A 747 plummets towards the Pacific Ocean. People just popped up like popcorn. This airplane is totally out of control.
It is gonna crash. In two minutes, China Airlines Flight 006 drops 10 kilometers through the clouds. Here's speed 270, 280, 290. The plane begins to tear itself apart as it spirals towards the sea.
Close my eye. I thought I was gone. The altitude, 15,000 feet.
12,000 feet. 10,000 feet. Emergency, emergency. February the 19th, 1985. A China Airlines flight cruises across the Pacific to Los Angeles. At 12,000 meters, it's racing towards the dawn.
For the passengers and crew on board, it's past midnight. A two-man relief crew is in charge of the plane as it sails above the ocean on autopilot. The main crew gets several hours off in the middle of the trip, so they're rested for the landing.
But Captain Moon Hyun-ho is restless. Good morning, gentlemen. Even though he's not officially on duty yet, Captain Ho returns to the cockpit. Thought I'd keep you company.
The captain isn't the only one up. Best friends Sexan Canio and Alex Knoll have something to celebrate. It's Sexan's 30th birthday.
I have the longest birthday because I just gained my 12 hours back. And we've been drinking champagne, celebrating 41,000 feet in the air. You know, not too many people get to do that. Bill Peacock is in first. class.
He's traveled all over the world for the American government. There was nothing special, it was a routine commercial flight. I had a very nice first-class seat, sat there and read some books, went to sleep. By now the plane is nearing the coast of California. Good morning ladies and gentlemen.
We will shortly be serving you breakfast. For those of you who wish to adjust your watches, the local time in Los Angeles is now 7 a.m. Sleep well? Very well, sir.
Thank you. Good morning, Captain. After their five-hour break, the flight crew is reunited in the cockpit.
Soon after, the plane runs into some stiff winds. Ladies and gentlemen, this is your captain speaking. We're experiencing some light air turbulence. The autopilot is set to keep the plane flying at 470 km an hour. But with the wind blowing hard, it's increasingly difficult to maintain the speed.
For the crew, the bumpy ride suddenly gets more worrying. Engine 4 is giving us weak thrust. There's a problem with one of the engines.
The flight engineer throttles up the engine. But it doesn't respond. We're losing speed.
Back in economy, Sex and Canyo has also noticed something. You notice the light in that wing isn't flashing anymore. So what?
I thought there was some light blinking at the tip of the wing. Looked like a cone. But when I look back this time, I didn't see no cone. All the light in that wing is still flashing.
I think you had a few, buddy. Have a seat. In the cockpit, the strange situation suddenly gets much worse.
Engine 4 slammed out. The fourth engine stops working completely. Take a look at engine out procedures. Work out a three-engine cruise altitude. The problem with the fourth engine isn't a complete surprise.
At the pre-flight briefing, Captain Ho was told that a repair crew had worked on Engine 4 before the flight. Perhaps the engine still wasn't working properly. We had a snag advisory on engine 4 before we took off. Yes sir.
Maybe that's it. Without the fourth engine, the plane continues to slow down. Airspeed 240. Call Auckland Centre and request a lower altitude. Auckland Centre.
Dynasty 006, requesting new altitude. Dynasty 006, stand by. Reignite engine port. Yes, Captain.
At this altitude, there isn't much oxygen, so the chances of a successful relight are slim. No response, Captain. As the crew try to restart their engine, their plane slowly begins to roll to the right.
Fantasy 006, you're cleared to flight 240. We're banking right, Captain. Airspeed 230. As the plane continues to turn and slow down, it's in danger of stalling. Altitude hold off. Nose down.
Hoping to increase his speed, Captain Ho tries pushing the plane's nose down. Nothing the crew does seems to help. Their jet is banking more and more steeply. Dynasty Flight 006, Oakland Center, how do you hear me? Airspeed 220. We're banking right, Captain.
I'm disengaging autopilot. For the first time, Captain Ho takes manual control of the plane. He struggles with the controls. But the plane has veered into thick cloud, and he can't see the horizon as he tries to keep his jet level.
I've lost ADI. The ADIs have malfunctioned. It's going out of limits. Just minutes after their fourth engine stopped working, the China Airlines flight suddenly stalls and begins falling from the sky. The aircraft is now in a state of emergency, and the plane is about to land.
People just popped up like popcorn, hitting the cabin, and all the train was flying. Hot tea, pots, noodles, and all the luggage in the compartment were hitting people. You could hear rivets popping.
It sounded like bullets were hitting the outside of the aircraft, which, you know, we're out in the middle of the ocean, nobody's shooting at us. At that time, we didn't know we were going to live or die. China Airlines Flight 006 is out of control and hurtling towards the ocean.
A China Airlines jet is tumbling out of the sky. After losing power to one engine, the jet is spinning out of control. It's dropping fast straight towards the Pacific Ocean.
You can see the students, all these people who didn't have their seat belt on, they were flying. DYNASTY 006, Oakland Center, how do you hear me? The crew are stunned, blindsided by their jet's bizarre behavior.
Engines 1, 2 and 3 have lost trust! Don't respond, doctor! Dynasty 006, Oakland Center, how do you hear me?
Airspeed 270, 280, 280 Dynasty 006, Oakland Center, how do you hear me? Struggling against the plane's wild motion, the flight engineer tries again to restart his fourth engine. The G-forces are so powerful that the flight engineer is pinned to the control pedestal.
Dynasty 006, Oakland Center, do you copy? Need to see this. In Oakland, air traffic control spots the plane's sudden descent. In a matter of seconds, the plane falls almost 3,000 meters.
Halt to 370, 360, 350. In the cabin the G-forces are punishing. When I close my eyes, I thought I was gone. I thought the plane just blew up in the mid-air. The plane is about to exceed its maximum speed.
Approaching VMO! Tumbling madly through the clouds, the 747 finally starts to pull out of its nosedive. As the plane rights itself, the g-forces change direction.
The passengers are pressed to the floor, feeling five times their normal weight. I remember looking over at this dignified older Chinese gentleman who was sitting across the aisle from me and his face was being contorted like this, like he was lying on his side in a wax museum in a fire. I mean, his face was just all contorted.
As the crew struggles to regain control of the plane, it begins to slow down. Airspeed 180 knots and falling. Dynasty 006 Oakland Center, how do you read me? Airspeed 140 knots and falling.
The jet is still dropping, but not as fast. This could be the crew's chance to regain control. I knew we were really in trouble, because G-forces, instead of being horizontal, started moving around to the vertical.
So we were being pushed down into our seats instead of sideways. As their speed continues to fall, the flight engineer reaches desperately for the engine throttles. Here's been 18 knots in volley. But the engines don't respond.
No response. The engines are flamed out. After tumbling 3,000 meters in 30 seconds...
the jumbo jet plunges again into another free fall. And the second time when it went down, this time... is plunged.
I mean, it went down. The change is swift. Once again, the passengers feel pulled towards the nose of the plane. You know, this airplane is totally out of control.
It is going to crash. The stuff were sliding around and flying around and shoved to one side and then shoved to another side. So it was kind of like being on a boat that gear is broken loose and it's just going back and forth with the waves.
ugly. My stomach was up to my throat. You smell people urinating in their pants.
I really made peace with the Lord. And I said, you know, to myself, I said, you know, I've really had a wonderful life. If this is the end, I'm ready to do it. 0-2-2-5-0. Airspeed 2-90.
As the plane spins towards the ocean, the airspeed increases rapidly. Dynasty 006. With the crews struggling to control the plane, six separate calls from air traffic control go unanswered. The stress of the dive tears the landing gear doors off the plane.
In less than a minute, the plane drops six kilometers. Hold on! That's my car! Stop! He said, I love you, man.
I told him I love you, man. And we said goodbye to our wife. And he said something about his belonging. He gave all his belonging to his wife. And that's when we just start pushing our car.
chair back together. With no visible horizon line, Captain Ho doesn't know which way is up. Without a reference, he can't stop the plane from spinning.
After blindly plunging thousands of meters, the plane finally breaks free from cloud. When this thing was falling down, it looked like you had a magnifying glass and you went like that. And all of a sudden the white water break becoming closer and closer, faster. faster it's like incredible and we thought we were going to die as he struggles for control captain ho has only 30 seconds before his crippled plane smashes into the ocean I can see the horizon multitude 10,000 feet For the first time since beginning his harrowing descent, the captain can now use the horizon line as a reference in leveling the plane. As he tries to pull the plane out of its dive, the passengers pay the price.
Their bodies are forced into their seats, battered by another dramatic change in direction. You know the G-Force was so strong and I weighed 200 pounds, so my weight was almost 1200 pounds. It's a race against time and the plane starts to win. ADI is coming back! As the plane finally begins to level, the attitude indicators return to normal.
ADI is coming in. More importantly, as mysteriously as the incident began, three of the plane's engines regain power. Engines 1, 2 and 3 are coming back.
Engine 4 still negative. Meet night engine 4. Yes, Captain. Once again the flight engineer tries to reignite the fourth engine, but this time...
Engine 4 reignited. For the first time in minutes, the plane is flying under control. They saved the airplane. They pulled the airplane out of this acrobatic maneuver at an altitude of 9,500 feet. They popped out of the clouds at 11,000 feet, and they had the airplane in stable level flight by 9,500 feet.
That was a masterpiece of flying. Ladies and gentlemen, this is the captain speaking. Is anyone hurt?
Do we have a doctor on board? There's a gentleman sitting behind me splattered with blood from hitting the compartment. So we kept flying. And next thing I knew that the whole plane was quiet. Real quiet.
Nobody talk very much in the talk, whispering, because we don't know, we still don't know we're going to live or die. Dynasty 006 fell off my screen, but she's back now. A new controller, Brian Campbell, has taken over control of Dynasty 006. Dynasty 006, Oakland Center, do you hear me? Can you fly the plane?
006, we are flamed out. We are... Emergency!
We are Niner Thousand! Niner Thousand! Roger, Roger.
We have radar contact. Oakland Center, Dynasty 006, we can control the aircraft. Roger, Roger.
Less than ten minutes. minutes after the start of their problems, everything seems normal again. ...request radar vectors to return to course.
There really is nothing I can do to assist. He's the pilot, he's flying the airplane. I'm going to give him a safe altitude to descend to, I'm giving him a destination. It appeared to me that he was well in control of his aircraft. Dynasty 006, Oakland Center, are you declared?
During an emergency, do you want to divert to San Francisco? Negative, Oakland Center. Condition normal now. We will continue to Los Angeles.
Air traffic control clears the plane to climb to 10,500 meters. But a new problem soon arises. Roger, Oakland Center. Captain, our landing gear is down and won.
Can you bring them up? Negative. The hydraulic fluid in system one is empty.
For some reason, the plane's landing gear is down. Hydraulic fluid, which controls the gear and many other parts of the plane, is also leaking away. Oakland Center, Dynasty 006, request new clearance to maintain flight level 270. Dynasty 006, Oakland Center, do you have injuries?
Stand by, Oakland Center. Sir, are you okay? Ed. One passenger has suffered serious injuries, and two dozen others have cuts and bruises.
006, we have at least two injuries on board. Dynasty 006, Oakland Center, are you declaring an emergency? Do you want to divert to San Francisco? Stand by, Oakland Center.
Oakland Center, Dynasty 006, we're declaring an emergency. We request a direct route to San Francisco. Well, they cleared all the other airplanes out of the way. They gave them clear runway, so nobody was waiting. Nobody, he didn't have to wait for anybody else.
He went straight in for a landing. Dynasty 006, Oakland Center, you are now cleared. You are free to descend at pilot's discretion.
Captain Ho not only has injuries on board, the plane itself has been severely damaged. His rear elevators, which help control the altitude of the plane, don't seem to be working. Without them, landing his jet safely will be extremely difficult. The problem is, it's a very big airplane and it responds very, very slowly, and you just might not do it before you run out of air. You might hit the ocean.
What you need is a very cool head. Captain Ho must now land using varying amounts of engine thrust. After pulling the plane out of its terrifying dive, if he makes one mistake, Flight 006 could still end in disaster. Nearing the end of a trip across the Pacific Ocean, China Airlines Flight 006 falls suddenly from the sky.
No response! The engines are flamed out! Emergency! Emergency! After a terrifying plunge, the crew manages to wrestle the plane level again.
But the jet is badly crippled. The elevators aren't working. Without them, Captain Ho has to land mostly by reducing power to his engines.
It's a controlled fall towards the runway. As we came in, we flew over the house in Atherton where I had lived, where my kids had been born. And I looked down and said, boy, this is fitting. If we don't make it down or this plane explodes on landing because it's been so badly torqued and ruptured, you know, at least I got to see that.
He made one of the best landings I've ever seen. I mean, it was just perfect touchdown. Ladies and gentlemen, this is Captain Hoare speaking.
Wishing you a safe journey. I hope you enjoyed our uneventful flight. Thank you for flying China Airlines. I thought he was a hero. He saved our lives.
I mean, how can we fell off very... I really don't know how far we fell at that time. We thought he was a hero and everything was fine. On the ground, the full extent of the damage to the plane can be seen.
I saw this enormous piece of extremely complicated machinery that is much larger than most buildings sitting there on the tarmac. With bits ripped off it. Parts of the entire tailplane at the end were ripped off as though a tornado had come through or a crane had been in and ripped pieces out of it.
It was a very sobering experience. It's clear why the crew had such a hard time landing the plane. Enormous chunks of the tail are missing, either torn off by the stress of the dive, or crushed when the landing gear doors broke loose. If the damage had been much more severe, the crew wouldn't have been able to regain control of their jet.
Two dozen passengers have minor injuries. Only one requires hospitalization, but is soon released. A near disaster was avoided. But what had gone wrong in the first place?
The National Transportation Safety Board arrived that very day and launched their investigation. The cockpit The cockpit voice recorder is sent to Washington. But it's designed to tape over itself every 30 minutes. None of what happened in the cockpit during the terrifying plunge from the sky remains.
Without a cockpit voice recorder we had to reconstruct what the crew said and how they interpreted things and what was going on in the cockpit to the best of our abilities with the other data that was available to us. A record of the plane's instrument activity during the flight has been captured by the flight data recorder. But again the team runs into a problem.
The flight data recorder experienced unprecedented stress during the dive. There were electrical interruptions too, which caused gaps in the recording. The FDR information will have to be recovered using painstaking techniques of reconstruction. It's a frustrating start to the investigation.
Investigators begin with what they do have. Passengers and crew report that just before the failure of the jet's fourth engine, the plane flew through unexpected turbulence. Had this caused the engine to fail? Satellite weather maps reveal that there was indeed heavy air turbulence over the Pacific. But it wasn't severe enough to cause engine failure.
The jet's four engines are tested and studied. Even after the horrific dive through the sky, they're found to be in working order. However, given the previous history of problems with engine 4, it receives particular scrutiny.
They had an anomaly with one of the engines. They believed that the engine had flamed out or that there was something seriously wrong with the engine. The wear on a small throttle valve trimmer is measured.
It's worn down by only four or one thousandth of an inch. But that's enough to restrict the fuel flow to engine four. Engine four is giving us weak thrust. Investigators determined that at 12,000 metres, engine four did indeed deliver weaker-than-normal thrust.
It's known as a hung engine. The aircraft logbook reveals that engine four had been written up on two previous occasions just the week before. Perhaps the engine wasn't properly fixed, which led to the China Airlines mishap. The NTSB decide to dig deeper into the history of maintenance on Engine 4. We had a snag advisor on Engine 4 before we took off. Maybe that's it.
But after weeks of investigation, the NTSB concludes that the engine didn't need to be replaced. All the repairs were done according to the book. A faulty engine was not the cause of the accident. And even with the loss of one engine, the plane shouldn't have been in immediate danger.
Engine 4 flamed out. A 747 is designed to fly on only three engines. The loss of thrust on a four-engine airplane is a minor event. It's an event, you have to take care of it, but the airplane is easily retrimmed and the airplane will fly on three engines with no difficulty. We're banking right, Captain.
Airspeed 230. The airplane is perfectly capable of flying. It's not as efficient because it's got this big round drag-producing device out there, not, you know, not producing any thrust, but... Given that it's not going to get quite so many miles per gallon, otherwise it's perfectly flyable. Take a look at... Engine out procedures.
Work out a three engine cruise altitude. Yes, Captain. There are standard procedures to follow in the case of an engine failure. But the crew of the China Airlines flight hadn't followed them.
They tried to reignite the engine immediately instead of descending. Reignite engine four. Yes, Captain. They attempted a restart much too high. You are supposed to attempt to restart an engine only below 30,000 feet.
They were at 41,000. What is a little curious to me is why they didn't use the normal relight procedure. They were starting to try to relight the engine at altitude, and that would likely not relight.
No response, Captain. It's a mistake, but it shouldn't have led to the plane spiralling out of control. So how had a manageable problem turned into a near disaster?
I've lost ADI. The ADIs have malfunctioned. It's going out of limits!
To get more information on what was happening in the cockpit, investigators interview the flight crew. I heard the captain report the ADI was lost. And then I saw the standby ADI was also going out of limits. The crew tell investigators that their ADIs, which measure how level the plane is, weren't working. They could have said this can't possibly be right and looking at their indicators can't possibly be right and therefore they must have failed.
The attitude indicator had indicated a position so implausible. that it looked like it had to be a failed instrument. This couldn't be what the plane was really doing. But in fact, when the ADIs are studied by the NTSB, they're all found to be perfectly normal.
When we started banking right, engine four was already flamed out. We started to descend faster and engines 1, 2 and 3 also failed. Engines 1, 2 and 3 have lost thrust!
NTSB investigators are even more confused when the crew tells them that all of their engines had failed. No response, Captain! With the exception of engine 4, the flight data recorder indicates that the other three engines were working the entire flight. Mission negative!
If the engines had all failed, there would have been a host of other problems, such as cabin depressurization. But that didn't happen. Engines one, two and three are coming back.
Finally, when we descended lower in altitude, one, two and three came back and we were able to reignite engine number four. Engine four reignited. At the end of the dive, the crew had the plane under full power.
It was a remarkable recovery. But to investigators, it's a puzzle. The story the crew is telling doesn't match up with the evidence they've uncovered. After months of investigation, the NTSB team slowly pieced together a re-enactment of the plane's near catastrophe over the Pacific.
It includes information from the reconstructed flight recorder, personal interviews and the air traffic control transcript. When the work is complete, there's only one conclusion. Apart from a problem with a small valve, there was nothing wrong with the 747 before it plunged from the sky.
In fact, it was the crew that made a series of fateful decisions that almost crashed the plane. Just after 10 o'clock Pacific time, engine 4 starts to lose thrust. Engine 4 is giving us weak thrust.
The flight engineer struggles to fix the problem. But investigators discover that he doesn't take one of the most basic steps he should have. He leaves the engine's bleed air valve on.
The bleed air valve takes air generated by the engine to help cool the plane. When an engine isn't working properly, the valve is supposed to be closed, so the engine can use all available air to restart. It's a little puzzling that the flight engineer didn't shut off bleed air.
And in my mind, the most likely reason for it is that he didn't expect to be told to restart the engine at 41,000 feet. And so when the captain instructed him to try some restarts, he just... Kind of wasn't ready with his checklist. He wasn't, he was doing something out of order.
And that's why it didn't occur to him to shut down the bleed air. The end result is that the engine which is slow to start won't start at all. Unwittingly, the flight engineer has started a ticking clock.
Engine 4 is slowly losing its ability to stay lit. We're losing speed. With more engine power on the left wing than the right, the China Airlines flight begins turning. In order to keep it from turning to the right, the proper thing to do would have been to step on the rudder. That would have produced a twisting force, so to speak, that would have overcome the imbalance of the engines.
But instead of adjusting the rudder himself, Captain Ho continues to let the autopilot fly the jet. The autopilot is designed not to move the rudder. The autopilot can adjust the ailerons and spoilers on the plane's wings, but these flaps aren't strong enough to overcome the imbalance that the plane is experiencing.
Without the help of the rudder, the plane's turn becomes steeper and steeper. Now, it's possible that he'd forgotten that the autopilot didn't use the rudder. He may have been assuming all along that the autopilot was just flying the airplane the way a human being would have, which it wasn't. Engine 4 flamed out.
Investigators discover that after losing power to his fourth engine, Captain Ho continues to leave the autopilot on. He doesn't take complete control of the plane. He doesn't adjust the plane's rudder with his left foot. Airspeed 240. He didn't use the rudder to compensate for the lack of thrust on the right outboard engine.
The airplane started to lose speed and one thing led to another and... In the end, it was really that little error of airmanship, the failure to step on that left rudder pedal, that triggered everything else. Reignite engine four. Yes, Captain.
Rather than taking control of flying the plane, Captain Ho's attention seems to be focused on his engine problem, something that his flight engineer could handle on his own. No response, Captain. It's really critical that attention be paid to flying the airplane.
But it's happened over and over again in aviation that the crew gets focused on a problem with a system. this case an engine but it could have been a light bulb it could have been any other malfunction and if everybody's focused on that and nobody is flying then they're not prepared for what's happening to the airplane the plane enters a critical moment it's about to flip on its side and enter a nosedive the ntsb believes that the captain was concentrating on his airspeed indicator but seemingly fails to notice the instrument directly beside it His attitude indicator. This instrument would have warned him that his plane was starting to roll alarmingly to the right.
They concentrated on one part of the phenomenon and lost the full picture. And as they lost the full picture, they lost apparently a very important part of any instrument flying, which is the scan. You look at all of the primary instruments, one after the other, and whatever is going on, you look at them all constantly. During the plane's nosedive, it flies through thick cloud.
With no visual horizon as a reference, the flight crew must trust their instruments to level the plane. I've lost ADI. Instead, what investigators believe happened is that the crew became spatially disoriented. They decided that their instruments were failing. They simply didn't believe what they were seeing, and they thought they had lost their adage.
instruments. They hadn't lost their attitude instruments. The airplane was in fact embarking on an aerobatic maneuver. The most probable reason for all three crew members believing something so unlikely as that all attitude indicators could malfunction in the same way at the same time is that the way in which they malfunctioned was so unexpected and strange that it didn't seem to correspond to any possible thing that the airplane could be doing.
The airplane had in fact rolled over on its back and gone into a vertical dive, and that's something that Boeing 747s don't typically do. As the plane begins tumbling towards the ocean, another critical lapse in judgment occurs. The standby ADI was also going out of limits. I tried to restart...
During interviews, the flight engineer told the NTSB that all three of the plane's working engines failed. We started to descend faster, and engines 1, 2, and 3... But the flight data recorder shows that in fact they were still working.
In the heat of the crisis the engineer had made an enormous mistake. The investigation reveals that as the plane fell the thrust in each engine was indeed reduced dramatically. But the cause wasn't engine trouble. The engine throttles had been lowered to idle in an attempt to slow the furious fall of the jet. It was something the engineer missed in the chaos of the dive.
You can understand why the flight engineer might have been confused about this situation if he had not seen the captain pull the power to idle. on the engines, he would reasonably assume that the fact that they went to idle was a problem rather than intentional. Investigators also believe that they know why the engines didn't give the crew more power when the engineer tried to throttle them up. The cold temperatures at 9,000 meters would stop them from responding quickly.
But in the heat of the moment, the engineer could have taken their slow response as another indication that they failed. The NTSB discovers that indeed gauges in the generator panel behind the engineer showed that the three engines were still firing. But the gravitational force became so powerful, the engineer couldn't look back. After months of painstaking recreation, the NTSB investigators believe they understand what happened inside the cockpit of China Airlines Flight 006. But what they don't understand is why.
The crew's medical records are examined. Was there something wrong with the captain that might explain the bizarre behavior? Nothing turns up. You know, it wasn't just the three stooges who, you know, won a trip on a 747 or something. It was a trained crew, highly experienced, thousands of hours.
How could an experienced crew make so many fundamental mistakes? The investigators find the answers in the hours before the incident. What they uncover is a potential danger that affects pilots around the world.
In 1985, a series of small pilot errors lead to a terrifying plunge from the sky. Spinning wildly out of control, a China Airlines flight tumbled 10 kilometers towards the Pacific Ocean. By the time the crew regained control, the plane was badly damaged.
Amazingly, everyone on board survived. Investigators have uncovered a series of mistakes which nearly led to the death of everyone on board China Airlines Flight 006. But how could an experienced, well-trained and healthy crew make so many mistakes? The NTSB team decides to examine all of the factors affecting human behavior, including a new field of research.
For the first time, as far as I know, in a report, the circadian rhythms, the biorhythms, the day and night functioning of the body were seriously taken into account as... a possible explanation of why an extremely experienced Boeing 747 captain didn't notice things that to other pilots might have seemed obvious, such as the fact that his airplane was busy flipping on his back when he was attempting to deal with an engine problem. Although Captain Ho had the required 15 hours off duty before flying that day, The NTSB investigators take a closer look at the captain's schedule before the night of the flight. I do not think I was fatigued.
I can't say I slept well during the flight. This accident occurred at what would be about 2 a.m. local time.
And that's pretty significant. Most people are asleep around 2 AM. So this incident occurred at a point in his, what we would call circadian rhythms, in his body clock, where he would be in his deepest sleep. I remember also that he had gone back into the crew rest area on the 747. And he said he'd rested for five hours and slept for two. Another thing I remember from his interview is he said, you never really sleep well on the airplane.
Captain never sleep well during a flight. I worked many years for this airline, but I never had this problem before. That seemed like a very true statement.
You know, it's hard to get a really solid sleep on the airplane, particularly if you're the person in command, as he was. So, putting it all together, we saw this was an experienced crew, a qualified crew, and they were flying on a schedule that would make them susceptible to some of the negative or adverse effects of fatigue. During six flights in the previous six days, Captain Ho had covered a total of 18 time zones.
Thought I'd keep you company. The NTSB research suggests that desynchronosis, or jet lag, may have been a cause. I think all these factors certainly would have contributed to his being performing at less than his full potential at the time.
Investigators also take a closer look at the very machinery that is supposed to make long-distance flying easier. Take a look at engine out procedures. Work out a three engine cruise altitude. Yes, Captain.
We have people in the front of airplanes because we believe that in circumstances which nobody has foreseen, the human being in the front of the airplane can react creatively, can solve a problem that nobody has thought about before in real time. And automation can't solve problems that nobody has thought about before in real time in quite the same way. The NTSB concludes that possibly fatigued from air travel and bored by the fact that the human being is in the front of the airplane, by the monotony of his tasks. We're banking right, Captain. I'm disengaging autopilot.
The captain relied on his autopilot for too long. When he should have taken direct control, he hesitated, trusting his systems. That is obviously a failure.
The crew didn't behave as they should have behaved. Pilot error. As a result of the China Airlines near mishap and other incidents around the same time, aircraft manufacturers began to rethink the design of their automated systems.
The idea of the automation is that it's going to help the human do the human's job. It's going to help the human take the airplane from the gate to the gate at the other end, and it's going to help along the way. Boeing makes use of this particular incident to say we still want the crew to have full authority so that they can move the controls as far as it's physically possible to move them and to manage the airplane, even if it may bend the airplane. It is better to do that than to restrict the pilot's authority and then have him guess whether or not he's in charge or the computer's in charge. Whatever mistakes the flight crew made that day, they did succeed in their ultimate task.
They flew the airplane well. They did an excellent job with the approach afterward. They were careful with the airplane. They knew the airplane had been damaged.
They didn't know the severity of it. They were gentle with the maneuvering. get tested enough to make sure that they wouldn't get themselves in further trouble as they made the approach to landing. The one big thing they did right, and one only ever needs to do one big thing, is they saved the airplane. And in principle, that's all you ever need to do right when something happens to your airplane.
You need to save the airplane and you need to save the passengers. And that's what they did. How can you forget something like that? That I survived through that. So it's hard for me to forget that I was lucky and it wasn't my time yet.
The pilot saved our lives. He got us into it, but he got us out of it. And perhaps there was one other hero that day, the Boeing 747 itself.
It was put through maneuvers and stresses that far outweighed its known limits. And yet, despite it all, the aircraft survived and landed safely.