===TRANSCRIPT START===

Disclaimer.

This episode includes the usual amount of adult language and graphic discussions you've come to expect around here.

But in the event it becomes an unusual amount, expect another call from me. Welcome back to Scared All The Time. I'm Chris Cullari.

And I'm Ed Voccola.

And welcome aboard SATT Air. Before we take off, I ask that you please direct your attention to my voice as we review the emergency procedures for this podcast. There are six emergency exits on this episode. Take a minute to locate the exits closest to you. Keep in mind, they may be in front of you or behind you. Should the podcast experience a sudden drop in quality, a pair of headphones will drop from the ceiling. Place the headphones snugly in your ears and breathe deeply. If you are listening with children, what are you doing? But please secure their headphones first. We ask that you remain calm and listen for instructions from your hosts. Unless we've already been sucked out of the plane, in which case, see ya suckers.

I guess I can maybe add some plane crash noises there.

Yes, yeah, plane crash noise into song. Scared.

When are we?

Now it is time for. Scan all the time. Welcome back. We've reached cruising altitude. Ed, do you want to take us into housekeeping?

Sure, yeah, a couple quick things. One, I know we just said it, but the podcast is going to pretty instantly have a sudden drop in quality in a minute because we had an issue with Chris' microphone. So we were forced to kind of resort to Zoom for part of it. So and by part of it, I mean the whole rest of it, but I think it's very listenable.

It is. I will never again joke about a drop in quality in the cold open because I clearly fucked us. I cursed the episode.

And we don't have it in the budget to have any headphones kind of fall from anywhere. So no more cursing us, no more promises we can't fulfill. We learned from that. Number two, second sound thing, because we're just dealing with kind of Zoom, you're going to hear a third co-host a lot in this episode, and that is, uh, what are those dart frogs?

My poison dart frog. So listen, I apologize for this. My apartment is a one bedroom apartment and the bedroom has terrible God awful shit internet. So I can't record in there. So I have to record in the living room where my poison dart frog terrariums are. And they're both very loud. They both shriek constantly and they're very happy. They love you guys. And I'll post pictures of them on Facebook.

Also, they don't sound like frogs. Like when I think of frogs, I think of the traditional frog noise, but these things kind of just sound like like electrical interference. So yeah, it's extra confusing. I was like, what the fuck is this?

Yeah, it sounds kind of like a high pitched bell sound.

Sure. OK, the last order of business, since we're already on the topic of pets, lost a couple of good ones, lost Stu, who was a hell of a dog, lost Stella, who was a hell of a dog, two dogs. I'm very into even knowing, you know, how I feel about dogs. These were two sweethearts. So RIP, God bless those two animals.

RIP, God bless.

So let's move on to people dying, shall we?

Absolutely. So today, I'm going to take a big, deep, relaxing breath and talk about one of the things that is a true phobia for me, flying. I don't know about you guys, listeners, Ed, but when I have a flight coming up, my anxiety keeps me from sleeping for like a week or two out from the flight. I get nervous driving to the airport. I watch all the planes taking off and landing and wait for one of them to like explode in the distance and hit my car with like a delayed shock of the explosion. It's extremely intense for me, and I have a few ideas why, not as concrete as my Eat and Alive theories. But nevertheless, I do have a Xanax prescription that I use to fly now. Well, before I get into this, Ed, what's your feeling on flight flying? What's your nervousness level? Let's set sort of the floor here for what we're talking about.

My nervousness level is pretty low when it comes to flying. Flying is one of those things, and I don't know if I've brought it up on the show or not before, but it's one of those things where it just seems really out of my control. And basically when I get on an airplane, I resign myself to the position of if fucking this thing is going to fall out of the sky, it's going to fall out of the sky. Like, what are you going to do? And so it's one of the few things where I'm actually kind of zen about air travel. I have other issues with air travel. Like I have really bad ears. My whole life I've had inner ear issues. So sometimes if I'm a little stuffy at all, like a descent will be like putting a drill in my ear. So I don't like flying for that. It can kind of ruin my week after.

Yeah.

So I have like a lot of that issue, which I fucking hate about, you know, the change in pressure. But otherwise, I guess I love planes. Big plane guy, big space guy, as a lot of you guys know, and big air show guy, like spent a lot of time going to air shows with my good friends Jesse and Megan and Trevor and like even out here. When you live on the West Coast, you get a lot of Blue Angels time because they're out here training and stuff. Love that shit. And I love going up with friends when they're flying. I love going up with my dad's friend. But when I was younger, my dad had a friend who was a pilot, and we'd go up in his little plane. I love that stuff. But on top of my pressure ear issues, which is only an issue when you're going up in a commercial grade flight, I also get motion sickness from everything. So that includes warm, small planes, and they're always fucking warm up there. And so when I was flying in the Arctic Circle in Alaska, got super sick with every little bump, and I also one time threw up on a Virgin America flight, which was not my proudest moment. But as my friend Dan said afterward, he's like, you know what, the throw up bag on a commercial airline is probably the most underused free item we get, so at least you got to use it. And I just remember it was such bad turbulence, such unbelievably bad turbulence, and like this thunderstorm that I was like, holy shit, I'm getting real sick, like motion sick. And I took the bag. This was back when I was a window person, back when I was young and dumb. And so I was trapped by the window, and I took the throw up bag, and I, as quietly as I thought I could, tried to throw up in this bag, so that no one became aware.

The idea of a quiet vomit is hilarious.

Yes, it was, I was what they call in the business, not successful at that. I was like, blah, blah, like tried, so the craziest noises came out of me. And this old couple who were sitting next to me, looked at me, and then I had to just look at them with the eyes of, I know this is going to smell for the next four hours, and I'm sorry. This row is ruined now.

Perhaps for Patreon, we can get a recording of your infamous sitting next to a guy who is shitting himself story, because that's very funny, but we won't do it here.

Oh shit, yeah, no, we won't do it here. And maybe for Patreon, we can just have someone also paint me throwing up on a plane. Like paint a reenactment of that.

Who's our friend that makes the velvet paintings? Can we have her do a painting?

Oh shoot, Lowlife High Road.

Yeah, have her paint you quietly vomiting.

I don't think that's for anyone.

Yeah.

That would not be a good use of her talents. I guess we'll have to buy it.

We'll buy it.

So yeah, I like planes. I don't hate planes. But speaking of Xanax, I mean, that shit works in the sense that, you know, my cousin, whom you know, he is deathly afraid of flying or was for many, many years and still is. But yeah, there's something about that drug, man, like take one of those and that guy will fucking fly the plane. Like he doesn't give a shit anymore. Now he's on the flight and he's doing what he's got to do.

Growing up, I was never all that scared of flying. My grandfather, RIP. Dookie, he was a navigator in the Korean War. So I grew up around a lot of plane paraphernalia and model planes. And he had some plane like wallpaper with different plane models in his house. So like I was very familiar around planes and I liked making paper airplanes. There was this company called White Wings that I couldn't remember the name of them for the longest time. But it was like a company that made packs of airplanes that you could then like trace and cut with exactor knives out of balsa wood. And they were all different kinds of like traditional planes and experimental planes. And I loved flight. I loved the idea of it. My grandfather once even took me up in Massachusetts in a glider.

Oh, wow.

Which I can't even imagine doing now. But you literally get towed up behind like a, you know, it wasn't like a biplane, but like that sort of vibe, like whatever, just like a small plane. They tow you in this glider up to however many thousand feet. And then they retract the little connector. And then you literally just glide in big circles the whole way back to the ground. And then at some point, I just, I never took commercial flights very much as a kid. And I think that might have had something to do with it, because I didn't start flying until college, really going back and forth from Boston. Yeah, I just started getting really nervous and everything around flying made me crazy scared. And, you know, I actually got so bad that I used to take the train home from Los Angeles to Pennsylvania for Christmas. It would take three days. I would rather do that.

No, my cousin does that, too. He did that. He's done that more than once. Like the train across the country. Yeah, that sounds to me like a little bit like hell.

I mean, I usually did it as my Christmas gift to myself. My parents would ship in. So the first two days I would get a sleeper car and just bring a book and like a little bottle of nice bourbon or something and read my way across the country. And it was pretty nice. The third day of the trip was hell because the train would basically use a straight shot from LA to Pittsburgh. And then Pittsburgh, I usually had to wait like overnight in the Pittsburgh train station, which you'd think they might have like a cool, big old city vibe train station. But it's like a Greyhound bus depot. It also has a train to sleep in there all night and then get on the train from Pittsburgh to Harrisburg and then home. So the end of the leg was pretty awful. But yeah, I don't know. There wasn't one particular event. I do think it was just a growing sense of the fact that I was going to die someday and a growing sense of how little control you have, like you said, in a plane. And I think that that freaked me out, that feeling of like, oh, this is just people I don't know are driving this thing. And I mean, people I don't know drive buses and Ubers, too, but they're on the ground. So it doesn't seem as scary.

And speaking of people you don't know driving the thing, and I'm sure this will probably come up maybe, but like I'll never forget like the day I learned that the pilots of commercial airliners are not like millionaires. I was like, they must clearly be paid enough to put 300 souls on board, you know, in their charge. But no, I think it's a lot of them have like student debt and they aren't paid a ton and they're not like walking around like it's the 60s anymore, you know, as these celebrities at TWA or whatever. So I get a little worried about it when I see that like, oh, you're just a fellow broke person who you could be having a bad day.

And I do think there is I was reading something about this maybe when I was researching this episode about how one of the things that is alluring about becoming a pilot is that when you put in your years and you get to the top and you have seniority, it can be really great. It can be really nice. But it's those like 15 to 20 years that it takes to get there when you're getting paid shit.

Yeah. And regardless of the pay and the shit day you're having or whatever, I do always enter a flight with the idea of A, it's out of my control and B, I just feel like the person flying. It doesn't want to crash either. You know, I'm sure we'll hear examples of the opposite coming up. But I'm saying is I'd like to enter with the idea of, you know, they don't want to fucking go down either. So it's a win win. Everyone's out here. It's one of the few things we do as a society where everybody's on board literally.

We're all on board.

Yeah. I don't like the people who get mad at people who clap when we land that like bygone era of like clapping when we landed. Sometimes people will still kind of do it and then instantly hear someone comment like fucking losers. And I'm like, really? We all just kind of did something incredible. I'm into this.

Yeah, I'm big into clapping. Like if you deliver a baby, I'm going to clap for you. If you land a plane, I'm going to clap for you. If you manage to parallel park a car in a small spot on your first try, I'm going to clap for you. So like, you know, I don't get what the issue is.

We are an easy clapper. You're an easy clapper.

I want people to feel appreciated.

Feel good. You want them to feel good enough so that they don't enter a cockpit of a plane being like, I'm taking this whole thing down with me. I'm just in such a bad mood. Nobody's clapped for me in a long time, and now I'm bringing this whole fucking plane down.

I will say, like, to pivot off feeling good, to say one last thing before we get into some of our airline disaster stories for the day. I think, and if there's a rich person out there, first of all, Congrats on being rich. Congrats on being rich, first of all. Second of all, Mr. Big Hoity Toity Warren Buffett Sir, supporter, Patreon. Third of all, somebody please, for the love of God, start another Virgin America.

Dude, right? That was my favorite airline.

Those flights were so nice. And like, it cost pretty much the same.

I mean, I used to fly exclusively Virgin America. That's all I flew.

Me too.

And it was reasonably priced. I remember I described it as like, this dates me, but I described it as like flying on board an iPod.

Yeah.

Because it was like the color scheme inside, had like the black seats with like the white tube and it had the purple lighting and it was very fun. And then also, I remember they used to do this thing that like six hours before, 24 hours before check-in, you can upgrade your seat. But six hours before check-in, you can upgrade to first class. For no exaggeration, it was like between $80 and $120 to upgrade to first class for an LA to New York flight or vice versa. And I used to all the time upgrade for like $80. I'm like, okay, this is amazing.

No wonder they went out of business. I didn't realize that. I should have used that.

Yeah, someone was not charging enough. But yes, Virgin America fucking rules. Like it was genuinely great airline.

As a person who is nervous flying, I mean, not anymore because Xanax is great.

Modern medicine.

Yeah, but it was just they put... Look, if you were breaking the laws of man and God to take us off the ground into the sky, I feel like you almost should be legally required to do it with some kind of style and celebration that like we're doing this, it's fun, it's cool. And there's something about that, like it being just... You know, it wasn't a crazy party in the sky, but like you said, like there's colored lighting. You can upgrade to first class. Like they just make you feel like this is a fun, cool thing instead of this like paddle car, you're just meet with a butt that needs to be in a seat that every other airline does. And it just, I don't know, there's something so cold about airline travel that I think it makes it worse.

And do you remember the Virgin America video that played beforehand?

Yeah, it was all snappy and jazzy.

And it was a song and people were dancing and it was like really well produced. And the song would get stuck in your head and it was like, oh, I watched it a million times. I was constantly traveling. Like everyone else just had a person standing there being like, oh, well, the thing's over here. And, you know, if the fucking cabin loses pressure. But they had like a crazy fun song and dance video that was actually not the worst thing, the most boring thing to watch.

Yeah, just give it a little. Just give it a little jazz and jazz, especially now when you're paying some of these flights just from LA to get back to Pennsylvania or like $400.

One way.

Yeah, and if you're paying that much, give me a colored light, give me a chocolate on the pillow or something. Christ almighty.

Literally anything. There's two things I remember about that. One was every other airline I took at the time, their video in the beginning was just the CEO of the airline being like, hi, I'm Chuck Whatever, CEO of Delta. And we really appreciate you taking this flight. And I'm like, it doesn't seem like it. My knees are in my fucking teeth. I'm not getting any food. Like, this is wildly uncomfortable. The ticket was overpriced. But like Virgin, you didn't have to see Richard Branson to come on screen. He's just like, oh, I'm having a little bit of a good time. And it wasn't outrageously expensive. Then they sold it to, I think, Alaska airline, and now it just sucks, like fully sucks. And then I fly JetBlue now exclusively because, and don't get me wrong, they have their follow ups. I mean, I think since we've started this show, I've posted on the official Scared All The Time, like one night I was having like a terrible night flying with them. But they have, I think, undeniably the best leg room in Coach. And I like that they have the snack cabinet where you don't have to wait for anybody. You can just like walk and get your own snacks and drinks and refill everything, you know, of the free items or whatever. So I'm an aisle man. I'm an aisle man through and through because I'm not on Xanax. So I'm usually working. I'm getting up. I'm doing things. So I like being able to walk to the pantry, get myself a diet coke and some pretzels or whatever and go back to my chair and keep working and not have to hit a button or bother anybody.

Yeah, that's nice.

Oh, also, I feel like Virgin America was the like first one I remember where everything was just like on your credit card and you could do everything. You could order everything on the screen in front of you. You didn't have to talk to anybody. So yeah, Virgin America. I mean, we didn't even get into the animated opening video they had, but look, at this point, they should be giving us money, right? This is so crazy. It's part walking down memory lane, part a full blown commercial for a now defunct airline, which I guess means they don't have any more money.

They clearly ran out of money. So that kind of takes us into, I will say, you know, Virgin Airlines has the distinction. Well, actually, I don't know. I guess I didn't look this up. I feel like they never crashed. I don't know if there was ever a big Virgin Airlines crash.

I mean, there's the ones I remember as a kid, like I remember TWA, like things that were like big news when we were young. But just in terms of crashes, if I'm not mistaken, I think airline travel is the most safe travel statistically.

It is. But while they are statistically rare, the suddenness of an airline disaster, the ferocity and the scale of an airline disaster is fucking soul shattering.

Well, do you think that's why they call us souls, not people? Do you think that's why it's the only place I know of where they refer to the passenger as souls? Like, we have 200 souls on board, which is a thing that's said.

They absolutely should. I think that's a great idea that that's how they refer to it, because that's certainly what it feels like, is you're very close to heaven.

It's as close as we're going to physically get.

And if you crash, you're going to go straight to hell. There are so many different ways to dive into, and as you've already name dropped a handful of these airline disasters, when I was researching this show, I really didn't even know where to begin. I didn't want to do anything. I mean, like MH370, the Malaysia flight, there's a lot out there about it.

There's also no conclusions on that, so fuck it.

Yeah, so it's hard to talk about the disaster, because we don't really know what the disaster was. And there's just so many tragic, violent, depressing stories in the history of this topic that it was impossible to pick. So...

9-11 is off the table, right? Because I have no interest in talking about that.

9-11 is off the table.

Okay.

There's so much to talk about for 9-11, but it's not... I almost hesitate to qualify it as an airline disaster, because it was, but it really, you know, it was terrorism, which I feel like is a different topic, so...

Which we'll discuss that later. That'll probably be part of something else, but also it's very close to home for me, and I think also Chris.

Yeah. How about this? I suggest to you, Ed, should we start with the largest loss of life in one airline disaster?

I imagine it's pretty close to 100% casualty on every plane crash, so I'm just trying to think of what would be the biggest planes.

Two planes crashed into each other, so that's part of where the body count comes from.

Oh, okay. See, I didn't take into account. I didn't do the math. Yeah.

All right. Well, Ed, do you want to guess which country gets the distinction of hosting the most catastrophic airline disaster by body count?

When you say hosting, you mean, like, it was where it took off from, where it crashed? What do you mean by that?

Where the crash happened.

Oh, boy. By landmass, Russia has the most airtime to be over. China has a lot of airtime to be over. America has a lot of airtime to be over.

Well, this is, I guess it's unfair because it happened on the runway.

A lot of things do. And that's why when we take off, I'm like, fucking tragedy averted. And when we land, I'm like, tragedy is coming right now because all planes are designed to fly without engines. So as long as the wing doesn't fall off, you have some semblance of safety. But okay, well, you said what country, so I'm thinking it's not America. So let's just say England.

Close, I guess, Spain. The worst airline disaster in history, as judged by sheer loss of life, occurred in 1977 at the Los Rodeos Airport on Tenerife, part of the Spanish Canary Islands. Now I will say, before we get into this, these stories are tragic. They're obviously really hard for me to get through. But these stories, we're going to bring them to life as best we can. I realized as I was researching this episode, some of these stories are a little dry, because really the main way you get all this information is from very dry disaster reports and kind of post mortems on what happened. So there's not a lot of... No one's focusing on the horrifying details of being in one of these crashes. So just to say, a lot of this is very fact based, but I still think these disasters, especially if you're afraid of flying, are really interesting and really good to hear about.

And flight is 100 years old, basically. So many of these are new enough that family could be listening. So we're not here to make fun of anything per usual. It is a difficult podcast topic in the sense of a lot of the things that we're afraid of are also going to have tragedy tied hand in hand with them. So we'll try and thread the needle the best we can without being disrespectful, which is often slash always our goal here.

Yeah. So these two idiots drove planes straight into each other.

Cool. Cool. Super respectful. Right off the bat. All right. On the runway. So they literally drove planes.

Basically, yes. This was Los Rodeos Airport, 2747s. It was a dense fog. 583 people died. And it happened on the runway. So this is the collision occurred between two different planes. So there is KLM flight 4805.

Let me just say KLM, wonderful outfit. I really enjoyed my time flying with them and they give you apple juice. I don't know if it's a Dutch thing, but I do like that they give you apple juice. Not like, hey, would you like apple juice? It was like, hey, here's some apple juice, which I do like.

What up KLM? Put some purple lights on your planes and make it cool and I'll be there.

Awesome.

So there's KLM flight 4805 and Pan Am flight 1736. Part of what is so crazy about this disaster is that it is actually the result of terrorism, but not directly. So both flights were on route to the Grand Canaria Airport when a bomb planted by the Separatist Canary Islands Independence Movement, of which I had never heard of before this story, a bomb that they had planted exploded in the terminal of Grand Canaria Airport. Essentially, these guys wanted to force the Spanish government to create an independent state in the Canary Islands instead of the Canary Islands being a Spanish territory. So the bomb went off. Only eight people were injured, thank God. But due to the threat of a second bomb, the civil aviation authorities closed Grand Canaria. So all the flights bound for Grand Canaria, including the two in our story, got diverted to a second airport, Los Rodeos. So Los Rodeos was a tiny little nothing airport and the runways backed up almost immediately. Planes were like, it sounds like parking just wherever they could. And it was so busy that it was really hard to even make space for any of these planes to taxi down the runway. It also didn't help that Los Rodeos is 2,000 feet above sea level and experiences, seems like all kinds of really weird weather conditions. And this particular day, there's a heavy fog. So you can't see very far in front of your face with your eyes. Planes are parked everywhere and, you know, tensions are running high. Terrorists already set off a bomb in another airport.

I feel like I should bring up, have you ever flown in the fog, like in a real, real bad fog?

I have been in a plane coming out of a fog, like landing, and it was terrifying.

Yes, that just happened to me last year. I was flying back from Sarasota, Florida to New Haven, Connecticut in the small Tweed Airport. And we had to do a go around three times because the visibility was like under 200 feet for the pilot. Yeah, that was some of the scaredest I've ever been in a plane because it's like we're descending, we're descending, we're descending. We can't see the ground. Then all of a sudden, huge rush and roar of engines as it goes for a go around. Yeah, we flip around, then we come down, happens again. And anyway, happens three times, two or three times. I think it was three. And then they were like, you know what? We're flying to Hartford, so good luck finding your way home from Hartford, a totally different airport. We're going there and we landed there and I have just no idea if anyone landed that night there. It was so unbelievably like pea soup fog. I was terrified. I was like one of the few times where I'm like, this is not good.

Yeah, right as I was becoming the most scared of air travel right around the beginning of college, I went on my first big family vacation with like the whole family and there was a connecting flight. I think we were flying from Pennsylvania to like North Carolina or South Carolina or something. And we'd been circling because you couldn't there was too much fog on the ground. And then we start to descend and we came out of the cloud cover. And of course, I was already nervous and everything. So my brain probably was playing tricks on me. But we were, dude, so fucking close to the ground at such a bad angle. And I just was like, what? I remember like a little scream. And then we like, like, do the straight back up into the air. And I don't think we almost crashed, but it really felt like we almost crashed.

Oh, my God.

So, yeah, very scary to be in fog on a plane. But anyway, in the middle of all this fog and airline traffic, both the KLM flight and the Pan Am flight are trying to take off. This next part, there's a lot of technical flight control terminology that I didn't quite understand for what happened next. But essentially, it seems like air control had miscommunications that got compounded by radio interference, that got compounded by the fog, and essentially the plane's pilots could not see that they were headed on a path straight for each other.

Air traffic control is another thing we should talk about at some point, which we have a drastic reduction of qualified people. The skill gap in this country includes that in the air traffic control community. It's actually shakier to be flying every week we live.

Yep. According to the cockpit voice recorder, the Pan Am captain, Victor Grubbs, said, There he is when he spotted the KLM's landing light through the fog. It was approaching at takeoff speed, and Grubbs said, God damn, that son of a bitch is coming. While the first officer, Robert Bragg, yells, Get off, get off, get off. Grubbs applies full power to the throttles, makes a sharp left turn towards the grass in an attempt to avoid the collision. That's on the Pan Am plane. Now on the KLM plane, these guys are already moving approximately 160 miles an hour, and by the time they figure out that they're going to hit, they're only 330 feet away. So I don't know how many feet per second that is, but it's not very many feet and not very many seconds. So the KLM pilots jam the aircraft nose upward to attempt to clear the Pan Am, but they don't quite make it. Their nose landing gear, so those little wheels that come off like beneath right the nose of the plane, got over the Pan Am, but their left side engine, lower fuselage and main landing gear struck the upper right side of the Pan Am flight, ripping apart the Pan Am jet almost directly above the wing, and the right side engines crashed through the Pan Am's upper deck directly behind the cockpit. So a lot of those people are now dead on the Pan Am plane. The KLM plane knows that they hit the plane beneath them, and they remained briefly airborne, but the impact had shredded enough material off the wing that it got sucked into the inner left engine, then it sheared off, then the wings got damaged. The plane immediately went to a stall, rolled and hit the ground 500 feet away. It slid down the runway for another 1,000 feet, where the full load of fuel on board the aircraft that had actually delayed the flight and caused the takeoff at the same time, all of the fuel exploded into a giant fireball. So immediately, all 248 passengers on the KLM plane died, and 335 passengers and crew aboard Pan Am had died. 70 survived, but 9 later died of their injuries on the Pan Am flight. And most of the survivors walked onto the left wing of the plane, slid away from the collision, and were fine. Because of where the planes had collided, if you were behind a certain point, you basically were fine.

Wow, so that's last ones on the plane, first ones off in that case.

Yeah.

Pretty wild.

Another crazy fact about the crash, or I'm sorry, the fog was so thick that day, that the firefighters who responded to the site discovered the crashed KLM plane burning, and were completely unaware that the Pan Am plane was sitting just a few hundred feet away. That's how thick the fog was. I'm sure they, you know, like, they felt the heat and smoke from it, but they thought it was just one crash. They couldn't see the flames and stuff from the other plane. So it was real thick.

Yeah, you might want to just pop some cancellations on days like that. And that's profit over safety, I guess, because it's like, hey, maybe we shouldn't fly today, you know?

Yeah, when people are at the airport, I'm sure some listeners have seen this happen, but like they'll like delay an hour or two because there's repairs or something. And there will be people who go up to the counter and they're like, what the fuck is going on? Why can't I get on the fucking plane? It's like, bro, do you know what a plane is? Like, it's a machine. It has to work when it goes up in the air. Where do you have to go so badly that you're like, yeah, just yeet me through the sky on a broken hunk of steel.

Broken plane, who cares? I'll hold the window in place. Like, nobody's doing that. I fucking hate people. But again, the like profit over safety, whatever, like these planes stay in fleets for a long ass time. Like, I don't know if they were designed to stay there. I flew on a plane maybe six years ago, seven years ago, that had an ashtray on it. Do you understand? Like, planes with ashtrays still in it. Like, these are not... Some of these planes are old as shit.

Yeah, ashtrays went away on planes and what the...

Later than you'd think, dude. Later than you'd think.

It just seems like even in the heyday of cigarettes, you're bringing multiple small fires into a plane. That seems like a terrible idea.

Well, it's not a pure oxygen environment. Like, you're not in space.

No, but you're more likely to set a fire if you're starting a fire than if you're not starting any fires. So I would have said, no, thank you. So something I thought might be interesting, I was going to say fun, but it's not really fun, but interesting, to cover maybe in these disasters are whose names make the headlines. Because you know, you always hear that thing about like, oh, if you go on a plane, you see like Kanye West is on the plane.

That's the best example you can come up with.

I don't know, Tim McGraw, Derek Jeter on the plane.

These are some all over the place celebrities, man.

That like, oh, well, I know my name's not making the papers if the plane goes down.

Wait, that's a thought you've had?

That's a thought a lot of people have. I feel like that's like a cliche plane crash joke of like...

What? No way. I don't think about what the paper's going to say when this thing goes down. I just assume I'm going to die and that's it. Although I will say, speaking of death on planes, my mom always talks about this story and maybe I've said it in a previous episode. My brother Dave, my oldest brother, was on a plane with my mom and he was nervous while flying on the plane. And he was like, what if the plane goes down? And my mom said to him, if the plane goes down, that's just God's, you know, that's your time. You know what I mean? That's just what it means. And I don't know why that would make anyone feel better. But his follow up question was pointing to an old man and said, what if it's his time?

Wow, what a great line.

Yeah, she had no answer for that one.

Well, unless that guy was a defector from the KGB or something, hopefully it would not be his time in a way that would take the whole plane down. You know, he could have suffered a simple heart attack, maybe vomited blood onto your brother, you know, something, something a little more safe.

This was the height of the Cold War probably when they were on a plane together. So there you go.

True, true. On this flight, on the KLM flight, your name wouldn't have made the paper because the pilot of the flight, a name I'm gonna fuck up, Jacob Veldhuisen Van Zanten was the chief flight instructor for the airline, and he was sort of a little celebrity in and of himself because he'd been featured in a lot of their advertisements. So Jacob Veldhuisen Van Zanten was like the Marvel man for KLM. So if you'd been on that plane, no one would remember you. They'd remember this guy. And on the Pan Am flight, we lost Eve Meyer, who was a pinup model, an actress, a producer, and the second wife of film director Russ Meyer. So clearly she was a total smoke show.

I don't think smoke show was the correct term to use for a person who definitely died in a fire.

Damn, dude, fastest gun in the West. RIP, Eve, God bless.

RIP, God bless.

So that is the largest loss of life in a single airline disaster. But I don't think it's the scariest. Because for my money, this plane disaster, if you squint, it's sort of just a big car crash. It was just kind of a big explosion and over pretty quickly. Well, at least for the people on the Pan Am flight, I guess KLM, if you were on that plane, it was a little scarier because you got up and then went down real fast. Something I learned while researching this episode, in that in most plane crashes, the body physically wouldn't even be able to feel or comprehend that it is dying at the moment of impact. Because planes reach a cruising speed of around 550 miles an hour, which is 800 feet per second, but the human nervous system only sends signals at around 400 feet per second. Unless you see an airline crash coming, you won't even know you're dead, which is a whole other existential crisis for me. If you believe that death is non-existent, like a state without any past, present, future or memories, the only thing that really gives your life any context is having enough time to be aware that death is coming. Because once you're dead, nothing exists for you anymore. So like the white light, the DMT release in the brain, all that stuff is like a really important part of dying. Because if you die, like if someone right now, not to give anybody anxiety, but if someone right now is standing behind you with a gun to the back of your head, and they pull the trigger, and you don't know you died, or that you don't know that you were dying, everything that you've ever done, thought, experienced, whatever, is meaningless to you. I mean, it matters to the people who are around you, but everything is immediately meaningless to you, because it's as if you never existed at all.

Well, I assume I'm going to be in heaven, my dude. I feel like I'm going to get up there and it's going to be a vibe. I'm not even going to worry about it.

They're going to be feeding Ed grapes. God's going to be like, I love your podcast, man.

Oh, yeah. And they're all going to be like, how did you die? And I'm going to go, I don't know. And you know what? Don't tell me.

So anyway, my point being, you know, the scariest part of being in an airline crash is seeing the crash coming. And from that perspective, this next story about what happened to Japan Air Flight 123 would make it a contender for the scariest airline disaster of all time. So it's one of the worst examples or best, I guess, if you look at it that way, of a long drawn out crash with so much time to know that you're fucked. This happened in August 1985. They were going from, I believe, Tokyo to Osaka. And 12 minutes after takeoff, well after reaching that cruising altitude where you kind of like, if you are nervous, you exhale a little bit, it's straight. It's probably not bumpy at this point. You're just kind of floating along. Bang! The entire plane experiences a rapid decompression. And no one on board knows it at the time. But what they're experiencing is a decompression resulting of a large chunk of the plane tail just being ripped right the fuck off the plane because a faulty repair at the back of the plane broke in mid flight. And as a side note, I would just like to say, you know, Ed sort of mentioned airline controllers earlier. Power to labor. So many airline disasters are the result of underpaid, overworked laborers making an unbelievably small mistake when they're fixing a plane.

I mean, that's what the stuff that's going on in the news right now with Boeing planes. When they like look at that, they're like, oh, these are these bolts keeping the doors on or threaded like two threads in.

Yeah.

Like someone's either not having enough time to finish it or whoever's on that part of the assembly line is fucking doing a terrible job.

Well, yeah, in this case, it was a matter of fixing the repair with one line of rivets instead of two. That's all it took for the next half an hour of hell to happen.

And I'd be interested to find out if there was some corporate policy where it's like, oh, we don't want to spend money on rivets.

Yeah.

Or some shit where it's like, oh, we can get five more backs of planes finished by doing one line of rivets versus doing the, you know, engineer suggested two lines of rivets.

Yeah, exactly. So bang, part of the tail goes. The sudden change in pressure also rips down the ceiling around the bathrooms in the back. It damages the aft fuselage and unseats the vertical stabilizer, which is a really technical way of saying that the vertical part of the tail just is gone. It just gets ripped off and it severs. I don't know how the inside of the plane works exactly, but this decompression and the sudden ripping of the tail severs all four hydraulic lines that control the plane. Now, to me, that sounds pretty bad. That sounds like, should this thing just fall out of the sky bad? But by 1985, to the credit of engineers and physicists and airlines and lessons learned from all kinds of other accidents and disasters, planes are pretty well built, and so this thing just keeps right on trucking. There's actually a surviving photo from inside the plane developed from film found in the wreckage of everyone sitting there with their oxygen masks dangling and a flight attendant helping people put them on. And the photo is like eerily calm.

If there's any group of people who would be taking photos, even during a plane crash, it would be 1980s Japanese. If every movie and piece of mass media I've ever been exposed to would have me believe.

Yeah, they just want to have a record of things. That's all.

I love that moment in Caddyshack when Rodney Dangerfields, like they're parking at the country club and the dude's taking photographs in the parking lot. He's like, Hey, Wank, what's with the pictures? It's a parking lot. Guys like taking pictures. I think about that all the time, basically every time I'm in a parking lot, but also every time I see somebody taking a photo that I'm like, they're never going to look at that again. I'm always like, well, what's with the pictures? You're in the parking lot.

So anyway, yeah, it's a really eerily calm photo. I'll try to remember to put it in the show notes. So at this point, the pilots set their transponder to a distress signal and the ground control goes back and forth with the flight engineer and the pilots to try to get them to bank towards the nearest airport. Now, imagine the drop in your stomach as the pilot of this plane. When you realize that you cannot bank the plane left or right.

Well, you have no vertical stabilizers, your ailerons are all fucked, half your wing ripped off.

Like you have no control over the plane. Yeah. And things haven't even started to get bad for the passengers yet because, you know, that's when Godzilla shows up. Yeah. Mothra grabs the plane. Obviously, if you're a passenger, you hear this explosion. Even if you're not sitting in the part of the plane where you have any idea what's going on, you're probably freaking out a little bit. Your heart rate is racing at this point. And oh, that's the other thing. A white haze started to fill the cabin because the air was condensing so quickly. So that also would start making you panic. But you wouldn't know that the pilots have lost control of the plane until the now pilots. Somebody please write in and correct me. Fugoid or Fugoid cycle starts. GOID cycle, the Fugoid cycle, which I think sounds like a series of records from a straight edge hardcore band in like DC in the 80s Fugoid cycle. But the reality of what a Fugoid cycle is, is so much worse. So I found an article on media that describes this crash in great detail. And according to that article, a Fugoid cycle is when quote, a descending airplane gains speed until it starts to pull up by itself, entering a climb. So going up, which in turn causes it to lose speed until it heals over and enters a descent again. In the case of flight 123, the plane quickly embarked on a Fugoid motion with a 90 second period and an amplitude of 3000 to 5000 feet and a pitch angle varying between 15 degrees nose up and five degrees nose down. So what I translate that to mean is every 90 seconds, this fucking plane is dropping and rising 2000 feet.

Like a roller coaster.

Like a roller coaster with 500 some odd people on board. And I imagine screaming and crying and praying and shitting their pants.

And if I'm there, I'm definitely puking.

Ed is puking as quietly as he can. Just, you know, he doesn't want anyone to laugh at him if they survive this. They don't want to be like, that's the puke guy.

Well, I wonder if it has to do with like on a plane, there's a thing called the trim that you set the trim. You know, the plane is constantly wanting to go a little up, a little down, what have you. And basically you set it to keep it on the horizon line of we're going straight. We're not going down a little bit. We're not going up a little bit. We're going straight. So I imagine if you think you're going to fall out of the sky, maybe you set the trim way up to just kind of constantly tell the plane to be going up and not down. But I don't know enough about planes to even say what I'm saying. But I do wonder, you know, what are your actions? What are the steps you take when it's like, hey, we have no, we're missing a ton of very important parts of the plane.

Yes.

And like could doing the right thing, which is like, okay, if I follow the handbook, I should do this. But by doing that, could it still end you up in a crazy cycle of bad scenarios?

A little bit of both. We'll get to it a little bit later on. But the pilots and the ground control and the flight technicians were having a real, you know, this almost became an Apollo 13, like, holy shit, we did it. Unfortunately, it's on this show, so it did not. But these guys were fucking smart and they were heroes. Anyway, so the pilots have lost control of the plane. The people on the plane only find that out when it starts to go up and down like a crazy roller coaster from hell, 2,000 feet every 90 seconds up and down. And then because they lost at least 55 percent of their vertical stabilizer, including the rudder, a Dutch roll was introduced on top of the Fugoid cycle.

Which I have to imagine a commercial airliner not designed to be doing Dutch rolls.

No, the article explains that in a Dutch roll, a plane without lateral stabilization starts to behave like a fishtailing trailer on the highway, rolling and yawing from side to side with a regular period. Following the separation of the stabilizer, Flight 123 experienced a Dutch roll with a period of 12 seconds, during which it would roll 50 degrees to the right, then 50 degrees to the left, before repeating the cycle over and over again. Can you even imagine the plane is throwing people around, left, right, up and down, all at the same time, and now there's puke and shit and piss. I mean, we're getting to the top of the fear tier just on the amount of hot piss and shit alone in this fucking plane. I mean, so literally, for those of you, Ed and I are on Zoom so he can see my hand movements, but just to be clear for everyone just listening, essentially what's happening is this plane is rising and dropping 2,000 feet every 90 seconds while going left and right 50 degrees each way, also every 12 seconds, I think it is.

It does make me laugh about the Dutch roll aspect where it's like if you're going Dutch, you're paying half, and a Dutch roll would only roll half way, not a full roll. Well, it's like what is with the Dutch and this world perception that they won't go all in on anything. I need to know more about that. But anyway, people who are real people are dying at this moment. So tell me more.

Yes, hundreds of souls are on a collision course with the great beyond. This is where the pilots and ground control crew, I think, are like total fucking heroes. So because they knew they couldn't control the planes, hydraulics and rudders at this point. Like they figured out, OK, we don't have control over these elements of the plane, but they could still control the engines so they could still fire the engines. And here's God damn, here's the like one of the just like kill me now moments. They realize they could counter fire the engines to control either the Dutch roll or the Fugoid cycle. The fucking nightmare was that the more they stabilized one, the worse that they would make the other. So if they tried to stabilize the Dutch roll by counter firing the engines one direction to the other, it would make the Fugoid cycle, rip the plane out of their control and vice versa, which is just like, come on, man. Like you're sitting in a cockpit at that point. What the fuck did I do? How am I here?

It's at that point, everyone's memories went back to the guy at Japan Air, who just six months earlier was like, hey, I know it's expensive, but maybe ejector seats for every row? Yeah, everyone's like never going to need it because this seems like exactly the moment where I would love to just hit a button and eject everybody.

Yeah, well, I hope this is one of those things where it's like, and I didn't see this in the literature because again, most of it is like highly technical and I don't understand a lot of it, but I hope this is one of those things where one of the things that came from this was, hey, we didn't think you could get in a situation where you'd have a Dutch roll and a Fugoid cycle at the same time. If you do, now we've figured out how to fix it so that you don't fuck yourself fixing one and making the other worse. The only bright side of plane crashes is they usually learn, they go, oh, we didn't see that coming and then they fix it.

There's this great book, a book for pilots, you know, small plane pilots that my old coworker was reading. And the book was essentially like all the things I learned, I learned like almost crashing. It was like stories of, okay, here's something I didn't think would kill you in a plane. And here's how I got around it or here's how you can avoid it. But it wasn't like, here's the rules of flying. It was like, here's the things you're maybe definitely going to run into. And you should be aware of how to correct this.

Yeah, flying is still, you know, you're fucking around with physics and crazy things happen. And you got to learn how to fix things on the fly. I certainly couldn't do it. I can barely turn the microphone on when we start this podcast.

So there's days where I think I can be an airline pilot. And then there's also just listening. So I used to work with a I worked with a guy who the guy was just talking about the guy who was reading the book. He worked like one desk over for me at a company who pretty exclusively listened to air traffic control. So I listened to all day was air traffic control. He's a great guy, but it is weird. But sure.

Yeah.

And I will say that just listening to air traffic control, it's such shorthand. It's also like quick math and shit like that, where I just don't think I would have that in me. I wouldn't be able to be like, oh, well, coming in at whatever, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Like my brain doesn't work that way.

No. So I will say at this point, the pilot's brains on Japan Air 123 probably weren't working much at all because unfortunately, during the confusion and the miscommunication and pulling G's every up and down like, yeah, they had forgotten to or chosen not to put their oxygen masks on. And the audio suggests that they were suffering from hypoxia at this point, which is a lack of oxygen to the brain and making it hard for them to understand what was happening. So this is where the really getting fucked started to set in. Because like at one point on the recording and I'll post, there's a YouTube video that's really well done that lines up all of the audio recording with a simulation of what the plane was doing at every point for the like half an hour this all went on.

Which by the way, the people who made that video are the same people who are subjecting their coworkers to the sound of air traffic control all day. There are many enthusiasts in this hobby.

Yes, there are. But like at one point on the recording, the pilots talk about trying to descend as if they hadn't tried it yet, even though they've been trying to descend for a couple of minutes already and not having any success. Then for another what I'm sure was an unbearably frightening 10 to 12 minutes, the pilots keep trying all these different things to get the plane under control. And again, as someone who just like really loves people who are great at their jobs and like steely eyed and could get shit done, these guys were amazing. They lowered the landing gear to try to create some drag, see if that could help slow the plane down. And they finally managed to fire the engines in the right way to make a right turn towards the nearest airport. But once they started the turn, they couldn't stop it. And then that sent them into a 360 degree downward spiral where they lost about 5000 feet of altitude every couple of seconds. And after about a full half an hour of this roller coaster terror, the plane crashes into the mountains.

Miraculously, everyone survived.

They all deserve to, man. Well, actually, I guess before I even say miraculously, one of the compounding tragedies here is that the assumption from the Japanese government that there would be no survivors delayed rescue crews reaching the crash site. And according to some of the survivors, there were four of them pulled from the wreckage a day later, they heard people all night screaming and wailing and shouting to each other, which means there were a lot of survivors relatively.

There were potentially more than four, but they took their sweet ass time because they were like, no one's going to survive what we just heard happened.

Yeah. So doctors later estimated that they think they could have saved 20 to 50 more people from the crash if there hadn't been a delay in getting people out there.

So that's heart wrenching.

Jesus Christ. Yeah. If experiencing the fear of falling out of the sky is part of what you're afraid of on planes like I am, this one might be the worst airline disaster in history.

Well, I guess in my mind, when I think of, you know, when I get on a plane and I say, you know, what's out of my control and whatever happens happens, and I guess until right now, I always thought that if the plane falls out of the sky or crashes on landing or whatever, I'm going to die. I guess I have never once in my life put into my mind that like, oh, one of the things that can happen is I'm going to go on a half hour minimum, one hour maximum carnival ride I did not anticipate and did not pay for.

I mean, from the accident to the actual moment of impact is about a half an hour.

And there's no version where that feels fast to anyone but the pilots. The pilots, you're working, you're busy, the time is flying by and the ticking clock is ticking. But to anyone just sitting in your seats, you're begging for death at a certain point. Like you're fucking doing spins, you're doing circles, you're going up, you're going down.

Yeah.

Bags at this point have fully blown out of the tops of the fucking trays. If you are at a window seat, you're looking at like a Twilight Zone level, you know, Gremlin has eaten away the fucking plane. I'm sure we'll get to Gremlins later because Gremlins are a folklore born in the air. But it is just like I genuinely, yeah, when I get on and I tell myself if this happens, this happens, I until right this moment never really thought of the idea that what you just said could happen. I always assumed in my brain, I'm like, oh, wing falls off, it fall to the ground, it's 25 seconds, we're good. So yeah, I really don't like this story. This is fucking terrible, dude.

Yeah, I know. Also never really thought about surviving a plane crash and then sitting in the mountains overnight with your legs missing, waiting for someone to come save you.

But it was in the mountains?

Yeah, it crashed in the mountains.

Okay, because I feel like that's a little bit more like, okay, maybe it's difficult to get up there, so we'll postpone it until everyone's ready. If it had crashed in the parking lot of a hospital and then they still took their sweet time, that's I think egregious. But the fact that it's in the mountains in rural Japan, I could see how that could be like a logistical nightmare.

Well, and I'm pretty sure there was an American, I want to say like a Navy helicopter or something that flew over first maybe, and they were like, we should get down there and save people. The Japanese were like, I don't remember if it was because they were afraid that they'd look bad or what it was, but they told the Americans no. They were like, we don't need your help. Yeah, so among the famous deaths here that would have gotten either of us out of the newspaper, Japanese singer and actor Kiyu Sakamoto, banker Akisha Yukawa, the father of violinist and composer Diana Yukawa. I don't know who any of these people are, but they are apparently much more famous than me, and thus my name would not have made the headlines of dying in that plane crash.

Rest in peace, those people.

Rest in peace, those people. This is, you know, it helps talk about these things. That's part of why we started this podcast, to like get the fears off the chest a little bit, form a community. God, these are heavy, though. The problem with a lot of these crashes is that no matter how scary they are, well, the problem for those of you listening to this as entertainment, no matter how scary the crashes are, a lot of the information, like I said, is really boring and technical, so it's like finding good ones to talk about are tricky. Oh, okay, here's a good one. In the previous two crashes that we talked about, the pilots did everything they could to avoid disaster. One thing I know really scares people though, is the idea that their pilot of their plane might be suicidal. And even in the world of airline disasters, suicidal pilots are really, really rare. According to the New York Times, a US Federal Aviation Administration study found that out of 2,758 aviation accidents documented from 2003 to 2012, only eight were suicides. So pretty low chance.

Yeah, that's pretty low. I think eight is still higher than I thought you were going to say. But that is, it's good to know that there's not too many. Although, speaking of suicidal pilots, not truly suicidal, but an interesting thing, we talked earlier about smoking on planes, right? I'm fairly certain that even after smoking on planes was banned, the pilots were still allowed to smoke because the airlines were worried that what it would do to the, I guess, the psychology of a pilot who would have to be going to withdrawal on long flights if they're an everyday smoker. And so they let them smoke with a regulator in the cockpit to kind of blow the smoke out, I guess. But they were allowed to smoke after 1995 or whenever the hell we stopped smoking on planes because they were worried that, do you want an irritable pilot who's like, I fucking can't smoke for 12 hours? Are you kidding me? That I think is very interesting.

Yeah, I guess. I mean, what do they do now? You just chew gum now?

Yeah, whatever. But I think there was this like period where the pilots union probably was like, what do you want? You want a bunch of people pissed off flying your planes? You kidding me? Yeah. And I think they tried to acquiesce that with, and I don't know, I'm just making that up. I don't want to put words in the mouths of the pilots union reps that maybe didn't happen.

Well, I was going to put words in the mouths of the pilots union by saying they also probably were fighting for alcoholics to fly planes. I feel like that's a pretty standard pilot trait.

It's a trope. Yeah.

God, I'm sorry. If you're a pilot, I don't mean to demean your profession. I thank God that you're as good as you are.

This show loves pilots.

Yeah.

And we missed the time when they were **** and **** people.

I mean, yeah.

And I think we should go back to that. I think you should be able to go back to **** and **** being a celebrity who's ****. That's the Scared All The Time promise that we will edit this out, because I can't say any of those things.

Scared All The Time Air, we'll make sure. So we're going to close the episode talking about two suicidal pilots. Although I promise the last one is hilarious. It's hilarious and surprisingly uplifting. So keep listening. But first, a tragedy. German Wings Flight 9525, the most recent and highest profile airline disaster that was caused by a suicidal pilot. This happened March 24th, 2015. German Wings Flight 9525 was an international passenger flight going from Barcelona to Dusseldorf. And it went down 62 miles northwest of Nice in the French Alps. All 144 souls on board and six crew souls were lost. The story here isn't nearly as long or complex as the Japan Air disaster, but it's no less horrifying if you imagine what this must have been like. So the plane takes off from Barcelona around 10 a.m. hits cruising altitude 38,000 feet seven minutes later, and the captain, a 34-year-old guy named Patrick Sondenheimer, requests the co-pilot, 27-year-old Andreas Lubitz, take over the controls while Patrick leaves the cockpit to go take a pee. Patrick leaves the cockpit and Lubitz immediately locks the door behind the pilot and guides the plane into a rapid descent. And one of the things that I think is so scary about this crash is that when Sondenheimer returned to the cockpit and realized he couldn't get in, he started banging on the door and trying to break it down in front of all the passengers. So if you were sitting there, you're seeing the pilot banging and screaming to get back into the cockpit as you were going into a steep decline, I mean, you know it's over.

You were second guessing your first class tickets at that point. You'd be the only ones up front.

True, true. The door was made of reinforced steel. It was installed after 9-11. They're built to, I read somewhere, and I can't believe this is true, but they're built strong enough to hold up against a grenade blast, which seems like it would, the rest of the plane would just explode and the door would be all that survives, but there's no chance that this guy was going to get through the door. The black box audio has never been released, but it is reported that you can hear the passengers screaming and the pilot banging on the door saying, for God's sake, open the door. 10 minutes later, the plane crashed into the mountains. Even though the passengers had no way of knowing that their pilot was suicidal, they did know they were going down really fast. And I think it's kind of weird to think that everyone, including the pilot, died, probably assuming that there was some kind of a medical emergency, like that the co-pilot had like a heart attack or something. Because I don't think anybody would be like, oh, well, shouldn't have left it to the suicidal guy.

I guess, yeah, you're true. Even for the other pilot who's banging on the door, he's like, yeah, he's probably not thinking the guy has taken control of the plane and is actively going to crash it. Yeah, he probably is just thinking, oh, the guy had a heart attack, collapsed onto the wheel or something. But if you're a pilot, you might know and feel what's going on and be like, this motherfucker.

Yeah.

Or the guy like every day is just sucks in this other pilot knows like, fuck, this, this fuck, this guy, we knew this was coming.

Investigators found out that it's unclear if anyone knew this was coming. They went through his computer, Lou Beats' computer after the disaster and discovered that he'd been searching for suicide methods and researching cockpit door security in the days leading up to the crash. Oh no. They also discovered he had a history of severe depression and he had doctor's notes declaring him unfit to work, but he had never submitted that information to Lufthansa.

That really seems like it should be a responsibility of the medical professional, not on the fucking patient there.

I guess so, but I mean, what's the, I don't even know. What's like patient privacy rules around my patient, because do you even know your patient's profession necessarily? I mean, you might.

I mean, he said he's unfit to work.

Yeah. Well, I guess if he wrote notes.

Yeah. So I would imagine like if anyone's at fault, I mean, that person's pissed, you know, they're kicking themselves now. It's like, well, why didn't I just send this to Lufthansa and say, hey, I think the second worst thing after the heist that happened on your airline is going to be maybe my patient drives it into a fucking mountain. So wanted to make sure this got to the right place.

I guess a therapist has to report you if you like, if you discuss committing suicide, like actively discuss killing yourself, I think they have to report it. But I don't know. I don't know if a doctor has to tell your workplace that you're suicidal. That's a good question.

Also, this is Germany. So who knows what the laws are there?

Yeah.

In many ways, you think they'd be stricter, but who knows?

Yeah.

This guy sucks, man. This guy sucks.

This guy sucks.

This person deserves to fly a plane into a mountain and arrive in hell because that's such a dick move. It's unbelievable.

Yeah. I was saying that I think this guy is kind of honestly like almost more evil than a terrorist because hear me out.

Okay.

Like terrorists, at least even if misguidedly, like they believe in something like there's a cause, there's a purpose. Whereas this motherfucker killed 150 people because his girlfriend broke up with him, which just seems so, there's no greater.

Is that really what happened?

Yeah. Yeah.

It was a lady. A lady broke up with them and he fucking decided to kill 300 people over it.

Actually, I shouldn't say that. I don't have that highlighted in my fact color. So maybe not. I shouldn't say that. I don't want to start throwing accusations around.

So the guy's upset. The guy, I don't know. I don't agree with the terrorist thing. I think I'd almost rather a guy kill 300 people for a completely selfish reason than that of indoctrination. So there you go.

Interesting. Interesting. Fair enough. But we will end on, as I promised, a sort of God, the lawyers probably won't like it if I say inspiring story. But to say our next story is our next story is a charming suicide by plane that happened in 2018. Ed, have you ever heard of the Sky King, Richard Russell?

No, but I am pretty furious right now that 2018 was not long ago. Well, especially in my mind, we're like, everything is the year 2019. Like I don't ever think about the COVID years. But 2018, we're dealing with fucking pilot suicides as recently as 2018. I don't love that.

Yeah. But this guy wasn't even really a pilot. So to fully appreciate this story, you really need to hear the audio. And maybe we'll put it in. I don't know if it'll cut in very well. I'll certainly put a link so that you can go to a YouTube video and watch it slash listen to it. But it is weirdly, it's a story of a man who snaps and kind of without harming anyone takes his freedom. And I should stress, I guess at the beginning, we're not encouraging this, but considering how tragic this episode has been and when looking for a positive note to end your episode on airline disasters, this was the closest I can find. So enjoy. On August 10th, 2018, Richard Russell, a 29 year old ground crew employee at Seattle International Airport or a SeaTac, I believe, stole an empty plane off the runway for a joyride. He was described as a quiet guy, but well liked, never displayed any kind of issues at work or at home. He also, wildly, considering some of the maneuvers he pulled off, had no piloting experience other than what investigators think he may have been able to pick up from at home flight simulators. So it's bizarre that he was even able to pull this off.

I will say at home flight simulators are pretty fucking intense now. Like Microsoft simulator is, it's truly simulating. I mean, every button, switch, flap, whatever is all represented. It's so wildly realistic, that stuff. I mean, how that translates to being able to do it, I don't know, but they really are incredibly detailed, these simulators. And I'm pretty sure they've got like big planes, like the big airliners, like the one this guy stole.

Well, they are on the recording at one point, he mentions like, yeah, you know, I play video games. So some people have taken that to mean that he was like training on a flight simulator, but he may have just been flying planes in Grand Theft Auto for all we know. So not only did he manage to get this plane in the air, but he executed a number of loops and barrel rolls that experts have said would have been difficult for an experienced pilot, nevermind an amateur. You know, partially that may have been because he was, you know, feeling like this was the end and like he didn't really give a shit, so he just kind of went for it.

But also I think what he means by that is like a barrel roll in a plane is not like I'm going to turn the wheel to the left and it's going to spin. There are pedals, there's different adjustments, there's all sorts of things that like, you know, you don't just turn the flight over and it stays straight ahead and stuff.

Yeah.

I do believe there is a series of things that, you know, mechanically you need to engage for some of these. So yeah, he definitely wouldn't have just played video games, I guess.

Yeah. Part of what's really crazy about the whole situation, and again, this is where like the video and the audio comes in, is that there was, and I kind of remember seeing this like play out live on the internet between Twitter and Reddit and YouTube and stuff the day that this happened, because there's a ton of video that witnesses took because he was flying this plane within and sometimes directly over populated areas. And so there's video as well as the audio of his conversation with air traffic control that was recorded and posted online. So we will again, either drop it in the episode or put it in the links. But on the recording, Richard Russell tells air traffic control that he has a screw loose, although he didn't realize it until now. He apologizes for causing any complications at Seattle International and even apologizes to air traffic control and says that he hopes his little stunt doesn't ruin their day. He claims he just wants to pull off some maneuvers and see what the plane can do. At one point, he even asks for coordinates of an orca that was spotted off the Puget Sound so he could quote, go see that guy. So again, I stress you listen to the audio. He sounds pretty happy. He doesn't sound angry. He doesn't sound upset. He sounds like he's getting away with something and that he's really enjoying himself.

This guy's wearing a Tommy Bahama shirt. He's wearing flip flops flying the plane.

It sounds like I imagine him kind of looking like the pilot from Chip and Dale rescue rangers, you know, just like, you know, a big jolly dude. When it was suggested by air traffic control that Russell land the plane, he says, I don't know, I don't really want to. I was kind of hoping this was going to be it, you know. He added that he quote, wasn't really planning on landing it. And then air traffic control pushes him to try to land at this nearby Air Force base. And he says, now those guys will rough me up if I try to land there. I think I might mess something up there, too. I wouldn't want to do that.

That's a pretty smart, smart response.

Smart. You know, two F-15s were eventually scrambled to guide him out over the ocean and away from anyone he could hurt by accident or on purpose. Because even though he sounded relatively friendly, no one was entirely sure what was going on. So the F-15s were, I imagine, ready to shoot him down if need be. But the fighters didn't fire. And Richard Russell went out on his terms, crashing the plane into an isolated forest after pulling off one last barrel roll. So this motherfucker barrel rolled straight to heaven.

Hell yeah, dude. And I'm sure that plane was insured that he stole. There's no losers here.

No. I mean, look, again, I certainly don't encourage it or recommend it. But, you know, the weirdest thing is no one really knows what happened. Like, even when they investigated, it seemed like his relationships were all okay. I don't remember if he had a girlfriend or if he was married or not. But, like, he hadn't been complaining about it. It just seems like he kind of, like he says on the recordings, like, had a screw loose and something just, it just didn't go well that day and he flew off into the sky.

I mean, that's the thing about Richie, you know, he's left of center. He's a bit of a card. You know, he's fun at parties. And sometimes he just wants to see what that plane can do.

Yes, he wants to. That's another good SAT t-shirt. I want to see what this thing can do. Beryl Roll Richie. The audio and video became a meme, and he became known as the Sky King for his actions. So, yeah, Richard Russell, RIP. You seem like a real one.

RIP, God bless.

RIP to all the people who perished in these accidents, because I think on that note, we should step back from these disasters before I am unable to sleep. So, Ed, where would you place airline disasters on the theater? I know the first two episodes of the season, we've got some real high-scoring fears.

Luckily, I'm placing it low, because I have faith in, I don't know, pilots not wanting to be suicidal, and I have faith in the numbers that statistically it is still the safest form of travel, as long as I guess you're not flying on Boeing. Allegedly, I don't know what the legality of saying that is. It's just funny, because it used to be, you know, very respected. Like, if it's Boeing, you're going. You know what I mean? Like, it's not going to be an issue. And now it just seems like they're in the news every freaking day. And that's kind of nuts.

I did see today, as we were recording, I saw a headline. They just replaced their whoever the head of that division was or something. There's been a big change of Boeing.

I mean, listen, the only people with more loose screws than Richie, the Sky King, is a Boeing factory at this point, it sounds like. So, yeah, they got to get that shit under control. They got to tighten it up. No pun intended.

Please, before I get on a fucking plane.

Yeah, because it used to be if it's Boeing, you're going in the Airbus as a scare bus. Like now it's like Airbus looking pretty pretty right now and Boeing is looking pretty shitty. Didn't mean to rhyme. That said, I'm keeping it low because I have to fly a lot. It's better for me not to think about every time I get on here, it's going to turn into Japan's largest roller coaster. So I am going to just go ahead and say I'm keeping it low for my sanity.

I, unfortunately, because I've had such a severe issue with this, I do have to place it high. Where did we end up with? I think we said we placed-

Eatin Alive is the top, is the moment.

Eatin Alive is the top. Man, I got to put airline disasters up there because I've just had such a hard time and still would if it weren't for my little white pill helpers up in the sky. So I don't know, I guess, you know, I put it above stalkers. I'd put it maybe below Eatin Alive and above stalkers, possibly even above Eatin Alive because there's a much better chance that I will die in a plane crash than be Eatin Alive by an animal. I say that now. Just wait. I'm sure my obituary will be super fucked up. Some animal tears me too.

Or you're going to be in some snakes on a plane situation where you're Eatin Alive as the plane's going down.

And then we land in the Amazon River and an anaconda swallows the plane with the snakes on it. It's like a turducken of planes.

And your stalker shows up at the funeral to befriend your whole family.

Yeah, exactly. So yeah, real fucking bleak.

Nice short bleak one. This is a good lesson for us. It's our first one we've done where I feel like it's pretty uncomfortable. Because there's just, this is like one where there's so many victims that didn't need to be, and it's such a wrong place, wrong time. Yeah, like wrong place, wrong time. I'm perfectly comfortable dealing with on the show. But when it's wrong place, wrong time for hundreds and hundreds of people, it bums me out.

Yeah, true. But that being said, this is one of those topics. And Ed and I have talked about this with some of the other topics for the show. But there's, I mean, we could do one of these a season.

There's so many you literally didn't bring up at least five that were on the top of my head that I thought were going to come up, which I'm happy that there's stuff that I wasn't really aware of or was very knowledgeable of. But yeah, for something that doesn't happen that often, there's a lot. We could have done Concord, so we could have done TWA. We could have done, you know, Malaysia, like you mentioned, but that one seems boring.

Yeah, Lockerbie. Yeah, there's a lot.

So there's plenty. There's plenty to get into. We could do a couple more parts or every season do one more, revisit it after a couple of successful flights on our own.

Yeah, if you like airline disasters as a topic, you know, let us know. If you hate it, also let us know. We won't do any more. Well, that's up to us, I guess. Maybe we will. We want to hear from you guys. We're almost at 500. We may have crossed 500 Facebook group members by the time you listen to this. And we couldn't do this without each and every one of you. So glad you're still listening. Thanks for being here. I'm Chris Cullari.

And I'm Ed Voccola.

And this has been Scared All The Time, and we will see you in the wild blue yonder.

We don't want you to fall out of our lives or out of the sky. So stick around. Keep coming back. Scared All The Time is co-produced and written by Chris Cullari and Ed Voccola.

Edited by Ed Voccola.

Additional support and keeper of sanity Tess Feifel.

Our theme is the track Scared by Perpetual Stew.

And Mr. Disclaimer is ****. No part of this show can be reproduced anywhere without permission. Copyright Astonishing Legends Productions. We are in this together.

Together.

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