New ACI episodes.

[Garfly]

Some recent Air Crash Investigations are now up on YouTube. (Thankfully ad-free so far.)

 

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC6efatOfdyCTJLVnvsrMJ4A

 

They include the famous Kennedy Piper Saratoga accident. The Death Of JFK Jnr (S14E06).

 

 

Whilst it's good to see GA being covered (if only for the celebrity angle) I found this to be one of the weaker episodes. By maintaining the dramatic conceit that the true solution must remain obscure till the end, they made the investigators in this case seem especially dumb (more than usual). That is, a very likely culprit - to anyone in aviation - seemed not to have even occurred to our trusty detective. Not until every other possibility - and its dramatic recreation - had been eliminated. Okay, these programs can't be expected to always satisfy the cognoscenti, but I'd say, just from the general viewer point-of-view, that the key-concept of spatial-disorientation remains there, at the end, ill-explained. Thus, I'd say it falls down, a bit, in its own terms. But still, for all that, very much worth watching.

 

Equally applicable to our kind of ops, I reckon, is Vanishing Act (S14E03). It's about a bunch of unfathomable nav problems aboard a Varig 737, flying a simple domestic leg. It reminded me, among other things, that technology can mislead; that my first line of defence is the 'gross-error' check (especially when interpreting /acting-on numbers). And that the big-world-picture that I'm seeing needs to be measured against what I'd expect to see, not forgetting how much my own 'confirmation bias' will lead me astray given half a chance.

 

Great lessons from these (mostly) very well and responsibly made programs.