing site.

(01:34:45):
And in fact, there's this idea in popular culture that you can land an airliner on a highway.
But actually, it hasn't been attempted very many times.
But every time it's been attempted in an actual passenger airliner, it has ended more or less in disaster.
So in general, we know now that it's better to make a forced landing in a field because there's less to run into.

(01:35:12):
But nobody had actually tried to land a full-size jet airliner on a major highway before this.
So unfortunately, the crew did not really know what the consequences would be.
So Captain Hulse lines the plane up with the not quite straight stretch of the Autobahn.

(01:35:34):
And it has no time to even make a brace for landing call to the passengers or anything like that.
He just puts it down because the entire time from engine failure to the plane is hitting the ground is 66 seconds.
They have about a minute. That was how long they had to find a place to land.

(01:36:00):
And actually, they didn't even have all of that time to think about it because after a certain point, they were committed to wherever they had already picked.
So they had literally seconds to pick, and this is where they picked.
So Captain Hulse touches the plane down.
The descent rate on touchdown is about 2,000 feet per minute, which is bad.

(01:36:21):
That number is too high.
That is too high.
And the landing gear can actually handle, yeah.
And they're traveling at about 150 knots, and they're moving against traffic in the southbound lanes heading north because the northbound lanes were full of commuters leaving Hamburg and heading to the suburbs.
So incredibly, there were actually no cars coming southbound on this stretch of the highway at that time.

(01:36:48):
So the plane did not hit any cars. However, because of the high rate of descent on touchdown, the left main landing gear immediately collapsed.
The left wing struck a call box and then uprooted the guardrail, and the entire plane slew around into a dramatic side slip, nose left, and then it plowed sideways into the bridge that was seen in the previous slide.

(01:37:17):
And this diagram that's currently on screen shows what happened to the plane when it hit the bridge.
So the bridge support pillar on the west side of the highway sliced through the forward passenger cabin in the area just behind the cockpit and forward of the wings and split the airplane into two pieces.

(01:37:38):
Basically, everybody who was seated in the area directly hit by the bridge pillar died instantly.
So we're talking about the area on this diagram now between rows, roughly one, or seats, one through 46 is the general area we're talking about.

(01:37:59):
And obviously some people did survive in this area, but anyone who was in the part that was directly impacted by the bridge pillar did not survive.
After hitting the bridge pillar and being split into two pieces, the plane continued, the cockpit slid to a halt in a ditch beside the road.
The rest of the plane, including the wings, aft cabin, and tail section spun almost a full 360 degrees down the highway and off the side onto the margin into the grass and came to rest straddling a ditch miraculously intact.

(01:38:35):
And everyone who was in that section of the plane essentially walked away.
Now, the image that's now on your screen is the cockpit and the very scattered remnants of the part of the plane that ceased to exist.
Yeah, pretty much any part of this aircraft that hit the bridge was just turned into just confetti.
Tiny, tiny pieces.

(01:38:57):
Yeah, an insane amount of energy.
Incredibly, incredibly, all three of the pilots survived this crash because the cockpit was sliced off in one piece.
And now all three of them were seriously injured.
The third pilot, Manfred Rode, had a significant head injury. Elizabeth Friske broke her leg.

(01:39:19):
Captain Reinhold Hulse actually was not badly hurt.
In the passenger cabin immediately behind them, 18 people died instantly on impact with the bridge.
And two more died in hospital and another in route to hospital.
So in total, or two more at each actually.

(01:39:40):
So four more people died after the crash in the next 24 hours.
So in a total, 22 people died out of 121 on board, but 99 people survived.
Most of them seated in the back of the plane where they just walked out through the hole in the big hole in the fuselage and were fine.

(01:40:01):
And there was no, initially no fire.
This is what that part of the plane looked like immediately after everyone had gotten out.
This is what it was taken by someone who was on the scene even before emergency crews were.
And a fire did eventually break out amid spilled fuel that was pooled in the ditch underneath the tail section.

(01:40:24):
But, and this fire eventually consumed most of the airplane, but not until after everyone had left.
So there are some accounts of this crash that imply people died in the fire.
After the plane hit the bridge, that was it.
If you, if you did not receive fatal injuries at that point, you survived this crash, which was really quite incredible.

(01:40:49):
So now let's talk about the aftermath.
So, okay, so basically what we had is we have a massively overweight, shitty little plane built by BAC in the 60s with absolutely full fuel tanks.
Whose engines have just melted down, it lands in a hostile environment, it goes sideways into an autobahn bridge at 100, at probably 150 knots.

(01:41:13):
And almost everybody on board survives.
And I have this little rover here because this was built around the same time and about the same part of the country.
So the same people built both of these.
And this was, this was designed in the 1960s when plane interiors were required by law to be made out of fireworks and napalm.
Except for the parts that were made out of asbestos.

(01:41:36):
It's even more surprising that almost everyone survived.
Really, really shocking.
Yeah, no, they were very, they were very lucky that fire did not break out until several minutes after the crash.
If there had been a fire immediately, the death toll would have been a lot higher.
But as it stands, 99 out of 121 people on board surviving, that's a pretty good record.

(01:41:57):
And I gotta say kudos to the pilots for pulling it off.
Yeah, so obviously the airline goes bust pretty quickly afterwards.
The only people that face any sort of consequences are the two mechanics.
I do have the article that they were indicted.
Kierak, do you know if they actually served any sort of time?
Um, I think they did, yes.

(01:42:19):
So yeah, obviously the only people in this story who were innocent were the pilots and obviously the passengers.
But at every level, you know, if we go back through the sequence of events, we had this airline that never should have been flying.
It was founded in order to evade taxes.
They were repeatedly judged.
They completely unsafe, you know, should not be flying passengers.

(01:42:44):
A powerful politician keeps intervening because he's been paid to try to prevent this airline from getting shut down.
They are flying in the most horrible conditions without proper personnel.
Somebody fills barrels, completely unbarrowed, labeled barrels with kerosene,

(01:43:07):
and they get loaded into the water injection system.
It destroys the engines.
They make this emergency landing.
It's a complete shit show from beginning to end.
And there are a lot of people on here who probably deserve to go to jail,
not least among them, Tassilo Trommar and Jorgen Bossenhardt, the founders of this airline.
Nothing happened to them.
So, yeah, so, so they, they, the airline went broke pretty much immediately after this crash, right?

(01:43:31):
Because these guys obviously, yeah, actually they kept, they kept flying for a couple of weeks after this.
But I would call that pretty immediately.
Travel agency, yeah, well then, yeah, the Neckarman's travel agency,
which was responsible for most of their business, pulled out of their five-year contract
because it was, the crash was giving them a bad name.
So they lost, they lost like 90% of their customer base in that.

(01:43:55):
And so they very, very quickly ran out of money.
It's a bad look to kill 20 people. Who knew?
It is, in fact, a bad look, especially if that's the only reason anyone has ever heard of your airline.
I want to talk about Kristoff Michael, okay, and Emerald Airways.
Ah, yes.
So, Trommar and Jorgen are completely broke, right?

(01:44:16):
So these guys, they've lost their customer.
They suddenly have a lot of airliners that they need to fix.
And obviously they've just had a fatal accident.
So there's a lot of things they need to do with, they need cash right now.
So they had a call from a guy named Kristoff Michael.
And Kristoff says that he is, I believe the chairman or the CEO of Emerald Airways.

(01:44:37):
It's a U.S. based airline and he wants to give them a $5 million cash injection immediately.
And they are so excited.
They fly this guy out, they whine him, they dine him.
I believe there are stories of Trommar giving this guy rides in his personal Mercedes up and down the Autobahn.
Yeah, and his girlfriend.
Yeah, so this guy lived large on what was left of Trommar and Jorgen's bank account.

(01:45:01):
And then obviously it fell apart because there was no Emerald Airways.
It's not an existence.
Kristoff was just a man with delusions of grandeur.
I don't believe he was grifting.
You know, this was not necessarily an issue of crime.
I think there is sort of enough evidence to say that he probably genuinely did think that he was the CEO of an airline.

(01:45:22):
But if not, then this is a Nigerian Prince level scam that these guys got sucked into.
Yeah, they totally bought this hook, line, and sinker.
They were going to their pilots and saying, don't worry, stay with the airline.
We're going to have this injection of cash.
Emerald Airways is going to save us.
And the pilots were like, we've never heard of Emerald Airways.

(01:45:44):
What are you talking about?
And Trommar and Botzenhart didn't listen.
They believed this guy.
And so he had them, you know, whining and dining him, as Ari said, for 16 days before they figured out that his airline wasn't real.
Because the way he got them was he was like, oh yeah, you can call this number to talk to the president of Emerald Airways or whatever.

(01:46:08):
And so they called the number and an authoritative sounding American picked up.
And it's like, oh yeah, totally, totally.
I'm with Emerald Airways and we'll bail you out.
And they never questioned this until more than two weeks into the scam.
Okay, so as far as a lot of people went their separate ways, I believe Hewels eventually got back in a cockpit for some regional airlines.

(01:46:33):
I do not have, Kieridino, what happened to the other two pilots?
Yeah, so I don't know what happened to Manfred Rowe, the third pilot.
So Captain Reinhold Hulse flew for another airline for a bit and then he got a job with the LVA, the regulator.
Elizabeth Friska initially struggled to find another job, but she eventually found a job flying business jets.

(01:46:56):
And actually, she died in 1987 in a crash involving, while carrying the premier of Schleswig-Holstein State,
Uwe Barshall, who was the only survivor of the crash, coincidentally.
Only he was found dead several months later with about a million different drugs in his system.

(01:47:23):
Wow.
So he wasn't the sole survivor for long, but that was the unfortunate fate of the co-pilot.
So.
And again, I don't know what happened to the third pilot.
So trauma, I believe, was charged at some point with failing to fund pensions.
Yeah, he did not pay into his employees' social security, but in August and September 1971.

(01:47:47):
And so they dinged him for that.
He was never charged in relation to the crash.
Boats and heart never received any sort of penalty.
And as we talked about, the two mechanics, Duvenhorst and Seafort, were sentenced to seven months and eight months in prison.
Yeah.
So I don't know, a two-tiered justice system?
Maybe a little.
Yeah.

(01:48:08):
And obviously, as we talked about, by the mid-70s, the entire charter operations had just kind of completely fallen apart.
It was a very flash in the pan.
Yeah.
Because the tax loophole was closed at the end of 1970, so all these airlines had to become actually financially viable, and most of them couldn't.
So the majority of the dentist airlines in West Germany shut down within a couple of years.

(01:48:30):
And, you know, we're left with things like Condor Fluge Deans, which are still around because they were actually doing a good job from the beginning.
So next slide.
What did we learn?
Apart from don't put Jedi in a water injection tank, what did we learn?
Don't join a special depreciation tax financing scheme.

(01:48:52):
Good advice.
If you're going to buy BAC-111s, maybe choose the version that hasn't been stretched out of all recognition.
Maybe?
Yeah.
I mean, I guess look realistically.
Um, well, no, if you're going to buy a BAC-111-500, fit it with afterburners, not before burners.

(01:49:13):
If you're going to buy a BAC-111, don't buy a 717 instead.
They're much cheaper.
717.
It's a 717 to you.
Okay.
So, yeah, but realistically, this was a problem that sort of solved itself, right?
Once the loophole was closed in the end, we had, by 1975, the oiled Margo was pretty soon on the horizon.

(01:49:34):
So, you know, these airlines were going to collapse no matter what.
Yeah.
And they were basically being fueled in part by the completely explosive growth of this charter industry in West Germany.
Basically, between 1961 and 1972, the number of charter passengers being carried increased 100-fold.
And then that boom leveled off, you know, in the mid-1970s, and things cooled down, and things became more reasonable.

(01:50:03):
And the Pan-Internationals of West Germany all basically fooled.
And water injection mostly stopped being a thing.
So, it stopped being even a potential failure mode.
They need to be mitigated.
Mm-hmm.
Yeah, modern jet engines are a lot more powerful.
They don't need water injection to get the, to drag the plane into the air.
Exactly.
Okay.
So, that kind of brings us to the end of our story.

(01:50:24):
And while we were doing some research, we found one thing that we think you guys, that's pretty cool.
And...
Next slide, please.
Next slide.
So, we found Jürgen Bootsenhardt through a profile that was being done of him in a small German newspaper.
And it talked about him as a bird watcher, and as a grandfather, and as an amateur meteorologist.

(01:50:49):
What it did not discuss was his participation in a tax scheme that involved, that resulted in 22 deaths.
Nor does it disclose, as I later found when I discovered his Twitter account, that he is a pro-apartheid racist.
Yes, he has him.
He has very few tweets, but he has a profile picture of himself wearing a Make Africa Great Again hat.

(01:51:12):
Which is just, I don't know, it's very silly.
Yeah, he lives in Cape Town.
He loves it there.
He talks about how great the West Coast of South Africa is.
But, you know, he doesn't actually said anything overtly racist on his Twitter account, because he doesn't have very many tweets.
But, if you live in South Africa and you say, and you're white, and you say, Make Africa Great Again, it's pretty obvious what you're referring to.

(01:51:39):
Yeah, we're not connecting a lot of dots here.
So anyway, yeah, we just thought that was weird, that it was wild, that, you know, we, I assumed this guy had,
Yeah, he's still alive.
This guy had been dead for decades.
Just the fact that I found him, and he's this, was just,
Wow.
That is the only possible way to end a story with this much insanity.
Yeah, so, don't be this guy.

(01:52:00):
Main takeaway.
Okay, all right.
I also note that he created his Twitter account in November 2016, and he has that hat.
Just saying.
Yes.
Okay.
Um, all right, everybody, thank you for joining us.
Our next episode will be on Malaysia Air 370.
Yes, totally, as it definitely was this time, as promised.

(01:52:23):
Not a joke.