The Air Africa Congo Halloween Crashtacular of 1996 | Episode 96 - Doomsday: History's Most Dangerous Podcast

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:05):
Take the most frightening death that you can imagine, and
then double it, then double it again, and then add fire.
This is our Halloween episode, and by the time we're done,
your favorite horror movie will have all of the impact
of a baby food commercial. I'm not saying you'll never
sleep again. I'm not saying it, but I am apologizing

(00:29):
in advance, and I remind you that a doomsday barfag
is only an email away. Hello, and welcome to Doomsday

(00:52):
History's most Dangerous podcast. Together, we are going to rediscover
some of the most traumatic and on inspiring but largely
unheard of or forgotten disasters from throughout human history and
around the world. On today's very special Halloween episode. Get
ready to endure the most gore laden story that we

(01:15):
have told in a long time. You'll get a pretty
vivid sense of why airlines from the Congo are considered
at the top of the list for most dangerous in
the world. You'll learn how little stopping power a chainlain
fence truly provides against something the size of a building
and twice as fast as a train. And you'll see
just how much of an impression twin fifteen foot tall

(01:37):
horizontal lawnmower blades can make on the human body and
then will make it worse. And if you were listening
on Patreon, you would learn how the fall of the
USSR made irradiating your least favorite city easier than ever.
You would learn how the former King of Belgium, of
all places, preemptively tried to out Hitler Hitler, and you

(01:57):
would hear about how cargo made aim military flight in Afghanistan. Basically,
do a skateboard trick into the ground. This is not
the show you play around kids, or while eating, or
even in mixed company. But as long as you find
yourself a little more historically engaged and learn something that
could potentially save your life, our work is done. So

(02:19):
with all that said, shoot the kids out of the room,
put on your headphones and safety glasses, and let's begin
a happy holiday. Greetings to you, my bloodthirsty listeners. It's
a spooky time of year, and this is a show

(02:40):
that occasionally knows how to scare. So, however, shall we
honor the season and mark the occasion by we're visiting
an episode that I shelved five years ago, all the
way back in the first year of this show. This
is a story so awful and horrific that I honestly
thought at the time it cause what little audience I

(03:01):
had to abandon the show in droves. And here we
are five years later, and be warned, we are about
to explore what may very well be the most disturbing
tale we have ever explored, at least from an injury
point of view. So throw some candy at the kids,
grab something non water soluble to potentially throw up in.

(03:25):
And remember all those things I told you about fondling
your parasympathetic nervous system from our last episode. This never
intended to be heard. Episode begins now, and to begin
today's story, we are returning once again to the Motherland Africa. Actually,
our story oddly begins in far off, faintly haunted Moscow, Russia.

(03:49):
Sorry about that. When the Soviet Union kurploded back in
nineteen ninety one, everything that they took for granted flew
out the window like leaves in a cold wind. And
it was enough just to make sure people weren't able
to just u haul away a bunch of leftover nuclear arms.
There was an entire world of resources thrown to the wind,

(04:11):
and not just things people professionals skills. When the Soviet
Union gasped its last breath, there were as many as
nine thousand planes and about six hundred thousand pilots and
support and maintenance staff suddenly unemployed. Everybody and their brother
seemed to have a cup and a will adjust flight

(04:33):
trim for food. Sign A lot of those people went
private and were able to find something to feed themselves,
but not everybody. A lot of them had to look
further afield for work. Now. The Kremlin had had its
fingers in pies all around the world. They'd supported anti
colonial movements and leftist governments across Africa, and many African

(04:55):
countries were facing their own headaches. Without getting into it,
for their governments to say that keeping on top of
civil wars and arms trafficking and humanitarian crises was unreasonably
difficult really paints the situation with a forgiving brush. For
today's crisis, we are returning to the very heart of Africa,

(05:18):
the Congo, and we've actually been here once before. You
may remember. On August twenty fifth, twenty ten, we boarded
a fill air Let L four ten, flying from the
capital of Kinshasa with several stopovers in Kiri and Pokoru
and Samendwa and Bandudu along the way. About four stops

(05:40):
into our flight, it turns out that one of the
passengers had smuggled a live crocodile, all folded up in
his carryon onto the plane. After unlipping itself from the
bag with its teeth, it escaped, which led to an
immediate panic, which drove the passengers running and screaming towards
the front of the plane. Once they were all inside

(06:02):
the cockfit, the pilots became helplessly pinned against the controls
by the mass of humanity trying to now hide with them,
which drove the flight sharply into the ground, while actually
it landed on a house, But you get my point.
We covered this tail in all its glorious detail a
few years back, and incredibly, of the twenty one people

(06:24):
on board, one survived to tell the tale, and the
crocodile reportedly also survived the crash until rescuers arriving at
the scene mauschedied it to death. And we haven't been
back to the Congo since, but we are about to
change that. Some call it the Green Inferno, but for
our purposes we'll be calling it Zaire and I'll explain

(06:48):
that in a bit. Back then in the nineteen nineties,
for the Zyrean government, keeping tabs and control over remote
areas of endless forest was laughably difficult, and in environments
where formal systems don't really work, darker markets tend to
spring up, and that included the aviation industry. African states

(07:11):
like Angola and Zayer needed qualified pilots to pick up
the slack that national airlines dropped. Transporting of people and
goods was in heavy demand, and sometimes weapons or random
military cargo just don't ask. Let's just say if you
had a plane and knew what all the controls were called,
you were sitting pretty for some pretty solid and lucrative

(07:34):
freelance work. As long as you were sober enough to
pilot an older Soviet airframe or cargo plane, and you
were willing to fly in sketchy conditions in and out
of what they euphemistically called low infrastructure airstrips, there was
a paycheck waiting for you. Pilots from Russia and other
former Soviet states flooded the area, and two things you

(07:58):
need to know about this kind of work. First, it
was sketchy. Like we said, sometimes you'd be hauling legitimate
cargo like food or mining equipment or fuel, and sometimes
maybe something a little more dubious, stuff that explodes, stuff
that makes other people explode, explosives, projectiles, you know that

(08:20):
kind of stuff. And second, it was dangerous. Your chances
of dying in a plane crash in this part of
the continent was roughly twenty five times higher than in Europe.
Case in point. In May of two thousand and three,
an Illusian seventy six was flying after takeoff from Conshasa
when its rear cargo hatch failed and opened at seven

(08:43):
thousand feet and one hundred and fifty passengers fell out.
Safety restrictions in Sub Saharan Africa are perfectly strict, but
without the regulators to enforce them. Because of that, oil
leaks and duct tape panels and worn out tires, maybe
cockpits filled with empty vodka bottles were all on the table.

(09:05):
The most common cause of accidents weren't mechanical. They were
because of overloading. Planes in this part of the world
were only considered loaded when there was just no more
room to be had. In December of two thousand three,
an entire Boeing seven twenty seven plunged into the ocean
off the coast of Benin. The pilots initially refused to

(09:27):
fly altogether because of overloading, until the ground crew told
them that they'd unloaded luggage to reduce their weight while
they lied, and one hundred and thirty nine people died
because of it. The politics of Zaire in the mid
nineteen nineties were described as brittle. Its leader was a
man named Oobutu sesse Seiko, and I don't want to

(09:49):
speak out of school, but as leaders go, he was
deeply corrupt and everybody knew it. Back in nineteen sixty,
the country was called Congo and it had just gained
full independence from Belgian rule. Joseph Kasavubu became president and
Patrice Lumumba became Prime minister. Worth pointing out that Congo

(10:10):
has both a president and a prime minister. The president
was the head of state. They were in charge of
the army and foreign policy, while the Prime Minister was
the head of government. They ran all the day to
day with parliament. This was a lofty arrangement that had
been designed to provide balance and prevent corruption, and it worked.
Just fine right up until Mobutu snuck in through a coup,

(10:34):
suspended parliament, banned all other political parties at the end
of a gun, and placed the country under military rule.
He had been born Joseph Desiree Mobutu, but now that
he was strutting around the capitol like Darth Vader, he
changed his name to Mobutu sesse Seko Cuku Nvendu wa Zabanga.

(10:56):
He was the one responsible for changing Congo's name to Zai,
and he would run the country for the next three decades,
becoming one of the richest people on earth until the
next guy rolled in on top of a tank and
kicked his ass out. But let's not get ahead of ourselves.
Babutu had a real hands off attitude around infrastructure. Oversight

(11:19):
over things like aviation and customs and border control was
fairly awful, but the United Rebels of Angola didn't mind.
The who the Unaio Nacional para Indepenzia total de Angola.
And you're probably asking, was that Portuguese will pronunciation aside, Yes,

(11:41):
and that was part of the problem. UNIA had been
formed as an anti colonial movement against the Portuguese rule
and had been taking potshots at the government of Angola
just across the border. For twenty years, and Zayre had
become one of their favorite supply roots. US government would
quietly buy weapons and vehicles from ex Soviet countries and

(12:04):
then load them onto cargo planes headed for Angola, and
Unita would pay them with blood diamonds. I couldn't tell
you how much the pilots or operators actually knew about
exactly what was happening on their watch, But a paycheck's
a paycheck. Official flight plans might list car parts en
route to some domestic destination, but it might very well

(12:26):
be flamethrowers on their way to the front lines of Angola.
Speaking of earning a paycheck, today, we will be flying
aboard a Russian made Antonov A and thirty two B
ferrying cargo from Endolo Airport here in the capital of Conchasa,
two hundred and seventy miles or three hundred and seventy
five kilometers east southeast to Kahemba, over the border with Angola.

(12:50):
The An thirty two B is a Soviet built military
style turboprop transport plane slash flying workhorse with a very
rugged utilitarian look. Perfect for getting into short air strips
and built to survive rough landings. Imagine a large twin
engine cargo truck with roof mounted wings. I don't want
to call the engines here huge, so let's just say

(13:13):
they're impossible to ignore. The A N thirty two B
held too massive of Chenko AI twenty series turboprop engines,
and they were mounted right into the wings and held
up by landing gear so cartoonishly long they looked like stilts.
This configuration helps keep the propellers clear of the air field,
which gives the A N thirty two B a big

(13:36):
eared appearance. It is just shy of five Dodge caravans
long that's twenty three meters or seventy five feet, and
had an even larger wingspan of about twenty nine meters
or ninety five feet or six Dodge caravans wide, and
altogether the thing is as tall as a three story building.

(13:57):
It was designed to seat fifty, but much like a
Dodge caravan Stowe and go feature, with the seats removed,
it could stow six to seven tons of cargo. It
has a big ramp that opens at the back like
the mouth of a whale, so cargo just gets driven
straight into the fuselage. If you can picture it, you
could think of it like a C one thirty hercules,

(14:19):
smaller cousin, and it's not shiny or aerodynamic like a
passenger jet. The exterior is coated in lots of rivets
and squared edges. Kind of makes it feel a bit
like a flying recreational vehicle. How this specific plane ended
up in the Congo isn't clear, but a lot of
old Soviet gear like this were being sold for scrap

(14:41):
for pennies on the ruble in the Middle East and Africa,
usually by the same newly unemployed people who still held
the keys. Our plane officially belonged to Moscow Airlines. It
was a subsidiary of Aeroflot, that's basically Russia's biggest airline.
Moscow Airways leased it to a Belgian company that happened

(15:04):
to be the sales agent for Skybe Airlift, which was
a Congolese airline partially owned by President Mobutu, and then
they turned around and leased it to Air Africa, which
was another obscure Congolese airline intended for flights in and
out of Zayir. They don't even give these things flight numbers,
they just refer to the tail number for identification tail

(15:27):
number r A twenty six two twenty two to be exact.
We don't know if Moscow Airlines knew what their plane
was being used for, or even if they knew where
it was. And they say the reason they like this
level of complexity and confusion around ownership was in the
event that anything ever went wrong, it would be hard
to know who to blame. This plane had been wet

(15:50):
least to Air Africa. If you've never heard of the term,
it basically meant that they were leasing the plane and
the crew to fly it. It's a little like leasing
a car are along with a private driver. Let's all
take a deep breath and suck in our guts because
we're going to be squeezing in this. I should warn
you as not a passenger flight, and the cabin has

(16:12):
already been tightly tetrist with crates simply marked supplies. The
plane was operating as a freighter and the only occupants
other than us were six crew, four Russians, one Ukrainian
and one Congolese man. Today we will be running cargo
between Kinshasa and Kahemba like we said, Kinchasa is the

(16:34):
capital and also the largest city in Zaire. It serves
as the gateway between the interior of the country and
the rest of the world. It's located in the western
part of the country, on the south bank of the
Congo River, directly across from Brazzaville. Then that's the capital
of the Republic of the Congo. And I know that

(16:54):
might sound confusing. The present day Democratic Republic of the Congo,
which at the time of our visit were calling Zayre,
and the Republic of the Congo are two separate countries
that took their admittedly confusingly similar names from the river.
They border and cher but one had been controlled by
Belgium and the other was French. The history of name

(17:18):
changes is long and messy and confusing, so we're gonna
skip it. I will tell you this though. The Democratic
Republic of the Congo or DRC or again Zaire where
we are today, is the second largest country in Africa.
It's about four times the size of France. It's almost

(17:38):
as big as Greenland for crying out loud, and it
sits basically in the very heart of the African continent.
For five hundred years from the thirteen hundreds to the
eighteen hundreds, this area had been called the Kingdom of
Congo with a K. That was right up until eighteen
eighty five, when King Leopold of Belgium sailed his at

(18:00):
up the Congo River, started leaving toothbrushes and overnight bags around,
and eventually took over and renamed it the Congo Free State.
And when I say take over, what they called a
humanitarian mission, historians called profoundly violent. Everything they did, they said,
was to bring civilization to Central Africa. Those are his words,

(18:23):
not mine. And they worked overtime to make sure that
when they finally left, the Congo would be socially and
economically and psychologically devastated. As many as ten million people
were killed. And it sounds so barbaric that most people
who know about this assumed that it happened hundreds of
years ago. Well, they left the Congo in nineteen oh eight.

(18:49):
Our flight today will be stick handled by two Russian pilots,
Captain Nikolai Kazarin and Andre Guskov. Five years earlier. Kazarin
had been a major in the Soviet Air Force, but
the minute the Soviet Union collapsed, he lost his salary,
his housing, everything, while his fellow pilots were selling their
uniforms for food. Kazerin knew that Africa was the land

(19:12):
of opportunity for men who could fly an Antonov or
an Illusion or a Tupelev. Some pilots joined reputable flight
and relief operations, but there was a lot more opportunity
and a lot more money to be made in grayer operations.
Nikolai found himself here in Zayre, flying from Moscow Airlines
on least to a patchwork outfit called Air Africa Right,

(19:37):
which was just one of dozens of cargo operators that
kept the continent moving. Nikolai and his co pilot, Andre
Guskov carried paperwork borrowed from another company, Skybe Airlift. We
told you about them too, and that paperwork technically cleared
them to fly. Everything was a little loosey goosey as
far as legal issues and clearances went, but this it

(20:00):
was perfectly normal. Sayre's aviation authority was on a different level.
Case in point, and I'd never heard this term before,
but smoothing your clearance to depart sometimes required facilitation payments,
which is a pretty interesting way to say bribe. I
mean no one cared. Our story takes place January eighth,

(20:22):
nineteen ninety six. Sitting on the runway ready for departure.
Our Antonov is squatting low on her gears, dipping a
little deeper with every new pound of cargo, and then
again when we were fueling up to carry it all.
And that is really the thing about planes. You need
fuel to carry the weight. And the more weight you add,

(20:44):
the more fuel that you need, which adds more weight,
which requires more fuel. And you see where I'm going
with this. The heavier the plane, the heavier the plane
needs to be, and the harder it is to get
off the ground. And it's possible that we're just a
smidge heavy. But Captain Kazarin had experienced everything from Siberia

(21:04):
and tundra to African dust storms, and dropped into places
where the runway set in quotes, was little more than
a clearing in the trees. They say that the runway
at Endola was fairly poorly maintained and lined with wrecked
planes and riddled with potholes. But if anyone was going
to pull off a simple take off, Kazarin was our man.

(21:28):
The runway was about seventeen hundred meters or fifty five
hundred feet long. But have you ever heard of a
displaced threshold? That basically means the starting line is moved
up for safety reasons, so you don't actually get to
start from the furthest end of the available runway. Ndolo
was a single runway airport sitting right in the heart

(21:50):
of Conshasa's urban sprawl. Not long after King Leopold finally
left in nineteen twenty five, Belgian war hero Adminri made
the first direct flight between the two countries, and to
celebrate the Belgian Airlines, Sabina started building up the site
with hangars and offices and buildings that remained there ever since.

(22:12):
And the thing was, after that, Kinshasa continued to grow
around it, and Endola did not grow with it. It couldn't.
That's the problem with urban airports. In the nineteen fifties,
in Jili, International was built well outside the city so
it could grow to its heart's content. It had a
runway so long it was designated by NASA as an

(22:35):
emergency landing strip for thus Space Shuttle. That's about eight
hundred Dodge caravans long to Endolo's three hundred and thirty five,
so with Jili taking international flights, Endolo was left to
handle smaller planes and charters and military flights. Endolo sat
like a ribbon of concrete hemmed in by the city.

(22:55):
On all sides. It was surrounded by neighborhoods and warehouses,
and there was even an open air market crouched just
across from the end of the runway. Who knows, maybe
we'll visit it. The market was called Simba Zadiki and
it was located in one of the busiest parts of
the city. Vendors set up stalls offering everything you can

(23:17):
imagine produce fabric, bolts, housewares, bootleg albums, dental implants, goats,
you name it. People ran produce in wheelbarrows through narrow
alleys between corrugated iron sheeted stalls with tarps overhead to
block the sun and the rain. Women balanced heavy baskets
full of fruit or fish, or soda bottles or who

(23:39):
knows what on their heads while vendors hawked the crowds
shouting out would be customers, while music poured out of
a hundred radios, and your nose is assaulted by every
kind of cooking smoke possible. There's children running around in
music playing and a competing labyrinth of smells and yells
and probably sea shells. It's a busy, busy place. There's

(24:01):
got to be a few thousand people walking around, and
every now and then everything would come to a quick
stop and everyone would kind of duck as a prop
plane would cut low across their heads before lifting into
the sky or making a landing. Not far away, the
market had grown around the airport fence for decades, and
you might think, doesn't that seem dangerous? Well, all I'll

(24:24):
say is that an airport does not make the best neighbor. Meanwhile,
at the far end of the airstrip of said airport,
our Antonov An thirty two B sat idling on the tarmac.
She crouched like an old man with bad knees. They
could tell she would be using every inch of the
runway today. The An thirty two B had taxied in

(24:47):
a position, lining her nose with the centerline of the
runway and ready to go. With the throttles pushed forward,
the massive engines spooled up, screaming and kicking up dust
behind them. Both engines produced over five thousand horse power
of thrust, straining to begin the takeoff roll, and the
only thing holding them in place were the brakes, which

(25:08):
Kazarin now released. The Antonov crept and accelerated sluggishly. They
used the rudder pedals to keep them on the centerline
as they rumpled down the runway, building up speed by
the second. The control column quivered and shook as they
passed V one v one, or rotation speed for the
As they passed V one v one or rotation speed

(25:31):
for the A M thirty two B is around two
hundred kilometers or one hundred and twenty miles per hour.
It's what they call the decision speed. It's the point
in any takeoff where an airplane reaches a critical speed
where bailing on the takeoff is no longer going to
work out for you. Getting up to the speed had
taken longer than they might have light. The engine screamed,

(25:53):
and the city skyline and the Zimba Zidiki market rushed
closer and closer, faster and faster. Because Aaron pulled back
gently on the stick to lift them off the ground,
but the Antonov refused to climb, they had to keep going.
The pilots were doing the math and came up with
a terrible moment of realization they were not going to

(26:14):
make it. No one could agree exactly how high off
the ground the plane got, but it wasn't nearly enough.
As the vehicle met the end of the runway, the
left landing gear struck an earth and embankment and collapsed.
This brought the aircraft down hard, slamming violently against the ground,
which then caused the aircraft to yaw and skid. Whatever

(26:36):
directional control it had left was gone. The only thing
standing between them and the Symbazidiki market were a couple
of chain lank fences, some gravel, a roadway, and a
lot of very surprised drivers, and all of that did
very little to slow them down as they entered the
market place, and what happened next was one of the

(26:57):
most deadly and disturbing moments in the history of powered flight.
The plane began sliding through the marketplace. It destroyed stalls
and vehicles, literally everything in its path. At over two
hundred kilometers an hour, the left wingtip contacted the ground,
partially separating and skithing the legs off everything in its path.

(27:19):
Everything it touched turned into a blizzard of flying wood
and sheet metal and bone. You name it. The collapse
landing gear put extreme torsional stress on the fuselage in
the wings, and then the front collapsed, turning the nose
of the plane into a battering ram that exerted the
same equivalent slap of a small nuclear bomb. It turned

(27:41):
everything it touched into a blizzard of flying wood and
sheet metal and car parts. But it hit a lot
more than stalls and cars. Any individual in its path
would absorb tens of thousands of meetons of force and
be instantly accelerated to twice the speed of a train.
Every soft tip issue in the body would rupture simultaneously

(28:03):
in some kind of order. The skull would likely explode
on impact, and the rest of the body would be segmented,
reduced to the consistency of cat food, and then thrown.
The nicest way to say it is they would experience
an unsurvivable blunt force compressive trauma, resulting in traumatic amputations
and catastrophic disruption of the body. They call it polytrauma.

(28:28):
That's where every system of your body is injured at
the same time. In this case, they literally explode and
any extremity or bone separates from the body and becomes
its own projectile, again accelerated to two hundred kilometers an hour.
Then you start to get your secondary impacts, as the

(28:49):
let's call them bio segments make targets of those not
directly injured by the plane. To make things worse. As
it skidded, the belly and tail section begin to rip apart,
peppering the crowd with high velocity shrapnel and debris which
fanned out in a wide slicing spread. You ever heard
of the Kessler syndrome. This describes something called collisional cascading.

(29:13):
It's this idea that where a satellite, for example, blows up,
and the debris starts to impact other satellites. They blow
up and create more debris, which destroys more satellites, and
on and on, And it's the same idea here, but
with severed limbs. The human body was not designed to
catch one hundred pounds of frisbeeing sheet metal or a

(29:35):
car hood or a plane tire, and the market had
been densely crowded, mostly with women and children, which made
avoiding the racing plane all but impossible for most, but
not for lack of trying. So imagine being borne down
on by a machine as tall as a three story building,
traveling hundreds of miles an hour, watching as the nose

(29:56):
catches people unaware, like insects on the front of a car,
and each new addition is immediately rendered unrecognizable with mutilation
injuries one after another. Contact with the body of the plane,
the gear struts, and the wheels imparted crush injuries and
skeletal fractures in all that it touched. People who had

(30:16):
been run down under the massive wheels were left with
cartoonish tire indentations on their bodies. And would it, by
any chance peak your interest to learn that this disaster
has barely begun. It's about to get a little upsetting.
I have to remind you that on either side of
the plane sat a four bladed spinning propeller and at

(30:39):
maximum throttle, spinning at close to eleven hundred rotations per minute.
That means that whatever they touched was sliced eighteen times
per second, and not just that they were fifteen feet
across spinning as a circular disc, racing towards you like
lawnmower blades, spinning as fast as they are mechanic able to.

(31:01):
They're only three feet off the ground, more than low
enough to interact with people and vehicles and structures and everything.
Direct contact with the propellers led to profound lacerations, amputations,
and dismemberments. And you would be forgiving for thinking in
your head that they would have appeared like slith, like

(31:22):
deli sliced meat. But the forces being imparted were so
powerful that they would have looked more like they had
held a grenade. Those lucky enough to simply be sent
flying by the rush of the impact and the wall
of debris and the humanity building around the front of
the plane still received spinal injuries, internal traumas, skeletal fractures,

(31:43):
and skin removal from skidding unprotected at high speed along
the ground. And here is the thing, This is not
even the worst part of this disaster. You pull your
face out of the thing you're yaking into and ask,
how in the how five do you make this worse? Well,

(32:03):
you set the whole thing on fire. As we said,
the plane had been holding as much fuel as possible
before takeoff, and it had not burned through even a
fraction of a percent before all of this happened. It
had been carrying as much as thirteen thousand pounds of
aviation kerosene, which unleashed as the plane began breaking apart.

(32:27):
They call it jet a and it is not the
kind of thing that you want to get in your
mouth or your eyes or a deep flapping cut. Jeta
doesn't vaporize as easily as gasoline, which just means that
at room temperature, it's harder to ignite. I say harder,
but not impossible. As it erupted, a sudden, white orange

(32:48):
flash swallowed everything in front of it, and people closest
to the crash never had a chance. Those a little
further away saw the air itself ignite and in a
matter of seconds exposed. Skin blistered, and hair and clothing
burst into flames. People inhaled fiery gases that burnt the
airways as the wall of heat rolled over them, burning

(33:11):
through clothes and skin in an instant. The roar of
the fire would have been so loud it would have
drowned out the panic of people pushing and fighting to flee,
screaming for friends and children. The layout of the market
was tight and not exactly evacuation friendly at the best
of times, and now every direction was blocked by walls

(33:32):
of flame and debris, which people tore at with their
bare hands. Many collapsed before the flames even reached them.
Many who survived the fire died within days from their
burns or the poison in their lungs from the resulting infections,
and of course the horrendous list of wounds and traumas
we already talked about. The liquid itself doesn't even burn,

(33:56):
it's the vapors that do so. From there, the heat
from the flames keeps vaporizing more fuel, so once a
fire starts, it sustains itself and just keeps spreading everywhere.
And it's not the kind of stuff you're gonna put
out with water. It needs special aircraft firefighting foam that
coats everything to rob it of its oxygen. It's amazing

(34:17):
stuff if you have it, which we don't. So imagine
this building sized bulldozer with dual lawnmower blades bearing down
and skidding towards you, engulfed in flames with a dense
billowing trail of black smoke pouring out the back. And
now you're engulfed in flames with a dense, billowing trail

(34:38):
of black smoke pouring out of your back. Would you
know what to do. There's not much I'm going to
be able to tell you as far as best practices
for surviving a full body crushing or skeletal explosion, but
I can certainly give you best practices for triaging a
deep slashing laceration injury from flying metal or glass or shrapnel,

(35:01):
or coping with embedded or impaled debris you know, wood
or rebar or aircraft parts. Okay, so you went to
the market because you wanted new socks, but instead you
have a deep, gaping slash wound, the kind of thing
that's too ungainly to simply staple shut. First step in
any situation like this is to make a lot of

(35:23):
friends real fast, and then get the authorities on the phone.
First practical step is to find the cleanest cloth or
gauze or clothing that you can find, fold it into
a pad, and then use it to apply direct pressure
against the wound to slow or stop the bleeding, and
keep it there no matter what people think. Once it's
saturated with blood, you're supposed to change it out, but

(35:43):
don't let up on the pressure. Just leave it there.
If the wound is on a limb, you want to
figure out how to elevate it above the heart. This
also can help reduce bleeding. Survival very much depends on
keeping your blood pressure up, which means keeping as much
blood in your body as you can. As a last resort,
if possible, you can use a makeshift tournique to tie

(36:05):
the area a few inches above the wound to slow
blood loss. The trick is to find that sweet spot
between tying off. The area is tight enough to stop
the bleeding, but not so tight that you start killing
the surrounding tissue or limb by constricting blood flow. Remember,
tourniquets are temporary. Ambulances are better once the wounds are stabilized.

(36:26):
Make sure the victim is laying down. You want to
try to keep them as warm and comfortable as possible
under the circumstances, because you're going to try to keep
them from slipping into shock. And it occurs to me
most people don't even know what shock even is. When
you see someone after an accident turn pale or cold,
or breathing too quickly, If their skin starts to grow clammy,

(36:49):
or they start to drift off or go quiet, that
sounds like shock. Their blood pressure is crashing, which means
their organs aren't getting enough oxygen rich blood, and their
body is shutting down to keep their heart and brain alive.
In many mass casualty events, as many as half of
the people who die are from preventable shock. Oh but wait,

(37:11):
what's that sticking out of your shoulder. While this is
one of the most important rules about trauma, a foreign
stabable could be plugging a major vessel, and removing it
would lead to catastrophic bleeding. If it's on fire, blow
it out. And if it's still doing that, don't you anything,
Just pinch it to make it stop. But whatever it is,

(37:34):
believe it be. Just stabilize it in place. It's kind
of the same rules as packing a wound against bleeding.
Instead you're patting and wrapping around the object to immobilize it,
to keep it from moving around inside and creating even
more damage. Of course, if the object is sticking out
of your eye or your neck or your chest, you
don't really want to put pressure on it. You just

(37:56):
need to stabilize it lightly. If it is in the
chain and you can hear air, then air is leaking
from a lung into the surrounding space. You're gonna want
to seal the area around the wound with anything airtight
like plastic wrap would be perfect. You want to seal
it almost completely, grosser not a chest wound is still

(38:17):
gonna need to let some of that air escape or
they could eventually suffocate. And I'm not getting into the
whole thing. But in a disaster like Ndolo, the people
who survived were the ones whose bleeding was controlled quickly.
Bottom line is pressure saves lives, and if something is

(38:37):
stuck in you look with your eyes, not your hands.
Just leave it for the professionals. The plane only came
to a stop after striking several buildings, leaving a path
of obliterated market stalls and vehicles in its wake, and
of course the hundreds of injured and unmoving bodies. Hundreds

(38:58):
more lumbered dazed, struggling to understand what just happened. The
combined aroma of jet fuel, burning produce and timber and
plastics and human flesh was unforgettable. The cockpit of the
plane was still partially intact. The Ukrainian and Congolese crew
members they had died, but the four Russians were still alive.

(39:19):
They were just trapped in the wreckage. Nikolay and Andre
were able to escape, but the other two surviving Russians
were never seen again. I mean they were seen, but
they had had spontaneous cosmetic makeovers, if you follow my meaning.
Rescue workers, soldiers and warndinary citizens clawed through the debris
with bare hands to pull bodies out of the smoldering wreckage,

(39:42):
but others did it with murderous intent. They were looking
for the flight crew. Will never know exactly how many
had been injured that day because so many had hobbled
off or were driven away before rescue personnel arrived, and
out of the hundreds and hundreds of bodies lined in
rows on the street, only sixty six of them could
be identified. Many were burned beyond recognition. Others had been

(40:07):
torn to pieces, slashed, squished, viscerated. My point being they
had been rendered unrecognizable and the recovery effort was pure
nightmare fuel PTSD for everyone. Firefighters from the nearby Kinshasa
Barracks and Indola Military Airport arrived quickly, but ordinary people

(40:28):
were already using buckets of sand and whatever was at
hand to beat back the flames. Victims were transported in
everything from military trucks to taxis. To wheelbarrows to Mama
Yemo Hospital which today is conshasa General and it was
immediately overwhelmed. Two other hospitals took on the overflow of patients.

(40:49):
And if only it had just been the patients. See.
Family members and curiosity seekers had mobbed the accident seen
right after, and no small number of them became immediately
outraged and descended on the hospitals, looking to murder the
surviving pilots, but they were met with police batons, which
only added to the lengthy list of people injured that day,

(41:11):
which surpassed five hundred. No one even knows how many
people died that day. It has been quoted as high
as three hundred and seventy. People across Conshasa mourned for
days and the funerals stretched on for weeks, and they
were all closed casket. So what happened, Well, we saw

(41:35):
what happened, But why did it happen is the better question,
and I can answer this on two levels. On the
higher level, Sayer had been falling apart under Mobutu's rule
while he was getting rich in his country and its
infrastructure went ignored and crumbled all around him. People weren't
getting paid so in order to survive. Everything became a hustle,

(41:59):
and every everything became a little corrupt, and with Angola
next door tearing itself apart with war, Zayer started slipping
them weapons, and the aviation industry got sucked into the corruption,
and Dolo Airport became something between an aerial taxi stand
and the Contina from Star Wars. Airlines like Skybe started

(42:20):
selling fake flight permits to smaller carriers like Air Africa,
which means no one really knows what's what, which is
a dangerous way to operate, and the kind of rules
that make sure flights in other countries make it reliably
from point A to point B got thrown out the window.
This is a long roundabout way of saying everything was sketchy.

(42:44):
Then there is the more practical, factual, distractable way of
looking at it. The antonov An thirty two B weighs
thirty seven thousand pounds empty, the maximum takeoff weight is
fifty nine thousand, four hundred pounds, and witnesses commented on
how grossly overweight our flight looked. Of course, the ground

(43:05):
crew said otherwise, and we were most assuredly loaded down
with weapons. We were overweight by almost six hundred pounds,
which may not sound like a lot, but it was
more than enough to make sure if a Halloween movie
were ever made of this story, it would have the
most over the top body count and would be so

(43:26):
gory it would be banned in most countries. The zaire
and government moved pretty quickly to a sign blame. The
pilots were arrested and survived their hospital stay long enough
to be charged with involuntary manslaughter. They admitted in court
that they had borrowed clearance papers from Skybe and they

(43:48):
could tell that the flight had been overloaded. Both men
were found guilty and sentenced to two years in prison.
Outrage aside, that was the statutory maximum. Air Africa, Moscow
Airways and Skybe Airlift were ordered to pay the victim's
families the equivalent of one point four million dollars. Moscow

(44:12):
Airlines folded up shop later that same year. It took
SKIBE two years to formally dissolve and legally wind down.
You have to remember they were a much bigger organization
and had a lot more to lose, and sure enough,
they lost at all. The government followed up by putting
a weight limit on planes coming in and out of Endolo.

(44:35):
Nothing ridiculous, but enough to effectively ban heavy cargo flights.
But for many in Conchasa, who only see spinning fan
blades of blood every time they blink or try to sleep,
these changes were too little, too late. The memory of
that morning of the fire and the screams from the

(44:55):
market never left. I mean, how could they? You only
had to hear about it. Shortly after the disaster, President
Mobotu was diagnosed with prostate cancer. Now don't clap, you're
clapping for cancer. While he was off getting world class

(45:15):
treatment in Switzerland, angry rebels swept through his country, and
by rebels I mean an amalgam of troops from neighboring
Angola and Rwanda, and Uganda and Burundi who each had
reasons for being pissed at him for supporting death in
Angola and then getting rich off it. Within a year,

(45:37):
Mobutu's government was toast and the names IIRR was thrown
in the trash with it. From that day forward, it
became formerly known as the Democratic Republic of Congo. It
took the fall of the Soviet Union and Angola in
civil war, and one ill placed Congolese market place, all

(45:58):
holding hands to make this horror possible. You could definitely
question any city that allowed a public market right where
a failed takeoff was going to land, and Nikolai Kazarin did.
It would be easy to imagine him as just some
arrogant Russian cold warrior who did his time and then

(46:18):
left it all behind. But no, when he returned to Russia,
he didn't hide from reporters. He could have blamed the
Congolese cargo handlers and the system that rewarded risky behavior
for making him do it, but he didn't. He accepted
his part in the disaster. Reportedly, he thought about it
a lot. He thought about the burnt out Antonov, He

(46:41):
thought about other pilots and other parts of the world
taking similar risks, and in his quieter moments, he thought
about all the women and children that, because of him,
never returned from the market that day. The Simbzidiki market
was rebuilt, but it was never as long large or popular.
Go Figure and Dolo remains in use today. Of course,

(47:06):
only lighter aircraft visit it. It's become a shadow of
its former self, and the city, just like a living jungle,
grew even closer around it. As a result, like most
crashes in the Congo, of which there have been plenty,
no proper investigation was conducted. Russia wanted no part of it,

(47:26):
and the NTSB wasn't invited because no Americans were involved.
This disaster set three records of note. First, it was
the worst plane crash ever recorded in the history of
African aviation. They were supposed to fly three hundred and
seventy five kilometers, but they only made it three hundred

(47:50):
and thirty meters or just under one thousand feet. It
also has been said to be the third deadliest plane
crash in all of human history, and third is debatable,
but not on this show. When American Airlines Flight eleven
and United Airlines Flight one seventy five crashed into the

(48:11):
World Trade Center in two thousand and one, it became
the deadliest ground casualty aviation accident of all time, with
two thousand, nine hundred and seventy seven killed. The term
ground casualty refers to the people killed by the plane,
but not on the plane. The thing is nine to

(48:32):
eleven was a disaster, but it wasn't an accident. As
a kind of a rule, I generally don't cover intentional
acts of terrorism on the show, and terrible as it
may be, nine to eleven was disastrous, but by my
strict definition, it was actually mass murder. It was its

(48:52):
intentionality that keeps it separated from every other episode that
we've done. Our flight today was negligent homice side, and
because of that, the Air Africa Congo crash tacular of
nineteen ninety six, in all of its inglorious detail, remains
the deadliest ground casualty disaster in the history of human aviation.

(49:21):
So maybe you can see why I thought this story
was a bit much for a fledgling audience to take in.
Back then, I just thought it was gratuitous. But now,
in the light of five years of atrocious body counts
an unspeakable horror, it simply just checks the boxes for
every type of anatomy based gore, just to a higher
degree than we're used to doing it in the context

(49:43):
of a Halloween episode, felt like the only real way
to temper it. I actually started compiling this first episode
on the show back in twenty sixteen, believe it or not,
which means I've purposely shielded you from this story for
nine years. It's one of those stories where everything it
happened happened so quickly and it was just so awful.
It might have been actually harder on the survivors than

(50:06):
the victims. I have a friend who once came into
close contact with a body that had been bisected just
below the shoulders, and it took years for him to
come to terms with it as well as he actually has.
So imagine that multiplied by hundreds. If you've made it
this far, I congratulate you, and I should probably make

(50:28):
guys survive the doomsday Halloween episode. And all I got
was this lousy T shirt shirts, And we will figure
out T shirts, by the way. And in the meanwhile,
now is as good a time as any to remind
you that a personalized Doomsday farfag is yours for the asking.
If you feel like this is the kind of thing
you want to play on a loudspeaker outside your house

(50:50):
to welcome tricker treaters this year, and you simply don't
know what to do with all the money, you'll inevitably
say by not having to hand out any candies at all,
you've already shown a real talent for decision making, So
why not consider becoming a supporter of the show at
patreon dot com slash Funeral Kazoozoo. It doesn't ask much

(51:11):
of you. I mean, the majority of supporters simply sign
up make a small monthly donation to help keep the
show that they love an Adore alive, and then they
just kind of disappear. They get ad free episodes, and again,
I am so so sorry about these ads. I don't
actually have any control about how many they are, or
their placement or their content. The only content control I

(51:33):
have is the extra content that patreons receive, you know,
all of the good stuff, and those donations are the
entire reason that I have been able to do this
show as often as I have over the last five years.
Of course, as I always say, if you're into it,
but you're not into a whole thing, you could always
simply visit buy me a coffee dot com slash Doomsday,

(51:55):
and just make a one time donation. And now I'd
like to share a quick but very heartfelt shout out too,
Monica Remicate, Johnny Wilkie foul On True Tas Matilda, Neilie Arnold,
and Sebastian Bachman Dueling. Thank you all so much again.
There is no show without you guys. You can reach

(52:17):
out to me on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook as Doomsday Podcast,
or fire us an email to doomsday Pod at gmail
dot com. Older episodes can be found where if you
found this one, and while you're there, please leave us
a review and tell your friends. I always thank my
Patreon listeners, new and Hold for their support and encouragement,

(52:38):
but I also ask if you could spare the money
and had to choose, to consider making a donation to
Global Medic. Global Medic is a rapid response agency of
Canadian volunteers offering assistance around the world to aid in
the aftermath of disasters and crises. They're often the first
and sometimes the only team to get critical interventions to

(53:00):
people in life threatening situations, and to date they have
helped over six million people across eighty nine different countries.
You can learn more and donate at Globalmedic dot Ca.
On the next episode, believe it or not, we are
gonna kill way more people. Wait what, shut up? No,

(53:24):
it's true, but it won't be nearly as graphic or
grizzly because the majority will be vaporized. And this story
takes place four hundred years ago, so you just know
it's gonna be good. It's the Great Wangon Chain Armory
disaster of sixteen twenty six. We'll talk soon. Safety goggles off,

(53:49):
and thanks for listening.

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The Air Africa Congo Halloween Crashtacular of 1996 | Episode 96

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}The Air Africa Congo Halloween Crashtacular of 1996 | Episode 96