Controlled Pod Into Terrain episode 8: UTA 141

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
Hello, and welcome to Controlled Pod Interterrain.

(00:15):
We are a multimedia podcast about air and space mishaps, aiming to put them in the broader
context of how and why things went wrong.
To introduce myself and my co-hosts, my name is Ariadne.
I'm the business aviation industry experts, and my pronouns are they and them.
My name is Jay.
I'm the systems and engineering expert, and my pronouns are also they and them.
And I'm Kira Dempsey, better known as the aviation writer Admiral Cloudberg, and my

(00:39):
pronouns are she and her.
Next slide.
For this episode, we're going to take you to West Africa in 2003, where a bunch of very
shady guys from outside of Africa came in and built the worst airline to ever fly, killed
a whole bunch of people, and got off scot-free.
But first, we have to do some kind of news thing.

(01:00):
Next slide.
Da da da da.
All right.
Let's do some kind of news thing.
Next slide.
So we're going to thank you, by the way, to the Admiral for creating this site.
Yes, actually, I didn't even come up with it.
My friend who doesn't even listen to this podcast came up with it, at least part of

(01:23):
it.
So we're going to start by doing a quick recap on Boeing's issues lately.
If you want a more in-depth analysis of the issues facing the 737 MAX and all of the other
Boeing airplanes, please take a listen to our recent bonus episode.
So we'll start with the 737.
Back around Christmas, Boeing had to issue a service bulletin to all airlines to inspect

(01:44):
all 737 MAX airplanes for a possible loose bolt in the rudder control system.
This came about after an airline discovered a bolt within missing nut while performing
routine maintenance.
It's probably for the best that Boeing is paying attention when it comes to the PCU.
I mean, they've not had any problems with it in the past or anything, have they?

(02:05):
Future episode foreshadowing.
Boeing is also trying to have the FAA certify the 737 MAX 10.
And one of the sticking points has been the nacelle anti-ice system.
The short version of this is that the anti-ice system works by heating the nacelle with bleed
air.
But because the nacelle is composite, I believe it's a fiberglass, if this bleed air is left

(02:29):
on too long when there's no ice, it will make the nacelle brittle and eventually it could
possibly crack and come apart.
And then rather than fix it with some kind of, I don't know, contact switch or thermostat
or literally anything, Boeing instead just wanted to tell the pilots that they had five
minutes after they left icing conditions to turn it off or else they might critically

(02:51):
damage the nacelles.
And they submitted this process to the FAA under the request that this be their solution
until they can install a permanent solution sometime around 2025 or 2026.
Yeah, but after the blowout on Alaska 1282, they quietly withdrew the request.
So the MAX 10 is not going to get certified until they can get a permanent mechanical

(03:14):
solution implemented.
And it could be a year or more.
So if you listened to our bonus episode, you heard a lot about all of those things.
But one thing that's new since we recorded that is we have some of the results of FAA's
audit on Boeing.
Yeah, a recent audit by the FAA of Boeing has concluded after six weeks, and it's

(03:34):
not pretty.
The FAA audited 89 different production items and workstreams.
They passed 56 of the audits and failed 33 of them, for an overall grade of 62.9% if
you're doing the math.
And while that is passing in 100 level English, and the dude that graduates last in medical
school still gets to be called doctor, it isn't a soaring success, especially when

(03:57):
you're given the answers to the test ahead of time.
There are fields where 62.9% is not a passing grade.
And frankly, this is one of them.
So I'm going to call that a fail.
Yeah, apparently the FAA found 97 instances of alleged noncompliance.
And what noncompliance means is not specified, but probably means, you know, what would you

(04:25):
call it?
A normalization of deviation?
Yeah.
I'm going to say.
For sure.
My wife used to work in food service.
She was a waitress and a bartender.
And she would always tell me that because the criteria for kitchen inspections was published

(04:46):
and was very clearly written, that restaurants really had no excuse for getting less than
100%.
And it really feels like this should have been something like that.
Spirit Aero Systems was also audited.
They failed eight out of 13.
Now that is a very not passing grade, no matter how you slice it, even in 100 level English.

(05:08):
I'll read you a couple of excerpts from the New York Times article that was written by
Mark Walker on the 11th of March, which was our source for all of these numbers.
Quote, at one point during the examination, the Air Safety Agency observed mechanics Spirit
using a whole tail key card to check a door seal, according to a document that describes
some of the findings.
That action was not identified, documented or called out in the production order.

(05:32):
I should note that it's the not documented part that's the big deal here, because checking
door seals at the hotel key card could be safe if someone has validated it and written
up a procedure for doing it, but that had not been done.
Yeah, it's pretty normal to check door fit with a shim or something like that.
And in fact, this is how everyone does it, from car companies to the people who assemble

(05:57):
your refrigerator at LG City in Korea.
That's how you actually do it.
That's normal, but it does need to be documented and approved and the thickness of the hotel
key card, as well as the process for running it around the door, absolutely does need to
be documented because that process is a vital part of the quality system for that manufacturing.

(06:24):
Yeah, and if you don't do that, hotel key card becomes an accepted unit of measurement.
And that's not reassuringly precise because when you're dealing with things that require
a certain level of precision, is it cold outside with the key card?
Is it a Hilton key card?
And maybe it's a little thinner.
These are things that require specific precision and not just whatever you happen to have in

(06:46):
your pocket.
In another instance, the FAA saw spirit mechanics apply liquid Dawn soap to a door seal, quote,
as a lubricant in the fit up process.
According to the document, the door seal was cleaned with a wet cheesecloth.
The document said noting that instructions were vague and unclear on what specifications

(07:07):
or actions are to be followed or recorded by the mechanic.
Same goes here.
Anecdotally, Dawn soap is just fine for this task, but it needs to be validated and specified
in a procedure.
When these kinds of things are done based on a, you know, that should be okay mindset,
even if they are okay, then you don't have a barrier against slippage.
You don't have a barrier against someone using Dawn ultra high power deep cleansing acid

(07:31):
wash dish soap that dissolves rubber.
I mean, this is actually a thing that can happen.
Rubber is fundamentally tree sap.
And some soaps actually have enough glycerol in them that they can make rubber tacky.
And then when it dries out, it sticks together.
And you know, obviously this is a problem for your quality management system, which

(07:53):
is apparently a term that Boeing just doesn't understand.
Okay.
Yeah.
Next slide.
Okay.
My notes say United gets kind of screwed by probability.
And yeah, I mean, that's pretty much it.
United Airlines has had what can only be described as a no good, very bad few days earlier this

(08:14):
month.
None of the incidents were serious.
None of them resulted in any injury, any hull losses, or even any sort of severe mechanical
damage.
So we'll just kind of go through the rapid fire, rapid engine fire, one might say.
All right.
So on March 4th, a 737 out of Houston Bush experienced an engine fire on the way to Fort
Myers, probably their punishment for trying to go to Florida.

(08:37):
They extinguished the fire and proceeded onwards.
Now normally this would not warrant discussion, but there was something about their explanation
that kind of caught our eye.
So they claim this was caused by bubble wrap being ingested into the engine.
Now I didn't think this passed the smell test just immediately because bubble wrap is made

(09:00):
of polyethylene, which is basically just congealed jet fuel.
And this was a 379, which means it has a CFM56.
The operating temperatures on these engines are around 800 to 900 degrees C. Obviously

(09:20):
all of the air and any bubble wrap that gets sucked into the engine has to go through the
compressor first.
And of course the compressor makes this very hot.
And of course, again, if this bubble wrap had gone through the bypass duct, then obviously
it wouldn't be causing engine fires.
It would just go straight through.

(09:42):
So the bleed air temperatures and pressures from the engine's compressor, 14th stage,
change with engine power settings, but the temperatures and pressures can reach 510 degrees
C and 15 bar when you're at Toga power.
At cruise, it's actually not that much less.

(10:03):
And the melting point for average commercial low density polyethylene is typically between
105 to 115 degrees C. So it is my contention that you could feed an entire 15 pound roll
of U-line bubble wrap into a CFM56 at cruise without retuning it.

(10:24):
I don't think you'd even have a noticeable effect on the exhaust gas temperature.
So I don't know what exactly happened here, but that story doesn't seem like it's right
to me.
And I mean the other way, because all indications are that this was a compressor stall, which
is the result of a disruption to the natural balance of air flows and pressures within

(10:48):
the engine, not necessarily mechanical damage.
And this results in dramatic flames due to incomplete combustion, but it's not always
even fatal to the engine.
So there are a couple of ways I think bubble wrap could cause a compressor stall, assuming
in either case the quantity of bubble wrap was fairly large.
So first, a large amount of partially melted polyethylene could adhere somewhere in the

(11:11):
compressor stages.
It wouldn't take much material to disrupt the airflow enough to cause a surge at takeoff
power.
And if the compressor pressure drops even a little with the engine at Toga, then the
combustion chamber pressure will exceed the surge line and air will explosively burst
forward through the compressors.
Alternatively, if a whole bunch of highly flammable polyethylene made it through the
combustion chamber and ignited, that could increase combustion chamber pressure above

(11:35):
the surge threshold and then the results is the same.
So these are my amateur theories, but they're both consistent with everything I know about
engine operation and bubble wrap.
Yeah, and the disagreement I had with that is that both would be transient, right?
Since the fire shooting forwards into the compressor would be well above the melting
point of polyethylene if it got stuck there.

(11:56):
And if it was going backwards through the engine core, then it would get burned off
really quickly.
And if the initial overpressure event damaged the compressor blades and the surging would
become self-sustaining at that power setting, regardless of whether the initiating material
is still present.
So this could have kept going by itself until the crew reduced power.

(12:18):
I still don't buy it.
Agree to disagree, I guess.
Well, it's really a pity that we probably won't ever get to see the investigation results
because this is almost certainly going to be internal to CFM.
Yeah.
Yeah.
All right.
I'm glad there's some debate on this.
Next slide.
On March 8th, a wheel fell off the 777 on its way to Osaka while it was taking off from

(12:42):
10R-28L at SFO, falling into the parking lot and absolutely totaling someone's Corolla.
Thankfully, they were not in that car.
For that matter, thankfully, this thing managed to find a spot where it couldn't hit anything
that couldn't be...
Anything else?
Yeah.
It didn't find a person, let's put it that way.

(13:05):
We have on the screen up here on the left, we have a diagram of what we think is probably
the best guess for the impact point.
You can see in the bottom right, the wheel actually falling off of the aircraft.
And up in the upper right, we have a San Mateo PD car that responded.
He's currently trying to figure out how he can kneel on the tire's neck.
Next slide.

(13:29):
Also on the 8th, an A320 had to return to LAX after one of its hydraulic systems reported
a failure.
It's only one of three systems.
Each one can do the job of all three, so this is not really a big deal.
Next slide.
Also also on the 8th, a A37 MAX 8 at Houston Bush went off the runway.

(13:52):
It was coming from Memphis.
It was landing on 27, and it was wet.
ETC ordered them to turn off at the Sierra Charlie taxiway.
We actually have a little diagram up here in the corner for you.
They went wide into the ditch, which looks like it broke the left main landing gear.
That shut down operations not only for two weeks, which is pretty severe, while they

(14:14):
salvaged the aircraft.
So air traffic control told them to expedite their exit from the runway, and then they
took a 90 degree exit at 30 knots ground speed, and the speed limit for a 90 degree exit in
the wet is 10 knots, so the result was predictable.
Let's just say.
Yeah, I think the NTB Spee Report on this one's probably about eight sentences long.

(14:37):
Next slide.
Okay.
On March 11th, a United flight from Sydney to SFO had to return to Sydney when they had
a hydraulic leak from the left main gear, probably from the actuator that tilts the
wheels.
It's actually this neat little mechanism that tilts the whole bogey like it's a car doing
a wheelie so that the plane can touch down more gradually.

(15:01):
But in this case, it sort of pissed Skydrol 500B-4 all over the runway at Sydney, and
that is exceedingly unpleasant stuff, as well as being corrosive and dissolving rubber and
dissolving paint and dissolving ramp agents and generally being unpleasant.

(15:24):
It's also extremely slippery, so you need to get it off the runway.
But all in all, not really a huge deal, just an unpleasant cleanup problem.
All right.
Next slide.
This is the last one.
Finally, as of the writing of this segment, on March 15th, a United 378 from SFO had a

(15:47):
section of composite fairing for the right side landing gear completely detached in flight.
Now, all of these incidents are fine in isolation.
None of them corresponded in serious, none even had minor injuries.
It doesn't necessarily indicate anything systemic.

(16:07):
Taken together, it's not a great look for United, certainly.
Yeah, it could be a coincidence, or it might not be.
I was asked for comment about this by the New York Times, and what I said first was
that this series of incidents is being falsely conflated with Boeing's troubles.
And second, even so, it's not great for United, but there isn't really evidence of incidents

(16:32):
on the whole being on the rise.
We don't even know if this is because something is actually wrong at United or if they were
just unlucky.
My take on it is it's maybe probably nothing.
They operate thousands upon thousands of flights, for sure.
Okay.
Yeah, and I'd like to point out, this is not even the first time that an American airliner

(16:59):
has had a wheel fall off in the last few months.
A few months ago, it happened on a Delta 757 on the runway.
One of the nose wheels apparently just decided to go off and have an adventure.
So bad luck for United.
All right, next slide.
So LATAM Airlines Flight 800, first number.

(17:21):
Don't know why we let anybody have that one.
It was flying from Sydney to Auckland on its way to Santiago, which is kind of an interesting,
what's called a fifth freedom flight plan.
It means it was allowed to stop on the way for fuel, but it's also allowed to pick up
new passengers.
At some point after reaching cruise altitude, the aircraft encountered an upset of some

(17:43):
kind and fell approximately 300 feet in a few seconds.
There were 50 injuries, reports of cuts and bruises, head and neck injuries, broken bones.
The flight crew decided to continue the flight to Auckland.
Twelve people on the flight were treated in hospitals.
Apparently one was in fairly serious condition.

(18:04):
At that point, the passengers stayed the night in Auckland and they traveled to Santiago
the next day on a new aircraft.
This aircraft went back to Santiago on a ferry flight a few days later, where they presumably
pulled the FDR.
Hopefully somebody flipped the breaker to the CVR as well.

(18:25):
Right now the theory as of the time of this writing is that it was related to, if you'll
believe this, the electric sliding chairs on the flight deck.
Now the electric chairs on the flight deck can slide backwards and forwards for pilot
comfort and so that they can get a consistent view of the runway through the HUD.

(18:45):
It sounds like maybe a member of the cabin crew possibly might have activated it by accident,
pushing the pilot forward far enough to press him against the yoke and disabling the autopilot.
The sliding mechanism involved here is really primarily designed to move the seat out of
the way so the pilot can get into and out of it.
So it moves on an L-shaped track for that reason, but again, this wouldn't have gone

(19:08):
around the L. We're talking about pushing the pilot forward.
It also shouldn't be possible to accidentally lean on the switch and activate it this way,
but there's supposed to be a cover over the switch.
But if the cover is loose, then you can do that and Boeing had apparently put out some
kind of bulletin about this in the past.
But yeah, this doesn't seem to have been the kinds of scary things that people were thinking

(19:33):
it was going to be.
And the 787's digital flight data recorder actually records cruise seat control actuation.
So I guess we'll find out as soon as the NTSB reads that out.
Or the New Zealand TIC or whatever they are.
Would it not be the NTSB because Boeing?

(19:56):
I mean, they might be involved.
Yeah, they'll be asked for it.
But New Zealand is leading it.
I think the position of the seat actuators is a wild thing for flight data recorders
to note down, right?
Especially since within our lifetimes, there have been, well, maybe not Kira, but within
our lifetimes, there have been aircraft that recorded 15 or 20 parameters at once.

(20:20):
Oh, way less.
Yeah, like six.
It not only records that, I was actually looking this up.
It actually records the position of the cockpit air conditioning controls.
At this point, I think it just records anything that happened to exist on whatever field bus
wiring was passing that rack, honestly.

(20:44):
So basically, the reason that the autopilot could cause an incident like this is if the
aircraft was out of trim at the time of the upset for whatever reason, disabling the autopilot
with a small nose down motion could cause an extremely violent upset as the aircraft
tries to force itself back into trim.
This may have been why the pitch down was so violent.
It hasn't been confirmed yet.

(21:05):
Now before we start our main story, Jay has more interesting facts about CPIT's favorite
dumpy little plane, the BAC-111, and we will absolutely force you to hear them because
they're very cool.
It's next slide.
They're very cool.
So ever since episode two, the three of us have been ironically obsessed with the BAC-111.

(21:27):
So in at least some of these episodes, we're going to subject you to this thing we're calling
Jay's BAC-111 corner, where I tell you the latest bizarre shit that we've learned about
what we have unfairly decided is the worst and therefore funniest passenger jet ever
made.
So I was making some merch, and there will be a link to that in the doobly-doo, and found

(21:51):
a scanned brochure for airlines advertising the 111, and I discovered something absolutely
incredible about the 111.
Now just to set the scene, at the time the BAC-111 was being designed, BAC was also designing
Concorde.

(22:11):
They fully expected the future of Long Haul to be supersonic.
Everyone did.
You know, Boeing and Lockheed were making their supersonic transports at that time.
They didn't cancel it until a bit later.
And so the thinking was that subsonic airliners would be limited to these very short segments
feeding supersonic routes, and therefore require extremely rapid turnarounds and landing on

(22:38):
local airports with very few facilities, because there's no point getting on a Concorde if
it takes you two hours to get through the airport at each end.
They wanted to land this thing on airfields with absolutely no facilities, like literally
just a bus stop.
Pick up people on a 10-minute turn, and then fly 30 minutes to the big airport with the

(23:02):
SSTs.
So they decided that it should be capable of an absolutely enormous number of pressurisation
cycles.
Every single flight article would be tested to 100,000 cycles, and it must have zero fatigue
cracking.
The landing gear was tested for 240,000 cycles.

(23:25):
And of course, with these very short sectors, they needed to mitigate crew fatigue, because
they would be doing 20, 30 sectors a day.
So they made it so that it was capable of maintaining sea level pressurisation to 18,000
feet with no loss of fatigue life.
How did they do this?

(23:45):
Next slide, please.
And listeners, I should clarify.
100,000 cycles and 240,000 cycles for the landing gear, these are 10 times what a traditional
subsonic aircraft is going to be certified to.
That is an obscene level of over-building.
100,000 is not 10 times.
No, it's about three times.

(24:06):
What it is, it's probably about three times more than the average plane is going to see
in its life.
And I don't know, like the extremely high time Aloha Airlines planes, if you ever read
my article on Aloha 243, they were pushing into the 90,000 cycle range, and they were
the highest cycle short haul planes like this.

(24:30):
So there was very little, well, it's just a very large number of cycles.
We will get to Aloha.
Yeah, we will.
How did they do this?
As you can see, the fucking plane was mostly made of sculpture milled parts made using
absolutely enormous billets of 6160 alloy, which was then milled to shape and heat treated.

(24:57):
There is one total, one other transport category aircraft that was made that way.
And yes, it was Concorde.
Of course, it was always going to be Concorde.
This is, we realized, how come it got flown at 200 miles per hour into a freeway overpass
and only 21 people died.

(25:17):
This is how come one particular 111 got bombed by hijackers twice, repaired twice, after
landing safely twice, they just replaced that piece and it flew for another, I don't know
how many decades.
Was it like two decades?
I think so, yeah.
And it was, in both cases, the bomber managed to kill himself only.

(25:41):
Yeah, every time we look at this plane more closely, we find something just utterly unexpected.
Next slide, please.
So for context listeners, I teased that in the Discord that the 111 was distantly ancestral
to one of the vehicles we talked about in the bonus episodes.
And I said that you guys weren't going to believe which and that's because it's the

(26:06):
ULA Vulcan rocket that we talked about.
This rocket, as well as a handful of others, used the exact same technique, lithium aluminium
alloys to build the walls of the fuel tanks.
And here's another fact.
One of the US airlines to operate the 111 was Aloha, which also had a bunch of 737s.

(26:28):
They flew 20 sectors a day on these 111s.
When they tried to treat the 737 the same way that they had successfully operated the
111, it burst open.
Told you we'd get to Aloha.
Yeah, we did.
It started out as irony, but I think I genuinely love this weird little plane.

(26:50):
All right.
Next slide.
Okay, let's get to the noticed all podcasters section.
In the comments for our last episode, the author of Understanding Air France 447, which
we all read for research, hopped into the comments to clarify some things.
We've pinned his comment to the top of that video because he goes into quite a bit, but

(27:14):
I'm going to have Jay quote the top section, which was about G pullout.
The actual issue here is not exceeding the structural G limits on the airplane, though
at lower altitude that will be a factor.
But the stall buffet margin is also expressed in G units.
At cruise altitude and airspeed, a margin of 1.3 Gs is all it takes to get to the stall

(27:38):
buffet.
We call this the buffet margin.
At low altitude, the issue on the pullout is maximum structural G load, which is 2.5
Gs, but at higher Mach numbers, the stall will occur again at a lower G load than that.
He also goes into CRM.
He goes into why Captain Dubois had this baffling reaction to be entering the cockpit.

(28:03):
Go check it out.
Our Patreon.
We have a Patreon if you want to support the show and support Admiral Klagberg's work.
We dropped our first bonus episode a couple of weeks ago.
We called it Oops All News.
We discussed the recent Boeing issues.
We talked about some helicopter crashes, a lot of aviation business updates.

(28:26):
Next we're going to be recording a movie review and recap for the 2022 Russian film
The One about the survival of Larisa Savitskaya after a mid-air collision.
This will be exclusive to patrons at our $5 and up Jato bottle user level.

(28:47):
And even at our entry level, you still get access to our Discord where we hang out, shitpost,
we talk about airplanes, space planes, pets.
We are a little weird.
If you like the vibe of these episodes, join the Discord.
This show is pretty much just a recorded and polished extension of that.

(29:09):
We also, as always, want to give a special shout out to our contributors at the $15 Airframe
Warranty Boiler and a $25 Fire Titanetra level.
Thank you Anslem, Fred with a PH, and six Adonis donors for their contribution.
So what is today's episode even about?
We're here to talk about Guinea.
Next slide.

(29:29):
No, that's a five Guinea coin.
Next slide.
Pretty sure that's a Guinea pig.
Next slide.
That's Equatorial Guinea.
We're getting closer.
Next slide.
That's Papua New Guinea.
We're further away, technically.

(29:52):
Next slide.
Ah, there it is.
Just regular Guinea.
Original recipe.
Next slide.
All right.
Let's do a very brief primer on West African aviation.
So the first thing you need to know about West African aviation is that it is complicated.

(30:12):
One disclaimer I will give is that this area of the world is extremely complicated.
There is a lot of history.
We are not historians.
We are not sociologists of this particular area.
We are not experts on it.
So this we're going to touch on only what is sort of directly relevant to this accident.

(30:33):
A lot of aviation in West Africa falls into what is known as a gray market.
In short, it's not a full Wild West free for all, but it's also not the tightly regulated
and safe market of Europe, East Asia, and North America.
Infrastructure can be woeful.
For a long time, there was a severe lack of intra African flights.
Passengers want to travel between different countries in the region would sometimes have

(30:55):
to connect in Europe, adding multi hour or even multi day delays in relatively short,
great circle distances.
Necessity being the mother of market innovation.
So up sprang Air Afrique.
This was a joint venture between the governments of Benin, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Central
African Republic, Chad, Cote d'Ivoire, Gabon, Mauritania, Niger, the Republic of the Congo

(31:19):
and Senegal.
They had flights between all of these countries as well as neighboring countries providing
a sort of vital service.
By the nineties, the difficulties of operating that market though, had left this airline
pretty badly saddled by debt.
And then of course, it was killed by the same thing that killed Robert Pattinson in that
one movie and also my generation.

(31:41):
So for retirement, 9 11.
But of course, just doing a 9 11 on an airline doesn't eliminate the market.
However affected that market may have been by KSM and Bin Laden.
But you cannot just go back to the status quo of connecting everyone in Paris because
the lounges in De Gaulle are so disappointing as to be tantamount to treason.
How can you have not chef champagne out at 8 a.m.

(32:03):
What are you doing?
That is illegal or it should be.
Anyway, you want to go direct.
So into this void steps the criminal empire known henceforth as Union de Transport African
de Guinée.
And if you've never heard of them, don't worry about it.
Their Wikipedia page probably hasn't either.
It's about as long as a Jeopardy clue and about as difficult to get anything sensible

(32:27):
out of.
All right.
Next slide.
So what is a UTA?
As we said, they are technically UTA DGE, but that's absurd.
So we're just going to say UTA because that's what it says on the side of the planes.
Yeah.
That's as far as I can tell, that's the abbreviation the company actually used not to be confused

(32:48):
with UTA, the defunct French airline.
Did they do that so that they could just buy the planes and not have to repaint them?
No, I don't think French UTA ever operated the Antonov AN-24 just on screen.
Okay, fine.
So this airline and from now on, the rest of this episode, anytime you hear any of a

(33:12):
safe word airline, just imagine that we're doing the Joey finger quotes from friends.
They were a razor's edge charter operation based out of Sierra Leone that flew an AN
old Soviet turboprop AN-24 and a LAT 410.
It had been around since 1996 using the Antonov for passenger services and the LAT as an air

(33:35):
ambulance and a charter for mining companies.
The LAT 410 and the AN-24 are the Jesse and James of Sub-Saharan African aviation.
Yeah, scrappy African airlines love the L410 because you can do no maintenance for a decade
then run it through a blender and it will still apply.
And the AN-24 can be fixed by someone who can't read and who only has a brick.

(33:59):
This is not a joke.
Antonov actually designed their early aircraft to be so mechanically simple that you didn't
actually need any documentation to repair it.
You didn't need to be able to read.
A peasant could fix it.
So we should also point out that the owners of this airline weren't from West Africa.

(34:20):
They were Lebanese and more on that in a minute.
Around the same time Middle East Airlines, the flag carrier of Lebanon announced a pullout
of the West African market.
So the Lebanese owners of UTA, thinking that their ticket to fortune was in cornering this
extremely specific market, decided to expand their business.
Now it's worth taking it up to note that these guys being from Lebanon isn't incidental.

(34:44):
The Lebanese diaspora as a group seized upon the tumultuous post-colonization markets in
West Africa in the second half of the 20th century.
They often acted as go-betweens that would help cartoonishly corrupt governments exercise
the barest appearance of public works projects.
They would also oddly act as agents of stability when one regime was replaced by the next because

(35:08):
it would just be the same Lebanese guys who were doing their graft.
So during these nations' attempts to establish functioning democracies in the wake of brutality
of Western colonization and then the inevitable collapse of same, there would just be these
Lebanese diaspora people who would step in and sort of grease the wheels of a collapsed

(35:34):
economy.
The Lebanese involvement in West Africa was actually significant enough to get the attention
of the CIA in the 80s.
Post hit that one.
So as we said, we have a market that needs cornering.
We've got some real winners that are going to be doing that cornering.
The brilliant individuals that will make up part of our story are Darwish Khazim, the

(35:54):
head of UTA, Ahmed Khazim, UTA general manager, and Mohammed Khazim, UTA director of operations.
Hmm, I'm detecting that these guys sound like they might be related.
And you'd be correct.
So Ahmed is the father, Darwish and Mohammed are his sons, but Darwish seems to be the
driving force behind things here.

(36:17):
So we've got Pinky and Pinky in the brain.
Yeah, so some other members of the Khazim family are also involved in this operation,
but these three are the main ones.
Also none of them have any aviation experience whatsoever.
Post hit that back.
So these guys decide that they're going to corner this very specific market and then
serve it ruthlessly, which is Guinea to Benin and then onward to Lebanon.

(36:39):
Specifically from Kanakri, which is the capital of Guinea, to Cotonou, the largest city in
Benin, and then onward to Beirut.
Their final leg from Beirut to Dubai was tacked on later.
Their plan was to do this route each direction once a week.
Simple enough.
And for these purposes, they apply to the Guinean Ministry of Transport.

(37:02):
They receive a permission to operate in that country.
The minister basically signs a blank piece of paper, away they go.
In Guinea at that time, there was no requirement for them to have a specific air operator certificate
or AOC in that country.
Next slide.
So let's talk a little bit about Guinea.
Guinea, around, especially around the time of this accident, was kind of a mess.

(37:26):
If you think this is sort of a standard colonization result, you'd be right.
It's a little more complicated.
And in this case, we can blame the French, which we love to do on this show.
France colonized Guinea.
But by 1958, domestic Guinean politics had become radicalized enough that they were ready
to vote for immediate and total independence.
So the French graciously accepted the change of power and left with grace and humility.

(37:51):
Nope, I'm just kidding.
They were lay assholes about it.
This was an absolutely brutal storm out the door.
The French wrecked everything on their way out in 1958.
No, seriously, everything.
France stopped all financial assistance with drew support for the country's economic infrastructure,
which led to a severe economic crisis on account of the French having built most of the economy

(38:15):
to be totally dependent on France.
They dismantled administrative education, health infrastructure, and removed or destroyed
essential tools and documents that were necessary for governance.
Property that belonged to the state of Guinea was confiscated or destroyed, including office
equipment and vehicles, crippling the new government's operational capacity.

(38:37):
And they did this because they absolutely could not tolerate the other countries in
the region moving for independence.
Yeah, this is a punitive deterrent measure.
I mean, and again, they took everything.
They unscrewed light bulbs out of the ceilings of buildings and took them with them.
It was insane.

(38:58):
They took the ice cube trays out of the freezer.
What kind of sick bitch takes the ice cube trays out of the freezer?
And it worked too.
Réunion and Guiana are still parts of France.
They're still departments of metropolitan France, administratively, and they will most
likely never escape.
Yeah, and we're not even going to touch on Gabon or Niger and their incredibly tight

(39:24):
connection with France and their nuclear industry.
Again, all of that is kind of outside the scope of this podcast.
But what this means is that Guinea had essentially none of what you might describe as state capacity.
The means of governance did not exist.
They would have to be rebuilt from scratch.
But the strongmen who came to power after the French departure did not have any interest

(39:45):
in doing this.
Overseeing the aviation industry was very far down the list of priorities.
They had better things to do, like running water and teach people to read.
Really, though, they were barely doing those things either.
I mean, the leadership of Guinea was just spectacularly disinterested for a long time.
Yeah, most of what these guys were doing for a while was collecting bribes.
The most recent military coup in Guinea with the suspension of their constitution was 2021.

(40:09):
Yeah, the cycle continued.
Okay, next slide.
All right, so we've learned about West African aviation.
We've learned what UTA wants to do there.
Now let's fly to the scene of the crash.
Next slide.
Okay, if you want to have an airline, the kind of airline that you can run out of a
canteen at minimum, what do you need?

(40:32):
I mean, really minimum.
The answer is you need a plane and you need some pilots.
Boom, you have an airline.
Yes, and what kind of plane can you get for real cheap in 2003 that will allow you to
fly from Conakry, Cotonou, to Beirut with enough passengers to be profitable?

(40:53):
Boeing 727.
They went with the Boeing 727, the best plane to be a trans femme gay that does crimes like
jumping out of a plane with $200,000.
I think that they disabled that feature after that exact thing happened.
Hey, the 111 has a ventral door.
Do you think it opens in flight?
We need to get a bunch of cash and find out.

(41:16):
So if you are a bunch of random guys who own an ancient Soviet turboprop that you want
to 727 in 2003, two decades after they stopped making them, where do you get one?
The answer apparently is that you ring up this company called the Financial Advisory
Group or unfortunately, FAG.

(41:36):
Do we spell out the name every time we mention them or do we just call them the slur group?
Let's just FAG.
FAG, sure.
Yeah, okay.
So FAG is one of those shady underworld companies that you never really know what they're up
to.
Their main business seems to be buying shithead airplanes, employing down and out pilots,
and wet leasing both to obscure cash strapped airlines in developing countries, at least

(42:00):
on the surface.
We'll have more to say about these guys later.
The owner of FAG is one, Imad Saba.
This is a truly shady figure.
Again, more about him later.
I will say during the research of this, we fell down some rabbit holes.
We found out some real wild things.
Allegedly, he is from Palestine.
He holds a US passport.
He lives in the UAE, though he used to reside in Miami.

(42:24):
He owns quite a few companies, of which FAG was only one of them.
At some point in the past, FAG was based in Miami, but it was later apparently registered
in the Virgin Islands.
But the only way to contact it was through their office in Sharjah in the UAE, where
Imad Saba was running around in what I could only imagine was a black Mercedes with heavily
tinted windows.

(42:45):
Anytime particularly stupid corruption comes up, the Florida man is always lurking nearby,
isn't he?
So Darwish rings up Imad Saba, and Saba offers him a 727 that would end up being registered
in Guinea as 3X-rayed Golf Delta Mike.
A flight crew paid by FAG is also provided.

(43:08):
This plane is a heap of shit.
Nothing on it works.
The lease begins June 13, 2003.
They run it once from Konakry to Kata Nui to Beirut, at which point the Lebanese air
safety inspectors flag the plane as suspicious, demand to inspect the aircraft and all of
its documentation.
And this is early 2000s economy in absolute shambles Beirut.

(43:32):
The plane is that bad that even they throw a flag on the field.
Yeah, the Lebanese authorities conclude that the plane is in such a bad shape, it's
unsafe to carry passengers or cargo.
They bar it from flying completely.
In fact, they agree to let this thing leave Lebanon only on the condition that it be flown
directly to a boneyard.
But FAG takes the plane back, flies it to Sharjah, and it's never seen again.

(43:54):
UTA still has the route.
They don't have a Boeing 727 anymore.
Undeterred by this, they ask FAG for another one.
And Iman Saba provides.
Let's talk about 3X-rayed Golf Delta Oscar, aka Boeing serial number 21370.
This airplane was delivered new to American Airlines in 1977, who ran it ragged until

(44:20):
2001.
Then this thing gets what it probably imagined was going to be a dignified retirement at
the boneyard in the Mojave Desert, but nope.
Wells Fargo Bank Northwest buys it from us to the scrapyard in February of 2002, after
which they sell it to our man Iman Saba of the financial advisory group.
FAG then turns around and leases the plane to Ariana Afghan Airlines, the flag carrier

(44:43):
for Afghanistan in January of 2003.
It is registered in Afghanistan as Yankee Alpha Foxtrot Alpha Kilo.
Yeah, Fag.
Fag.
Which is honestly the only sane reaction to this plane.
So on account of it being Afghanistan circa 2003, doesn't go great.

(45:09):
The plane doesn't stay in Afghanistan very long.
For some reason, Ariana does swap out the engines without documenting the change whatsoever.
Do we even know where they found these engines?
I mean, they're JTADs.
In 2003, you could probably find one in a dumpster behind a KFC or something.
Oh my god.
Yeah.
I mean, honestly, these engines are dime a dozen, especially if you are willing to buy

(45:32):
one that's been powered out and not care that it is illegal to fly it.
I tried to find one actually on eBay just for the slide, but there wasn't one on eBay,
but they have been.
They absolutely have been on eBay in the past.
In the recent past, they pop up every now and then.
Yeah.

(45:52):
I believe they still make spares for them.
So I know a lot of people run them on 737 Classics that have gravel kits.
And god, we're going to talk about those one day because the displays are so cool.
As well as any of the flying MD-80s, and I think they still use them a lot as marine
turbines or power generation.
But sorry, that's a separate issue.

(46:13):
So by June of 2003, this thing is out of Central Asia, has been re-registered and leased by
FAG to a Swaziland airline, ostensibly called Alpha Omega Airways, where it's re-registered
as three Delta Fox Red Alpha Kilo.
Alpha Omega then subleases the plane to UTA, in theory, sort of, brackets, question mark.

(46:35):
So Alpha Omega presents itself to the bank as the, and to UTA as the owner, which it
isn't.
But Imad Saba of FAG is the one who actually signs the paperwork.
The contract was for 30 days, after which UTA would sign a new contract directly with
FAG that re-registers the plane in Guinea as three X-ray Golf Delta Oscar.

(46:59):
The contract stated that FAG would supply the airplane in good condition with a flight
crew.
UTA would carry out the maintenance, update flight records and maintenance documents in
accordance with regulations, and pay crews and all other operating costs.
However, UTA didn't have any maintenance facilities, so it's not clear who was actually
doing the maintenance on this plane, if anyone.
They were not shipping this thing up to Frankfurt to go to Lufthansa Technik.

(47:22):
Some people within UTA later claimed that the plane was meant to be sent to Ariana Afghan
Airlines for heavier maintenance.
Also FAG apparently had a maintenance facility whose location was never discovered or disclosed.
Imagine how bad you are scraping the bottom of the barrel if you are sending your plane
to Afghanistan for a sea check.

(47:42):
Seriously.
UTA being responsible for documentation is real rich.
Another post it.
In July of 2003, the plane arrives in Beirut, and again the inspectors make a bunch of observations.
So we took a look at this.
The minimum equipment list is from American Airlines.
The operating certificate belongs to Alpha Omega Airways.

(48:06):
The checklists are from Ariana Afghan Airlines, and the insurance papers are for a completely
different plane entirely.
It also has no ownership or leasing documentation.
Basically they asked for license insurance and proof of ownership and they got one UNO
card, a bunch of McDonald's straw wrappers, and a receipt for a box of tampons.

(48:30):
Those two items would constitute more documentation than this aircraft had at this point in time.
They also find Lebanese authorities cite the following.
Torch and cockpit in operative.
Flight recorder emergency pingers in operative.
Which is, to be fair, completely irrelevant because we know exactly where the plane crashed.

(48:53):
Extinguisher bottles in engines number one and number three were never tested.
The illuminated exit path was inoperative in economy.
Passenger instruction signs were inoperative.
They were missing emergency equipment signs.
The backup compass had not been calibrated since January of 1997.
They did not have an emergency locator beacon.

(49:15):
The tire on wheel number three was beyond the wear limits.
The tire on number four was in bad condition.
The VHF antenna was cracked and engine number two had an oil leak.
Now, none of these are showstoppers.
These are all relatively minor fixes.
But we are painting a picture for you of a plane that is falling apart.
So UTA did the bare minimum to fix these things.

(49:37):
A few days later the plane carries on its merry way.
I should point out that these are all things that a ramp inspector can do, can check on
a foreign airplane.
They can't check things like, is the plane structurally sound?
So we don't actually know what the worst issues with this plane were.
And we aren't going to find out because it fucking crashed.
Anyway.

(49:57):
To be fair, the fire extinguisher bottles were kind of irrelevant given that it ended
up in the ocean.
So, you know, there's that.
True.
Yeah.
And they also turned up not to need the indication for where the emergency exit was because
they could, there was just big fucking holes in the fuselage.
But again, we'll get to that.
So somehow this works.
All of this somehow works for a few weeks.

(50:20):
These guys are running the absolute ragged edge of possibility, but they are doing it.
They are running Conakry to Cotonou to Beirut and then on to Dubai because sure fuck it,
why not?
Apparently this was for duty free shopping allegedly.
And I'm sure the Emirates aren't going to turn down a pipeline for labour.

(50:42):
Also I bet the owners had business there.
I mean, Ivo and Sava might even have insisted on it.
Yeah.
And these guys are doing these flights every week because the UTA doesn't care about running
the crew ragged either.
Oh, you've heard us correctly.
The crew.
FAG only provides UTA with one crew at a time.
They chew through the first two crews.

(51:02):
We're not sure why, but we pick up the story with a third crew.
Again, this is one crew that is doing all of the UTA's 727 flights.
We don't really know why the first two crews left, but it was probably related to a bunch
of criminals running them to exhaustion.
We do know that these guys are regularly blasting right through duty time limits and we'll
get into how we know this later on.

(51:25):
So now you have a situation where the continued existence of the airline is reliant on these
three pilots never missing a beat and never missing a day of work.
That means these guys are constantly under crazy pressure.
Now the skill of pilots is not a concern.
It's not relevant to this accident.
They all have plenty of experience.
We're led by the fearless captain Najib Al-Buruni, age 49, 11,000 total flying hours, 8,000

(51:48):
of which were on the 727.
He's currently of Libyan origin, used to fly for the Libyan Arab Airlines.
The first officer was also 49 years old with an unknown number of flight hours.
He also used to fly for Libyan Arab Airlines and his name was possibly Ahmed Al-Humaidi.
And the flight engineer was a 45-year-old male who had 14,000 flight hours, all on the

(52:11):
Boeing 727.
One source we found says he was originally from Peru and his name was Jose Rios Madueno,
but we can't actually confirm that information fully.
They also fly with the same four cabin crew at every flight, plus two mechanics and a
transporter of some kind, which I'm sort of interpreting as a local fixer that would
be on hand for bribes and dealing with like red tape customs issues, usually with bribes.

(52:35):
Yeah, more organizational chaos.
There was no written contract between UTA and the cabin crew.
They were just kind of there.
No paperwork, only vibes.
That will become a theme.
So every week these guys fly the route, Conakry, Contenou, to Kufa Airport in Libya, which
is way in the middle of the goddamn desert gas, and then on to Beirut and then the last

(53:00):
leg to Dubai.
And it turn around and it goes back.
When it stops in Beirut, the Lebanese would always demand that things get fixed.
UTA would do whatever the absolute minimum was to get it past inspections and get it
going again.
By the way, this was obviously the only work that was ever done while UTA was in possession
of the aircraft.
Yeah, after the fact, literally no one could point to any maintenance that had been done

(53:22):
since UTA acquired the airplane other than the work done in Lebanon in order to get approval
to leave.
What you have to know about this operation, if you have it together, is that it was fucked
from the jump.
Can this plane, as configured, sustainably do this route without falling apart?
Who knows?
That's not a joke.

(53:43):
Literally no one knew, but probably not.
They hired a company called Gatwick Aviation to do a route feasibility study.
That takes numerous factors into account, sort of an actuarial document.
By the way, do you know where this company is based?
Nope, you're wrong.
It's Dubai.
Is it named after some dude named Gatwick then, like Bob Gatwick?

(54:05):
The Emirates are the Florida of the Middle East, and Dubai is the most Florida.
Some sketchy bullshit going on in a Gulf state.
It's always fucking Dubai.
I think Doha would be Zurich.
All right, let me turn that on this.
I think Dubai would be Miami, Fort Lauderdale.

(54:25):
Abu Dhabi would be Tampa, and Sharjah would be Jacksonville.
That sounds about right.
I think that would make Iman Saba Jason Mendoza.
Yeah, none of this matters anyway because no documentation supporting this was ever
provided.
The editors later asked for the alleged route feasibility study conducted by Gatwick Aviation,

(54:49):
and everyone was just like shrug, I don't know.
There doesn't seem to be a lot of evidence that anyone planned anything, to be honest.
Yeah, I think they drew a line with rulers on a map and went, eh, close enough.
So was anyone going to be putting a stop to this?
Turns out that in practice, that's kind of hard.
Yeah, Guinea was a member of the International Civil Aviation Organization, but both Lebanon

(55:13):
and Benin did not have the capability to determine whether Guinea was actually enforcing its
own regulations, which they weren't.
And Guinea obviously couldn't do it because their governmental aviation bureaucracy was
basically non-existent, having been completely destroyed by the French.
Next slide.
Okay, so we've had a good background on all the important pieces.
We have a flying scrap heap blown by exhaustive pilots with little to no paperwork in a totally

(55:37):
unregulated environment.
Let's find out how it goes wrong.
The date is December 25th, 2003.
So our plane leaves Konakry and arrives in Cotonou without much trouble.
And so there are two UTA company executives on board, believe it or not, which I guess
is really standing behind your product.
Specifically, Darwish Khazem himself is on the plane.

(56:01):
He's heading home to buy route.
And I just want to say, he and his family clearly used this airline as like their own
private taxi service because the plane literally had six seats reserved for UTA management,
which I presume is the Khazem family because almost all the management positions were held
by members of said family.
Anyway, the events of our story start to totally unravel as soon as they begin boarding at

(56:26):
Cotonou.
So for starters, UTA has dozens of people that are trying to get to Lebanon for Christmas,
way more than they can actually fit on this plane.
And many of these people that want to go to Lebanon are in fact not booked on the flight.
But it turns out it was possible for passengers to sell their boarding cards to other passengers

(56:46):
after checking in because they didn't have names on them and no one is marking them off.
Now I'm guessing the way this worked was you check in, you get a boarding card, you
use the boarding card to get into a secure area that's probably in the same room, just
roped off.
Then you sell your used boarding card back across the rope and then anyone in the secure

(57:07):
area gets let on the plane with no further checks.
That's my assumption.
So the gate agents are just boarding this plane based on vibes?
Is that it?
Yeah.
Now, at the same time, the throwers, yes, that's what they're actually called, are
loading the bags into the plane.
Now on your typical flight on say Cathay Pacific, the throwers are going to load the plane in

(57:29):
a very specific order, which with each bag's weight, size and destinations all taken into
account.
This is then turned into a weight balance sheet, which is an actual sheet of paper.
When your pilot has told you that they're waiting on paperwork, a lot of the time, this
particular piece of paper is the one they're waiting on.
This does not happen.

(57:50):
Yeah, not only is there no record of the weight and placement of the bags, they didn't weigh
the bags at all.
These guys were also just putting bags wherever, and most importantly, they're putting way
too many of them into the forward baggage compartment, which makes the plane very nose
heavy.
Now this isn't actually a crisis because a nose heavy plane flies poorly while a tail

(58:11):
heavy plane flies only once.
And in this case, a nose heavy plane also only flies once, but we'll get to that.
Oh yeah, and remember how it's Christmas Day?
Well, a lot of the passengers are bringing their Christmas presents with them to buy
route, so the sort of average bag weight that the weight and balance sheets use is going
to be even more useless.

(58:31):
So now we have some number of bags in some order that weigh some amount.
Yeah.
And now we know that the mass of the baggage was a mystery, but surely the number of people
isn't because planes keep detailed manifests of the number of souls on board, right?
LOL.
LMAO even.

(58:52):
Yeah, there's no conclusive answer to how many people were on board this plane.
But here's what we do know.
This 727 had 140 passenger seats, plus 4 flight attendant jump seats, 2 cockpit jump seats,
and 6 extra seats for airline personnel.
So every one of these was filled.
They sat both of the airline executives in the 2 cockpit jump seats.

(59:16):
Again, one of those is Darwish.
Gave them an excellent view of what was about to happen, by the way.
As for the main cabin, we know that 86 passengers boarded in Konakry, and 9 of those got off
in Kotanou.
The manifest that the pilots were given said that 73 new passengers boarded in Kotanou,
which would take the total to 150.

(59:38):
Among those passengers, by the way, are 15 army officers from Bangladesh returning from
UN peacekeeping duty in West Africa.
But most of the passengers, over 100 of them in fact, were Lebanese.
So there were only 146 passenger seats, including the airline personnel seats, 3 of which would
have been occupied by the mechanics and the transporter.
However, there were 6 lap children, so the 150 passengers would have taken up 144 seats,

(01:00:05):
which comes out to 1 more than was actually available.
However, the actual number of passengers was definitely more than 150, and we know this
for reasons we'll get into after the accident.
The real number will never be known, but it could have been up to 160 passengers in addition
to the 10 crew members, which means that there may have been as many as a dozen people without

(01:00:26):
seatbelts or proper seating.
And as a result, the boarding was chaos.
No one had a seat assignment, some people didn't even have tickets, people were jockeying
for whatever seats they could get.
The cabin crew was doing everything they can to keep the situation under some kind of control.
So it's just like Southwest then is what you're saying?
Yeah, it's Southwest.
Yeah.
Next slide, please.

(01:00:46):
So after the crash, investigators crunched the numbers, and after factoring known quantities
including fuel and their best guesses for people in bags, their estimation of flight
141's takeoff weight falls somewhere between 179 and 190,000 pounds.
This is well still below the 727's max takeoff weight of 209,000 pounds.

(01:01:10):
However, it's above the max takeoff weight for the runway in Cotinou, which was only
2,400 meters long, with an outside temperature of 32 degrees C, which reduces performance.
So they have a short runway, high temperature, that both means less performance, lower max
takeoff weight.
So for those conditions, and with flaps 25, the max takeoff weight was only 172,000 pounds,

(01:01:34):
which was definitely less than what they were.
Now the flight crew is not oblivious to this, since they're watching the boarding and loading
process from the flight deck.
And in fact, about 30 minutes before takeoff, the cockpit voice recording starts.
And the first thing we hear is the first officer, al-Humaidi, say, J,
The sheets they gave us don't have the load.

(01:01:56):
What is that?
Come on, come on.
The sheets they gave us don't have the weight, only the number of passengers.
And the captain says, Ari,
Don't worry, we have the passenger manifest, just without weight.
Which I mean, great, but that's like only knowing the pressure in two of your car tires,
it's very much only half the information you need, you can't just infer the other half.

(01:02:17):
So anyway, Darwish Khazem is in the cockpit listening to all of this.
So the first officer says, J,
Each of them is bringing on board the airplane a 200 kilo suitcase.
200 kilos!
That's not possible!
Get them to unload them and weigh them, and then we'll know.
If we manage to take off, the people, I tell you, it will be quite a performance if we

(01:02:40):
manage to take off today.
At least let them put the exact weight so that we know it.
Let them put the exact weight so that we can calculate it.
But Darwish just says, quote, But the weight is indicated here.
To which the first officer says,
There is no weight.
Each passenger came on board with a 20 kilo bag.

(01:03:01):
It's impossible if you have an airplane with 100 passengers.
If this airplane takes off today, you will see if this airplane takes off.
Otherwise we're going to drop into the sea.
You have 141.
You will see when the aircraft will take off or we will crash into the sea.
So Darwish does the classic middle manager thing and he deflects upwards.

(01:03:23):
He says, quote, I'm sorry, as soon as we arrive in by route, I'm going to tell him off.
What can I do?
What can I do?
And on the return, I cannot do anything.
I came, I made this problem, I cannot return.
So the FO tries to reason and compromise and he says,
No, don't send the passengers back.
But the baggage must stay here.

(01:03:43):
Meaning in Kotanu.
So Darwish, the ever courageous lion says,
I will send six messages that more 30 kilo hand luggage and hand baggage is not allowed.
For whatever good that's going to do.
So anyway, the pilots know that this isn't right.
I mean, these numbers, the numbers are being given are a joke.
They're dangerously overloaded.
But there's no way for them to override this situation because what are they going to do?

(01:04:07):
Stop and face down hundreds of angry travelers who are going to miss Christmas.
The crew has no higher authority to appeal to for support.
While the captain has the ultimate authority on paper and can in fact refuse to fly on
intuition.
He can't because he's sitting three feet away from the director of the company.
There's no way he's actually going to do that.

(01:04:29):
You know, a pilot for American Airlines can refuse a plane and he will know that there's
a management structure there that's going to back him up and you know, say, you know,
prevent there from being consequences for this.
This guy has nothing.
So he proceeds with the pre flight.
So now we've got a flight crew who has no idea how many people are behind them.

(01:04:49):
They have no idea how many bags there are.
They have no idea how heavy they are or where the bags are.
And now they need to decide how to configure the airplane for takeoff.
So the most two most important elements of this configuration are the V speeds and the
stab trim setting.
So V speeds are the various speeds that are called out during takeoff like V1, VR, which

(01:05:09):
is rotation speed and so on.
The stab trim setting refers to the position of the horizontal stabilizer on the tail,
which determines the plane's resting pitch angle.
So in flight, the stabilizer pushes the tail down, pivoting the airplane about its center
of lift to raise the nose.
You can picture it like a lever in this diagram.

(01:05:32):
So how many units of stabilizer trim you apply determines how powerful this downforce on
the tail is going to be.
So it's vital to set this trim correctly.
And in order for it to be set correctly, you need to know exactly how much weight you have
and where for each of your three variables, gas, humans and bags.
And these guys only have one of the three, which is gas, because that's in the same

(01:05:52):
place every time.
Now I should note that while the absolute amount of weight is important for stab trim
setting purposes, its distribution is way more important.
Next slide, please.
So before we talk about the settings they chose, I have to explain a little bit about
center of gravity, center of lift and mean aerodynamic chord.

(01:06:13):
So center of gravity is pretty self-explanatory.
It's the specific point where you could balance the entire weight of the plane.
If you're inside the plane, there's usually like an arrow.
It's almost always the same window you'd look out of to look at the engine.

(01:06:33):
The CG is measured in terms of its position along the mean aerodynamic chord.
And what that means is imagine you're looking at a swept wing from the top down, as you
can see on this slide.
A chord in general is a line drawn from the leading edge to the trailing edge, but the
length of any given chord is different depending on how far out on the wing you draw it because

(01:06:58):
the wing tapers.
So the mean aerodynamic chord is basically an average of all of the possible chords down
the length of the wing.
You can calculate it using an integral if you remember any calculus.
And this mean aerodynamic chord, or MAC, tells you roughly where the center of lift is for

(01:07:18):
the wing overall, despite its non-uniform shape.
The center of lift, or the center of pressure, is the point where the aerodynamic forces
of the aircraft act through.
The location of the mean aerodynamic chord is fixed for a given aircraft.
All of this complicated math is done by engineers when the plane is designed, you know, unless

(01:07:43):
it's the space shuttle, in which case it's happening in real time on four of the five
GPCs and if it goes wrong, then you're definitely going to die.
In the last episode we had a whole slide about planes that crave disintegration via instability.
The shuttle was definitely one of them.
But the reason that it's so complicated for the shuttle is that it has to operate in this

(01:08:04):
vast range of different speeds, whereas our 727 does not.
It only really has to operate between zero and like 0.8 Mach.
So the mean aerodynamic chord and the center of pressure don't really move with respect
to each other.

(01:08:24):
You want the center of gravity to be forward of the center of lift, which pulls the nose
down and then the stabilizer trim pushes the tail down and that levers the nose up, counteracting
this nose down tendency.
Perfectly balanced as all things should be.

(01:08:47):
And you can picture this mean aerodynamic chord as an imaginary line stretching from
the leading edge of the wing to the trailing edge.
As shown.
As shown.
And the center of gravity is supposed to be actually a percentage of the way along that.

(01:09:10):
And of course the flight crew operating manual for the plane, if you have one.
Did this plane even have one?
I don't think it did, did it?
Yeah, I'm not sure it did.
Yeah.
So the pilots calculate where the center of gravity is, whether it's far enough forwards
of the center of lift, using a formula that the manufacturer gives them that allows them

(01:09:34):
to plug in how much baggage and passengers are in each part of the plane.
And they get in return from this formula, the location of the center of gravity relative
to the mean aerodynamic chord, which is expressed as a percentage, as I say.
What this means is that a center of gravity of 25% MAC is located 25% of the way from

(01:09:56):
the leading edge towards the trailing edge along this imaginary chord line.
The crew can then compare this to a manufacturer provided range of acceptable values, there's
a table.
And then they can use this figure to calculate how much downforce they need from the stab
trim to get the nose into the air on takeoff.

(01:10:20):
Basically the tendency of the plane when it's receiving lift from its wings to nose up or
nose down.
The farther forwards the CG is, the more stab trim you need.
Yeah, so evidence indicates that the flight crew calculated their stabilizer trim position
assuming a weight of 172,000 pounds, which was the maximum, and a center of gravity of

(01:10:44):
19% MAC.
But as it turns out, the real figure calculated after the fact was 14%, not 19%, which is
way forward of their calculations, because the throwers and Coughnough just stuffed everything
in the forward baggage hold until it was full and the pilots were unaware of this.
Incidentally you want this number to be as low as possible because the higher it is the

(01:11:08):
less efficient the plane is.
These guys set the takeoff trim on the stabilizer to 6.75 units nose up, which is the value
provided in the manual for a CG of 19%.
What they actually need was 7.75 units.
It doesn't sound like much, but that single unit is about to make all the difference in
the world.
Next slide.
So these guys finish their pre-flight, they start to taxi, and even this is a mess because

(01:11:31):
there are people in the aisles who refuse to sit down or can't sit down.
Again, the cabin crews take several minutes to get everyone to calm down and stop yelling
and moving around.
Again, some of them are apparently just sitting on whatever they can find, presumably.
The pilots know they're going to need every single inch of pavement.

(01:11:52):
They also know they're overweight, despite the fact that they used the max takeoff weight.
They knew they were over that.
So just in case, they select a rotation speed of 137 knots, which corresponds to a weight
of 170,000 pounds and not the 172,000 pounds official weight.
This would help make sure they don't rotate for liftoff before achieving sufficient speed

(01:12:15):
to become airborne.
You know what would have been useful right now?
Jato bottles.
Yeah, not even that much of a joke.
This episode, because that's literally what Jato bottles are for.
Short field, hot and heavy takeoffs.
Also rad pyro effects, but you know.
True.
So the time now is 1358 and one second, and our very short accident sequence has begun.

(01:12:38):
Seriously, in the report, the accident sequence is three sentences long.
Yeah.
So they start their takeoff and they roll and roll.
The report states that even the tower noticed how long this roll was taking.
So they hit VR rotation speed 137 knots.
The captain calls for out rotate.

(01:12:59):
So the first officer, whose pilot flying, calls back on his controls and nothing happens.
The captain is heard on the CVR shouting, rotate, rotate more, more, more, pull, pull.
But what's happening here is that their stabilizer is not providing enough nose up force to overcome
the forward center of gravity.
To get the nose up and become airborne, the pilot now has to apply that force manually

(01:13:23):
instead using the elevators.
And this was theoretically possible to do, but it would have required an immediate and
extremely aggressive full nose up input.
So realistically it wasn't going to happen.
And this leaves them 300 meters before the end of the runway.
They get airborne just.

(01:13:43):
The first officer is only barely able to overcome the forward CG and put the plane to the shallowest
possible climb.
Now normally this wouldn't be catastrophic because the runway at Cotonou points right
out to sea, they can just climb slowly.
But 118 meters beyond the runway end is a concrete block house containing electronic
equipment for the localizer array.

(01:14:05):
And I should note that this doesn't meet obstacle clearance standards by any means.
But clear standards didn't exist when this building was constructed sometime in the mid
1960s and it was still there.
And unfortunately they've only managed to climb 1.2 meters above the runway level and
the block house is 2.4 meters tall.
1.2 meters and this accident never happens.

(01:14:28):
Or you know it happens on a different day because I mean honestly let's not kid ourselves
here this is not a safety culture.
Yeah, next slide please.
So at 1359 and 11 seconds the landing gear and lower fuselage strike the roof of the
concrete block house with enough force to tear the roof off, rotate it 45 degrees, and

(01:14:48):
throw it 9 meters.
This absolutely obliterates the building and that also tears both of the main landing gears
off and mid-yeet the right main landing gear takes out the right inboard flaps.
Also a ground worker in the building was struck by debris and was pretty severely injured.
This draws a huge amount of energy out of the plane and because it's lost its right

(01:15:11):
wing flaps and the collision too it's down a lot of lift so it just crashes right back
to earth.
Clearly this disaster happened because they bought 727s instead of BAC 111s.
The BAC 111s would have bounced.
It probably would have just smashed right through the building and kept going without
noticing.
Of course I don't think it's actually possible to misload the 111 by that much because it's

(01:15:33):
not really long enough.
Well not for lack of trying by BAC that's for sure.
So the 727 clips a perimeter wall and then hits the beach and once it does it breaks
into three pieces immediately, the tail breaks away, the cockpit snaps the other direction,
and the main fuselage continues forward and overturns into the water.

(01:15:53):
So they hit the water with a huge amount of force and since a lot of the passengers weren't
wearing seatbelts or didn't even have seatbelts they got thrown everywhere.
And rather tragically the first officer that was trying to talk some sense into Darbouj
Khazem was mortally wounded and would later die in hospital.
Everyone else in the cockpit was able to scramble out through the huge hole that was now right

(01:16:13):
behind them including Darwish, motherfucker survives.
And that's actually kind of a scene here.
Most of the survivors were people who managed to swim out through holes and breaks in the
fuselage.
The rest of those that were killed were either killed instantly on impact or they drowned
when they couldn't get out of the plane.
The water was shallower than the height of the fuselage but the fuselage was upside down

(01:16:35):
which obviously didn't really help anything.
SCUBA Diving Pro Tip, if you cannot figure out which way is up, look at Bubbles.
This is a useful trick for underwater caves.
So first responders had a lot of trouble getting to the scene because even though they were
notified right after the impact, literally thousands of onlookers got to the crash site
before them.

(01:16:56):
A lot of the survivors that made it out of the fuselage were picked up by fishing boats
instantly?
Many of the survivors got to the hospital by the way of locals just picking them up
and taking them.
Yeah.
And it's just as well because there was no way to even know how many people were on the
plane or how many ambulances they needed to send, anything like that.
Because as we said, there were no manifests, no seat maps.

(01:17:17):
They didn't even know how many ticket sales there were.
So in the end, they found 141 bodies and identified 22 survivors, all of whom were injured in
some way.
And that totals out to 163 people, including 153 passengers and 10 crew, which doesn't
match the 143 available passenger seats on board even after accounting for babies.

(01:17:39):
It doesn't match the 145 passengers heard on the CVR.
We didn't quote that, but they mentioned at some point.
It also doesn't match the 149 passengers on the semi-improvised manifest and weight
and balance sheet.
But it gets worse because 12 of the deceased people that were found couldn't be identified
and seven people that were listed as missing didn't match the 12 unidentified bodies,

(01:18:01):
which means that the seven missing people were probably washed out to sea and never
found.
And that means that the death toll is indeterminate.
It could be anywhere from 141 to 148 if you add the seven missing to the number of bodies
recovered.
Wild, I know.
Next slide, please.
All right.
So let's talk about the aftermath.
And boy, this is the best part of this episode.

(01:18:24):
For sure.
And before we start this section, I want to call out a listener, Sam from Saudi Arabia.
Sam speaks fluent Arabic.
He was a lifesaver in helping us find news stories in Arabic.
He was able to translate a lot of stuff for us.
So Sam, thank you.
You are a huge help.
Okay.
So the immediate aftermath of this accident was a mess.
The identification of bodies was difficult because there was no manifest.

(01:18:48):
They had no idea where to even start with some of the individuals.
One of the Arabic news stories we found said that the Guinean and Beninese authorities
reached out to the US and to the UN to seek help with IDing some of the bodies.
And rather tragically, at least one or two bodies were sent to the wrong place because

(01:19:08):
they were misidentified.
So I think two Lebanese victims ended up sent to Bangladesh and had to send them back.
So the first thing Benin does is brings in the French Bureau of Inquiry and Analysis,
or BEA, which is headquartered out of this charming little French office outside Les Borgers.
You all recognize them from our previous episode about Air France.

(01:19:29):
This crash was not connected to France, although arguably they were ultimately responsible.
But the BEA is one of the most respected accident investigators in the world and it has the
capabilities and resources to make sure an investigation like this is done properly.
And of course it helps that Benin was a French colony until 1959.

(01:19:51):
Okay, but the BEA runs into a brick wall pretty quickly.
As for starters, no one wants to talk.
No one with the captain is going to willingly give a statement.
The captain almost certainly did a willing statement because he wanted to clear his name.
They do recover the black boxes two days later, so they start to put the events in order.
But the BEA already has the testimony of the captain and the tower controller.

(01:20:14):
So they have a rough idea that this accident was almost certainly caused by the plane being
unable to take off.
So the first thing they do is they wanted to find the aircraft's weight and balance.
UTA was unable to supply a weight and balance sheet, a copy of which must be kept on the
ground before every flight, or any, in fact, information about the plane's weight on the
accident flight or any other flight.

(01:20:35):
The Airport Ground Services and Cotonou said that UTA didn't ask them to provide any weight
and balance sheets.
The representatives from Lebanon did manage to dig up several weight and balance sheets
from the times the aircraft landed in Beirut, several of which were printed on Alpha and
Omega Airlines paper letterhead, of which three had been filled out during stops in

(01:20:57):
Beirut.
Part of one of these sheets was also found in the wreckage.
As a hilarious side note, the name of the airplane's previous operator was Alpha Omega Airways,
not Airlines, so someone at that company commissioned custom weight and balance sheets but got the
name of their own airline wrong.
I have to imagine that this paperwork, sort of like all their paperwork, was performative,

(01:21:19):
right?
It was designed to be done to such a state that they would hand it to an inspector with
cash paper clipped to it.
The inspector could go, yep, this looks like a weight and balance sheet.
Investigate no further.
Yeah.
So these sheets are supposed to contain the empty weight of the aircraft, but each different
sheet had a different empty weight.

(01:21:39):
These figures range from 95,900 to 105,200 pounds, and on the Alpha Omega Airlines sheet,
the empty weight was for a different version of the 727 entirely.
So on top of this, the passenger and baggage manifests were clearly incomplete or outright
false.
Hey, you know, airplanes can retain water as well, you know.

(01:22:03):
In the end, the BEA was able to reconstruct how much the plane actually weighed by taking
the performance data from the flight data recorder and solving for weight as the variable,
which resulted in a probable weight of 188,500 pounds, which was well over the maximum for
that runway under those conditions, but also assumes that the engines were working properly.

(01:22:28):
They were, actually.
As far as investigators can tell, they were working properly.
However, the simulations showed that the plane would have still become airborne at that weight,
all else being equal, because obviously, you know, none of these things are a hard and
fast limit.
There's supposed to be safety margin in those numbers.

(01:22:49):
The simulations showed that the plane could still have become airborne at that weight.
The data on the failed rotation showed that the real culprit was that the center of gravity
was much further forwards than the pilots thought, as a result of which the stabilizer
was not set correctly, which prevented them from bringing the nose up.
So now the BEA has a why, pretty conclusively.

(01:23:12):
The BEA knows that a crew with an overloaded bird tried to take off without having any
way to know how heavy they were, where that weight was, or how they could take off safely.
So we have a why.
The how, on the other hand, is fucking wild.
Next slide.
All right, we have to talk about how UTA, as an entity, is just a crime all the way

(01:23:37):
down.
It turns out UTA is more accurately called a crime family.
As we said, this was all one family.
Now, I should note the report for this accident is scathing.
I can't speak for Kira.
She's obviously read thousands or hundreds of these reports, but this is the first time
I've ever seen a report use the word apparently to cast shade and doubt on its own subject.

(01:24:00):
They use it eight times.
They also use an exclamation point to indicate shock, which definitely a first for me.
Yeah, it's really almost funny.
You can picture the investigators learning some new piece of bizarre information, going
what the hell, and then receiving shrugs from everyone who they asked for an explanation,
and then noting it down with apparently.

(01:24:21):
Hey, hey, I mean, they were French, so it would have probably been, uh, UTA!
And receiving shrugs is a way of life for, you know, Parisians, I'm just going to say.
The Hazem's family influence is Lebanon, was also murky, probably criminal.
The Lebanese defense minister told the press he thought local officials might have exerted

(01:24:42):
pressure to have the UTA aircraft land there.
When BEA started to pull apart the airline's assets, though, is when things got really
wild.
The airline owned three planes, two shipping containers, and a desk.
That's literally it, that's not a ship post.
The report contained an accounting of everything they owned, and a more detailed manifest that

(01:25:05):
was ever provided to one of their flight crews.
The headquarters of the airline was inside the building of a Conakry travel agency that
also happened to be owned by Darwish Hazem Shaker.
They rented a single check-in desk at Conakry.
They had two shipping containers on the grounds of Conakry airports, one of them contained
spare parts, the other, I quote, was used to stock the printed paperwork needed for

(01:25:28):
operations and bottles of mineral water.
The two genders.
Remember, this is a wet lease.
They were supposed to provide everything except a crew and depot-level maintenance, which
they couldn't afford and wouldn't have done anyway.
And the deeper that BEA dug, the worse it got.
The chief pilot was also the director of assurance, so there was no supervision.

(01:25:52):
Also he wasn't rated on the 727.
They had no maintenance manuals.
They had no inspection manuals.
The MELs had only ever been provisionally approved, so due diligence was a pencil-wip
by Guinea authorities at best.
The operations manual referred to departments that did not exist.
Specifically, the flight support manager, the section dispatch manager, the navigation

(01:26:14):
and Carlire-Jeppsen section.
Unfortunately I just cleared you and this is crazy, but you're below minimums, so
go around maybe.
Systems, procedures and publication section, and the crew scheduling and records section.
This airline also had no flight support manager, navigation support system, operation center,
briefing materials, remote support network.

(01:26:38):
Operations manuals talked about destinations that didn't exist.
They had flight plans that didn't exist.
There was no evidence of a maintenance manual.
The operations manual contained no information about aircraft weights, flight duty time limits,
weight balance limits.
The report lists three different serial numbers on each engine because the paperwork and the

(01:26:58):
engines on the plane don't match.
And in fact, they don't match in different ways depending on which piece of paperwork
you're looking at.
And this is because Ariana Afghan Airlines swapped the engines without documenting it.
Remember that?
This plane with three KFC dumpster engines has no flight history documentation, including

(01:27:19):
hours flown by the flight crew.
This had to be ascertained through repeated interviews of flight crew and ground staff.
I actually want to read you an excerpt from the report that was so wild I had to post
it in the host chat.
Quote, UTA was not able to produce the slightest data on the flights that it had performed,
flying hours and periods of service of the crew members and airplane maintenance personnel,

(01:27:42):
nor was they able to supply any documents to all relating to the weight and balance calculation
for any previous flight.
It was incapable of indicating who was in reality responsible for supervising the loading
of the holds and what such a person's instructions or training might be.
Quote, their documentation spoke to a fleet management plan for L-1011s, a plane they

(01:28:02):
never flew.
They weren't nearly cool enough to have one of those.
They had company documents which contained chapters in English, not Arabic or French,
relating to the operation of…
L-1011s, 707s, Fokker 50s, DHC-8 twin autos, notably none of which were planes that they
ever owned, let alone operated.

(01:28:24):
You know why they didn't operate the L-1011 is because you can't get dumpster RB-211s.
True.
It's true.
Documents specify training related to the 727 that was done in 2002, which is impossible
because it predates even their intention to buy a 727.
Yeah, here's what the BEA had to say about the operations manual overall.

(01:28:44):
Quote, numerous errors, omissions and inconsistencies appear on first reading of this document,
clearly assembled from clumsy copying from one or more operations manuals from foreign
airlines and obviously only destined to fulfill the regulatory obligation.
The wording of some chapters, for example, corresponds to activities based in Jordan

(01:29:04):
or in Gaza.
The operations manual did, however, have the following insertion.
Quote, safety is the most important rule for all airlines.
This is an essential ingredient for any evaluation of success.
This is the responsibility of all.
Our objective is the effective mastery of disaster with zero accidents.

(01:29:27):
The mastery of disasters means the prevention of injuries or accidents to prisons or goods.
With UTA, safety is the priority.
Try to make it your attitude and rule of life.
Oh no.
Okay.
Next slide, please.

(01:29:48):
These on the other hand are the masters of disaster who are also criminals.
Actually, three of them are from the same family, which has parallels here.
History does not record whether the UTA guys ever clashed with Batman.
New Wave here, the only supervillain I think who has ever been named Becky, is clearly

(01:30:10):
connected to that shipping container full of mineral water.
Also, briefly, the ownership of the company and the plane itself were a mess.
The owner was FAG, which is ostensibly a US Virgin Islands company, but was actually just
a front for the actual operations in Dubai, but first started in Miami, which means that

(01:30:31):
of course this plane was also struck by the indefatigable Florida man.
The report is so confused about the role of FAG in all of this that it just gives up and
doesn't even try to map it out, which is why, next slide, we decided to map some of
it out ourselves with help from SAM sources and holy fuck, shit, it's just a gigantic
slimy web of crimes.

(01:30:54):
So in 2008, the head of the US Drug Enforcement Agency claimed in front of the Senate Committee
and Foreign Relations that the accident airplane was carrying $2 million in cash for Hezbollah,
which had been extorted as tribute from Lebanese merchants in West Africa.
On the other hand, this is the same DEA that regularly gets caught doing all kinds of scummy
things, so I don't know that we can totally trust them to be impartial here, but on the

(01:31:16):
other other hand, do I trust them any less than any of other other sources for this section?
Also kind of no.
What we can confirm is that the owner of the airplane and FAG, Iman Sabo, was a very shifty
dude, who we found out was associated with even more shifty dudes.
Yeah, Iman Sabo was a serial founder of airlines, many of which only existed on paper, and all

(01:31:40):
of which were based in countries with no state capacity to provide oversight.
Remember the first 727 that UTA leased, Registration 3X-Ray Golf Delta Mike?
Well, that plane was never seen again.
But the registration turned up again shortly afterwards, attached to an Antonov An-12 belonging
to a nominally Cambodia-based company called President Airlines, which is really weird

(01:32:04):
because 3X-Ray is a Guinean registration code.
Also airplanes belonging to this supposedly Cambodian airline were frequently seen in
Sharjah, where Iman Sabo reportedly lived.
Huh, interesting.
Another of Iman Sabo's business ventures was a company called East slash West Cargo.
This airline had a fleet of IL-76 freighters, one of which crashed in 2005 while running

(01:32:29):
humanitarian aid into Darfur out of Sharjah, killing all seven crew.
But do you know what else is interesting about East West Cargo is that it was identified
as one of the airlines in the network of notorious Russian arms dealer Victor Bout.
Next slide.
Now you may have heard of this guy, not pictured.

(01:32:51):
Last year he was freed in a prisoner's spot with Russia in exchange for US basketball
player Brittany Greiner.
Isn't Victor Bout the inspiration for Yuri Orlov?
From the 2005 film Lord of War, starring as you can see here, none other than Sir Nicholas
of Cage?
Yeah, so more or less.

(01:33:13):
In reality, there are a couple of minor differences.
Victor Bout was Russian, Orlov as depicted was Ukrainian.
However, Bout was very much the merchant of death that Yuri portrays.
In the movie, Orlov speaks half a dozen languages, he has identities in newer world companies
and countries, he sold arms to both sides in multiple conflicts and made the bulk of
his fortune in Sub-Saharan Africa and the African Middle East.

(01:33:36):
Yeah, that sounds a lot like somebody.
Because between the breakup of the USSR's arrest in 2010, Victor Bout had his hands
in pretty much every war on the planet.
He sold arms to Liberian dictator Charles Taylor, the Taliban, the US in Iraq, Hezbollah,
both sides of the Congolese Civil War, I mean everything.

(01:33:57):
And the way he did it is he would found shitty little airlines in countries with no oversight,
buy junker planes and stuff them full of weapons.
These airlines would be constantly opening and shutting down and Bout himself would frequently
change his own residence and the place of registration of his companies made him hard
to track down.
Meanwhile, Imad Sabah was also connected to the arms trafficking industry not only through

(01:34:18):
East slash West cargo, but some of his other ventures as well.
For example, he was also behind the defunct Armenia-based airline Air Van, which was shut
down by Armenia for safety violations and cited by the United Nations for alleged arms
smuggling to Liberia.
Wait, didn't we just mention Liberia?
Well, we don't actually fully know where the story goes from here.

(01:34:41):
What this does tell us is that Imad Sabah is a genuinely bad guy, unscrupulous, willing
to dip his hands into extremely wildly illegal shit.
And we also know there are plenty of reasons an arms smuggler might be interested in flights
between West Africa and Lebanon.
But whether there were ulterior motives behind the founding of UTA and Sabah's financing

(01:35:02):
thereof, we really can't say, so moving on very nervously glancing over our shoulders.
Next slide, please.
We will get into some of the broader post-ACCF findings and recommendations in the next section.
But first, let's ask, did any of these scumbags suffer any sort of consequences for killing
140 people?
Uh…
Yeah, not…

(01:35:22):
No.
Well, no.
No, they didn't.
In 2010, a court in Lebanon sentenced some people involved in this crash.
One of them was a captain who got 20 years.
He didn't really deserve punishment for this, but he fortunately LVQ forwarded himself back
to Libya and has continued to do his thing.
Last I've heard, he kept flying for a Libyan airline called Rahila Air until he retired

(01:35:47):
in 2019, which is fine, this crash wasn't his fault.
Although embarrassingly, he did kind of flee the scene in plain clothes, only to be recognized
in the hospital.
And there's a photo that Sam and I determined definitely shows the captain wearing the deceased
First Officer's flight jacket on the beach after the crash, which is weird.
That's all I have to say about that.

(01:36:08):
So Imad Saba was also sentenced in absentia to three years in prison.
He never showed up for his trial, and his whereabouts since 2010 are unknown.
Darwish Khazem was sentenced to 20 years in absentia, but he just chilled in Guinea and
he never served a day either.
In this case, he knew he was pretty dead to rights, which is why he fled immediately.

(01:36:30):
He is the one on the CVR heard pressuring the captain to force the takeoff, despite
the captain and the FO's very clear and understandable concerns.
Yeah, Mohamed Khazem got six months, I believe also in absentia, he just hung out with his
brother Darwish.
Ahmed Khazem, the father, got one year and two months.
He was the only one who was actually tried in person.

(01:36:50):
At his trial, he had to be removed by security when the victims of families tried to beat
his ass to death.
And you know, like, relatable, BBH.
Yeah, we don't actually know if he went to prison or not.
I sort of assume he maybe did, but we're not sure.
So the grand total is that one member of the Khazem crime family possibly maybe served
a year in prison.

(01:37:11):
Justice?
Maybe?
Anyone?
Anyone?
Bueller?
No, not so much.
Okay, alright.
Next slide.
So, the fuck did we learn?
Let's talk a little about the findings and the recommendations.
At the deepest level, this accident happened because there was next to no due diligence
by any of the countries involved in the endeavor.

(01:37:34):
The BEA recommended that Guinea create their own civil aviation bureaucracy, which is a
much broader recommendation than I've ever seen in an accident report, which are probably
full of very specific mechanic or training-based recommendations and don't usually need to
come stapled to a section-free, 300-level undergrad poly side course on civil service.
The BEA specifically called out that the UTA was able to move themselves from Sierra Leone

(01:37:55):
to Guinea and sort of make up a transportation company based up around their family, all
without raising any sort of suspicion.
The report also calls out how long they were able to continue to operate in this level
of criminality, in the absence of any kind of written contracts for operations with outside
vendors, choosing instead to pay for things with cash.
They don't just call out the Guinean authorities.

(01:38:18):
Sierra Leone and Lebanon are also both called out by name as well.
Actually, the BEA praises Lebanon for being the grown-up in the room and insisting on
the bare minimum level of maintenance, which is kind of impressive.
Maintenance is Lebanon after all.
When you're worse at maintenance than Lebanon, wow.
Wow.
Yeah, so the BEA made an even higher level recommendation.

(01:38:39):
They recommended to the ICAO, which is the UN organization governing aviation, they act
more aggressively in pushing countries to comply with international standards.
Basically countries are supposed to recognize and honor the inspection and certification
of each other's aircraft, but they're not actually required to.
Obviously, the US does not demand an inspection of every British Airways jet that lands here,

(01:39:01):
but we do have the right to do so and vice versa.
The report recommends that countries have an obligation not to just blindly sign off
on flights and routes just because another country has said that the paperwork was in
order because in this case, it very clearly was not.
Yeah.
So as a concluding note, there are a lot of crashes that have happened because of cost

(01:39:25):
cutting, but this accident is in a different universe entirely.
This was an overtly slimy operation that shouldn't have been allowed to run a corner store, let
alone an airline, and is only able to do so by operating in the shadows in a part of the
world destroyed by colonialism.
The official report for this is wild enough on its own, but the more we dug into this

(01:39:45):
crash the worse it became, and if we had done another month of research, we probably could
have found even more criminality.
So I mean, in fact, we've been adding new findings to the script until literally today,
the day we're recording.
The fact that the victims of this crash were mostly poor workers just trying to get home
for the holiday makes this crash even more upsetting.

(01:40:06):
But on the other hand, 20 years have elapsed since the disaster, and the world is just
different enough to mean that you might not be able to get away with shit like this today
for as long, so it's less likely that something like this is going to happen again, hopefully.
Yeah.
All right.
Any final thoughts?

(01:40:27):
All right.
Thanks, everybody.
Thanks, everyone, for joining us.
Our next episode will be on Malaysia Air 370.
Bye.
Bye.
Bye.
Bye.
I'm great.

(01:40:48):
I built it.

(01:42:00):
you

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