CPIT ep 11: is too heckin windy

my airline ceo told me he was tired of his planes crashing in bad weather and I asked him how many planes he had. he told me he just goes to dispatch and sends another one so I said "it sounds like you're feeding aircraft to thunderstorms" and his shareholders started crying

with J, the engineer, ariadne the business expert, kyra the plane crash writer and bek the weather expert

Episode Transcript

(00:00):
Listeners, it is the morning of January 30th.

(00:09):
We are currently in the shadow of the first major crash involving a US-based airline since
2009.
We recorded this episode last Sunday, the 26th, before the tragic offense at DC's National
Airport.
We will be covering that incident extensively in our next episode, when we know more.
In the meantime, if you want to hear our thoughts on the incident, the best place to do so is

(00:29):
on our Discord.
Thank you.
Back to the show.

(00:49):
Hello and welcome to Controlled Pod into Terrain.
We are a multimedia podcast about air and space mishaps, aiming to put them in a broader
context of how and why things went wrong.
Now to introduce myself and my co-hosts, my name is Ariad Beetaljic.
I'm the business and aviation industry expert.
My pronouns are she and her.
My name is Jay.
Well, it isn't, but that's all you're getting.

(01:10):
I'm the systems and engineering experts.
And my pronouns can be she and her as well as a treat.
And my name is Kira Dempsey, better known as the aviation writer Admiral Cloudberg,
and my pronouns are she and her.
And today, because we're going to talk a lot about weather, we invited our friend who has
weather autism.
Hello, I am Beck.
You can ask me about weather.

(01:32):
My pronouns are also she and her.
Next slide.
Today we're going to talk about Brain F250, which is a tragic story of what happens when
a string of poor decisions put 42 people directly in the path of turbulence so strong that not
even our beloved 111 could save them.
Next slide.
But first we have to do some sort of news thing.
And this is going to be a news heavy episode because this crash was a long time ago.

(01:53):
It wasn't that complicated, and there were, as far as we can tell, no crimes involved.
And on top of that, we haven't released an episode in several months, and they were very
eventful months if you're into planes.
So let's start with some of the crashes that happened during that time because there were
a bunch.
Next slide.
First off, back on 25th November 2024, a Swift Air Cargo 737-400 operating on behalf of why

(02:18):
does it say SHI?
I thought it was DHL.
Oh, it was DHL branded.
To be DHL.
But crashed about a kilometre short of the runway in Vilnius, Lithuania.
Of the four crew on board, three of them survived, and one of the pilots was killed.
It also badly damaged a house.
It had a dozen people in it, but they all escaped.
Yeah, I'm not cutting the DHL thing out, incidentally.

(02:42):
This is going to be a long episode.
This was basically a C-Fit accident.
We don't know the details of how it happened yet.
It was obvious from the surveillance video that the plane was on a completely unstabilised
approach.
It started descending below the glide slope shortly before the crash after a sudden increase

(03:05):
in descent rate.
We don't know why.
Images from the scene suggest that the slats might have been retracted, which means the
flaps would have been too.
But this is a point in the approach where those high lift devices have to be extended
for low speed, high drag flight.
If they were never extended, then clearly the pilots were way behind the aircraft on
this approach.

(03:26):
But it's also possible that they were extended, and then there was some miscommunication,
and they were retracted again, leading to a high sink rate.
We don't really know which, and we won't know for a while, because Lithuania hasn't
met the ICAO Annex 13 requirement to release a preliminary report within 30 days.
Apparently this is due to coordination issues with the Silo-TNAC Onifying Judicial Investigation.

(03:49):
This is the first major air accident at Lithuania since independence in 1990, so it's not surprising
that issues like this will rise.
This was a DHL-branded aircraft, but it's not a DHL-operated.
It was operated by a contractor called Swift Air, which I was wildly disappointed to find
out has nothing to do with my Lord and Sabler, but is instead a Spanish Aero Supra knockoff

(04:11):
that loves to do sketchy shit and cut corners, perhaps in this case a little too literally.
It's like...
Also back in November, Spirit and American Airlines got shot at in Heaton.
You thought we were going to go a whole episode without talking about aviation crimes?
Nah.
The Google Docs just say, we blame Reagan.

(04:34):
I think that's about as much detail as we're going to get on this one.
Yeah.
Not much damage was done to the planes, but it's an affable thing.
We wanted to touch on it really quickly.
The bullets that hit a jet blue flight did strike a flight attendant, but they recovered
quickly.
The planes also escaped any sort of damage that would have prevented them from getting
the fuck out of the place they were being shot at, which we here on this podcast call

(04:56):
El Carlita.
One of them apparently hit the avionics bay, but did not affect any critical systems.
The FAA shut down traffic from the US to Haiti for 30 days, and then opened up after the
airport's beefed up security.
Yeah.
So everything, I just want to say, everything that has been done to Haiti since Europeans
colonized it has been a crime.
So that's our crime for this episode.

(05:20):
Well there's others, but okay.
There's lots of crimes, yeah.
Next slide.
Oh true.
This is a crime.
So we do have more to say about Azerbaijan.
So on Christmas morning, an Azerbaijan Airlines Embraer E-190 from Baku, Azerbaijan to Grozny,
Russia was hit by a Russian air defense Pantsir missile battery during an unsuccessful landing

(05:42):
attempt amid fog and GPS jamming.
Schraffnell peppered the aft fuselage, causing a depressurization and injuring passengers.
The pilots reported that they lost hydraulics and had no control over the airplane.
They pulled a United 232 and maintained basic control using variable engine thrust, but
they were all over the place, and at one point ATC was reportedly warning them that they
were below the MSA, the minimum safe altitude, in the Caucasus Mountains.

(06:07):
In one of the videos from the cabin, you can hear a flight attendant telling people to
move to the back, so we think they might have been moving passengers around in order to
trim the airplane.
Yeah, I mean, but not trim it too much because the only way they had to control their altitude
would have been, you know, power and the phugoid.

(06:28):
And that's what we call a situation.
So eventually the crew decided to proceed to Aktau in Kazakhstan on the other side of
the freaking Caspian Sea because it was the only place with clear weather.
There was a lot of speculation after the crash that Russia refused to let them land in Mahachkala,
but the ATC tapes refute this.
Russia vectored them out to sea as a cover-up, rings close enough to possible that this rumor

(06:52):
took quite a foothold, but alas, it is not true.
Yeah.
So without hydraulics, they managed to stay airborne for an hour and a half, and they
made it all the way to Aktau, but they lost control and crashed during their second landing
attempt.
The front and center sections were crushed in a giant fireball, but the tail section
was shot out ahead like a curling stone for like a kilometer and everyone in there survived.

(07:15):
So in total 38 people died and 29 lived, which for a plane that got hit by a literal missile
is pretty damn good.
Also absolute chat-ass line, truly DHL grade.
That's a reference to the 2003 Baghdad shoot-down incident where a DHL cargo A300 was hit by
a missile, lost hydraulics, and the pilots landed it not just in one piece, but actually

(07:41):
on its landing gear.
Still the only time anyone has ever done this, and we should definitely do an episode on
this at some point, even if only because of the family relationship between the 111 and
the A300.
Yeah.
And these Azerbaijan Airlines guys did a damn good job too, though.

(08:02):
I mean, they're unquestionably heroes for getting that far.
Yeah, and who the hell knows if we're ever going to get a detailed investigation into
this crash, but according to unverified leaks from Russia's internal military investigation,
Ukrainian drones have been operating that area previously, had Russians had GPS and
comms jamming active, but I guess they jammed their own military comms too.

(08:23):
Yeah, they did.
Classic Russian military competence.
For unknown reasons, the plane wasn't displayed to the pan-seer crew as a friendly, and the
crew had not been supplied with any civilian aircraft schedules.
I mean, come on, guys.
They teach this in how not to shoot down civilian planes 101.
Bold of you to think they were teaching these guys anything.

(08:44):
So two pan-seer crews were trying to figure out if this plane was a threat, but they couldn't
get through to their commanders because their own military was jamming them.
One battery saw the plane identified as a civilian, the other didn't, and the first
battery couldn't tell them because cell communication was down, and the landline didn't
work for unrelated reasons, presumably because someone had stolen the copper.
Yeah, probably.

(09:05):
Also, according to this version, there was never a Ukrainian drone in the area on that
day, or at least if there was, it got away because they never found any trace of it.
So add it to the pile of embarrassing Russian moments involving anti-air missiles and civilian
airliners, which is a worryingly large pile.
This was a wild story to unpack on the server because when we saw the photos emerge, the

(09:26):
first thing JAN said to each other was, those holes look concerningly like anti-air fragmentation
shrapnel.
There was some rumor right about right round afterwards about it having potentially come
from a disintegrating engine core, but this was so clearly anti-air that even Russia had
to admit it.
I mean, they didn't admit it, but they had to.
You're right.

(09:46):
Yeah.
All right, next slide.
All right, speaking of Russia, on the same day an SSJ-100 caught on fire at Anatolga
Airport in Turkey and everybody on board evacuated safely.
We have no idea why this happened, and we have nothing actually real to say about it,
but Ari and Jay wrote some funny jokes about the SSJ-100 and we wanted to tell them.

(10:11):
So as you know, every Russian jet is, we have jet at home, and this particular one is, we
have AT-20 at home.
It's the Russian domestic market's attempt to make a modern fly-by-wire regional jet,
and it's even got a couple of CFM-56 knockoffs.
And I do mean knockoffs.
They were initially a joint venture with SNECMA.
Did you just deadname Safran?

(10:33):
But since the invasion, the French got the fuck out of town, leaving a company all up
here to pronounce, to take over the entire effort domestically.
It's literally just ODK Saturn NPO.
Everything about this jet is a mess, and despite its claims of being made of being Russian-made
and Russian-strung, most of the parts are still Western, from companies like Honeywell

(10:54):
and BAE.
And the sanctions mean most parts aren't coming, and even making a dogshit knockoff
still takes a decade.
Look, I know you talked about the crimes involved in shooting AT planes, but I don't think
we can all sit here as reasonable people and present that the Sukhoi Superjet is anything

(11:18):
but a collection of crimes, from sanctions evasion to industrial espionage.
We've talked before about how they're totally dependent on tenuous relationships with the
Middle East and India to get stuff in, and despite talking a load of old toot about developing
replacements for Western components, Russian industry is just nowhere near capable of doing

(11:41):
this.
They don't even have the university pipeline to staff the companies that develop the parts
to build the equipment that they would need to gather the data to develop these components.
That's how far behind they are.
And they can't afford any of it, even if they did, which is why they're building quote-unquote

(12:01):
Russified versions of the damn thing, based on sanctioned smuggled chips and cloned firmware
that they put in modules based on reverse-engineered versions of whatever Honeywell or BAE or GE
was providing.
Does this work?
Sometimes sort of.
Is it safe?

(12:22):
Apparently not.
Is it a massive crime wrapped in a different crime?
Yes, definitely.
Next slide.
Alright, last but definitely not least, the one you've been waiting for us to cover,
Jeju Air Flight 2213, otherwise known as That's Why We Don't Put ILS Berms There.
This was a Boeing 737-800 passenger flight from Bangkok, Thailand to Muang, South Korea,

(12:44):
with 181 people on board.
It crashed on landing on December 29th, killing 179 people.
Only the two aft flight attendants survived.
So on final approach, they hit birds, and we can confirm at this time that bird detritus
was found inside both engines.
The technical term for this, by the way, is snarge.

(13:05):
That's fantastic.
Now, we don't know how much damage this did, but from video evidence, the right engine
had a compressor stall in the air, and the left engine transverser was abused on landing.
So both engines might have been fucked by the birds.
So why did they try to go around with two fucked engines?
Well, you know, the working assumption has to be that they started to go around when

(13:26):
they saw the birds or felt the impacts and only realized how fucked their engines were
after they had committed to it.
Now, after the go-around started, the plane disappeared off Flight Radar 24, and both
black boxes stopped recording.
So there's no data on the entire last four minutes of the flight, and this is presumably
because there was a total loss of electrical power when the engines failed.

(13:50):
Which is weird, though, because you can hear at least one engine spinning down after the
crash on the excellent quality video that came off some guy's presumably Samsung smartphone.
The accessory drive on these engines is off of N2, the high pressure spool.
So even if the fan was fucked and it wasn't producing any thrust, you would still expect

(14:13):
there to be electricity if the engine core was rotating.
Yeah, which I was right, I was just about to get to that.
I mean, the suspicion is that there was something wrong with the electrical system other than
just dual engine failure.
I mean, that's pure speculation, we don't have direct evidence of that, but I would
not be shocked if it was the case.
And yes, aircraft built before 2009, like this one, weren't required to have the CDR

(14:36):
run off the backup battery.
The 737 doesn't have a rain-marine turbine because it doesn't actually need electrical
power to fly.
It can be flown with mail or reverse as we talked about for TACA 110 last episode.
You have to start the E8CU to get the flight recorders back online and the pilots didn't
have time to do it because I think it takes about 90 to 120 seconds in the 737.
Yeah, and they didn't have a handy check pilot in the back of the cockpit to take over.

(15:04):
We asked ourselves if we can blame Boeing for this somehow, but we're not going to
because that other disaster podcast has ruined all of those jokes on this topic.
So based on video evidence, what we know is that during those final four minutes, they
circled the airport and they landed on runway 19 from the opposite direction.

(15:26):
This was probably an attempt to return to the nearest runway because the go around,
or such as it was, had made it impossible to continue to landing on runway 01, which
was their original intention.
Which by the way, the official advice if you lose an engine on final approach is to not
worry about it and just land directly ahead of you.
This is why it's called the impossible turn.

(15:47):
Yeah, although the impossible turn is coming back around to land on the opposite direction
of the same runway you just took off from, which is even harder than this.
Yeah, I mean making a super tight turn back with little or no engine power is insanely
hard and for whatever reason the pilots did not manage to extend the landing gear.

(16:10):
It can be extended manually with a gravity drop even with no hydraulic or electrical
power but maybe the pilots thought they didn't have time.
We might actually never know the answer to this because the CVR wasn't running.
Yeah, anyway, they touched down too fast, too far down the runway with no gear, so that
means no brakes and also no spoilers and maybe one thrust reverser at most.

(16:34):
So in short they were fucked, there was no way that plane was going to stop within any
reasonable distance at the runway end.
So my opinion is that this would have been a major crash no matter what.
But I think most people would have survived if the plane hadn't smashed headlong into
the concrete reinforced support berm for the localizer antenna array, at which point it
disintegrated into a cloud of fiery, frosly bits.

(16:56):
This is why you make structures near your runway frangible, folks.
Frangible means that when a plane and the structure get into a fight, the plane wins.
Yeah, it's also pretty obvious that this structure this sturdy should not have been anywhere
near as close to the runway.
And while South Korea is starting the process of removing these other airports, geez, they

(17:20):
paid just the highest price for this hindsight.
Yeah, we learned that too after Mk Airline's flight 1602 and we no longer have a berm with
our ILS on it in Halifax anymore because it crashed into it.
Great shout, yeah.
Was that the 747 that overran and broke in half?
It did.

(17:41):
It had a whole bunch of lobsters on it, so there was lobster all over the runway, which
is very stereotypical.
It broke into a lot more than half.
There have been two 747 runway overruns at Halifax and you're probably thinking the other
one.
Yeah, anyway.
One tragic piece of information to note is that the executive that is in charge of the
airport design company took his life earlier this week.

(18:03):
He was expecting to be charged by the Korean National Police for his role in the incident.
His role in specifically approving the ILS is unknown right now.
Yeah, and we're recording this on Sunday night and the Korean Transport Ministry has said
they'll release the preliminary report on Monday, so it should be out by the time you
hear this.
Actually, it's already out right now.
I'm recording this, it came out like literally seconds before we started recording this episode,

(18:26):
but apparently it doesn't really tell us anything we didn't already just say.
So carry on.
Next slide.
All right, our next section is aviation stomp to the Ariadne and we're talking about the
moving and shaking in the air as the executive is making and losing money for the Norwegian
Stockwork Wealth Fund and by other people, I guess.
The volume is striking downward.
After years of dealing with wage freezes, rising healthcare costs, restrictions of job

(18:48):
security, the Washington State-based Boeing Machinists Union finally threw down the gauntlet.
Picture this, thousands of workers in Washington, Oregon and beyond putting out their tools
and walking out, leaving us on the land still and quiet.
It wasn't just a bump in the road for Boeing, it was a full-scale halt, sending a strong
message that the machinists were done fucking around.
The first folk to strike was hugely popular and for good reason.

(19:11):
Boeing has spent the last two and a half decades doing everything they can to break the back
of this particular union.
The unique way that the 787 is both unassembled, mostly based around the fact that Boeing reviewed
the entire production line to South Carolina where saying the word unique will get you
arrested was done to try and break them.
Even their move from Seattle to Chicago in the early 2000s was to break the back of this

(19:32):
specific union.
And Boeing has repeatedly shot themselves on the foot out of sight, putting up with
constant delays, QA problems and work stoppages in the South Carolina factory because they
could pay workers in the South 12 to 16 bucks an hour if they built one of the most complicated
machines ever devised.
For weeks, Boeing and the machinists union butted heads, waiting for each other to blink.

(19:54):
Unions demanded better wages, retirement benefits, reasonable healthcare costs.
Boeing, on the other hand, was playing the usual fuckery, citing tough economic conditions
and the need to stay competitive.
Translation, ha ha ha, stop this, we spent all your money on buybacks, sorry.
Boeing tried all kinds of bullshit to end this shit.
We could put the machinists union held strong because they knew that for the first time

(20:18):
in a minute.
They held all the leverage.
They rejected Boeing's first insulting wheel offer with near the indemnity and they
laughed when Boeing declared their offer best in file.
And as the business expert, this was one of the funniest things I ever read.
You see that when you have options.
You have another evaluating.
You see it when you've got a flush.
You don't see it when you're holding a six and eight and uno card, a chick-fil-a receipt

(20:39):
and a goldfish.
I would be so busy laughing at my opponents, laughing a goldfish and an uno reverse card
onto the poker table that I'd forget to vote to continue the strike.
It's a genius move, you see.
Well needless to say, the union saw through the goldfish.
They told Boeing to fuck all the way back to Puteus Sound at Boeing, which were really
stupid.
Let's not forget the ripple effects.

(21:01):
Boeing's strike didn't just affect their factories.
It sent shockwaves throughout the entire aerospace industry, the entire stock chain, all of the
stock supply chain stuff.
Delayed orders, missed deadlines made it crystal clear that the machinists were not bluffing
about how crucial they are to Boeing's operations.

(21:21):
Eventually, the strike started to affect earnings sites and institutional investors decided to
step in to demand an end to the strike.
Which is the first time at Seek It, you'll hear about massive stockholders being used
for a net good.
Maybe the last time.
Maybe the last time, probably.
Boeing realized they had nothing.
So they put better wages on the table, offered some relief and healthcare premiums, guaranteed

(21:43):
some of the job protections that the machinists were asking for.
It was not a perfect deal.
It was enough for the machinists to feel like they were finally heard, for Boeing to finally
make some concessions.
It was the way to get production rolling again without any more bleeding.
In the end, the strike was a reality check for Boeing.
The machinists proved they weren't just cogs and machine.

(22:04):
They were the machine.
And for the workers, it was a wink approved when you stand up and you demand what's fair.
Sometimes you actually get it.
Unionize your fucking office.
All of this now relies on one fact.
Boeing is still totally screwed.
Because the following things are still true about Boeing.
The 777X is still years behind schedule because the trust line pushed all their prototypes,

(22:26):
aging like they chose unwise to get a grill grill.
They finally fixed it, but best estimates put delivery dates in 2026, 70 years after
the original goal.
That means the delay is 50% longer than the entire dev cycle for the original 777.
Their Starline capsule may very well never fly again.
They are only needing 55 units of their bread and butter 737, a single factory in rent every

(22:50):
month, 20 less than they need to be.
Airbus, let's remember, has four 320 factories, not just for capacity, but also for redundancy.
And let's just remember that 320 deliveries passed 737 deliveries, despite the fact that
the plane is more than 10 years younger.

(23:11):
Almost 20 years, Amber.
It's yeah, literally 20.
It's stacking 10 is what that 320 is.
Two of the 777X they built the central bus for have just up and exploded in geostationary
orbit in the last year.
They've announced that they're ending production of the 767 freighter early.
The 787, apart from having a 2000 word log section on Wikipedia called Operational Problems,

(23:36):
is actually doing okay.
Also the T7, which is replacing the T38 as a primary jet trainer for the Air Force, is
finally getting delivered way too slowly.
The KC-96, which is a replacement for the 135 and the KC-10, is still climbing over
the mountains of problems that it brought on itself.
All of this to say is that their issues are numerous and they're one small.

(23:56):
Boeing has a hugely uphill battle just to get back to normal.
They are still having huge problems with manufacturing, they're not making anything at the speed
they need to be or the quality they need to be at.
They have a debt load worth $60 billion, and while they have the ability to raise a lot
of money and credit lines worth tens of billions, $60 billion has a lot of fucking money, and
they're going to need at least another 20 to actually develop and test the 797.

(24:18):
Look at this fool who thinks Boeing will ever build a 797, they're going to leave it there
to tantalize us forever like Half Life 3.
Looking fondly at the model of the Sonic Cruiser concepts and saying that I'll see her in my
wildest dreams.
And they still haven't unfucked their supply chains either and the strike has emboldened
labour all the way up and down the value line.

(24:39):
So Boeing has a pretty steep climb to stability, let alone profitability.
Alright, next slide.
Alright, let's talk about everyone's favorite school bus that isn't driven by an ADHD lesbian
and how they continue to lose money to the point where they can no longer continue to
operate without significant debt restructuring and downsizing.
If you don't know that, some of the crew could be ADHD lesbians.

(25:00):
Head canoning Ms. Frizzle as a lesbian makes the Magic School Bus 10 times cooler, or is
that official canon?
It's been a long time since I read any Magic School Bus.
I mean, she's definitely queer coded and I will die on this hill if I need to.
I'll die with you.
I will too.
Yeah, no, we're all, I think we're all here.
Alright, so in mid November, Spirit Airlines declared chapter 11 bankruptcy.

(25:22):
It is important to clarify, especially for those outside the US, this is not the end
of the company.
It is a communist conceptual called bankruptcy as involved liquidations of assets to perhaps
complete debt, bring out business, you know, sort of your back and beyond kind of thing.
That's a chapter 7 bankruptcy.
By contrast, chapter 11 bankruptcy is designed to allow operations to continue employees

(25:42):
who pay as normal as part of a restructuring process.
So it's called a go in sin, no more from a court system.
Chapter 11 is not uncommon in your airline industry, every single one of the American
pick 3 have done it, as have many of their component airlines to be a merger.
They've all emerged either a key to be flying their current incarnation, or in some cases
an emerged entity.

(26:03):
Spirit's incarnation once it emerges from bankruptcy remains to be seen, although in
any event, it will be a smaller, leaner operation.
So Spirit, as you remember from episode 9 back in the fall, has been screwed a couple
of different ways.
For starters, as we discussed, Spirit has gotten deeply fucked by the issues with the
problem with the PNLB 1100, which is the cure of turbofan that has something like a 13 to

(26:24):
1 bypass ratio, which is unmatched in the world.
For now, Rolls is really trying to make the ultrafan happen.
Yeah, the problem is it achieves bypass ratios like that with the use of a planetary gear
set between the turbine section and the fan, because if you have a huge fan, you need to
spin it slowly so it doesn't tear itself apart.
So you have to make a reduction gearbox that's small and light enough to fit inside the hull

(26:48):
of a jet engine, but it has to be able to handle tens of thousands of newton meters
of torque, and it has to be capable of operating both in the desert of Dubai and the snow of
Saskatchewan for years on end.
That is right up against the limit of human understanding of material science.
These gearboxes are constantly trying to explode, something that is less than advisable for
continued airline operations.

(27:08):
This combined with the bad materials used in the second stage compressor core means that
a lot of their planes are grounded until inspections for repairs are complete.
Spirit has at times had some of their planes sitting for months, so they're going to spend
2025 and 2026 operating between 2 thirds and 3 quarters of their full fleet.
They won't get their full fleet back until 2027 at the earliest.

(27:31):
Combine that with the fact that legacy carriers have been able to femisect this small segment
of increasingly cast-striped budget traveler by introducing the wrong fuck you pay me fees,
to the extent that fundamentally what Spirit offers is an uncomfortable seat with too little
room and the ability to pay extra for everything from water to the ability to bring a bag.
And that is pretty easy to replicate actually.

(27:53):
The big three carriers can all do that, and the empire you get with them will be nicer
because you're attached to a global route network, and you're more likely getting a
decent IFE and the big three level of service for whatever that's worth.
You're joking about the IFE.
I've flown all three of the big three domestically in scum class because anything else would
be defrauding my Patreon supporters.

(28:13):
And I can assure you, the percent of those planes that have IFE is like 20%.
Spirit saw a domestic vacancy drop, and the US bounced back quickly after the worst pandemic
restrictions were lifted, and they got the able to expand quickly to cater to it.
They spent and borrowed huge amounts of money into training and operations sectors, and
of course they built massive office headquarters and paid huge retents of bonuses to their

(28:34):
executive suite.
The growth that they manifested never materialized or was offset by major competition of legacy
airlines.
They also had overcapacity problems, particularly in their previously strongest markets, Orlando,
South Florida, Vegas, international markets in Central and South America.
And some problems were out of their control.
During the last two years, they had expensive drawn out merger negotiations and legal proceedings

(28:58):
with Book Frontier and JetBlue.
The Spirit was high of hamstrung for making significant adjustments to their business model
by contractual agreement.
An example of this is they had restrictions on furlough and pilots during merger transactions
in progress, so they sort of oversat.
Now those merger talks ended, so they had to furlough 500 pilots across a couple of

(29:20):
rounds.
A lot of that resulted from these Neo Airframe groundings.
They sold off aircraft and free up cash.
They reduced their pilot count down below 3000.
One positive sign is that the supermajority of the debt holders that Spirit owes money
to voted in favor of the company's restructuring and downsizing plan before they entered bankruptcy

(29:41):
court in what's called a pre-arranged restructuring agreement.
Basically it's a plan to get themselves out of trouble.
The actual court is going to examine the plan, make sure T's are dotted and the I's are
crossed, and recommend any further measures.
I wrote it backwards and read it backwards.
It's funnier that way.
Yeah, I thought it was funny.

(30:04):
It should be kept.
It's funnier that way.
Okay, alright.
The court itself is going to evaluate the agreement, make sure the T's are dotted and
the I's are crossed, and recommend any further measures that are best interested to the debtors.
Spirit is pretty sure they've got everything covered.
They would like to emerge from it sometime in the first quarter of this year.

(30:26):
So we got all that out of the way.
What does this mean for you, the Growcast Traveler?
Naturally, not much.
So this is a chapter 11 bankruptcy.
Unlike what we said about what Unliked By Bath and Meoges did where it ceased to exist,
all its assets were given to creditors to solve the big debts.
This is a go at it no more.
The debts are re-organized.
The creditors are usually told to accept a few pennies on the dollar by the courts.

(30:51):
One of the things that the court did grant the creditors was most of the remaining portion
of Spirit's outstanding shares, meaning it's sort of a private company-ish.
They are also cutting a ton of stuff as we discussed back in 2017.
The bonuses to those executives, don't worry, those are still valid because they argued
as companies always do that they needed to retain all this quality talent.

(31:12):
Is that the same talent that got the mid of this?
Shut up peasant, don't ask questions.
An entertainingly ironic twist, Spirit's ownership of their sex in your headquarters,
operations and training facility, we put up as collateral as part of the restructuring
agreement.
So, nice work on paying a bunch of money to secure our bankruptcy dorks remote work forever.

(31:32):
To put this in terms of what solicitors of this show would understand, Spirit is kind
of right now where Apple was in 1997.
I'm not saying that I expect Spirit's next set of plans to be body blue and translucent,
but what I mean is they're a little bloated right now.
So in 1987, Apple faced Spirit's competition from Microsoft, when it tried to match up

(31:55):
with their own game selling sort of generic face boxes.
They overextended into a bunch of start-up printers, servers, a bunch of crappy Mac models.
And when Steve Jobs came back, he made a lot of unpopular positions.
He laid off something like 3,000 employees, cut 80% of product lineup, focused on the
leader organization, but threw the core strengths.

(32:16):
He redefined their branding, their advertising.
This resulted in the Think Different campaign that was so closely associated with the late
90s iMac that we try to receive.
So Spirit is kind of doing something very similar, but much less likely to get them
an Oscar-nominated movie in a couple of decades.
They've sold out much of XS aircraft.
They talked about layoffs, eliminated a bunch of routes, particularly in Florida to concentrate

(32:40):
on the markets.
Northeast, California, Texas, at the same time, they've significantly changed their
business models, offer premium seating options, and an Augusta Tech model to improve the customer
spirit experience.
If this makes them sound like they're kind of becoming every other airline, even will
you notice that too.
Spirit hired an advertising agency for the first time.

(33:01):
They've ramped up their advertising efforts.
They hired Frankie Nunes for a short commercial that parodies his time on Knock Them in the
Middle to promote their blocked middle seat options, which, I mean, I guess we can bring
Euro business to America, who knows why not.
If anything, these changes represent an impressive display of contingency planning in the event

(33:23):
of a merger not being approved in the near future, which is probably very likely going
to happen.
Spirit implemented this model change of debt restructuring plan seven months after the
federal court shut down JetBlue merger.
All of this aside, their long-term prospects remain pretty questionable.

(33:43):
They're still shopping themselves around to Frontier, JetBlue, God knows who else.
It's a fair bet they'll take advantage of the more larger, friendly policies in the
next couple of years to this purpose.
In the near term, Spirit has had their sort of come to Jesus moment, if you will.
They've admitted themselves that they're not going to be able to continue to operate

(34:05):
at the current size and growth vector during their early numbers.
So more to follow but continue as we follow the bafflingly shitty little school bus that
could.
Now, because we should have done another OOPSOL news episode but made the questionable decision
not to, Jay and Ari are going to quick fire through four more news stories.
All right, Starship landed the booster but massively failed to get to orbit with pieces

(34:28):
out of the cavernous absolute chaos of our few hundred miles of airspace around Turk's
Gecos.
I think this is a problem, but not a major one.
I put return of flight less than 90 days.
It depends how mad the airlines get about the massive amount of money this shit just costs
them in diversions and whether the FAA does its fucking job, which is questionable at
this point.

(34:48):
New Glenn thought to Orton, failed to land the booster.
We haven't seen anything about this other than in their ship, Jaqueline returned to
port empty.
Blargin says it, quote, fell short.
I called it.
Landing is a psychotic and hard problem and you're not starting with hopper roads, hundreds
of flights.
You're starting with a couple of dozen new shepherd flights.
You said it would explode and it didn't.
You also thought that B3U, the upper stage engine wouldn't work, which it did.

(35:13):
I just want to point out that it was also really, really pretty.
Anyway, I also want to point out that not landing actually kind of doesn't matter.
What does is that on its first flight, New Glenn's lower and upper stages performed
pretty much flawlessly in demonstrating its ability to put gobsmackingly large masses

(35:36):
into a specific target orbit.
Some shit flew a DJI V's shit over the LA fires and managed to put a super scooper out
of service for a week.
Well done, you absolute fucking cockwamble.
Interestingly DJI responded to this by saying they won't even bother geofencing restricted
areas anymore.
So this will probably happen again at some point because unlike my tears, drones don't

(35:57):
have a shape, they tear on the wingskin.
This actually damaged one of the wing stringers.
They posted photos of the repair job.
You should look it up, it's really interesting.
Yeah, finally Airbus announced they won't light up the Beluga anymore.
My theory here is that really heavy thing that needs to go away the fuck over there
really soon in the market isn't very big.

(36:18):
This thing was designed to compete with the AIA-2124 in the dream lifter which was sold
to Atlas.
I thought renting this out was genius, but it's got kind of a terrible range.
It will mass out way before it bulks out.
So really the market was weirdly shaped shit needs to go place.
And that just wasn't enough to keep these in the standalone business.
Also I love that this shares a type ring with the 300, the XL with the 330, but Boeing has

(36:39):
to handpuff like half the world's airline passengers to a drafting table from the 1960s
to keep one type.
My takeaway is that we missed our chance to hire the happiest plane on earth.
Next slide.
Ha ha!
Psych!
We're not doing a 111 corner this time because the entire episode is 111 corner.

(37:00):
You're all going to have to wait to learn about the fly-by-wire 111.
Next slide.
Alright, time to talk some capitalism.
Our Discord as we say is CPIP.
I'm going to take a second to say something.
I have my emotions saying it.
I know I got it right again.
When we came up with CPIP, we wrote a podcast and then we opened a Discord around it to
discuss it.

(37:20):
Over time, that's changed a little bit and the Discord server became what we would describe
it as being like a day bar just outside the NASA Ames facility and it's become a very
wonderful place for some of the best people I've ever met.
The Discord server became the point of secret and these episodes became content made for
our fans as a reward for being the incredible and sweet group they are.
It's one of the reasons these episodes went from a few weeks to monthly to quarterly.

(37:44):
We are hoping to get them back to being more regular dramas, but we've had a pretty eventful
site at Havoc 2024 which includes moves across town, moves across the country, job changes,
international vacations.
One of us got hit and run by a no-shoot minivan.
Yeah, it was me.
I got hit by a minivan.
Alright, we do bonus episodes.
We include things like we do oops all newses.

(38:04):
We do willy analysis where we take turns picking movies and analyze them.
Kiera likes weird Russian movies.
Jane likes movies that Ford and then do the engineer they are.
And I like to make movies.
One of these days I'm going to make these two watching a movie with Thomas Cruise control.
And on that note, let's talk about Braniff flight 250, also known as that time a BAC

(38:24):
111 fought the state of Nebraska and lost.
Next slide.
So what is this scene today's episode about?
We're going to talk about Braniff.
What is a Braniff?
Next slide.
I'm pretty sure that's Branson, Missouri.
Nope, that's a Bran muffin.
That's Oscar nominated director Kenneth Branagh.

(38:46):
That I believe is Baffin Island.
Nope, that's Banff.
Isn't that where Beck is from?
No, she's from Nova Scotia.
That's like a seven hour fly away.
40 if you're on Air Canada.
There we go.

(39:07):
That's Braniff.
Wow, that's a lot of orange.
Looks kind of like a creamsicle.
It does.
Yeah, the original 747 is always so snappy and weird.
Braniff or Braniff International Airlines was what you would describe today as a shibby
little regional.
Back then, however, they were known as a trunk carrier.
This meant they were founded before the airline industry got properly regulated and whatever

(39:28):
routes they flew were basically locked in by regulation.
Your business was protected.
In other words, the federal government had declared it illegal or impossible to compete
with them.
Those of you who study civics know this as regulatory capture.
Those of you who have any kind of job expecting this on behalf of the government may know
this as the thing that makes your life hard.

(39:48):
Airline deregulation killed off a bunch of these, but what you need to know is that Braniff
is an airline that performed regional flights between states, primarily in Tornado Alley.
I would simply not go to a place called Tornado Alley, but I'm built different, and by different
I mean delicately.
We do have one fun Braniff fact.

(40:09):
Next slide.
They operated Concorde for a bit as a treat.
They ended up not buying any in the end.
They did have an option for them, but they just didn't buy them.
Seeing it in this color is so wrong.
I hate it.
Hey, at least it's not the Pepsi Concorde.
All right, next slide.

(40:30):
All right, so what is on 111?
The story is peak 111 doing six legs in a day.
Only six?
It's designed to do 45 minute legs all day, every day.
I am not making this up.
That is what it was designed for.
Okay, I'll do what is an 111?
It's what happens when you design a plane without compromise.

(40:50):
A quick bit of background for those of you that aren't up on your seat but low, and
fair enough if you're not.
The 111 is a small regional jet.
It's in fact the first short haul regional airliner to ever have been built.
And I mean small.
It's around 100 feet long, smaller than any 220 or current 737.
The section of the same size is the 737-100.

(41:10):
It was built using similar manufacturing techniques to its younger, hotter sister Concorde.
And yes, this is grossly excessive.
But they figured that if you're, and they marketed it this way, bus stop jet is going
to do 15 pressure cycles in a day.
It needs to be extremely strong for the airframe not to do an Aloha 243 or more to the point,

(41:34):
a de Havilland Comet.
The fact that this thing was designed to fly a bunch of routes a day to a supermarket that
never ended up existing meant that it was just the original airliner that was fantastically
overbuilt and excess expensive.
Of course, the nature of BAC and its successor organisation BAE meant that a decent chunk
of that fantastic expense came directly from the British government, which means it came

(41:57):
from my parents' taxes, I suppose.
This plane was brand new.
Many airlines flew these things for 30 years on short trips, doing as many as 10 or 15
miles a day.
And there was never a need for an aging fleet program like Aloha 243.
We are obsessed with this plane.
It is our official Mio Icon plane.
We have had multiple Pepe Silva streamboards to show me how this thing has been and how

(42:19):
it's connected to everything from the DoSwip's crane to the ULA Vulcan Centaur.
Next slide.
And last, but definitely not least, let's turn it back to answer the question.
What is a thunderstorm?
This is not a thunderstorm, but it is the Storm Spirits by Evelyn De Morgan.
In this painting, you can clearly see wind shear, lightning, ridge turbulence and other

(42:40):
weather phenomena.
And it is therefore very relevant and not just me trying to be highbrow while we all
make poop jokes the rest of the time.
I really like that painting.
It's kind of neat.
I might have to...
I have a copy of it on my kitchen wall, actually.
It must be lovely to look at.
I'll tell you about a thunderstorm.
A thunderstorm is a bad bunch of weather.

(43:01):
At its core, it's a lifting mechanism, which is commonly the sun heating the roof, causing
warm air to rise.
Moisture and instability.
You add in a sprinkle of wind shear and you've got yourself a storm.
It's bad for planes because it's windy, and it also has lightning.
The explanations will get a lot more complicated from here on out, so pay attention.
Next slide.
Okay, so the date is August 6th, 1966.

(43:26):
Where are we?
Middle of nowhere in Nebraska.
You don't need to know much more than that, because the Midwest is the real place, and
everywhere there is the same set of real places.
But the flight starts in New Orleans, where our last flight ended.
Or really will end, I guess, decades from now.
It's a flight going from NOLA to Minneapolis, with stops on the way in Shreveport, Fort
Snet, Tulsa, Kansas City, and Omaha.

(43:49):
This particular section is the second to last one between Kansas City and Omaha.
Next slide.
Wow, that colorway is worse than the orange.
Yeah, no kidding.
Their aircraft, which you can see here, is N1553, built in 1965.
It's actually brand new.

(44:10):
They crashed a shiny, new, fresh 111.
I bet it even still had new plane smell.
Specifically, it's a BAC111-203AE, which is to say that it's the shorty model with the
Spain Mark 506 engines, it has the ventral air stairs, it does not have the hush kit

(44:34):
because it was the 60s.
Ah, the 60s, when jet engines were allowed and BAC was going to make Concorde happen
any day now.
This is the 70th 111 to be built, including the four prototype and development planes,
one of which was messily crashed.
Anyway, on the flight deck today we have Captain Donald Pauley and First Officer James Hillacher.

(44:59):
Out of Pauley's 20,767 flying hours, only 549 are on the BAC111.
Well, Hillacher has less total flying hours with 9,269, but 685 of those were on the BAC111.
And that's actually not going to be relevant at all, but it's just information everybody
wants, for some reason.
So anyway, it's just before 11pm, and these guys are in Kansas City, about to fly the

(45:24):
next leg of flight 250 to Omaha.
Now according to people who talked with him, Captain Pauley had been worried about the
weather on this part of the flight since all the way back in New Orleans.
So Beck, do you want to tell us why that was the case?
Next slide.
All right, so let's first discuss the forecast from various weather offices that day to paint
a picture of the severity of the situation.

(45:46):
On the day of the accident, the National Meteorological Center produced a weather chart showing that
a low pressure system was centered over western Wisconsin, and another low pressure system
was centered over northeastern Kansas.
The Weather Bureau Forecast Center at Kansas City filed for the time and place of the accident,
called for a cold front extended from northwestern Iowa, southwestward to northeast Colorado,

(46:09):
moving toward central Kansas by 7 o'clock.
And if that wasn't confusing for anybody else, it was confusing for me.
You might need to get your compass out.
Isolated severe thunderstorms with hail and gusts of 65 to 70 knots were forecast for
the extreme southwestern Kansas and extreme northeastern Nebraska until 2200 and 2300

(46:31):
hours.
Because of this, two SIGMETs were issued.
A SIGMET stands for Significant Meteorological Information, and they're issued by one of
the three aviation weather centers in the US to warn pilots of any weather condition
that could be hazardous to flight.
And so, the first SIGMET called for a line of thunderstorms from Mason City, Iowa to
Norfolk.

(46:51):
Norfolk?
Norfolk?
It was in Nebraska.
These thunderstorms were expected to become severe.
The second called for occasional short lines of thunderstorm from Goodland, Kansas northeastward
through Omaha, Nebraska to Waterloo, Iowa.
Also Aviation Severe Weather Bulletin number 446 contained a severe thunderstorm forecast,

(47:11):
which was valid from 2002 hours until midnight August 6.
The area covered in the Bulletin stretched along a line 20 miles southwest of Lincoln,
Nebraska to 40 miles south of Waterloo, Iowa and included the area 60 nautical miles either
side of that line.
Surface wind gusts were projected to be up to 55 knots.
An active squall line was forecast from extreme southeastern Minnesota to northeastern Nebraska

(47:36):
and was expected to move southeastward at 30 knots.
Next slide.
Here we go, here's a depiction of what Bec just described.
So Bec, can you explain what a squall line is?
Because that's going to be really important.
Yeah.
So squall lines or quasi-linear convective systems are groupings of thunderstorms that
are, you guessed it, formed in a line.

(47:57):
These lines tend to run diagonal with the top edge leaning northeast and the bottom
edge leaning southwest shaped like a recurve bow.
Associated with those lines of thunderstorms are intense winds.
This is because of the warm air being forced up into the sky, super cooling and rapidly
descending.
When this happens you get those rolling and boiling winds that continue eastward until
they eventually run out of energy.

(48:19):
Sometimes they even spawn short-lived tornadoes.
It's angry tubular-esque wind that likes to eat planes.
Right.
So that's not something you really want to fly into.
Which is why the manual for Braniff Dispatchers stated that no flight shall be dispatched that
knowingly requires penetration of thunderstorm cells.
And it also stated that if a squall line existed along the flight path, that could not be practically

(48:41):
circumnavigated then flights should be held on the ground.
As it turns out, the squall line over Iowa and Nebraska that night was pretty continuous.
The crew of a Convair 580 headed south from Omaha encountered severe turbulence while
trying to penetrate the squall line shortly before Braniff Flight 250 took off and its
flight recorder recorded that the plane was subjected to 2.85 positive vertical Gs, which

(49:04):
is a lot.
At around the same time, Braniff Flight 255 delayed its takeoff from Omaha because there
wasn't a good route through the squall line.
And another Braniff flight, Flight 234 from St. Louis to Des Moines, saw the squall line
on radar, couldn't find a suitable gap anywhere within 75 miles in either direction, and decided

(49:25):
to divert to Kansas City.
So by this point you're probably thinking, well, maybe Flight 250 should wait for all
of this to blow over.
You know.
Have a drink in the airport bar and just wait.
Surely you wouldn't dispatch a plane into those conditions.
Well, that's exactly what Braniff did, so let's just take a moment to understand why.

(49:48):
And why they didn't just go home to weed out the ship's storm back in Texas.
Is that a Taylor Swift line?
Yes.
You get to know it.
So the first issue was that Braniff's own forecast issued at 20-hundred hours only indicated
a cold front, scattered moderate rain showers, and isolated thunderstorms.
The Braniff dispatcher at Kansas City checked the forecast and didn't think there was really

(50:09):
anything hazardous about this weather.
So he didn't ring up the National Weather Service to receive this severe weather bulletin
or the SIGMET.
That's right.
Back in those days, dispatchers had to actually call the NWS to get this stuff.
It wasn't a great system.
There was a system that allowed this info to get automatically faxed to dispatch offices,
but it was a subscription service and it was voluntary.

(50:32):
The report doesn't talk about it, but I'm guessing Braniff either wasn't subscribed
or the dispatcher for some unfathomable reason couldn't be bothered.
Back in those days, it would have been analogue facts and they were quite subject to interference
and the lines just not being working and they were quite unreliable.
Also, as if that wasn't bad enough, the dispatcher knew that Braniff flight 255 had

(50:58):
delayed its departure from Omaha and it knew that Braniff flight 234 had diverted to Kansas
City because of weather because neither of them could see a way through this squall line.
But the dispatcher didn't know about the squall line.
So he thought these reports were irrelevant because they were too far for flight 250's
intended flight path even though they were all the path of the same squall line.

(51:22):
So meanwhile, our captain Polly arrives at Kansas City Airport and he meets the pilot
of a flight that had just arrived from Chicago.
That captain said, he told Captain Polly that there was a salted line of very intense thunderstorms
with continuous lightning and no apparent breaks, as long and mean a one as I'd seen
in a long time and I didn't feel the radar reports gave a true picture of the intensity.

(51:46):
In response, Captain Polly said he hoped to get to the west of the line.
I'm sorry, I have to interrupt.
I just heard that line in the voice of the narrator from the Big Lebowski.
Okay.
It's a very 1960s line and incidentally, this crash was actually mentioned in Mad Men.

(52:07):
So it's just perhaps that's why the dialogue sounds.
Yeah.
Oh yeah, it is.
Is it?
Okay.
That's really interesting.
Captain Polly said he hoped to get to the west of the line.
We can't be sure why he thought this was a good idea.
Maybe he was huffing glue or influenced by all of his prior experience on Douglas aircraft.
This is a bad choice when trying to get around the squall line in the Midwestern states,

(52:29):
when flying northbound though.
Never go west.
West is bad.
Hey, we like the west here.
It's got Washington state, California, Oregon.
It's where I keep all my stuff and it also has most of the wicked witches at least.
Can I seem to find Ravi?
No, you cannot.
Okay, west in this case is bad because the squall lines in that region tend to run from

(52:50):
northeast to southwest while moving in a generally easterly direction.
So if you're flying northbound, turning west usually, but not always, either takes you
right into the squall line or puts you in a position to get overrun by it.
Note that this isn't like official aeronautical guidance or anything.
It's just a general geometry based truth that's obvious by looking at it.
So what you're saying is that you cannot always go around because that doesn't apply to storms.

(53:14):
Yeah, pretty much.
If these lines are predictable and hard to miss, there's usually plenty of warning, so
the solution is to just wait until it passes before taking off.
Don't try to go around.
I mean, you can try to go around.
Sometimes it can be done, but often it can't.
So anyway, this captain from Chicago just basically described a squall line to Captain
Pauley.
So Pauley calls up the Braniff dispatcher and receives the dispatch paperwork.

(53:38):
This has Braniff's own forecast in it, but it doesn't have the sigmet or the severe weather
bulletin because the dispatcher couldn't be arsed to get them.
So he reads over this paperwork and goes, eh, it should be fine after all.
And that's how we get to Flight 250 taking off into a big fuck-offs squall line where
it had no business being.
Next slide, please.
So Flight 250 departs Kansas City with 38 passengers and four crew on board, flying

(54:03):
northwest.
Initially, they're limited to 5000 feet for traffic separation, so they have to wait
to climb to their cruising altitude of 20,000 feet.
While flying level at 5000 feet, the crew requested to deviate left of course, that
is, to the west, which is what Captain Pauley had said he was going to do.
They also requested to remain at 5000 feet all the way to Omaha, which wasn't explained

(54:25):
in the report.
I'm not entirely sure why they did that.
I mean, it was a short flight, but it wasn't so short that they couldn't have climbed
a lot higher.
And this is something I've observed a few times in researching flights from this era.
And I think there might have been a sort of misguided belief that it was easier to, or
better somehow, to penetrate thunderstorms at a low altitude in order to stay in clear

(54:47):
air and avoid precipitation areas visually.
But it's certainly not a good idea, and it's pretty weird to me that anyone would do this.
It might have been because of icing concerns.
A lot of planes in this era didn't have robust anti-ice systems.
Anyway, Kansas City cleared flight 250 to maintain 5000 feet and deviate left, and then

(55:08):
they contacted Chicago Center.
The crew had a back and forth conversation with the Chicago controller about what was
on their weather radar, and the controller advised them that the squall line was basically
solid with no obvious gaps anywhere between Des Moines, Iowa, and Pawnee City, Nebraska,
which is well over 150 miles.

(55:29):
At this point, First Officer Hilliker suggests that they deviate even farther west to try
to find a gap at Pawnee City, but Captain Pauly ignores him.
1960's Sarah Mell, if the captain wants your opinion, you will give it to him.
Instead, Chicago advises them that Braniff flight 255 has finally taken off from Omaha

(55:50):
after an hour delay on the ground and is crossing the squall line presently, so flight 250 calls
them up to chat, and the crew of flight 255 says they were climbing to 17000 feet and
reported light to moderate turbulence starting 15 miles southwest of Omaha, and they predicted
they would remain in it for another 10 minutes based on radar.
So generally not a bad report, but in later testimony to the NTSB, the pilots of that

(56:15):
flight said they had to deviate 40 miles east of course to find a gap, and even then after
penetrating the squall line, they encountered strong turbulence and clear air ahead of the
storms that threw the plane around at the force of plus 2.5 g's, but that hadn't happened
yet so the crew of flight 250 didn't know about it.
So at local time, 2308, flight 250 signs off with flight 255, and that's the last anyone

(56:42):
ever hears from flight 250.
Captain Pauly thought he saw a gap near Falls City, Nebraska, that's an extreme southeast
Nebraska, as you can see on this map.
He saw this gap using their weather radar and decided to go for it, and witnesses on
the ground near Falls City could see the plane clearly, flying at a pretty low altitude,

(57:02):
lit by the full moon, flying directly toward a massive thunderstorm that's looming over
the endless cornfields like a Lovecraftian horror.
It sounds pretty terrifying.
As they watch, the plane flies over something known as a roll cloud, which means it's
time for our accident sequence.
Next slide.
It would be more of a Stephen King horror than a Lovecraftian one if it's cornfields,

(57:23):
right?
Oh god.
Oh and planes.
Yes but this accident wasn't in Maine so it can't be Stephen King.
That's also true.
That is true.
So our accident sequence has begun, which takes us to Wupupula.
Next slide.
So Beth, it's weather autism time, what were these guys flying into?
Hoo hoo, glad you asked.

(57:45):
Witnesses on the ground on the day of the accident reported seeing roll clouds or shelf
clouds and surface winds estimated to have been as high as 70 mph.
That's pretty windy.
What you see on your screen right now is a roll cloud.
It's the beautiful, round, fluffy, dangerous looking cloud.
To understand a roll cloud, basically you have to understand that a thunderstorm is

(58:06):
an engine that makes warm air go up, cold air go down.
A cold front pushes cold air into an area of warm air.
The warm air tries to rise above the cold air because it's less dense and as it rises,
losing energy until it gets cold and falls back down.
This cycle is called convection.
Anyway, the point is you have cold air rushing down to the ground and spreading outward,
while warm air rushes in over the top of this cold outflow.

(58:30):
Roll clouds happen due to shear between the downrush of the cold air flowing out of the
thunderstorm while the warm air ahead of the storm is trying to rise up into the clouds.
Here is a change in wind speed or direction over some horizontal or vertical distance.
When air masses move past each other in different directions, the air between them starts to
spin, just like rolling a pencil back and forth between your hands.

(58:52):
So roll circulation is specifically just a long, two-shaped mass of air rotating like
a pencil between the thunderstorm's inflow and outflow.
And if there's condensation in it, then what you see is a roll cloud.
Kind of looks like a baguette.
Now part of the process involved in trying to figure out what exactly happened to the

(59:12):
accident aircraft was an independent study conducted by a mesometeorologist, which is
to say that this weather person knows a lot about meteorological disturbances that take
place on a mesoscale.
That is the study of weather systems at horizontal scales approximately five kilometers to several
hundred kilometers.
Some examples of weather measured by mesometeorologists would be tropical cyclones, thunderstorms,

(59:35):
tons of windstorms, sea breezes, and of course, squall lines.
The meteorologist testified that the amount of excess atmospheric pressure and the outflow
wind speed of a weather system is proportional to the amount of surface rainfall if the height
of the convective cloud base remains unchanged.
And to be clear, that's important because it determines how strong the inflow and outflow
will be, and thus how strong the shear between them will be, which helps us understand how

(59:59):
fucked Flight 250 was.
And how that meteorologist calculated that outflow could have been as strong as 60 to
70 miles per hour.
However, at the same time, through measuring the spatial variation of the precipitation
from one location to another, he was able to conclude that the rainfall in the area
located 30 miles northeast of the accident site was four times that of the one to the

(01:00:19):
west of the site.
This means that the rain-induced cold air mass to the east was about four times larger
than that of the one to the west.
The outflow wind speed was therefore greater to the east than it was to the west, creating
an area of shear between where the air masses moving at different speeds collided and slid
past each other.
This is the exact area that Flight 250 flew into.

(01:00:40):
This means that not only did you have this strong 60 plus miles per hour outflow creating
strong horizontal shear between different vertically stacked layers, you also had stronger
outflow moving horizontally past the weaker outflow next to it, creating vertical circulation
between these layers too.
Basically, not good for planes, very bouncy air, very turbulent air.

(01:01:00):
Now, the insidious thing is that the maelstrom where these circulations meet isn't inside
the precipitation column, it's actually out ahead of them along something called a gust
front.
The gust front, or boundary layer, is the boundary out ahead of the thunderstorm between
the new warm air that gets yeeted up into the troposphere and the air that's already
been yeeted has fallen back to earth and is about to get yeeted again.

(01:01:24):
If you're on the ground and it's got gust front passes over you, you'll notice wind
suddenly shift from warm blowing towards the storm to cold and blowing away from the storm.
There's a lot of storm chasers when you see them standing at the side of the fence watching
a great big mesocyclone, they'll comment on how cold the air is getting around them
and that's how they know that things are really ticking up because they're feeling
that cold air come back out from the rear flank downdraft.

(01:01:46):
But this isn't where all the rain and hail and stuff is falling down in the storm central
downdraft, it can actually be miles ahead of it.
So if you're flying a BAC 111 in 1966, just for the sake of the argument, and you have
weather radar that bounces radio waves off of precipitation, you can't see the gust front.
Exactly.
When you have a zone of horizontal wind shear and strong up and downdrafts like this, the

(01:02:09):
velocity of these swirling eddies can be way faster than the overall straight line wind
field.
This type of wind has many times plucked planes out of the air and broken them apart.
Fortunately though, it's predictable and that it can be found really in only two specific
locations.
The most common place this type of weather usually lives is alongside a mountain.
Powerful straight line winds encounter a mountaintop, rush over the summit and form eddies in its

(01:02:30):
wake, creating pockets of extreme turbulence.
This is called a mountain wave by the way.
And they're very uncommonly found in Nebraska.
Very uncommon in Nebraska, that's true.
Yeah, it's not the right place to see a mountain wave.
The other place you can find this kind of extreme turbulence is at the gust front of
a severe thunderstorm.
On the day of our accident, the plane ended up in an area that was most favorable for

(01:02:52):
the development of roll circulations, eddies and pockets of vorticity.
Flight 250, in an effort to fly through what they thought was a weaker part of the squall
line, deviated to the left and crossed the gust front at a location and altitude that
was most favorable for these dangerous and unpredictable fast changing winds.
And they did this at 5,000 feet where the air is dense and has more mass, which made

(01:03:13):
it worse.
Yeah, this is why, I mean, these days it's considered suicidal to fly into a severe thunderstorm
at 5,000 feet, but we've learned a lot in 60 years.
So anyway, yes, you're talking about dangerous and unpredictable fast changing winds.
Yeah, and to use another Tannoyla term, it was heckin' windy.

(01:03:34):
It wasn't even just windy, it was also spinny.
And yes, planes do not like wind, but what they especially don't like is spinny wind.
I would simply not fly my plane into the Moray rampage of revenge tube.
Next slide.
Okay, so at this point, my notes just say Jay talks about how hard you have to hit a
111 to break it.
So here it goes, I guess.

(01:03:55):
As we've discussed, the 111 is a massively over engineered airframe.
Many of the people who worked on its design had recently been involved in the Comet investigation.
I mean, quite recently, like less than 10 years previously.
Which is to say they had worked in the British aircraft industry because everyone was involved

(01:04:16):
apparently in the Comet investigation.
I mean, they even built a giant pressure testing tank in a quarry.
They erred on the side of caution with the 111.
The pressure hull is particularly over engineered because the 111 is designed to fly a ridiculous
number of pressure cycles over its lifespan and often without departing from sea level

(01:04:39):
cabin altitude because it was felt that this would be very tiring for the cabin crew and
the pilots.
But today we're talking about tail break off, Mr. Bond, because that's what it turns out
happened to this particular plane.
The 111 has a bigger than usual tail because it's designed to take off with a very wide

(01:05:01):
range of CG's.
What do you mean that's inefficient?
Who cares?
You're only flying this thing to get on a Concorde and oil is eight bucks a barrel,
right?
Anyway, like most aircraft, the vertical fin attaches with these four spar booms that fit
into frame hoops at the back of the fuselage.
You can see them on this slide here.

(01:05:23):
It's designed to take the loads that the rudder and the elevator can apply to it.
There's an artificial field system which increases the amount of force that a pilot would have
to apply to the rudder to get a certain deflection based on how fast the plane is going.
This is intended to limit the amount of twisting force or torsion that the rudder can apply

(01:05:43):
to the vertical fin because with the shape of those spar booms, this is the direction
it's least strong in.
The elevator can apply more force since that's the direction those structural spars actually
run and on the 111 it can apply quite a lot because the tailplane is very large for the

(01:06:03):
size of the aircraft.
So you have to hit the 111 really hard to break it, none of which is at all relevant
because any plane would have broken if it was hit by the kind of gust that this one
took.
Just for some background, 111 pilots regarded the 111 as having exceptionally good handling
in turbulence.

(01:06:24):
We found a quote on a website that's delightfully called bac111.com.
No, really, it's a real website from apparently from the 90s.
It looks like it's from the 90s.
I think it's still maintained too when I was looking.
They seem to update it regularly still.
It's quite delightful.
Yeah, it's up to date.
We found a quote on bac111.com where some dude named Michael Brett, who is apparently

(01:06:49):
a 111 pilot for many years, said, and I quote, and I imagine he said it in a cut glass English
accent so I'll do my best.
The aircraft's handling qualities in adverse weather conditions remain an outstanding feature.
This was demonstrated during investigation of at least two major accidents where wind

(01:07:10):
shear slash microburst type conditions were considered to be major factors.
These same conditions were programmed into simulators of different transport types for
comparison.
The 111 recovered safely on many test approaches, whereas other types did not always make it.

(01:07:32):
The bac111 airframe was probably the strongest ever built on an airliner.
This was proved in 1967 when due to an error, the wrong engine ATO was shut down and the
200 series 111 crash landed at night on a partially wooded hillside north of Milan.

(01:07:54):
Although the aircraft was refueled at Milan, there was no fire and the airframe remained
intact.
All passengers and crew walked away with no serious injuries.
I was curious so I looked up the ARB report on this incident, which is not an accident
because no one was apparently injured.

(01:08:14):
There's no note of any injuries.
It notes, when the rescue party arrived several hours later, the passengers and crew were
sitting in the woods, refreshing themselves from the retrieved catering and bar.
This is peak British aviation.
Based, based, based, based, based, based, based.

(01:08:34):
Wow.
On top of that, in this incident, the accident report also states that BAC had conducted
static strength testing and flight load testing that went well beyond the certification requirements.
And BAC also complied with amendments that were issued after the type certificate application

(01:08:54):
was submitted, which they were not required to do.
So the FAA certificate review team reported that, quotes, the testing of structure, loads
and fatigue has been very extensive and beyond the normal requirements.
Anyway, my point is the 111 is probably the best possible jet airliner to fly into shitty

(01:09:17):
weather in.
And it still doesn't matter because if the storm spirits want you dead, they do in fact
want you dead.
So what actually happened?
So shortly after crossing over the roll cloud and into the gust front, the plane was hit
by a sudden, extremely intense gust blowing up from below and right to left simultaneously

(01:09:37):
at about 45 degrees, which appears to have broken off the horizontal stab and the vertical
stabilizer.
This gust was estimated at 140 feet per second with an onset time of less than one eighth
of a second.
The mass of the airplane didn't have time to accelerate with it, so all this force was
borne by the tail structure itself.

(01:09:59):
We don't have direct attestation of this gust other than the damage it did, but assuming
the gust came at the most adverse angle, which would be up and from right to left, then the
minimum gust strength required to produce this failure was estimated at 140 feet per
second.
That's how we got that number.
We know it was an eighth of a second due to evidence from other sources.

(01:10:21):
So 140 feet per second is only about 154 kilometers per hour, or the sustained wind speed inside
a category 2 hurricane.
So not even close to the fastest wind speeds that are out there, or even the fastest wind
speeds that airplanes fly in.
But there are several factors that increase the severity of a gust.
So first of all, you have to keep in mind that the airplane was not already being exposed

(01:10:45):
to airflow coming from the direction of the gust, and thus the wind speed along the gust
axis rose in one eighth of a second to 154 kilometers per hour from zero, not from the
speed they were flying, from zero.
The speed with which the gust reaches its peak intensity is also crucial.
So if a gust builds up to 154 kilometers per hour over a longer period of time, then the

(01:11:09):
structure of the airplane will react to that to redistribute the loads, which is what Jay
just said a minute ago.
You know, basically if you have a gust coming from the right with steadily increasing magnitude,
the plane will naturally try to weathercock into the wind, which relieves the high stress.
The plane is very happy pointing nose-first into winds measuring a bajillion miles an

(01:11:31):
hour, but if the gust reaches peak intensity too fast for the plane to weathercock into
the wind, then the entire lateral component of the gust becomes a side load on the vertical
stabilizer, and also at the same time the entire vertical component is becoming a vertical
load on the horizontal stabilizer.
So the third factor affecting resistance to a gust load is the plane's forward air speed.

(01:11:54):
The faster the plane is moving, the lower the gust intensity required to fail the structure.
In this case, the cockpit voice recorder captured a sound consistent with the plane suddenly
encountering a very strong headwind that caused its speed relative to the air, you know, airspeed,
to increase from the normal turbulence penetration speed of 270 knots up to as high as 320 knots,

(01:12:16):
which caused a 10% reduction in the maximum gust intensity that the tail could withstand.
So even though the tail was capable of withstanding a gust 50% more powerful than the maximum
gust intensity expected in normal service, even this wasn't enough to withstand this
gust because all of these factors combined like a sort of deadly weather voltron.

(01:12:38):
Having gotten whacked by this extremely sudden off-axis gust of turbulence, the entire tail
fin, including the rudder, broke off shortly thereafter, more or less simultaneously, although
the horizontal must have broken off first since otherwise the wind wouldn't have been
able to apply enough force to break it apart from the vertical fin without the mass of

(01:13:01):
the plane to work against.
Yeah, so anyway, the lack of downforce on the tail, which is normally applied by the
horizontal stabilizer, then caused the tailless plane to pitch so sharply nose down that the
right wing was overloaded in upward bending and it broke off as well, at which point the
plane went into a completely uncontrollable tumbling motion, transitioning into a flat

(01:13:24):
spin and after about 25 seconds it hit the ground, killing everyone on board.
Next slide please.
Okay, so let's talk about the aftermath.
This gust, which the NTSB reckoned would fail any commercial aircraft at the time, is not
far outside the realms of what had been measured at the time.
Moreover, it seems to have been much more common than they had estimated prior to this.

(01:13:48):
Roles in squall lines are just really bad news for planes.
Even a gratuitously overbuilt one like the 111 was pretty much completely incapable of
dealing with the forces involved with such rapidly rising and rapidly changing winds.
So a huge problem pointed out by the NTSB was that this extreme weather was not only

(01:14:09):
more common than measurements at the time seemed to indicate, it was also that the data
on turbulence was gathered using past thunderstorm avoidance practices and with a much
smaller fleet.
But in the 1960s, the total number of miles flown by commercial aircraft was increasing
exponentially closing the statistical gap between the number of miles that must be flown

(01:14:30):
to encounter catastrophic turbulence and the actual number of miles that were being flown
in real life.
And the number of passengers at risk had also massively increased, and yet at the same time
the introduction of weather radar was causing pilots to fly ever closer to thunderstorms
with ever greater confidence even though that radar couldn't protect them from extreme

(01:14:51):
turbulence.
The weather radar could only see precipitation, not turbulence.
The fact is that flight 250 broke apart before it ever entered the thunderstorm cloud, while
in what the pilots thought was clear air, five miles from the nearest precipitation visible
on radar.
And this is why today the official guidance is to stay the hell away from thunderstorms.

(01:15:14):
Especially to stay at least 20 nautical miles away if you can, and certainly do not under
any circumstances get within five miles.
The reason we don't see planes getting ripped apart by turbulence like this anymore is because,
as Beck and I said earlier, there are only two places on Earth where you can find turbulence
this strong.
One immediately downwind of a prominent mountain on a day with strong high altitude straight

(01:15:34):
line winds, and in the gust front of a severe thunderstorm.
So the solution is basically just don't fly there.
And over subsequent years, while thunderstorm penetrations remained common, pilots got a
lot better about exercising judgement about which thunderstorms were severe and which
ones were just piddly little things.
Of course even the tiniest wimpiest thunderstorms can produce microbursts, but that's a story

(01:15:58):
for a completely different episode.
And a rant you've heard from me before.
Yes, next slide please.
Also a couple of years after this crash, the same fucking airline did it again.
Braida 352 on May 3rd, 1968 broke up on a flight from Houston to Dallas.
This one was the pilot in making bad choices accident, not perhaps being thrown into a

(01:16:19):
bad situation accident.
Yeah, particularly two bad choices.
The first, to fly into a thunderstorm, and the second to try and turn around.
When you turn a plane, you introduce a bank angle so your wings are no longer level.
Wings level is the most important thing that needs to happen when you're flying into
any kind of adverse weather.
Yeah, when the bank angle is high, the angle of attack is higher as well, which reduces

(01:16:41):
the stall margin.
So in that case, the plane was hit by a gust from below that combined with the high bank
angle to cause the plane to stall, flip over, and enter a dive.
The pilots pulled up sharply during the recovery and the wings broke off due to the high g-forces.
But anyway kids, that's why if you find yourself flying inside a thunderstorm, just hold the
yoke straight and pray, do not turn around.

(01:17:03):
This crash though is not connected to the flutter incidents that took down Braniff 542
in 1959 and Northwest 710 in 1960.
Those four's lucky to go back to the drawing board and massively reinforce the elytra,
making it perfect, ironically, for the WP-3D.
I've had a lot of fun being here, and I just wanted to end on my favourite plane.

(01:17:23):
Yeah, it's a lot easier to deal with massive weather when you know what you're getting
into.
And hurricane hunting is something we'll have to touch on in a bonus episode at some
point because it's cool.
Flying into thunderstorms on purpose?
Hell yeah.
What the fuck did we learn?
Next slide.
Alright, for one, we got a hell of a lot better at detecting and predicting the storm behaviour.
We've subsequently made we stop dispatching jets directly into the death weather.

(01:17:47):
And actually that really is the main thing.
We don't dispatch jets into the death weather.
Not much to add there.
Alright, next slide.
Thanks everyone for joining us.
Our next episode will be on Malaysia Air 370.
Have a good night.
Have a good night.
This is where Taylor Swift releases a track named Lockheed Electra and just C-Pit Discord

(01:18:09):
just implodes.
That would be amazing.
Wouldn't it?
Yeah, but we'd implode harder if it was called BAC 111.
True.
Next, please welcome The
------------
Expl favor duck Water

(01:18:33):
Spr Don't cry
You

(01:19:13):
you

(01:19:43):
you