Controlled Pod Into Terrain episode 3: UPS 006

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
Hello and welcome to Controlled Pod in the Terrain. We are a multimedia podcast about

(00:05):
air and space mishaps, aiming to put them in a broader context of how and why things
went wrong. And just a note to those of you that have been with us, we've heard some of
your feedback. We're going to try some things to make this show a little friendlier to the
audio-only audience. Now to introduce myself and my co-host, my name is Ariadne. I'm the
business and aviation industry knowing one. My pronouns are they and them. My name is

(00:30):
J. I'm the systems and engineering expert. And my pronouns are also they and them. And
I'm Kyra Dempsey, better known as Admiral Cloudberg. And my pronouns are she and her.
Okay. All right. We're going to go ahead and go to the next slide. Today we're here to
talk about this. Now this used to be a 747. It was a big one. It was a white and brown

(00:53):
one. And a man named Matthew Bell tried everything he could to have it not look like this. And
he tried, he tried really hard and we're going to make sure we tell you his story. But first
we have to do some kind of news thing. Next slide. Some kind of news thing. This makes
me laugh every time. This slide does make me laugh every time I see it. Let's just.

(01:19):
We might add music, but we're not changing the slide. Okay. So here we see a before and
after of an Ilyushin IL-76 crashing off the end of a runway after what appears to be a
botched landing, I'd say. It looks like they ran, they landed long. They tried to take

(01:41):
back off again. They didn't. After it overran, it went down kind of a big embankment past
the overrun. And at some point after impact, it burst into flames. So quite energetically.
A large fireball is seen on camera after the impact. So something blew up after the tanks
broke up. This IL-76 was allegedly carrying members of the Wagner group into the city

(02:05):
of Gao in Mali, where the Wagner group is engaged in various, in the Mali in civil war.
And I guess we don't really know for sure if they tried to take off again, but it kind
of looks like they did. In any case, the plane was definitely not slowing down when it was
on the runway. They touched down too far down the runway. They did not decelerate at all.

(02:26):
And from the video, I don't think the spoilers deployed on this airplane. It's hard to tell
about other braking systems, but without, you know, without the spoilers, you're not
going to have a lot of braking effectiveness regardless.
Yeah, yeah. It's designed specifically for very, very short takeoffs and landings. It
has huge spoilers. It has these sort of blown flaps on the back, big brakes, massive bucket

(02:49):
thrust reversers. So this is designed to stop in a short distance if it has to.
Yeah. And it just didn't. And we probably won't ever know why, because it was a Wagner
group plane landing in a war zone and, you know, neither Mali nor the Wagner group are
known for their transparency. So I don't think, I don't think we'll ever really get answers

(03:10):
on this, but allegedly at least, according to media reports, unverified, around 140 people
were killed in this accident, presumably mostly Wagner mercenaries. Allegedly some people
may have survived, but I guess we can't really confirm anything.
I think if you look at the video, actually, you can see towards the end of it, it looks

(03:34):
like they're trying to pull up, but they don't accelerate and they don't brake either. It's
just like, I don't know, target fixation or something on the part of the flight crew.
Really, really strange. I don't, I don't really understand how that could happen, but it definitely

(03:55):
didn't go well for them.
No, and nothing of value is lost.
Yeah, this is real, real bad, so sad energy.
Yep.
And remember folks, if you have a bad landing, you can always go around.
There ain't no party like a toga party because a toga party goes missed.

(04:19):
Just don't try to go around after you've already run off the end of the runway. It usually
doesn't work.
Yeah, yeah. At that point you can get hit the brakes. Okay, we're going to go to the
next slide.
Okay, now Kyra, this plane looks quite familiar. So let's talk about it.
Yes, we talked about the Ural Airlines A320 landing in a field last time, but now we have

(04:41):
new fun news, which is that Ural Airlines plans to take it off again from the field.
So they are presumably repairing the damage to the airplane and preparing the field for
the takeoff. I know they're trying to reduce the weight of the airplane as much as possible.
They've stripped out all of the passenger seats. We don't know exactly what their plan

(05:04):
is, whether it's to, you know, harden the ground somehow, like put by putting down wood
or metal and to create some kind of makeshift runway or as I've seen reports that they're
just going to wait until winter until the ground freezes solid because it's Siberia.
Either way, they're going to attempt this. Yeah, either way, they're going to attempt

(05:27):
this. And if I hope they live stream it.
Yeah, absolutely fantastic.
Because I think I think it's probably going to work. I think they're probably going to
pull this off. But if it doesn't, I kind of I do want to I do want to be there.

(05:50):
I think the I think I think it's pretty hilarious that they've erected this fence to try and
stop people watching them do this. The other thing that's quite notable is that they there
was a report that came out that said that during the landing, they've managed to damage
the wing slightly and and the engines also needed some inspection. So they've got to

(06:17):
do that as well as presumably fixing whatever they did to the the hydraulic system that
caused them to land in this this field in the first place. So, you know, that's that's
kind of fun. Right?
I think if they're going to if they're going to wait until winter, they should have plenty
of time to do all of that.

(06:37):
So obviously, though, that, you know, so okay, the elephant and rum whenever we talk about
one of these airlines is as we discussed last time, sort of the availability of parts and
the sanctions are are pretty crippling, but they have allegedly been able to get counterfeit
parts from East Asia, as well as parts that come through sort of third party shell companies,

(07:01):
usually in the UAE. So they are probably are going to get able to get parts for this. But
whether this works, like we said, it's if they get this airborne, and the fix doesn't
take the funniest possible thing that could happen is is this thing lands in a third field.

(07:22):
That would be I don't know, I would I would feel like I'm losing my grip on reality if
that happened. I think let's go to our next third and final news story.
Yeah, so this, this is a FedEx 757, which, well, it isn't supposed to be like that. It's

(07:45):
it's not supposed to be the engines aren't supposed to be load bearing while the plane
is on the ground. Well, no. So this, this plane was this cargo plane was on a short
flight from Chattanooga to Memphis, and they had a hydraulic failure almost immediately
after takeoff on of the left hydraulic system, which on the 757 is the the more important

(08:11):
hydraulic system. It controls quite a number of things, including the normal gear extension.
Now there are two different backup gear extension methods. And from what we know from the air
traffic control tapes, it seems like the pilots tried both of the alternate methods, and neither

(08:33):
of them worked.
Which is not supposed to be possible. Right?
There's an electric there's an electric hydraulic pump. There's also a Pete an electric PTU
that can transfer what's left in sort of the fill line right after right and they had a
hydraulic fuse blows, but they have that they have standpipes in the hydraulic the standpipes

(08:57):
that thank you to stop them from emptying all the way so even if there's like the rest
of the left system has actually leaked out, there should be enough fluid trapped below
the level of this standpipe, supposedly, that you can still get the gear down the flaps

(09:17):
down and, you know, these kinds of things but
so the alternate extension procedure worked because it doesn't rely on hydraulic fluid,
they elect the elect it's electrical. So, right, but there's the other there's the other
alternate flaps thing because the flaps the the flaps are connected to the PTU branch

(09:39):
of the hydraulic system of the left hydraulic system. So it should have been possible to
extend the flaps using the PTU, but it just didn't happen for whatever reason.
Yeah, they also were not for some reason able to successfully execute like a gravity drop.
Right, because the hydraulic system had had gone so far out the window that the they couldn't

(10:04):
even get the doors open.
So my understanding is that the way gravity drop works on the 757 is there's a there's
a separate so the when the gear is stowed it's locked in place up in the wheel in the
wheel wells so that positive hydraulic pressure doesn't have to be constantly applied to keep

(10:24):
it up there. So there is a there is a completely independent hydraulic actuator with its own
hydraulic fluid that's supposed to just undo the lock so that gravity drop can happen.
And we don't know why that didn't work. I mean, it's not supposed to be connected to
any of the other hydraulic systems in any way.

(10:46):
Yes, this seems like a fairly decent cascade of failures. And the other thing was that
because it was a short flight, they only had something like 90 minutes of fuel when they
declared an emergency, which I know it sounds like a lot. But when you are trying to run
multiple checklists, and you're also trying to work with air traffic control to to get
vectors and maintain an altitude like 90 minutes of fuel can go pretty quickly. So you're going

(11:10):
to want to get this thing on the ground.
It's not a lot of time to, you know, try to find a way to not, you know, substantially
damage this airplane. And I guess I say substantially damaged because I think it's plausible that
this airplane could fly again, depending on the extent of the damage that was done to

(11:31):
it. Obviously, the engines are toast, but the airframe itself might be okay. Yeah.
Yeah.
It's definitely going to have to go to probably a d level depot check. So they're going to
strip, they're probably going to strip the plane all the way down to its bare structure
and do and check every single, you know, bolt and, you know, if they have to install doubler
plates somewhere, they're probably have to do that. This also, I mean, you can tell that

(11:55):
this isn't this is wasn't even a 757F. This is a converted one because we can see the
passenger windows in the plane. So, you know, they they also might just decide to send this
to Arizona once they just, you know, just sort of get it flying into test flight stage
and then just send it straight to the boneyard. Possibly. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. FedEx likes really

(12:15):
old planes and they like to kind of run them into the ground.
Don't they still have a bunch of MD-83s?
They had MD-11s. I believe.
I know they have MD-11s. I see them with my own eyes from time to time.
Yeah, I think they're finally phasing those out and they're replacing them with, I want
to say, triple 7Fs or 767Fs.

(12:36):
Yeah, I don't know. No.
Yeah. If you guys do get a chance, pull the landing up on YouTube. It happens at night.
There's a billion sparks. It does look like a really good death metal album.
Yeah, I would petition for all belly landings to happen at night for extra visual impact.
I think that would be great. Great.
Yeah. And I think if you don't make enough sparks, it doesn't look cool enough. Like,

(12:58):
you don't, it will be insufficient clout. You got to go around to do it again.
Yeah, absolutely. Just go around.
All right. Anything else on FedEx?
I don't think so, though.
Okay. Only a couple of no taps this week. So first one is the Autobahn. Well, we were,
we sort of, we called this Autobahn Urban Legends, how we have it titled in the notes.

(13:20):
And one thing we put in the notes last week, or last episode that we did not get to is
sort of this pervasive urban legend that the Autobahn and the American interstates were
built to act as emergency runways in an emergency or in basically in a nuclear war. That is
obviously not true. Hopefully, you know, a BAC 111 tried to land on a decent strip of

(13:41):
it and hit a bridge. So hopefully we could put that urban legend to bed in all of your
heads.
Yeah, it's absolutely not true. Unless you happen to be Swiss.
Yeah, they're just freeways.
Yeah. Yeah. Okay. And then J, I think you had, you wanted to, we had some clarifications
of the exchange rate.

(14:02):
Yeah. Yeah. So clarification about Deutsche Mark exchange rates in 1971. There was about
3.64 Deutsche Marks to the US dollar. So my $1,000 for the bribe was off by a factor of
more than two. 8,000 Deutsche Marks is actually $2,312.

(14:22):
Well, 8,000 Deutsche Marks wasn't the bribe. That was the amount of Jürgen Botzenhardt's
personal savings that he put toward the purchase of the airplane. The bribe was a lot more
than that.
The bribe was a lot more than that, but it was still, it was both of, both of these numbers
are still pitifully low.
Anyway, onto our, our story.

(14:45):
Our next slide. Yes. So what is today's episode even about? Well, the first thing we need
to do is talk about lithium. Next slide.
Yeah, I think this is the wrong lithium.
Yeah, this is the, not, not the seminal 1991 Nirvana single.
You know, the B-side was Beena's Son, which is very thematic, particularly from my 90s

(15:07):
anyway.
Maybe the next slide is, has it right? Oh, oh.
Next slide. Nope. This is, nor are we talking about the 2006 single from Evanescence. I
listened to 100 times that summer because it came out the same week I got dumped. Michelle,
I hope you're happier now wherever you are.
Ah, here we go. This looks like actual-
This is what we're going to talk about today. We're going to talk about this little scam.

(15:30):
Up here in the corner. So J, take it away.
Okay. So, for all the people who are listening, rather than watching, this is a complicated
slide with way too much stuff on it. In the top left-hand corner, there is the atomic
structure of lithium, which is three protons, three or four neutrons surrounded by three

(15:53):
electrons. It is the lightest metal with an atomic mass of about seven. No, hydrogen doesn't
count. Stop commenting. Not even astronomers call hydrogen a metal and they call everything
metal. There are two naturally occurring isotopes, lithium six and lithium seven. This doesn't

(16:14):
matter for our purposes. Both work exactly the same, but it really surprised the shit
out of Edward Teller during the Castle Bravo test. Yeah, it's the official position of
CPIT that Edward Teller can get fucked. I'll just go along with that. I don't know who
Edward Teller is, but don't worry about it. He's a guy who almost reduced us all to radioactive

(16:39):
dust several times. I see. Okay.
Lithium is pretty common in the universe. It's very useful in batteries because its
ion is small enough that it can actually intercalate into electrodes. You can see this, the bottom
left-hand image here is lithium ions actually sort of soaking into the material so that

(17:04):
the whole bulk of the electrode material is being used to store this charge. And the electrode
material screens the electric charge of these lithium ions from each other so that you can
pack them to much higher densities. In lithium ion chemistry, the whole bulk of the material
is active, whereas in most other chemistries, only the surface of the electrode actually

(17:28):
does anything. This is one of the reasons why lithium ion batteries are such a game-changer.
It is the most potent reducing agent known. It loves to rip oxygen off of things. It just
lives for that. This includes water. If you put water on lithium metal, it will rip the

(17:49):
oxygen off of that water, producing large amounts of energy and lots of hydrogen gas.
And with three electrons, it either wants to get seven, which is very unlikely to happen,
or give away one, which it does with absolute abandon. It does not want that electron, and

(18:11):
it will donate it any time it can.
All right. Next slide. Some applications of lithium.
Yes. Okay. Yeah. So, you know, we've got a cheap little drone, you know, your power tools,
the USB battery everybody has, flashlight, you know, some home devices. We've got a little
smartwatch here, Tesla, the electric zero motorcycle over here in the corner. So all

(18:36):
of these things, obviously, what they have in common is that they are predominantly built
around a lithium ion battery, aka the global, the basis of the entire global economy. We've
got obviously examples of them here, and I will bet cash money in whatever your local
currency is that you are probably in reach with a lithium ion device right now. I counted
six on my desk, and that was without opening a drawer or turning my head. So, okay. So,

(19:02):
J, we kind of talked about this before when we were doing all the research, but can you
explain to me the difference between lithium ion, right? So what's on our cars and our
phones is different from the very evil little fucker that we're going to talk about today?
Well, we're going to talk about both kinds today because there were both kinds on this
plane. But yeah, so a lithium ion battery doesn't actually contain any lithium metal.

(19:27):
A lithium ion battery, actually, you go to quite some trouble to stop it from containing
lithium metal. If you overcharge a lithium ion battery, it's possible for the lithium
ions to plate out as metal, and at that point the battery will explode, which is bad. Yeah,

(19:48):
we do have a slide. Yeah. Oh, we see some lithium metal exploding.
Yeah. So these are lithium metal cells. You may recognize the ones up in the left-hand
corner. These are some A123, or sorry, CR123 or CR5 batteries. They're the kind you use

(20:12):
in old film cameras. They don't tend to use them in digital cameras.
I think you would describe them as a watch battery. The smallest one is what you would
call a watch battery, right?
Yeah. Yeah. That's a CR2012, which is like the kind of battery you'd put in the remote
for your car's central locking if you have something that does that. The other two batteries

(20:40):
that we show there are actually the kind you'd put in a camera. They're slightly larger.
These are lithium metal batteries. They contain just an ungodly amount of energy. Lithium
metal cells aren't rechargeable, but they have extremely long shelf life, anything up
to 20 years. They're used in a lot of emergency gear for backing up the memory in things like

(21:08):
the clock on your computer probably runs off one of these, unless it's a laptop.
Okay. This is a really dorky question. When I had either the SNES Van 64, right? So something
that had stored the memory on the cartridge itself. Is this what was in that cartridge?
They would always say, oh, if this battery dies, your safe game will be lost forever.

(21:28):
Yeah. That's exactly the kind of battery. Actually, those are usually a 2032. So same
diameter as the one in this picture, but thicker, 3.2 millimeters thick. Some other images that
are here that you can see if you're watching on video, there is an explosion. This is what

(21:49):
happens when you upset a lithium metal cell. They are touchy little beasts. They can contain
extremely high energy densities as high as 3,500 watt hours per kilogram, which is about
10 times what lithium ion gets. They are extremely energetic objects and they do not need oxygen

(22:17):
to give up this energy. You can see on the right hand lower image here, this is a thionyl
chloride cell. Yeah. This is the kind of thing that you might use in a flight data recorder
to power the pinger that they use to locate it when it's in the ocean somewhere. It's

(22:41):
a very high energy battery. One of the big problems with thionyl chloride is that thionyl
chloride reacts explosively with water. The lithium metal also reacts explosively with
water. It's just explosives all the way down. Yeah. It's just a whole bunch of chemicals

(23:02):
you don't really want to be anywhere near. When these things actually do get hot, this
catalyzes the breakdown of all of these chemicals and you end up with gases like hydrogen and
sulfur dioxide and all of these kinds of very reactive gases that will cause the battery

(23:28):
to swell up and potentially explode. The contents of these batteries is flammable with a flash
point that's around room temperature. It's between 16 degrees Celsius and about 20 degrees
Celsius. If one of these things is getting hot, when it actually vents, it's going to

(23:56):
come out as a jet of fire and it's going to be hot fire because it's a metal fire that's
happening. Is that why I've seen tests where they pierce it with a needle and it's literally
just a torch aflame? Yeah. That's exactly it. Lithium metal melts at 180 degrees C.

(24:17):
Which is not terribly hot. You make French fries in the oven hotter than that. Yeah,
you do. It's extremely corrosive to aluminium because aluminium is an extremely reactive
metal. It's even more reactive than lithium or sodium, but it's protected by a layer of

(24:40):
alumina which is aluminium 3 oxide that forms instantly when it's exposed to air. But molten
lithium will strip this away because it will reduce it because it's the most potent reducing
agent known and it will prevent it from reforming, which means that your 2000 degree lithium

(25:02):
metal fire is now joined by a 3000 degree aluminium fire. It's your worst nightmare.
They're almost impossible to extinguish. That's pretty spooky. Yeah. Carbon dioxide won't put
it out. It will make it worse because lithium will reduce the carbon dioxide and give you

(25:24):
soot and pure oxygen. It's a nightmare. It reminds me kind of of the, I don't know if
you know the story of the Bradley fighting vehicle. So for those of you that don't know,
the Bradley is an armoured personnel carrier that was developed by the United States during
the Cold War. It was made with an aluminium armour that they were trying to use to save

(25:46):
weight, but they found that it would burn with this incredible energy when it was hit
with an anti-tank round, which you know, it's not what armour is supposed to do when it's
hit by things. Definitely suboptimal. That's not all of the fun that we get here because
the lithium metal battery has an electrolyte in it. And you know, okay, so all of the chemicals

(26:11):
inside this thing react violently with water. So you have to have some kind of aprotic solvent.
It's usually something like ethylene carbonate or something like that. But to make it conductive,
they need to add something ionic. And what they use is lithium perchlorate. Now lithium

(26:31):
perchlorate is about 60%, a little more than 60% oxygen by weight. When it's heated, it
decomposes. So you've got flammable ethylene carbonate, which is about as flammable as
something like acetone or maybe a light alcohol like, you know, ethyl alcohol and methyl alcohol.

(27:04):
It's very, very flammable stuff. And it's absolutely loaded full of this extremely strong
oxidiser. And there's lithium metal in there as well. So these things are basically just
fire bombs. If they actually do catch fire, there is no putting them out. It's completely

(27:28):
impossible. And they burn hot. And some of the fire is not actually fire. It's just the
chemical energy and the battery coming out. So, you know, depriving it of oxygen won't
help because it's loaded full of the stuff. I think we're going to get to that later.

(27:52):
Yeah, it's just... With the fire tetrahedron. I'm remembering that slide now. Oh, God. Yeah.
These things have a very long shelf life. So they're very, very useful in industry.
You just don't want to have too many of them in the same place because they're quite energetic.

(28:15):
Didn't you say you have a bunch of these lying around your house and you don't know what
to do with them? They're actually quite difficult to get rid of. So I have a bunch of lithium
ion batteries that are from an e-bike that I have. They are worn out because, you know,

(28:36):
they have a limited lifespan. But the problem is that you can't really... You can't throw
them out because, you know, they've got all these toxic chemicals in them. Very few places
will recycle these things. It's actually quite difficult to get them recycled. I mean, if

(28:56):
I was General Motors or Tesla or, you know, whoever is making vehicle batteries, I'm sure
I could figure something out. But I'm just some nerd who lives in San Francisco and I
have no idea how to get rid of these batteries that are no good anymore.

(29:17):
Just take them out onto the street and hit them with a shovel and let them burn out.
Yeah, it sounds like this is the problem that's going to solve itself pretty quickly. Very,
very quickly.
Yeah, I actually wanted to try and reenact some of the fire sequences that we're going

(29:38):
to get to later, but my wife said that that was not something she wanted me to be doing.
So yeah, sorry.
And then I asked J to send them to me so I could try it. But I found out they would
have to be shipped around for reasons that will become apparent very quickly.
Yeah, yeah, it's not great. And then, of course, you know, there's the reason that we put up

(30:01):
with these things, which is that lithium ion batteries store about 400 watt hours per kilogram.
Metal metal hydride, which was the previous, like, best battery you could get, was about
75. And lead acid batteries are about 30. So it's more than an order of magnitude over,

(30:22):
you know, the state of the art in about 1990 that we're getting with these lithium ion
batteries. It's a huge deal. You know, there's a reason that all of these little flying toys
like drones and things only started showing up when lithium ion batteries started getting
cheap. It's because they have very high energy density and very high power density. You could

(30:45):
discharge one of these batteries at rates that would just explode any other kind of
battery. And you can charge them much faster, too. You know, if you if you have a Tesla
and you take it to a supercharger, you can possibly get a sort of 60 percent charge in
20 minutes. And that's completely impossible with any other kind of battery. The chemistry

(31:06):
just won't support it.
I regularly get 300 kilowatts when I plug mine into a supercharger.
Yeah. And that's like three and a half C, right? Because you have like a 70 or 80 kilowatt
hour battery. So you're charging it. Yeah, you're charging it at multiples of the of

(31:28):
the capacity. Right. You can't do that with any other kind of battery. They would just
melt and and discharging also means that that's the other reason that if you have a vehicle
powered by lithium ion that it can dump so much power into the motor instantaneously.
Yeah. I mean, if you look at these zero motorcycles, I mean, this is a pretty good example. Right.

(31:49):
The battery in one of those is about the size of, you know, a full tower PC, if you can
imagine such a thing. And it weighs, you know, 150 pounds, but it can dump 900 amps into
that into that motor into that motor controller. You can you can get peak powers of well over

(32:12):
a hundred horsepower from a battery that weighs less than the engine that you would need to
do that would weigh, which is is just a game changer for all kinds of vehicle applications.
Yeah, I think that's our that's our that's our background on exploding things. So now
let's go to the part where the exploding things explode, which is flying to the scene of the

(32:37):
crash. Yeah. Next slide. OK. So today we are talking about this plane, the one the one
if you're seeing on your screen specifically, this is a November five seven one uniform
papa. And for those in audio, we are looking at a UPS seven four seven dash four four
alpha foxtrot freighter. What that means is this is a dedicated freighter. It was not

(33:02):
converted from a passenger aircraft like that FedEx one was. This was built at the Boeing
facility in Everett to to be a freighter. It was this is a relatively young plane. I
think it only is only about three years old. And one of the important things about this
being a freighter is that it has this right here. It's it's kind of hard to see. There's

(33:23):
a little line that comes right down below the cockpit. And what that is, is the nose.
So the entire nose on a freighter seven forty seven can swing upwards and sort of clear
the cockpit and they can load extremely long things in there, things like windmill blades
or generators for for mines or like Vladimir Putin's conference table even even exactly.
Yes. Yes. OK. Next slide. Anyway, next slide. Slide. Yeah. So this was the route of the

(33:48):
flight. And I'm going to give you guys a very, very quick primer on cargo operations. So
cargo operations are a very extreme version of the hub and spoke model. Basically, a lot
of this overnight shipping model relies on a lot of feeder traffic coming in and aircraft
waiting all day to make a flight. Usually it leaves very, very late at night depending
on on where they are in the world. And you've got basically three three big players in this

(34:12):
market outside of sort of charter carriers like Atlas. You've got UPS, FedEx Express
and DHL FedEx Express really specializes in sort of overnight delivery. Right. They want
direct point to point. You drop a thing off with FedEx. FedEx delivers it on the other
end. DHL has sort of vertically integrated freight where they take things all the way

(34:33):
from a rail yard. It might go out of ship. It might go on another aircraft, but they
control the entire path of the way. They are also super national. DHL will and I'm
not kidding, delivery package for you to North fucking Korea. They will not ask questions.
I didn't know that. That's pretty cool. I've actually I've actually had occasion to use

(34:54):
DHL when we were trying to deliver equipment into an area that had just been hit by a hurricane
and there was three feet of water surrounding the airport and DHL got that equipment to
our destination. I have no idea how, but they did. But we're not talking about DHL. We're

(35:15):
talking about UPS. Yes. So here's what makes UPS special from everybody else is that UPS
does obviously fit about 50% of their cargo is UPS branded, but 50% is what's called bulk
freight. Basically, this means they just kind of take it on at the airport and then they
deliver it on behalf of somebody else. And what this means very, very crucially is that

(35:38):
they do not control the manifest, meaning that at some point, right, everything that
goes on a FedEx aircraft has been through the hands of a FedEx employee, but because
UPS does bulk freight, that's not the case. And it's especially was not on this night.
All right. So this was like we said, this was the flight plan for Hong Kong to Dubai
to Cologne, Germany. Yes. And this was there was a crew change in Dubai, I should also

(36:02):
add. Yeah. Next slide, please. So these are some of the things that were put onto the
plane in Hong Kong and would remain on it through Cologne. So this cargo included a
lot of palletized cargo consisting of a whole ton of types of different things. But many
of these things contained various lithium batteries of different types, including lithium

(36:26):
ion, lithium metal. There were like some lithium iron phosphate type batteries in here too.
I don't even know what those are. There's just a huge number of them of all different
types imaginable. And none of this was marked as hazmat. And in fact, it was legal for most

(36:48):
of these lithium batteries to not be marked as hazmat, but there were some that supposedly
should have been. And this was because of what Ari said just a moment ago, you know,
UPS doesn't necessarily even know specifically what is in all of these pallets of forwarded
cargo. So it was the responsibility of the shipper to label these as hazmat, but for

(37:12):
whatever reason, they didn't. And so some pallets containing lithium, quote, lithium
type unquote batteries that were, I think, supposed to have been labeled as hazmat were
loaded into the main deck cargo positions, four, five, and six, among other locations,
which we're going to show a map of where those are later. But for now, all you need to know

(37:35):
is that's the area located under the aft part of the hump on the 747. So behind, so on the
main deck, which is below the cockpit level and well behind the cockpit. Yes, so some
parts of this report that we were reading through are not actually good science. Three

(37:56):
of these nine shipments, items seven, eight, and 13, contained lithium ion battery packs
with watt hour ratings significantly greater than 100 watt hours. So eight and 13 were
lithium iron phosphate batteries. This is a different chemistry of lithium ion batteries

(38:18):
that has what we call a negative temperature coefficient. So these kinds of batteries don't
catch fire. They won't explode. They don't go into thermal runaway. On the other hand,
I was reading through this and I thought, oh, watch batteries. That can't be so bad.
And then I looked how many there were and there were 50,000 of the damn things on one palette.

(38:42):
That's, that's an incredible amount of energy that's stored in all of these little tiny watch
batteries when you have 50,000 of them. Yeah, it was 57,000 of them. In fact,
yeah, there was 54,000 in 18. And then there was another one, which contained watch batteries

(39:03):
that we don't, we don't have on this slide. It's, it's, it's in another, another spot.
Just, just mind blowing really. So all in all on UPS 006, I think we totaled about 400 kilograms
of lithium metal batteries and two tons of lithium ion batteries. There appears to be 50,
284 watt hours lithium polymer packs that are bare, not in enclosures or equipment,

(39:30):
just on a palette. And this is 51 megajoules of energy, assuming that they're fully charged.
One kilogram of dynamite contains seven and a half megajoules of energy. So this is a sizable
amount of energy in batteries that have no protection on them at all. They're just thin

(39:50):
plastic envelopes full of incredibly energetic substances. And these were, these were 284
watt hours. And just for sort of a comparison, your typical EV battery is between 50 and 80,000
watt hours. And that's why those travel by rail. Also, they're really heavy. Yeah. Oh, and when we

(40:11):
read it, we read the manifest, we found vape pens, like lots, like you guys, there's, there's so many
vape pens on this manifest. Yeah, there's enough, there's, I don't know, there's an incomprehensible
number of vape pens on here. So I think we all agree that this accident was caused by vaping. Do we,
do we get to blame Subaru? That's, that's the question. We could try. Okay, so this is, this is

(40:35):
obviously a huge fire hazard, right? This would be a huge fire hazard if this was sitting in the
middle of a parking lot, but we're putting it on the inside of a plane full of fuel. So this is,
this is a really big fire hazard. And obviously, they've, they must have mitigated this. They've,
they've thought about this five steps in advance. So let's talk about the fire suppression systems
on the 747. So next slide. Let's start with how fire suppression is supposed to work. I'm sorry,

(41:01):
what the hell is this? This? I just, okay, so, so listeners, we pulled this from report from, from
the, the official accident report, and this looks like a consulting ass slide. Like I am not convinced
I did not make this at some point. Yeah, this is actually in the report. I can only conclude that
the United Arab Emirates GCAA that wrote this report thinks we don't know how fire works.

(41:27):
On page 119, page 119 of an accident report about an aircraft fire, they're like, hey,
we're gonna explain how fire works. Yeah, and it's not even a tetrahedron, it's just four triangles.
I'm losing my mind. It's like Maslow's hierarchy of fire's needs. Fuel, oxygen, heat, love, and
emotional support, self-actualization of redox potential. No, nobody, buddy. That, that, that

(41:51):
joke's for all the chemists in the audience. Okay, we're gonna go to the next slide. Okay, so some of
the pellets that we are going to talk about, um, were loaded in positions three, four, five, and six.
So these are in the front of the plane under the hump. Well, six is actually the important one,
so it should be circled too. But, um, I don't know why the notes don't mention six. Anyway,

(42:19):
so these are all on the main deck of the 747. So we're going to talk about fire suppression and
resistance on the main deck of the Boeing 747 freighter. And so this entire open main deck is
what's called a Class E cargo compartment. And a Class E cargo compartment is one that's fitted
with smoke detectors. Um, that's one is fitted with smoke detectors. Two has means to deprive a fire

(42:44):
of oxygen. And three has means to exclude smoke and fumes from the cockpit. So notably what a Class
E cargo compartment doesn't have is any active fire suppression systems. So it doesn't have any CO2
extinguishers. Um, it doesn't have any Halon extinguishers. Um, nothing like this. I mean,
like there's a handheld fire extinguisher the crew can grab, but we're not, there's nothing that,

(43:08):
there's no button the crew can press to, you know, flood the compartment with extinguishing agent.
I mean, Halon or CO2 wouldn't put out a lithium battery fire anyway, because only some of it is
actually fire. Some of it is an internal anaerobic chemical reaction. And some of it is burning with
oxidizer that is conveniently packed inside the battery. So will these burn in a vacuum?

(43:35):
Yes. Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. Okay. Well, that's delightful. Yeah. It's, it's a,
just a bundle of joy. Yeah. So again, the, um, the Class E cargo compartment has, instead of
extinguishing agent, it has means to exclude oxygen from a fire that is burning within it.
And it does this by, or there is a switch that the pilots can, can flip, which will

(44:05):
cease pressurization of the main deck. And so the pressure inside will simply leak out until
it equalizes with the external pressure. So if, if you're at a high altitude, this will cause the
a regular fire to potentially die due to oxygen starvation. Um, and the Class E compartment is

(44:27):
fitted with a supposedly fire resistant liner. And the idea behind the, um, this liner is that it
gives enough time for all of the, or it, um, it, it contains the fire for enough time for the pressure
inside the main deck to all leak out and, um, and starve the, the fire of oxygen. So if there

(44:49):
wasn't a liner, it takes several minutes for the, um, the pressure to leak out when the pilot does
this. And in that time, the fire could theoretically expand and damage critical systems. The fire liner
is supposed to keep it delayed until that, that oxygen deprivation can happen. And so this is
designed for fires, you know, of things like, I don't know, textiles or paper, where it's easy to starve,

(45:13):
starve the fire out because, and you can tell this because the liner is only rated to withstand temps
of, um, 927 degrees C for five minutes, because that's how long it takes to depressurize the main
deck. It is not required and actually does not withstand exposure to fire for any longer than that.
Um, but so you can imagine, as you probably already figured out, this entire system is completely

(45:37):
ineffective against a lithium battery fire, because that fire is just not going to care.
It barely needs oxygen and it gets way hotter than the 927 degrees Celsius that the liner is rated to.
So under such conditions, the liner is quickly just going to become brittle and then it will
shatter under normal flight loads. So it, it, it will be completely useless.

(45:58):
Yeah, they actually had a section in the report where they were saying that some of these batteries
turn themselves into projectiles when they burst. And, um, you can imagine that when this liner has
become, you know, very brittle, having a, uh, an 18650, um, just pelting at it, uh, um, 100 meters per

(46:20):
second is going to punch a hole in it pretty effectively.
Yeah. So the other feature of a class E cargo compartment is that you have to be able to keep
smoke and fumes that are in the compartment from reaching the cockpit. And the Boeing 747F does this
using a positive pressure system. So basically the main deck fire procedure calls for the crew to

(46:41):
shut off air conditioning packs two and three, which supply air to the main deck while leaving
air conditioning pack one running to pressurize the cockpit. And therefore the pressure in the
cockpit is higher. So smoke is not going to leak from the main deck, the depressurized main deck

(47:02):
into the pressurized cockpit because the airflow is the other way. At least that's the, that's the
idea. And if that doesn't work, if there is, or if there happens to be smoke just sitting around in
the cockpit, the pilot can also open the smoke shutter, which is a door located in the aft cockpit
ceiling, which can be open to clear smoke that's lingering around, but it won't help if the fire is

(47:29):
still producing smoke. Actually, if it's still producing smoke, it will make things even worse
because it will, it will provide a path to draw smoke from the main deck into the the cockpit,
which we'll talk about later. So if we can go to the next slide, let's meet our heroes. So the date

(47:55):
is now September 3rd, 2010. It's evening. The plane is in Dubai after flying from Hong Kong, and these
two pilots take over. On the left, we have 48 year old Captain Doug Lampe, who has 11,000 flying hours,
including 4,000 on the Boeing 747-400. So he's, he's quite experienced. And we have 38 year old

(48:19):
First Officer Matthew Bell, who has 5,500 flying hours, but he has only just upgraded to the Boeing
747-400. He has only 77 hours on tight, so he's sort of just out of initial operating experience.
And sorry for the quality of these photos. It's really difficult to find pictures of either of

(48:42):
these guys. So the accident sequence. Okay, so the first thing is actually before departure from Dubai.
The previous crew had noted a fault with Air Conditioning Pack number one. Recall what I was
just saying about the Air Conditioning Packs. And maintenance could not get to the bottom of this,

(49:06):
but it wasn't a big deal because the Air Conditioning Packs were not working. So the
Air Conditioning Pack one was working when they set off. So, so this is operating as flight 006
to Cologne. They depart Dubai at 1851 local time. The sun has set and it is getting darker. And they

(49:28):
climbed to 32,000 feet heading northwest over the Persian Gulf. And everything is normal,
except during the climb Air Conditioning Pack one trips offline again and the pilots reset it,
according to the procedure, and it resumes working. So as they're continuing to climb,
they cross out of the Dubai air traffic control area and contact Bahrain, which is just off the

(49:55):
west side of this this picture behind Qatar. And so they are in the middle of the Persian Gulf,
where this roughly where this black circle is. And sometime prior to reaching that location,
we don't know exactly when a lithium battery ignites in a pallet in the vicinity of cargo

(50:17):
position six, just behind the hump on the main deck. And we don't know why the thermal runaway
started in this battery or batteries or when exactly, you know, the best evidence of when a
fire started is when the smoke alarm goes off. But there were rain covers over these pallets,
which could have delayed detection of smoke smoke could have been building up under the rain palette

(50:40):
and could have delayed detection by up to several minutes. So we don't also Yeah, again, we don't
know why the thermal runaway happened. I mean, the report speculates that there could have been
vibration coupling via the aircraft structure that set it off or other acoustic effects.
You know, it's at the end of the day, it doesn't really matter. You know, sometimes a lithium

(51:02):
battery just combusts because you know, they want to do that constantly.
From some of the post crash photos, there are e bike type batteries in this in this
this cargo collection. In these batteries, the only an insulation between adjacent cells is
the shrink wrap over the body of the 18650 cell. In high quality batteries, they're glued together

(51:28):
to stop them from rubbing against each other and abrading the shrink wrap, which would short the
battery out. They definitely were not in some of these batteries. Just looking at the photos,
you can see there is no glue. And it's not like it, it could have disappeared, you know, the glue,
the glue would be there. Even if that battery had gotten really hot, the glue would still be there.

(51:52):
So we know that some of these batteries were not constructed to what we would today call best
practices. This is 2010, which is really quite early in the history of these sort of light vehicle
type applications for lithium ion batteries. I mean, think about how many people you knew who

(52:15):
had an electric scooter or electric bike or an electric skateboard in 2010. You know, it was
nowhere near as well developed back then. So, you know, it's entirely possible that there was
some defect in one of these batteries because they they just hadn't got to the point that we're at

(52:36):
now where there are these best practices that have been established in the industry. The fire. So
anyway, we have a fire and this fire was probably already well underway by the time the first main
deck smoke detectors tripped at time 1913. Well, and yeah, so this the fire was probably already
pretty large at this point, but you couldn't have stopped it anyway, because as we described,

(53:01):
it's a lithium battery fire, you cannot put it out. So the pilots, the pilots don't know this,
they receive an alarm indicating fire main deck forward. So Captain Lampe immediately decides
they're going back to Dubai. He takes over control and he calls Bahrain air traffic control and he
declares an emergency says I need to land ASAP. And Bahrain says that the nearest airport is Doha

(53:25):
in Qatar, 100 nautical miles to or 17 flying minutes to their west. But the captain says no,
we're returning to Dubai, which is 180 track nautical miles to the south. And it doesn't look
like there should be such a big difference on this map, but it's so much more because it takes a
Boeing 747 at cruising speed like 50 to 60 track miles just to turn around before even going back

(53:50):
to Dubai. So it would in theory take 27 minutes in a best case scenario to reach Dubai from that
position. And we don't so we don't really know for sure why he decided to take the longer route back,
but it was probably a combination of things. First of all, they didn't have charts for landing in
Doha. And also, they would have to reconfigure the flight computer, but for a return to Dubai,

(54:16):
they could configure the flight computer to do that with like basically the press of a button.
They were also obviously they had no idea they were dealing with like donkeys,
inferno inside of the the main deck and not like a smoldering box of Cheerios or something.
So, so yeah, so guys, we ran the numbers, and we are talking about a fire below them that is

(54:40):
approaching the surface of the temperature or sorry, it's approaching the temperature of the
surface of the actual sun. So if you if you're picturing the Dr. Octopus machine,
the sort of Dr. Octopus reactor from Spider-Man two, you're you're not far off.
Yeah, and I totally thought that sounded wrong at first, but I checked that it's actually true.
The reason it sounds silly is because we talk about the surface of the sun being really hot,

(55:01):
but it's not even close to the hottest part of the sun. But it's but it's really hot. You don't
want something that hot on on your plane, you don't actually want to be anywhere near it.
So can we go to the next slide? Especially considering that your plane is made out of a
metal that melts at 700 degrees. Yeah, so here, I do want to ask a question. So,
yeah, so here, I do want to ask a question about this slide right here, which is so you mentioned

(55:26):
that they they wanted to basically give themselves more time to run their checklists. Is it because
at this point CRM is fairly well established, and we know that task saturation is very much a thing?
Well, it would all be spec it all be basically unfounded speculation. We don't know why
Captain Lampe immediately decided to go back to Dubai, I put forward some possibilities that

(55:47):
investigators thought were fairly likely. But um, yeah, we we obviously we can't ask him.
We don't know. Yeah. So as soon as he declared an emergency, Captain Lampe began turning them around
to return to Dubai and initiated a descent from cruising altitude. While First Officer Matthew

(56:11):
Bell began reading the emergency checklist. So the first item on this checklist is to flip the main
deck fire switch, which shuts off air conditioning packs two and three to begin depressurizing the
main deck. And again, this is going to do nothing because this fire does not care whether there is
oxygen. I mean, these, as said earlier, this could burn in a vacuum. And also, even if this was a

(56:34):
regular fire, this was going to do nothing because the captain is already descending for approach.
And Boeing's guidance is that depressurization as a fire suppression measure works best above
25,000 feet. But at the same time, this kind of doesn't make sense because there if your airplane
is on fire, are you really going to want to hang around at cruising altitude? And actually, the

(56:55):
final report points out this whole idea of depressurizing the hold and staying above 25,000
feet is kind of a half baked idea. Because what they actually found when they tested this is that
when you deprive a fire of oxygen this way, it tends to to just continue. It starts hibernating
and consumes material via pyrolysis. And then when you get back down to an altitude where there's

(57:18):
more oxygen during the attempt to land, it will explode back into flames with more power than it
had before. Yeah, so basically the whole idea behind a class E cargo compartment was bullshit,
but nobody knew this at the time. Yeah, I mean, land as soon as possible and hope that the fire
doesn't damage anything too important before you can do that is basically the best advice.
So, so in theory, what flipping the this fire switch will do in this scenario is it will ensure

(57:49):
the positive pressure differential between the cockpit and the main deck. So at least the smoke
will be kept out as long as air conditioning pack one is working. But oh yeah, about pack one,
it's intermittently failing remember. So one minute after the fire main deck switch was was
tripped, pack one died again. So it stopped providing positive pressure to the cockpit.

(58:15):
And actually, even if it did stay on, it probably would have stopped working later because the fire
eventually started to consume the air conditioning ducts. Yeah, so we pulled up this from the port,
the ducts are made from something called and I'm going to mispronounce this poly,
poly isocyanate, which it burns like newspaper, it releases poison smoke. And this was the shit

(58:39):
that was out on the outside of the Grenfell Tower in London. Yeah, it's it's not very nice stuff,
but the air conditioning ducts were made out of it. And so eventually they would have burned.
So anyway, the next thing on the checklist is to put on oxygen masks, which the pilots do. And
these can be set to mix oxygen with the ambient air or they can provide 100% oxygen. And they

(59:05):
should be set to 100% oxygen by default. But for whatever reason, the first officer's mask is set
to mix and we don't really know why. But the masks also have built in smoke goggles, and you can't
put on one or remove one without removing the other they are they are attached, they are not

(59:25):
a single unit, but they are attached to one another. So anyway, the pilots put on their masks and those
are working okay for now. Next slide please. So Captain Lampe is making an emergency descent
to 10,000 feet, and he disconnects the autopilot to fly manually, and he immediately discovers that

(59:50):
his manual controls are not working. And he repeatedly says to the first officer, I've barely
got control or I have no pitch control of the airplane. And this is because the 747 is a
traditional aircraft, not a fly-by-wire aircraft, in which the control columns are connected via
steel control cables to hydraulic actuators located at the control surfaces themselves.

(01:00:12):
And redundancy exists in this system because the first officer and the captain have independent
control cables with different routing. And then there's also a third layer of redundancy,
which is the autopilot, because the autopilot doesn't use control cables at all, it transmits
electrical signals directly to the actuators. So the issue with Captain Lampe's control cables,

(01:00:38):
and why the pilot plane is flying fine on autopilot, but the captain can't control it manually,
is that the raging inferno has already killed the supposedly fire-resistant cargo deck liner
and is cooking critical aircraft systems, including the control cables which run through
the main deck ceiling directly above the fire. And when these control cables heat up, they go slack,

(01:01:01):
or if their mountings melt, they go slack, same difference. So when the cables are slack,
the control column is just going to wiggle the cable without transmitting any force to the
hydraulic quadrant so the control surfaces won't move. But the autopilot doesn't care about cable
tension because it uses electrical signals, so as long as the wiring is intact, the autopilot is fine.

(01:01:22):
So Captain Lampe is literally moving this control column back and forth to the stops, and the plane
is not reacting at all. So he does the smart thing, and he re-engages the autopilot. And the autopilot
is just like okay, and continues the descent to 10,000 feet, where it will automatically level off,
and has absolutely no problem doing this. So next slide please. By this point, the lack of positive

(01:01:44):
pressure and the failure of the cargo liner are causing a lot of smoke to enter the cockpit,
and it's starting to get hard to see the instruments because there's not a lot of ambient
light, and also smoke is very dark. And so Captain Lampe tells Bahrain that they have smoke in the

(01:02:04):
cockpit, and he announces to the first officer that he is opening the smoke shutter. And
the shutter does not do anything in this situation because of the venturi effect.
So basically this vent to the atmosphere means that smoke is being pulled up
from the main deck through the cockpit and out the smoke shutter. And it's pulling so this is...

(01:02:29):
Yeah. The smoke shutter is also stopping them from being able to establish any positive pressure,
even if the pack had been working. Yeah, which obviously it wasn't. So, but yeah,
and this bottom center image is the piece of the exterior fuselage skin where the smoke shutter was
located as it was found after the accident. And so you can see there's this horrifying streak of

(01:02:56):
tar-like smoke residue that was just streaming out of it. Or actually, I don't know if this was
the smoke shutter. It may have just been some other port, but the smoke shutter would have
looked like this too. This is the smoke that was in the cockpit, and that must have been utterly hellish.
And I kind of want to... Okay, so for our viewers, I want to draw your attention to...

(01:03:19):
For our audio listeners, it's a yellow ladder on the right, and this is the ladder in the main deck
that goes up to the cockpit. It is normally very, very bright yellow, and you can see which end goes
on the main deck, which end goes up the cockpit, because it starts to... As it goes lower, it gets
gradually blacker and blacker. Actually, it's probably the other way around, because smoke is

(01:03:40):
hot and tends to rise. The bottom rungs are probably the ones that are cleanest, and the top
rungs up closer to the cockpit are probably the ones that are covered with black residue.
That's assuming it's not just oxidized, because it was exposed to a lot of heat, and the surfaces
turned rusty, because that is a steel ladder, right?

(01:04:03):
I mean, I don't know, but it's possible.
Yeah, okay, so Lampy is trying to fly, and we've got F.O. Bell is trying to set up the
computer, right? He's trying to get them back to Dubai?
Yeah, so they're trying to get back to Dubai, and the idea is that they can land straight in
on runway 12 left, and with Captain Lampy's control cables not working, they are going to try an

(01:04:28):
auto-land, so that means the autopilot will fly the thing all the way down through the landing flare,
basically to touchdown. To do this, they need to enter into the flight management system interface
the frequency for the instrument landing system on runway 12 left, and First Officer Bell has a

(01:04:51):
really hard time doing this, because there's so much smoke he can barely see the interface,
and he complains about this several times, but he eventually manages to get it entered somehow.
So with this frequency entered, the plane will more or less land by itself if they can put it
in position to intercept the localizer and glideslope signals from the instrument landing system,
which remains to be seen. So at this point, however, things take a turn for the even worse

(01:05:20):
at time 19.20, which is seven minutes since the fire alarm, and they've just finished the turn
back. They are now finally headed in the direction of Dubai, and the captain comments that it's become
very hot, and then he says, I've got no oxygen, I can't breathe. And what has happened here is
that the fire is spreading through the main deck more or less directly below them at this point,

(01:05:43):
and the radiant heat has likely melted one of the flex hoses in the captain's side oxygen
distribution system. So there is no oxygen coming from the oxygen bottle to his mask.
And he tells the First Officer to get him more oxygen, because there is actually a spare oxygen
bottle and a spare mask in a compartment at the rear of the cockpit, but it's not quite possible

(01:06:07):
to reach this while seated. So he wants the First Officer to get up and get it, but the First Officer
again is very inexperienced on the 747, and in the heat of the moment, he can't remember where this
is located. He says, I can't go get it. So the captain says, okay, you fly the plane, and he gets

(01:06:31):
and he gets out of his seat to go to the back, and he has to take his mask and smoke goggles off
in order to do this, which is unfortunately fatal, because his last words on the cockpit voice
recording are I can't see, and then he's never heard from again. And he likely entailed smoke

(01:06:55):
while trying to find the spare oxygen mask and then became unconscious and probably died within
seconds or minutes, because smoke isn't just CO2, it's also a whole ton of other, you know,
poisons that will kill you dead in minutes, including hydrogen cyanide, there's carbon monoxide.

(01:07:15):
You mentioned some other chemicals were probably in there too, you said hydrofluoric acid.
Yeah, hydrofluoric acid. I have worked with some pretty scary chemicals, but hydrofluoric acid is
the only one that gives me pause. You can get a splash of that on your skin and be in agony for

(01:07:38):
months and have to have limbs removed from your body. It is incredibly unpleasant stuff. It will
dissolve glass. It is just, just awful. And if you were to get it in your eyes, it would destroy your
corneas almost instantly. That literally could have been in the smoke. But the autopsy found that

(01:08:06):
Captain Lampe's cause of death was carbon monoxide poisoning, and his blood had a carboxy
hemoglobin concentration of about 50%, which is considered severe carbon monoxide poisoning
by a wide margin. And people have survived carbon monoxide concentrations above that,
but it's not all that common. So especially without medical treatment. So he was probably,

(01:08:30):
he was probably dead long before this plane eventually did hit the ground.
He was certainly unconscious.
Unconscious. Very graphic.
Next slide, please.
So at this point, First Officer Matthew Bell, with 77 hours on the Boeing 747,

(01:08:54):
is flying a single pilot in an emergency where he cannot see shit. And I'm telling,
I mean, I mean that it was way worse than in this pic, which is just like a fluff pic.
There was barely anything that he could see. And this is a completely hopeless situation.
This is a pilot's absolute worst nightmare to be in this position.

(01:09:19):
You know, he never even had time to try to find out what happened to the captain.
He didn't try to call back like, Hey, are you all right? All he had time to focus on was trying to
save this plane and by extension his own life. But he was facing a lot of barriers. For one,
he was having trouble breathing because his mask was still set to mix to mix instead of 100% oxygen.

(01:09:45):
And this mask has a belt in smoke vent that is designed to keep smoke out of it. But it was
having a hard time given the sheer volume of smoke that was here. So it's possible he was inhaling
some not very nice things, not in concentrations high enough to incapacitate him, but probably
enough to make life very uncomfortable. And actually an interesting thing I want to stop

(01:10:07):
to note here is that if a more experienced First Officer had been there, who actually knew where
the supplemental oxygen was, that First Officer might have gone back and attempted to get it and
died in exactly the same way that Captain Lampe did, while Lampe's own mask not providing him
oxygen would have led him to die as well. And then this would have been a ghost plane scenario,

(01:10:27):
except the plane's also on fire. That's a weird, weird thing to think about that that that could
very easily have happened, but it did not. And listen, it's one of the things we discovered
in our research. And so one of one more reason. So everything we discovered about this crash was
just more horrific than the last thing. One one reason we just one sort of fact we discovered

(01:10:48):
that made this cockpit true hell is that Bell, he needs to keep flying and he needs to keep trying
to talk to air traffic control, right? Aviate, navigate, communicate. He now has to do all three
all by himself. But to use the flashlight, right, to see his systems and to work checklists, he
needs both hands. And in the 747, it does not have what's called push to talk. If you are wearing an

(01:11:10):
oxygen mask, you have to push a button down on the yoke. So you need to take your hand off either
the flashlight or the checklist to talk on the radio. So he's he's got to do all of these things
all at once while he's flying a plane that is on fire. Yeah. So next slide, please.
So by this point, the plane is reach approaching the edge of Bahrain's flight information region.

(01:11:35):
And there are no repeaters to support the Bahrain air traffic control frequency beyond this this
radius. So the Bahrain controller tells Bell to contact Dubai on the radio and start talking to
them. And Bell responds that he can't contact Dubai because he can't see his radio to input

(01:11:56):
the frequency. There is too much smoke. It is completely invisible. And at the same time,
he can't keep talking to Bahrain because he's about to fly out of Bahrain's VHF radio range.
Yeah. So VHF doesn't go around corners. It's too high of a frequency for ground wave to reach

(01:12:17):
past the horizon. You don't get any ionospheric ducting. It's like FM radio. It's very close in
frequency to FM radio, actually. So we actually calculated the range of these VHF radios at these
altitudes. At 32,000 feet, it's about 190 nautical miles. And at 10,000 feet, it's about 106. Bahrain

(01:12:42):
is about 260 nautical miles from Dubai. So this is a real problem. Yeah. And the plane is equipped
with all kinds of long distance communication systems like SATCOM and HF radio. But Bell can't
use any of these because he can't see them to tune them. This is a very frustrating situation to be

(01:13:04):
in, obviously. And at the same time, what? Yeah. And at the same time, Dubai can't just start
broadcasting on Bahrain's frequency to contact UPS flight six because as an air traffic control
facility, they have assigned frequencies and their equipment isn't even tunable. So at this point,

(01:13:29):
Bahrain has to communicate with flight 006 by relaying messages via passing aircraft that are
in VHF radio range of both Bahrain and flight six, as shown in the slide. So there's starting to be
a game of telephone that's taking place here. And at the same time, this problem is about to be

(01:13:58):
compounded because flight six is going to fly out of Bahrain's radar range as well within a very
sharp period of time. And this is a big problem because Bell can sort of see the altitude air
speed and heading input knobs on the autopilot control panel, but he cannot see his primary

(01:14:19):
flight display to determine how the plane is responding to his inputs to the autopilot control
panel. So he can set this air speed to whatever or the heading to whatever, but he doesn't know
what the plane's current air speed and heading are. And he can't see his navigation display either,
so he doesn't know where he is. And he needs air traffic control to tell him his position,

(01:14:45):
speed, heading, and altitude based on radar. But Bahrain no longer has this information because
he's out of radar range. So he's in the United Arab Emirates flight information region. So Bahrain,
air traffic control, has to call the United Arab Emirates area control center on the landline to

(01:15:06):
get this information from them. So when Bell makes a request to know his basic flight parameters,
it has to go through the relay plane to Bahrain to the United Arab Emirates air traffic control
center who reads their radar and then it goes all the way back. And this game of telephone is so bad,

(01:15:27):
most of the information is lost during this process. None of the people involved realize
how bad the situation is aboard the flight. And to make matters worse, relay planes keep flying out
of range, so they have to get new ones who also don't know what's going on. And I think they
ultimately used at least five different relay planes. And the result of all this is that Bell

(01:15:54):
will ask for his air speed, altitude, and heading, and then he'll get back only the distance from
Dubai like 45 seconds later. So it's completely unhelpful. And there is another option available
to him, which is the universally emergency frequency of 121.5 megahertz, also known as
GARD. And every flight is supposed to tune, have one radio tuned to GARD at all times.

(01:16:19):
And in fact, one of their radios on board flight six is tuned to GARD. And so Bell tries saying,
Mayday, can anyone hear me, on GARD. And several planes try calling him back on this frequency,
and they're actually heard on the cockpit voice recording, but for some reason he does not hear

(01:16:40):
them. He thinks no one can hear him on GARD. And when he does, he's not able to hear him.
And we don't really know why this was, but it was probably just because he had the volume on his
headset for that channel turned too low to hear them. That's the most plausible reason, unfortunately.

(01:17:01):
And if he had been more experienced, maybe he would have realized this,
but or maybe he was just task saturated. We don't really know.
Alternatively, it would have been possible for a relay aircraft to tune one of its radios to the
Bahrain frequency and the other radio to the Dubai frequency to shorten the game of telephone,

(01:17:22):
but nobody thought of that until later, for whatever reason. So if we can go to the next slide, please.
So at this point, the plane is rapidly approaching Dubai. By this time, the autopilot had leveled the
plane off at roughly 10,000 feet as it was commanded to do, and so Bell needed to make sure that he was
in a position to intercept the localizer and glide slope from the instrument landing system, or ILS,

(01:17:47):
so that the autopilot could follow the flight path to the
runway and perform an auto landing. And other than auto land, there's really no way to get this plane
on the runway because he can't see out the windows. So the way that this is going to work is there's a
localizer beam in the vertical plane and a glide slope beam in the horizontal plane, and these beams

(01:18:12):
are quite narrow, so when the plane approaches the beam with the approach mode, the plane will be
in the flight computer. The ILS receivers will pick up these signals and the autopilot will track
them, automatically putting the plane on course to land. And so when these signals are captured,
then the approach mode goes from armed to capture, and that's what you want to see. But if the plane

(01:18:39):
passes through the beams too quickly, the computer won't be able to see the flight path. So this is
a good example of how the ILS can be captured. But if the plane passes through the beams too quickly,
the computer won't have time to capture the signal, and approach mode will not engage or just remain
armed. So flight six is actually on a decent trajectory to capture the ILS at this point,

(01:19:03):
but it's moving way too fast. We're talking 350 knots. That's like, you know, that's like
the first officer doesn't know this because no one is telling him what his airspeed is,
and he barely even knows what his position is. So he's desperately asking for vectors to the ILS
intercept point, but he's getting nothing in return. His desperation is palpable. At one point,

(01:19:29):
he literally tells a relay pilot, you're gonna have to do better than that. He's just chewing
these guys out on frequency. So the United Arab Emirates Air Traffic Control Center also can't
directly see the instrument landing system or clear them to land, so they have to call the Dubai
Tower for that information, adding yet another layer to the game of telephone. And Bahrain can't

(01:19:51):
get that information from the Dubai Tower because they don't have a landline to their.
So it's just a mess. So at this point, the plane actually passes through the glide slope beam
and is already above it when Bell finally presses the approach button to arm the approach mode. So
the glide slope never had any hope of capturing. He would have had to have been informed that he

(01:20:15):
needed to do that a lot earlier, and he also would have needed to know his airspeed and know to slow
it down because he's traveling too fast to capture the localizer, so he just breezes through it,
bam, like that, it's gone. And air traffic control at this point says through the relay plane that he
is too high and fast and asks if he can make a 360 to lose altitude and speed, and Bell emphatically

(01:20:43):
replies negative. There's no way for him to make a 360, he can't see what he's doing. So at this
point basically all hope is lost because he really had only one shot to intercept the ILS and perform
an auto landing, but he does not give up. So he puts the autopilot in vertical speed mode and tells
it to descend. He extends the flaps, which prompts the autothrottle to pull back thrust so as not to

(01:21:09):
exceed the flap speed limit, and so their speed begins dropping. He also extends the speed brakes,
but they barely move because the control cables have gone slack, so he doesn't have any speed
brakes. He tries to extend the landing gear to help slow down as well, and it doesn't drop. He gets
an immediate aural alarm that says landing gear unsafe, and so systems are just failing left and

(01:21:33):
right at this point as the fire is consuming everything. But the plane is still flying at a
time 1938, flight six overflies Dubai airport at 4200 feet in a descent with a speed of about 320 knots,
so obviously not in a position to make a landing. So air traffic control informs them that Sharjah

(01:21:58):
airport is to their left at 10 nautical miles. That's SHJ on the map for those who are looking at
the slide. And so Bell asks for a heading, and he gets told the heading to Sharjah is 095 degrees,
but he can barely see his autopilot input panel, so we at least we think that's why he accidentally

(01:22:21):
entered a heading of 195 degrees into the autopilot instead of 095. So the plane started turning to
the right instead of to the left, and at this point Bell disconnected the autopilot. We don't
really know why, but it's possibly because the airplane was doing something unexpected. He was
disoriented, he panicked, he tried to take control. He surely had a reason, but he didn't have time to

(01:22:45):
tell us what it was. Yeah the priorities are aviate, navigate, communicate, at no point today is it
narrate. Yeah, so as soon as he disconnects the autopilot the plane pitches 14 degrees nose down,
and this was probably because of a couple things. First of all the thrust levers had been reduced

(01:23:05):
to idle around this time by the auto throttle in an attempt to slow down below the flap limit speed,
and this causes a pitch down moment on planes with wing mounted engines. And then once the plane
started pitching down there was a lot of burning cargo in the cargo hold. It was probably no longer
secured, and this might have slid forward causing a center of gravity shift that significantly

(01:23:28):
exacerbated the nose down moment. Yeah, uncommanded center of gravity movements in a cargo plane are
very very bad news. They're usually almost always fatal. Yeah, well they they can be, but this yeah,
and I mean also the center of the center of gravity is the center of gravity is on fire.

(01:23:51):
So the plane continues turning past 195 degrees because he's turned the autopilot off and he
hasn't leveled the wings. He eventually levels the wings. The plane is sort of heading west-ish,
and he's pulling back on the controls because he knows he's descending, we think, but he's not

(01:24:14):
getting a normal response from the elevators because his control cables are starting to get a
little bit wonky too. Remember that they're independent from the captains, which failed a
long time ago. So at first the elevator responses to his pitch inputs were just out of phase,
and then they slowly ceased responding altogether within the course of about a minute.

(01:24:36):
And during this time the plane was basically diving
from 4,000 feet toward a residential subdivision called the Dubai Silicon Oasis. It's one of those
you know, of course of course a residential subdivision in Dubai would be called something
like that. I find it kind of silly, but anyway. I think they were trying to I think they were

(01:24:58):
trying to cultivate a tech industry at one point, and I think that was that was like the
it was a mixed residential and commercial like development for you know tech tech startups to
have a spot in Dubai. As far as I'm aware it didn't really work. I certainly never heard of any

(01:25:19):
company never heard of any company coming out with that. So as he was messing with the controls,
he managed to alter the trajectory just enough to make sure that the flight was going to be
a little bit more efficient. He was able to alter the trajectory just enough to miss the Dubai

(01:25:40):
Silicon Oasis, which no doubt saved some number of lives on the ground. Even though Bell probably
had no idea what he had done because he was completely disoriented and he couldn't see
anything. There's no way for him to have known that he was flying toward the Dubai Silicon Oasis,
and he just totally stopped working. So next slide please. At this point the plane is obviously out

(01:26:06):
of control, and it it finally begins to impact the ground 28 minutes after the first fire warning.
This plane has been in the air for quite a while, but it's finally over as the plane the wingtip
impacts several street lamps on the perimeter of a military base and then impacts a service road,

(01:26:27):
and the right wing then plows into several unoccupied storage and support buildings,
which sends the fuselage crashing to the ground and it slides into a large embankment,
which causes the plane to explode rather violently. So basically just a storm of
continuous forward and strikes several more support buildings on the military base before

(01:26:51):
finally coming to a stop. And this has left charred debris over an impact path to over 2,000 feet long,
and it's total destruction through this area. There's just charred debris as far as the eye
can see. Obviously there was no way for Matthew Bell to have survived this impact. He was sadly

(01:27:15):
killed instantly, but nobody on the ground was hurt, rather miraculously.
Just can get a next slide. So let's talk about the aftermath.
So about nine months later there was a sort of eerily similar accident that happened off the

(01:27:35):
coast of South Korea. In this case it was I believe this was ASEAN Air Cargo 991. In this case it
appears that a pallet in the aft of the plane, we believe somewhere behind the wing route,
was carrying lithium and it caught fire. The pilots said on the radio that they were losing

(01:27:56):
control and then very, very quickly after it stated that neither of them had any sort of control. So
this obviously seems like a very similar chain of events. Analysis of the wreckage also showed
smoke in the cockpit. This one went sort of much more rapidly, much more violently than UPS 006
because it appears that the fire either burnt all the way through the structure of the aircraft

(01:28:19):
or it made it weak at the aerodynamic forces, just sort of ripped the entire fuselage apart.
The time from declaring an emergency to ATC to impact was 18 minutes.
Yeah, I believe it's suspected the entire tail section of the plane fell off in flight
because of the intensity of the fire. Yeah, the flight data recorder was recovered. It did not

(01:28:44):
have a memory module. They think somehow it was lost in the ocean currents. The cockpit voice
recorder has never been found. Yeah, so we don't have a real good idea of what happened on this
flight, but it was presumed to be another lithium battery fire, much like UPS 006.
Okay, so let's go to the next slide. This means this is the second episode we've done where we've

(01:29:07):
mentioned Asiana. That's true, true. Yes, yes it is. This one was very much not their fault.
No. So I want to talk about Matthew Belt. So he's the guy on the left here. I'm sorry for the poor
quality. We really tried. We really could not find any good images of him. To our Zoomer listeners,

(01:29:27):
there was an era not too long ago where you had a digital point and shoot, and that was kind of it.
Phone cameras were not very common and they all sucked. Anyway, so I want to let you guys know
that researching this incident was... it ended up being sort of deeply unsettling in a way that
some of the other ones weren't. Even ones where more people lost their lives. And I think it was

(01:29:51):
very emotionally impactful because this guy did everything right and he still died. And it seems
very unfair and it seems like that kind of thing shouldn't happen. Something should have been able
to have been done. And when we do an episode, we sort of discuss amongst ourselves what we want,

(01:30:14):
the theme of the episode to be. What are we trying to say? And during the research for this episode,
I decided that the thesis, sort of for me at least, was going to be... Matthew Belt was a hero
and a legend and he flew an impossible tiny little sun for a half an hour and he almost
fucking made it. And his last action as a soul on this planet was to turn, even accidentally,

(01:30:37):
to miss a bunch of houses and he saved dozens of lives, even if he didn't know he was doing it.
And we just thought his story deserved to be told. Yes. And we gamed this out a lot of different ways
and so did the investigators actually. We don't think there was really any possible scenario in
which he survives. Yeah, we do a lot of crashes and we discuss a lot of crashes amongst ourselves.

(01:31:01):
Where it's sort of, you know, the joke of, oh, I simply would not have crashed the aircraft.
But in this case, there is no other way. Yeah, that aircraft is going to be on the ground
and it is not going to be in one piece. Obviously the most common one that people
ask is, what about Doha? So can we cover the Doha diversion? Yeah, so one idea is, you know,

(01:31:22):
with the outcome of it better if they diverted to Doha, which would have taken 17 minutes in theory
to landing instead of 27 minutes. And so the investigators gamed this out and they thought
the soonest a landing could have been achieved was time 1934. So that's about 20 minutes after

(01:31:44):
the fire bell sounded. And if we, you know, consider the actual flight, what happened within
the first 20 minutes after the fire bell, that means the captain still would have run out of
oxygen and died. Their controls still would have failed. The cockpit still would have been full
of smoke. The landing gear still wouldn't have extended. The big upside would be that the

(01:32:09):
communication problems would have been avoided. So it would have been in theory possible for
timely information to be transmitted to Matthew Bell so that he could successfully align for the
auto landing. Maybe. Ideally. However, with the landing gear up, full load of fuel and a massive

(01:32:30):
fire on board and the cockpit full of smoke, it's difficult to imagine that he would have survived
because the cockpit of the 747 doesn't have an emergency escape window. He would have had to
walk, get out of his seat and walk back to the crew escape hatch. And he would have had to take

(01:32:53):
off his oxygen mask and smoke goggles to do that. So unless-
He would have had to have been in good enough shape to actually stand up, which if you've just
belly landed a 747 full of fuel, is probably not something that's going to happen.
We also have to sort of discuss the option that at this point, it's very likely that the fire

(01:33:15):
weakened the structure in a very, very severe way. So that the aircraft might not have even
landed intact. And this is especially true for the next one, which is what if he had been able to
successfully intercept the glide slope at DX? Yeah. Then the outcome would have been basically,
yeah, it would have been basically the same outcome that I just described,
just in a different location, essentially. Yeah. The last one that we kind of want to

(01:33:40):
discuss is ditching, right? So trying to land the aircraft somewhere in the Persian Gulf. And
on its face, this is not the most ridiculous idea, especially if for some reason they had
the idea to do this immediately after the fire bell sounded. The Persian Gulf tends to be fairly
calm waters. It's very warm. But we will say that it's dark. The sea can change very quickly.

(01:34:07):
And the 747 is not a float plane. This was a scenario that was so sort of unpredictable
with so many different variables that the UAE GCAA did not even choose to speculate. They had
a section saying, we are not even going to try and run this as a simulation, because there's
too many variables for this to have any meaningful result as part of the investigation. Yeah. Not to

(01:34:28):
mention that it's really hard to... The autopilot can't do a ditching. You would have to be flown
manually. And by the time they got down there, it would be very likely that at least the captain's
controls were not working properly. And there probably would have been smoke in the cockpit
anyway. So it would have been really difficult to see where the water was. It just... It wouldn't

(01:34:53):
end well, in my opinion. In any case, it's difficult to see where the water is at night.
The other thing that you need to remember is that after ditching, you've got a plane that's
probably in pieces that has leaked out all of this jet fuel. Oh, and did I mention that lithium metal

(01:35:14):
reacts violently with seawater and it floats? So you've got this built-in igniter for all of this
fuel that you are now floating in the middle of. Yeah. Good luck. It wouldn't be very nice. Very
nice. It wouldn't go well. So we did amongst ourselves, though, discuss one possible option

(01:35:35):
that was not tried. And I want you guys to remember when we talked about that this was a 747
freighter and it has a nose that swings up. Now it is possible for the crew of a 747 to override
these safety interlocks and open the nose. And we just thought, do it. Do it, you fucking legend.
Just that's real, real I'll see you in hell energy. Yeah. Just open it. Who cares about the

(01:36:01):
consequences? I mean, literally, what's the worst that could happen? And then point the nose straight
down like Memphis Belle. Also, for legal reasons, this is a joke. Next slide. Another silly idea we
came up with. The Pallet Yeeter 9001 is clearly the solution here. You can see a proof of concept

(01:36:23):
above. I believe that the US military has a number of these. The US military is in the United States
Air Force is very, very good at pallet eating. I have seen Star Trek. I have seen Star Trek.
If you have a problem, you dump the contents of the cargo bag. Very simple. Yeah. And you know,
in these episodes, we always talk about how Jato bottles would help. And we thought, we thought

(01:36:49):
there was no way for Jato bottles to help in this this accident scenario, but they will attach the
Jato bottles to the pallets to propel them out of the plane. And that's your Pallet Yeeter system.
And I can see no possible downsides to this. On my argument, though, I would like to point out

(01:37:11):
that this is yet another accident in which reheat could have very much made a difference.
Because if this aircraft had a reheat, as all wide bodies should have, it would have made it back to
Dubai much faster and with much less fuel. So it would have been quite a lot lighter.
You know, I should point out just so that everyone is aware, we also support the eating

(01:37:33):
of ULDs. Those are unit load devices. Yeah, the eating of ULDs. It doesn't have to be a pallet,
is what I'm saying. Yeah, the Yeeter does not discriminate.
What if they had doors at the bottom? And just opened it up and everything falls out?

(01:37:53):
Right, exactly. What you're describing is Bombay doors.
Yes, you just ditch the burning 18650s. It's perfect. Perfect. All right, that's good. So
we get to read the headline. Atlanta Company drops cluster and send your ammunition on Dubai.
Yeah, I don't see any problems. Honestly, do we have any more thoughts on the pallet Yeeters?
I mean, obviously, this should be standard equipment and lobby your congressman today.

(01:38:17):
Patent pending, patent pending, patent pending. Okay, so what did we learn from this? Okay,
so J, you want to tell us a couple things what we learned about lithium carriages and packaging?
We now have these wonderful rules of lithium carriage. You've seen this this sticker. If
you're listening, it's that sticker with a bunch of batteries, one of which is broken open and has

(01:38:39):
fire coming out of it that says UN 3481, which is the the international set of rules for carrying
lithium on planes. There are new regulations on the marking of hazmat and new definitions of what
hazmat even is because, you know, prior to this accident, nobody really thought it was that sketchy.

(01:39:06):
We have a lot more sophisticated battery management systems and products. This is partly driven by a
desire for better performance and longer longevity, you know, longer cycle life, this kind of thing.
But still, they also protect these batteries from being put into a state where they become unstable.
There was a lot of industry interest in lithium iron phosphate battery chemistries. They have,

(01:39:29):
as I said earlier, a negative thermal coefficient, so they don't burn like this. They're a bit sort
of gravimetrically energy, not as dense as you would want, so they don't get used in vehicles or
that kind of thing. But a lot of sort of the kind of energy storage you would have if you had solar

(01:39:54):
panels on your roof and, you know, you didn't buy it from Tesla, you bought it from someone else,
those you tend to use lithium iron phosphate batteries now because they're just so much safer.
This is, yeah. So one thing that was learned about containers as a result of tests that came out of
this accident was that, so regulations at the time required cargo area smoke detectors to sound an

(01:40:18):
alarm within one minute after ignition. But testing showed that if the fire starts inside of a cargo
container, it can take between two and 18 minutes after ignition of a normal cargo fire for the smoke
to escape from certain types of cargo containers, which results in a potentially substantial delay
in alerting the crew to the fire, during which time the fire grows in intensity inside the container,

(01:40:43):
basically circumventing the regulations. So, and also another thing they discovered was that cargo
containers constructed out of supposedly fire-resistant polypropylene resulted in fires
with twice the peak energy output, so it was completely counterproductive.
Yeah, really the key is to just to not have fires, to never ever not know what is going on to these

(01:41:07):
aircraft. Yeah. Another thing that came in was that there's now a rule that the largest energy
capacity for a battery that you're allowed to take on a passenger flight specifically
is 100 watt hours, and as a consequence the MacBook Pro that is currently sitting on my lab has a 99

(01:41:30):
watt hour battery for reasons that are now obvious. So they introduced just a whole bunch of
additional regulations that would hopefully prevent this from happening in the future.
Yeah, and things like this are why they tell you to keep your electronic devices on for a long time,

(01:41:51):
to keep your electronic devices that have batteries in the passenger cabin, because if a fire starts
inside the passenger cabin, ironically it's a lot easier to detect it and keep it under control
than it is if it starts in the cargo compartment, because nobody can get into the cargo compartment
in flight. Yeah. They've also been working to develop, UPS paid a good bit of money into

(01:42:19):
researching smoke resistant viewing systems. You can see one of the prototypes here on the right.
There's a few different variations on this, but they all sort of come to the idea that
in zero visibility environments you will always be able to see the most critical instruments.
We also found that smoke training was being mandatory for crews. We're not sure how it works

(01:42:40):
if you sort of hot box the sim. Also the safety recommendation was section four decimal 20.
If you are a commercial pilot, either commercial passenger or commercial cargo, please write in
and let us know how you do smoke training. Yeah, we'd love to know because we couldn't
find any pictures of the special smoke simulator. Yeah, if they even do this, I'm not totally sure

(01:43:04):
this was genuinely a mandatory thing, or if it's something that only certain airlines,
like probably UPS is doing this, but I don't know if everybody is doing it.
Okay, do we have any final closing thoughts on UPS 006?
Yeah, send my regards to Matthew Bell. Legends never die.
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, Matthew Bell, you're a hero of CPIT.

(01:43:29):
Kyra, would you like to talk about your Patreon?
Oh yeah, I have a Patreon, I mean for my articles, which you can contribute to and get into a
Discord server that has all three of us in it. Yeah, it's not AM, it's not the CPIT Patreon.
Do not donate it thinking you are giving money to Ariadne and J,

(01:43:53):
that money only goes to me, but one day in the future there may be a CPIT Patreon.
It could happen.
It could happen. Okay.
Thank you everybody for joining us. Our next episode will be on
Malaysia Air 370. As usual, see you.

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