Episode 181: Swissair Flight 111

Three, two,

one, mark.

Okay.

Look at that.

I work out one day, and all of a sudden, my palms don't hurt from clapping anymore.

All right, all right.

We're going now.

Are you okay?

Am I okay?

Are you okay?

I'm seeing a beautiful vision of the 1990s.

I'm sorry you're not okay.

What's going on?

Oh, no, I'm fine.

I was just saying that as a rhetorical gesture.

I see.

I see.

Yes.

I was worried.

As I have to be, because you're my best pal.

No, the big issue right now is that I've cleaned up enough of my office that I can lean my chair back, but it leans.

That's the worst thing that you've ever invented.

Yeah, because, like, you, Bros and I have the same chair, so he's on the video, but I am.

So, let me demonstrate something for you.

I'm willing to get competitive about this or indeed anything.

Let's fucking go.

Hold on, hold on.

We gotta go fuck.

Ah, shit.

Go down.

Okay.

Okay.

Okay.

Right.

We're going down.

These things really need a limiter on this.

This is stunt podcasting.

There's probably a way to do that anyway.

Oh, God.

Oh, my God.

This is after this long, it took us this long to pivot to video, but the pivot to video is a little like...

like four-minute thing ahead of the episode that is just us reclining our chairs too

oh my god i missed this okay yeah me too here here here we are um

all right let's just let's just this is another man reclining his chair

his doesn't recline very far before we get into the before we get into the news i have an announcement to make okay first to praise the glorious hogs and berate them for not doing enough

uh so you glorious hogs raised about four thousand dollars for my co-worker's grandson He has muscular dystrophy.

He needs a wheelchair van.

We're up to $4,666.

Hail Satan.

But we need more money.

Hail Satan.

And you're going to give us more money.

So I'll put that in the video description.

Perfect.

Yeah.

Okay.

Let's get into this reclining male.

Are these cos Porta Pro headphones?

You've been watching

too much dank pods, I think.

Yeah.

To be able to recognize that off the dome.

I'm interested in what's going on with the tie.

I want this tie.

It's a shame that this man is going to explode and die.

It's very whimsical.

You know, the 90s were a whimsical tie sort of time.

yeah the four the four the what is it the third gen taurus with the little the little the little little cute little ass

what i'm saying is i want to the four taurus you have been watching too much

uh hello and welcome to well there's your problem

it's a podcast about engineering disasters with slides and definitely

i'm the person who's talking right now my pronouns are he and him okay go it's the podcast where we plug two podcasts before our own.

I'm November Kelly.

I'm the person who's talking right now.

My pronouns are she and her.

Yay, Liam.

Yay, Liam.

Hi.

I'm Liam McAnderson.

My pronouns are he, him, his.

I'm doing that now.

Oh, goddammit.

You outwalk me?

You come into my own home and outwalk me to my house on the day of my daughter's wedding.

And I hope that your first child will be a non-binary child.

Hey, man.

Give me 30 seconds and I'll get up to speed with any pronouns.

I did an uncomfortably close to Bernie Sanders, Luca Brazzi.

I'm not thrilled about how that came out.

99%

of the pronouns are used by 1% of Americans.

Both of meet Bernie Sanders, we're going to redistribute the pronouns.

Go to www.bernysanders.com.

I am no longer asking for your pronouns.

We have a guest.

We have a guest.

We have a guest.

Hello.

My name is Maya Ventura.

My pronouns are it, it's, and she, her, which is for.

So I've now taken that

crown.

Um, I run a newsletter.

Uh, it's called Laser Chronicles.

Some of you read it.

Uh, most of you probably know me from the last time I was on here.

Yeah, but welcome back.

I mean, pretty close to consecutive

chronologically very recent.

Maya.

Yeah.

You have a, you have a podcast to plug too, bud.

I do, yes.

I was going to do that at the end, and I forgot, so thank you.

Um, I'm also.

I figured you would.

I also host Queens of the Monsters, which is a podcast about kaiju films.

Hell yeah.

Which has been dormant for a year and is going to hopefully be backed up before this episode comes out.

But if not, it will be immediately afterwards.

So

looking forward to that.

Hell yeah.

So what we see on the screen in front of us is a man.

A man who is relaxing in a luxurious seat on an airliner.

This is like peak 90s Euro vibes.

Look at the arm holding the not iPad in front of him.

Like,

that's so overbuilt.

Like, now that would be a flimsy little like flex thing, but that's like built in there like a throttle quadrant.

It's like, yeah, that thing, that thing folds into the armrest.

That thing is like, you know, it's made out of metal.

Like a person had to make that as opposed to an iPad, which I assume just sorts sort of, you know.

Well, a child had to make that.

Yeah,

someone thought about it and it came into being through like ai or something i don't know

before before all of the label was externalized and abstracted from you yeah exactly exactly this was made by uh you know a horrible man in an airbus factory it's true this was made by a horrible frenchman it's like uh amg doing the one man one engine but it's just one one angry uh striking french worker

one his shitty little tablet thing he's got a tiny little bottle of champagne uh he's drinking that champagne out of a...

Okay.

So today, today we're going to talk about when entertainment systems go wrong.

Swiss are

flight 111.

Hang on, we pivoted to video, so let me do this real quick.

Flight entertainment god naughty?

God wild?

No, no.

I'm not fond of that.

Also, also, you're not in the thing because we just have the video before the slideshow starts because we're not getting dev to like cut in our own video at this point.

Like, that would be.

Yeah, it's stuck like this.

There's nothing I can do.

Okay, okay.

The expression, it's a it's a it's a source of pain.

Like, it's

like a full we'd have to get like

streaming setup, right?

Where like everything goes on.

I have to get another monitor.

You have two.

What?

No, I have to get another one.

It's just everyone's going to be able to do it.

Everything about this podcast somehow always becomes more work, and yet we never release it anymore consistently.

Nope, we never will.

Fuck you.

Unlikely, unlikely.

And then I have to get, you know, you know, we'd have to get four extra inputs,

one for Liam, one for Nova, one for me, one for the guest, one for activity window.

At this point, we just buy some kind of hyper yacht and we fly us all out to international waters.

It's an expense a hyper yacht.

We'd like to.

Yeah, to record this in person, you know.

I say international waters because, like, obviously I'm not going to the U.S.

anytime soon because they will find the JD Vance memes in my phone and send me to El Salvador.

Oh, right.

Yeah, I forgot they were doing that.

We didn't put that in the goddamn news because first we have to do the goddamn news.

Recussive.

That was a tremendous.

Hold on.

Let me get the

Zoran Mamdami.

Let's fucking go.

Along with Brad Lander, did the RRR not to not to suspenders dance to Andrew Cuomo and killed him.

Andrew Cuomo has died.

He has been killed.

Andrew Cuomo has been killed.

And in the words of Brad Lander, good fucking Reddins.

Thank God.

Yeah.

But who is going to.

No, I don't want to do it.

I'm going to.

I'm going to bring home the ZD.

So I get to talk about this.

Bless my stupid puppy life.

I get to talk about this on three separate podcasts, one of which is entirely mayor-focused.

We've talked about this on Trash Future.

We talked about all the political implications of that.

I'm going to talk about the mayoral implications.

Mostly for this one, I'm just soaking up the vibes because the vibes were immaculate.

The vibes are really good.

Everyone loves Zoran.

Zoran's so good.

Everything about him is like positive.

Like, this man has never had a negative vibe in his life.

No, no.

He's amazing.

And like, the thing I was saying on TF as well is that like

there are people like this everywhere, right?

Like, I don't want to do hero worship in the sense of like, I want to do great man theory to New York City, right?

Like, no, no, no, I'm going to start a cult of port personality around this guy.

I think that's a good idea.

By the standards of politicians, yeah, he's unusually charismatic and like everything like that.

He's very good at what he did.

I don't think he put a foot wrong in the campaign.

I think he should become Stalin.

I agree.

I agree completely.

I think governor, senator, president, after we change a couple of amendments.

But like,

and listen, I'll be proud to fight and die for him in American Civil War too.

We could make him an Ayatoa.

I don't know if that really.

Anyway, that's not going to resonate with the Midwest voters.

The thing thing i was going to say is you know somebody like this or you know someone who knows someone like this and what this is is a success of organizing right of having particularly dsa nyc um being able to create a candidate and support a candidate like this because a few years ago he was you know he was doing like uh like leafleting and stuff right um yes and that's that's hard work on his part but that's hard work on everybody's part and you know i'm i'm certain he would tell you the same thing, right?

So it's not just, and like, I think we're allowed to have some hesitation about electoralism.

I'm sure in office he's going to do some things by nature of being in office that are going to be bad, but it's, it's like, it's strategic, right?

And you're allowed to be happy about this.

You can live out.

You have permission to live out.

And the worst people in the world are real mad about it, which is not how you work out.

That's the important part in all this, I would say, certainly as far as I've experienced.

Andrew Cuomo successfully sent back to the suburbs for one.

Yeah, this is true.

Even those of us who are fucking technocratic nerds who have concerns about free buses are pretty happy about this result.

You just don't like him because he's a bus guy and you're a train guy, and those are like two houses alike in dignity, you know?

Shut up.

But yeah, so

he's now got a like, because the other thing about this is it's been structured in such a way that he's having to fight his way through increasing levels of creeps.

Because now he's got to beat Eric Adams and like whatever kind of insane third-party write-in candidate that Bill Ackman tries to organize.

Oh, yeah.

And there's a GOP candidate as well.

Isn't it Sliwa again?

Like Slua.

Yeah.

They didn't have a primary.

They just nominated him by acclamation.

Incredible.

This is

like St.

Peter, yeah.

yeah this this is like centrist infighting I can't believe these centrists are like so fucking disorganized you gotta you gotta be glitch you gotta be smug if anybody says any about Zoron you gotta like uh get completely like peaceful and beatific in your expression and you gotta hit them with a vote blue no matter who yes it's true exactly the thing about the centrist infighting is that my understanding from what I've heard from people who worked in New York I used to be an organizer I should probably clarify

from what I've heard in New York this is basically what what happened to andrew cuomo um because democratic voters sort of told uh establishment officials people in power party officials whatever uh that they didn't like any of the candidates like towards the end of last year so they were like okay we're going to give you andrew cuomo and then they gave them andrew cuomo and this is where we are now

this is

It's amazing because like all the other candidates just, you know, everyone united and was like, okay, okay, whoever you vote for, just don't vote for Andrew Cuomo.

This was like a non-like, just a don't vote for Andrew Cuomo election.

And everyone was pretty chummy, which is pretty funny, which is apparently something you can do with a ranked choice voting.

Yeah.

I don't know.

We got to expand this system.

We'll never let it happen again.

Please, please let us have it in Philly.

I am so tired of Sherelle Parker.

As far as the like Cuomo campaign, as well, like if you think about it this way, he came out with two messages, right?

Message number one: I know it's against the odds, but all 13 women are lying.

Number two, I stand with Israel.

Exactly, exactly.

Right.

And the thing is, like, Eric Adams and whoever else is going to be able to

go into fucking Zoran's old tweets where he's like, defund the police or whatever.

And you have that argument now.

But he didn't have to have it previously because the argument that he was having instead is, actually, I'm not a member of the Al-Qassam brigades, and that's an insane and racist thing to say about me.

Like,

and it was so obvious to everybody, like, and it just completely backfired.

And I think you have to look at this, apart from anything else, as this like seismic shift in terms of like

Israel and Palestine in the American electoral calculus.

One of the more interesting things was the day after the election, when all the New York conservatives

tried to tie him to 9-11 in order to do racism, but like, they were just like America forgot.

It was like,

I did find his passport in the rubble.

The problem with politicians, right, is sometimes you look at them and you're like, you've never done anything interesting in your life.

You've advanced too early, too, too fast, and too high.

And you're just like, yeah, if he was doing 9-11 at the age of 10, you know, it's like, what hope is there for the rest of us?

You know, 9-11 at 10, mayor of New York City at a year younger than me.

And it's like, I'm having a midlife crisis probably.

Yeah,

I wish I had done 9-11 at 10.

You were 10 when 9-11.

I try to come to the U.S.

and I just like, which episode of the podcast should we put on in the holding room?

Just so you can understand why you're getting sent to El Salvador.

I'm a U.S.

citizen.

I'm allowed to do 9-11.

Actually, born,

I'm not allowed to be on the podcast with you saying that you're allowed to do 9-11, is the problem.

I have a constitutional right to do 9-11.

Why am I being detained?

I know my rights.

i know my right day one not even of the zoran administration but the zoran nomination and you're like getting a bit ahead of it like i have the right to do 9-11.

It's not even day one.

The RCV thing is like next week.

God damn it.

It's like day negative.

Oh no.

But like the interesting thing is that, of course, New York conservatives pulled out 9-11, but like the average conservative everywhere else, including the executive branch, is the Jews did 9-11 guy these days.

Yeah.

So

that didn't work out too good.

So, I mean, poorly.

It's also

like they're also trying to suggest that he's going to do Sharia law in New York City.

That one.

Yeah, let's go.

Better than the NYPD, probably.

I haven't checked, but

if we can do like the woke Sharia, if we can institute that,

let's fucking go.

You know?

Yeah, I would support woke Sharia at at this point.

Why not fuck whatever we want?

Everyone has to dye their hair.

Everyone's going to have to get a Septum piercing.

Listen,

you are allowed not to have Neo pronouns, but you just have to pay a tax for it.

It's a small thing.

It's like it's a formality, you know.

Yeah, so I'm really happy.

There is, of course, always the scope.

This is a,

if you have the right to do 9-11, right?

I, as a leftist, always have the right to like piss and moan about anything and like ruin anybody's day.

And so there is a theoretical way where you're like, oh, this is electoralism.

It's a distraction.

It's not going to do anything.

It's like, you know, it's taking people away from burning down the Walmarts or whatever.

Right.

And if he socializes the Walmarts, then there won't be even any point in burning down the Walmarts.

So that's a good point.

That's horrible.

Yeah.

That's horrible.

So I guess you could do that.

But the thing is, if you're doing that, you are

sort of more radical than the Communist Party of India brackets Marxist,

which congratulated him today on

having been nominated.

And so I only subscribe to Communist Party of India, brackets, Maoist.

I believe there are several of those last time I checked.

There are at least several.

It's like Atomic Decay, you know?

Yeah.

Yes.

But yeah, so I obviously very happy to hear that like every New Yorker who wears glasses is going to be killed

and like an army of halal cart guys is going to be sort of like armed and deputized to enforce the woke sharia.

They're going to there's going to be

state-run grocery stores and you're going to have to go there and you're going to have to purchase deli meats.

It's going to be like a reasonable amount of money.

Yeah.

They're going to make you do that like in communist Kiva.

They're going to nationalize Boar's head.

I mean, considering all the hysteria, that's probably not a bad idea.

Yeah.

People are going to have to smuggle in Dietz and Watts and deli meats.

This is the first time that I've felt good about things politically, anything politically, for a minute.

And I know it's like different because I live in a different country.

I'm, you know, thousands of miles away.

It doesn't affect me directly, but I'm happy for my friends in New York.

I'm happy for my friends in America because, like, if it is possible to learn any lessons from this, I have total faith that the Democratic Party will fail to do that, right?

But if they do, if they surprise me, then the rewards are great, right?

Because people like it when you believe in things and they like the policies.

And if you just advocate on that basis, then you do very well.

I know it's completely foreign to everything the Democratic Party wants to do anyway, but learn the fucking lessons, guys.

Maybe this finally collapses the Democratic Party.

Inshallah.

That blood machine,

blood machine never break, right?

It's like, do you want abundance, the thing that is very well thought of by a bunch of columnists and fails all the time or do you want this right um

so well i think i think the abundance guys like zoron yeah he doesn't like him back though which is really shocking it's like why why won't you follow me back it's like they're trying to get on sharper

Managlesius doesn't like him, and he's like, as far as I can tell, the head abundance guy these days.

The abundance pope.

Yeah, Matt Aglesius turned himself into the abundance guy when I think that the actual abundance guys seem to be a little nicer, but Matt Aglesius is now the face of the movement oh yeah he's the worst guy imaginable yeah they had they had their they had a weird fucking conference in DC uh like a couple months ago and it was genuinely the most surreal thing I've ever seen including all the times I've worked in politics yeah

yeah so good things are possible uh electoralism is back on the menu uh wolf howl that's true like it's it's all good um and i i i don't know how that translates to a british context other than fuck maybe we'll join the green party i don't don't know.

Yeah.

Speaking of good things being possible.

We bombed Iran and it didn't do shit.

That's true.

Where are you articulating the good thing here?

Like, is the good thing that Iran appears to have weathered being bombed by the U.S.

Air Force?

We've knocked the door in, apparently.

Yeah, we like, you know, sort of,

again, there was a sound.

kind.

There was a sound in the bunker that sounded like the upstairs neighbor's cat jumping off a table.

All it cost was like $2 trillion and like 18 hours of flying time for 100 aircraft.

Yeah, I was about to say this was like a $100 and something million dollar operation.

Being like, well, how come if we bombed Iran,

the B-2

took 36 hours to do it, but I can take a flight from

and it's just like it's because of flat earth.

They were just like, no, they they got it confused with the B52.

Well,

the problem in this case,

the reason why there's possibly been not much damage is because of the opposite of flat earth, which is pointy earth.

Ah, yes.

Like a mountain.

Yeah.

Worn to the mountains, raising a cave, snooks and fucking is all I crave.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And I mean, I think it's because we're doing this podcast, obviously, the goddamn news has never been more overtaken by events.

Like fucking World War III almost started while we were out there for a minute.

We gotta wait another couple of months before doing an Oops All News.

Yeah, yeah.

But

we sort of like

ended up with Israel trying to start a war with Iran and drag the US into it, and then Trump agreeing to bomb the side of a mountain

and then getting really mad at everyone involved, which is I did a good job.

Yeah.

First time you're going to get like a president dropping the word fuck on a like live broadcast, which was cool.

Biden already did it when he was VP.

I guess he was VP, not president.

Oh, yeah, you're right.

Yeah, this is a big fucking deal, yeah.

Big fucking deal, yeah.

I will say, there's a lot of people who are like the thing about him saying that he wants peace after bombing is obviously illogical and just a diversion, but like, no, Donald Trump is very much the stupid.

Yeah, he is.

Thank you for your attention to this matter.

But yeah, so I mean,

we're all gonna throw a few bombs at each other and we're going to shut up afterwards, right?

This is like, you know, a stupid fight you had when you were drunk after a night at the bar.

I'm kind of like, yeah, that was pretty dumb.

And now

after having done this and after having been sort of like bombed a little bit in return,

Israel are like, okay, well, that was cool.

Now we're going back to the genocide in Gaza.

Right.

Yeah, this is true.

This is true.

So the nuke wasn't that big a deal.

Rightly not.

No.

And I mean,

I hold out hope for Trump getting frustrated and Patty and doing a kind of like Zelensky-style humiliation to Netanyahu, but I

that would be cool, but I'm not holding my breath.

That would be pretty cool.

JD Vance hitting him with the have you even said thank you once?

I do like the idea,

but I read they throw his dirty laundry at him, like the literal dirty laundry he brings in.

Get the fuck out.

Yeah, Yeah, I don't know.

This struck me as like an extremely funny thing when it was happening.

When it was like, oh, we bombed Iran.

It was like, okay, you know, the first five minutes, you looked at it, like, oh, this is horrifying.

Then you realize what they bombed.

And it's like, oh, they tried to bomb the thing that's inside a mountain.

Yeah.

The non-mountain bombing is bad, but at least now it seems to have kind of

like come to an end for the moment.

nothing new to say about israel being a kind of like dangerous

genocidal warmongering state right which is a threat to at this point global security um and the the sole check on that is a real estate developer from queens getting mad at them so that's cool

i i will say the islamic republic of iran are the most patient people on earth i think at this point they have earned an award for that certainly um because this is of course now the second time that they've been bombed and the first time they just kind kind of sent the drones and did nothing else.

And then this time they went the largest, the most war-mongering country in the world bombed them.

So they just kind of sent the drones and not much else.

Well, they're still trying to figure out how to kill SpongeBob.

That's true.

That's a good point.

I didn't think of that.

When they bombed that one U.S.

base, Trump said one of the funniest things he's ever said, which is just by way of arranging this, they're like, they called ahead, right?

To be like, hey,

can we bomb you?

Yeah, is

a good time.

You can bomb.

When can we drop a bomb?

And Trump's like, I, you know, about, you know, 1 p.m., what's up with you?

And, you know, he's like twirling the cord or the phone.

Yeah, I'm just asking, asking the idea.

So, how's you doing anything, Lee?

It's just, it's really funny.

Slow burn hashtags.

So, like, remaining kind of command of the like Iranian armed forces are just like all of their colleagues are getting like effortlessly murdered with their families.

And they're like, you know what?

We're going to have to escalate this a bit.

I'm going to move to the next chapter of this book by this guy, Baudria.

And we're going to like, we're really going to sort this out.

I'm going to call the Americans and ask if I can bomb them.

We do conceivably have better negotiations standpoints with Iran right now than we do Israel.

By far, that's

true.

The joke I always about this is I came up with this when it was the Soleimani assassination and it's still true that like

being being a kind of iranian decision maker is like yeah you've trained for years to become a kind of chess grandmaster and you're up against a guy who keeps eating your pieces right

no that seems perfectly reasonable

I will say, whenever this happened, I was watching the social network and it took about five minutes before I put my phone down and kept watching the movie.

So that was,

you know, whenever this is the closest we can come to a major global conflict,

I would say it's interesting, but the fact that one's party, which is Israel, wants to make a major global conflict and can't do it.

So, you know, that's very amusing to me.

I don't want to say nothing ever happens, but like Iran are very patient people and they might want to make nothing ever happen.

I feel like you've kind of

kind of guaranteed an Iranian nuclear weapon on a long enough timeline.

Well, we did that

as soon as we scrapped the JCPOA.

That's true.

That is true.

Yep.

So, you know, that's nothing really new there.

Yeah.

Yeah.

You know, I mean, at this point, you know, the biggest threat right now is the Israelis getting really mad at nothing and doing the Samson option.

Cool.

Yeah.

Yeah, you know, which

I don't know.

They'll probably do that at some point.

You know,

they put out all these videos of like, oh, Iran is going to nuke Paris.

And then they nuke Paris.

Yeah.

Honestly, get along with it.

Maybe it'll kill some of the rats.

I've already seen the Modalisa.

Just get rid of Paris.

It's fine.

Size of the postage stamp.

It was bigger than I thought because I had been told by everyone that it was smaller than I would think it would be.

And then it was bigger than I thought it would be because I had internalized that so much.

That's a good manager expectations, okay?

That's a good story.

It's the only time I've ever done it successfully.

I've been to the Freer Gallery.

I know how small paintings can be.

They can be really small.

I remember I was at the VA with my dad, and they have those gigantic, like, like royal portraits that are like 12 feet tall and my dad like grabbed a curator and was like, why is it so big?

I just don't, I don't want Israel to nuke Paris because my ex lives there and I'm fond of my ex.

Can we negotiate on this?

Can we nuke somewhere that I'm probably never going to go like Stockholm?

Oh, you can't nuke Stockholm.

Sure.

Leon must be destroyed.

Yeah.

Frankfurt.

Do we know anyone in Frankfurt?

This is

a global part.

There's an old Russian joke, right, which came up again

in the context of the Ukraine war where the Russian generals are like, okay, well, we got to bomb the West.

Where do we bomb?

Like, we're going to bomb Paris.

And it's like, no, my wife likes to go shopping there.

Okay, we're going to bomb London.

You can't bomb London.

My kid goes to school there.

Okay, well, we're going to bomb, fuck, I don't know, like Geneva.

All my money's there.

And they argue about this for like an hour.

And eventually they're like, all right, fine.

We bomb Voronezh, which is in Russia,

because it's the one place that none of them care about, right?

Yeah.

We're going to, folks, folks, we're going to bomb Moline,

Davenport.

I want to go to New York.

What are the others?

Just nuke the

colours.

I mean, they could always take the funniest option and nuke Moscow.

And just like

total agents of chaos.

Yeah, let's see what happens.

Is Israel bored of not getting the attention nukes Kiev and Moscow simultaneously?

Simultaneously.

That's true.

They could do that.

Pyongyang as well.

The one option, the one country on earth deterrence doesn't work against.

Aside from Poland.

Oh, yes, obviously.

That's because they have solidarity.

That's right.

Yeah.

That's true.

And Pope, well, they don't have a Pope anymore.

They're still dining out on the one pope.

America has a Pope.

You know, America's a Pope

went to Villanova.

Doesn't count.

I mean, I can't make fun of the White Sox anymore because I feel slightly bad.

Like, I'm, yeah, like, I'm not, I'm making more points against me to get into heaven in case the Catholics are correct.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

You know,

well, what can you say, but ghost socks.

That was also with you.

Yeah.

And with your sparing.

Fuck.

Yeah, I changed it on you.

That was the goddamn news.

We talk about in-flight entertainment.

Oh, shit.

Yeah.

Okay.

Stare straight ahead at the TV.

Yeah, raw dog.

Why is I Saw the TV glow on here?

That's actually my picture.

God, watching I Saw the TV glow at the beginning of like an 18-hour flight, you get your egg cracked, you're like, oh, fuck, I'm in the hell zone, and you've got another like 16 hours of flying.

Oh, boy.

And you're flying out somewhere, so you can't even get home to start transitioning.

You're just like,

well, the good news is this is my picture, and I took it on a flight to Seattle.

So, I mean, it's a relatively good place to end up at the end of the airplane.

Yeah, they'll just meet you off the plane, you know?

Yes.

Yes.

You know what a film I watch on the airplane?

Is it airplane?

Yes.

It's a good film to watch on an airplane.

It's a good film to watch on an airplane.

So I have an audiobook that I only listen to while I'm flying

and I refuse to listen to it at any other time.

So I've had to listen to this in two-hour sprints over the past four years.

Almost halfway through, baby.

My version of raw dogging is I sort of semi-rawdog.

I wrap it up, right?

Like, but not very effectively.

I take like a paper towel.

yeah

i take i take my like noise cancelling headphones and i just listen to music but i'm looking at my phone to see what the music that i'm listening to is all the time yep that's that's the real like autism locking in and i'm doing that for like five six hours What happens to me is, you know, I get a beer and I sit down.

And, you know, when there's some mild turbulence, I'm absolutely terrified.

Yeah, you are.

Yeah,

it's my version of hell.

Like a cat that's been splashed with water.

You're just like digging into the seat rest.

Yeah,

this is true.

Yeah.

He does do that.

I flew on a very small aircraft in a whiteout back in February.

So I no longer feel any fear on larger aircraft, which is an experience I recommend for everybody and also do not recommend for anybody.

I got to turn my air conditioning down because it's 200 million fucking degrees in Philly and I have three desktops running in here.

It's also 2 million degrees here and I've had to close mine in the other room because it's too loud.

So I'm suffering, but that's fine.

You should all move to Glasgow, the climate-proof city.

I was in London for a week doing the Trash Future live show

and it was the hottest venue I've ever done.

It was like fucking 50 billion degrees in there because it was like a concrete basement.

And we got a bunch of

Gwen, my wife took a bunch of like promotional photos of us and every single one of us is like mostly sweat.

Then I got back to London.

Then I got back to Glasgow and it's like, oh, it's pleasantly cool.

Meanwhile,

you look at the kind of weather app on your phone, and it's like, the place that you just left is currently on fire.

Yes.

It was 101 two days ago here.

God damn.

Yes.

The first time we broke 113 years, apparently.

I was going to say something, and I forget what it was.

Well, it was about the weather.

It's just been insufferable.

All right.

Yeah.

We've had Canadian wildfire smoke and the heat at the same time.

It's been real nice.

Can you hear my fan?

No.

No.

No.

Excellent.

All right.

I'm human again.

Not humid again, which is actually the problem.

It's stinky after this.

So time was, I'm pulling us back on topic here.

Time was.

Oh, fuck you.

If you were,

I gotta do it.

If you were kind of like on a plane, you're and you're like, I'm bored, I don't know what to do.

You wander down to the parlor or whatever, the dedicated dining room.

Yeah.

You go to the smoking room.

You take part in an Agatha Christie murder mystery because you're on a flying boat or whatever the fuck.

And okay, it takes eight hours because it's flying at like five miles an hour, but like you're on a you're on a Hindenburg.

Yeah.

You know, and you, you go and, um, you know, you, uh, yeah, you go to the restaurant and you, um, then you go to the smoking room, which has 35 doors between you and uh the outside world.

Flicking a cigarette butt off the end, off the like out of the Hindenburg must feel so good.

Can you imagine

the Marlboro Unlimited plane?

Oh,

fuck yes.

Oh, shit.

I'll wear my Marlborough Unlimited back.

God, the Marlborough Unlimited was like the greatest concept to me as like the worst thing, the worst experience for any human to go through.

And I would have killed somebody to get to experience.

Oh, yeah, me too.

Even as somebody who hasn't smoked in five years.

Anyway.

It's fine.

You make those five years back in about 10 minutes.

That's a good point.

Yeah, that's true.

Catching up for lost time.

Yeah.

But so eventually, like, maybe, maybe you want to do something else besides go and murder one of your your fellow passengers, right?

Like, maybe, yeah, yeah, but it's very learning that.

You're going to have to lead a bit.

Yeah, sorry, sorry, sorry.

The top left here, this is what they call the first example of in-flight entertainment.

It's called the world's first aircraft cinema.

It says there.

Oh, my God.

This, in case you haven't noticed, it's just a regular film projector that they're loading into what it looks like a Ford dry motor to me.

That's going to shake so much.

It is.

Crank it, man.

Like the propeller's developed.

Imperial Airlines.

Altator.

Yes,

this was a British innovation.

Except I think it was.

There was no such thing as a British innovation.

We gave you, I saw the TV glow on a seatback TV.

That's true.

Except I think they were actually the second to do it.

And this banner is a lie, but I can't remember what the first one was.

I looked it up in my research and did not write it down.

Back in the day,

just lie.

You could just do that.

Yes.

This was the first one to have a picture taken for it, which means that basically it might as well be the first one in terms of documentation.

Hell yeah.

Yeah, so, and also, notably, this was 1925.

So, of course, film was made of nitrate at this point.

And if you know anything about nitrate film, it has a tendency, it has a tendency to spontaneously combust.

I have a message for Germany.

And

this was not a problem, but it is an interesting concept to load the spontaneously flammable material aboard the very small aircraft.

In any case, I don't think we killed anybody with that.

Everybody's smoking.

Yes.

Everybody's testing their lit cigarette ends towards the back of the plane.

This is DC-3.

It's basically invincible.

That's true.

I mean, it's a trimotor, which is close enough.

But this was a point in time whenever planes were sometimes made of wood.

And if they got too wet, the wings would come in.

If they got too wet, the wings would come unglued, and that killed people a few times.

The wings fall off, button.

Yeah, the wings fall off rain.

In the middle here, this is an ad from Trans World Airlines, an airline that I have made jokes about for the past 10 years.

I've been trans.

This is sort of a later but more common concept of in-flight entertainment, which is still just a film projector.

But like by the 1950s, film projectors had gotten like normal enough that they had done a, they had started, there was like a specialized industry.

for this for in-flight entertainment specifically.

Is that what this is on the bottom left?

Is that a projector?

Yeah, that's a later one.

Yeah, that's a later one.

This is just, this is the original one, which would have just been a film projector, not really that far off from the same technology on the older one.

Since, of course, films have gained the technology of sound in the intervening 25 years, 30 years, they had developed in-flight audio, which was done by pneumatic tubes at this point in time.

It a system I don't really understand.

You see getting the pneumatic tube canister through to your seat, it's just like and you open it up and it just plays a noise.

Yeah, I don't really understand that.

Notably,

it's more fun than like a static card with dialogue on it.

Well, because originally, if you're screening a silent movie in a plane, you know, you've got to get the projector in there and then you've got to get the pianist as well.

So, oh, that's true.

Oh, yeah, that's a good point.

Yeah.

Of course, notably, in the notably, planes were so loud in the first one that the pianist had to play very loudly all the time.

Boom and she falls off.

Yes.

Oh, you know, that would also happen.

Just have an upright piano.

Yes, just dragging that bitch.

What kind of airplanes or airport specialty vehicle do you need to load the upright piano?

No,

I think it's like an integral structural part of the airplane.

It's like the astros, and the piano is going from side to side.

Once the rain starts, the piano is the only thing keeping a wing on.

It's a load-bearing piano.

Yeah, the pneumatic tube thing.

This load-bearing piano, you shouldn't have detuned.

The pneumatic tube thing is weird, and I don't understand it.

As far as I can tell, Delta had them until like 2006 on some planes, which is even more confusing because Delta flies absolutely ancient aircraft until the wings essentially fall off.

And they still do that.

Because they don't put the piano on there and they don't know and they don't know that okay in certain kinds of turbulence the only thing you can do is play Claire de Lune that's the only thing that keeps them keeps the wing on banging out nearer my god to thee on the DC3

it's not formulaic it's a callback

The bottom left is not one of the projectors sort of that was featured in the middle, except that's a simulated screenshot, but like this is a slightly later one this is a projector uh that is essentially made of three cathode ray tubes that do each do red green and blue um if you know how a rear projection tv from like the 1980s or 90s works it's basically the same concept um they were not very they were not great but they could run for infinite amounts of time and didn't really require maintenance

so they were it looks very space age and i guess this is one of those things that like airplane food or whatever that just kind of gets stagnates for a while, just plateaus.

And what's the deal with that?

Yeah, becomes fodder for stand-up comedians because it's just a fact of life of flying that everyone has to accept as you're you're all looking at the movie that they screen on like you have no choice in this um yes that

you can either like get the headphones or the little pneumatic tubes or whatever or not so you can either like watch this watch Carrie Grant muted or watch Carrie Grant with sound, but you have to watch him.

Yes.

I think it'd be funny if you were an airline and you're like, we're going to do some like really, really

out there films.

Like, folks, today's in-flight film is come and see.

Yeah, I hate playing Alantalia.

They made me watch Salo 120 days or so.

Letterbox should charter aircraft for weird film screenings.

Do not give them that idea.

They will do it.

They have an auction budget to do whatever kind of silly bullshit they hear someone with enough followers say on the internet.

They will do that.

Thank God I have less than a thousand followers still.

Yeah.

So the one at the bottom left, this is what they had sort of after the film projector, but it's the same basic sort of concept.

You're just projecting a film from a central source.

They were mostly done from tapes at this point.

Not like VHS tapes, but like

video 8 tapes, which I'm sure like five of you are going to know what I'm talking about.

It's a little bit more.

Audience of trans women going to say that.

That's a fair point.

Also, audience of like tech mount viewers i know there's a fair overlap there oh including me yeah yeah i know you do because i know you're there because you're in the patriarchs every time i watch jesus christ am i i guess i guess so yeah that makes sense okay um i should become a patron of that guy i love

tech mount he's good at his work but that's video eight was just sort of the small tape format not super relevant here they you this sort of projector was common in airlines but also a bunch of other places you'll notice this picture is actually of it mounted in like a classroom or something.

But it's the exact same thing.

It's just three cathode ray tubes that get really hot and put a lot of voltage through them, and they project an image.

And it looks bad, but you could project an image with reliability, and that's what they need.

At least you can't set this one on fire with a cigarette, though.

Yes.

Yes.

If you've ever watched Die Hard 2, they should turn on The Simpsons with one of these.

On the right is just sort of this.

This is sort of where we are now.

This is the seatback in-flight entertainment.

These have been around for probably 20 years or so.

This is a picture that I took.

This was also on Delta Airlines, coincidentally.

They have moved past pneumatic tubes and have gone towards

the 21st century.

Yes.

This is just sort of how most people

would recognize in-flight entertainment as the big screen that you can touch and you can watch movies.

Nowadays, it's for free.

It used to be that you had to pay for them.

But nowadays, the sort of airlines that will make you pay for them just don't give you anything at all, which is very funny.

Remember when in the back of the seat, there was a weird bulky telephone.

Yes.

First time I ever flew, my parents yelled at me for even getting close to trying to touch the damn thing.

You actually $5,000 dudes

for touching the sky phone.

Yes.

$5,000 was a lot more in 1999.

Well, and also this was like 2005.

So like they at that point they were gluing over some of them, but like some of them, the glue panels had fallen off and the phone was still there because U.S.

Airways was a bad airline.

i always wonder and i don't know if there's an answer to this about whether how curated

the uh like seat back video is like can i watch flight on a plane like is is that allowed am i allowed to see denzel washington doing coke before flying the plane right like they're they're pretty heavily trimmed i've every film that i have seen except for tv glow funnily enough has been like trimmed or censored in some way i've watched the first austin powers film on a flight like a couple years ago and there were actually scenes where they had cropped down the picture to censor something and did not have enough resolution, so it was just very blurry compared to the next scenes before it and the scene after it.

Airline Sharia Law.

Yeah,

that's actually accurate.

Yeah, that's

a clumsily drawn

like turtleneck over Heather Graham.

I watched the French dispatch on the plane.

That would be, I would do that.

That would be and it had a, you know, there was, there is a scene with nudity, and it was just there.

It was fine.

I am not

maybe it's only on flights to Europe where they don't have morals.

Yeah, you're scrolling past Sallow.

Yeah, exactly.

But like,

that's too, that's too tame for me.

Yeah.

I mean, I, I also,

my question was sort of like, not so much about, like, sex and violence, but like.

What they have on there, yeah.

Do they kind of avoid, do they, like, block out the ones that are going to set people off into fits of hysterics because they include the like wings falling off a plane?

Can I watch alive on a plane, you know?

It's a good question.

You can actually look at the, I'm looking at the flights that Delta has right now, and it all looks rather

rather basic stuff.

Oh, they got Jurassic Park on here.

You do got to kind of keep people calm, right?

And like,

okay, like, you're not going to get that much exhilaration out of a tiny, sort of like iPad-sized screen, but like, you don't want to hit anyone's kind of like phobia of flying.

And I've always wondered about that.

Like, how not something I know the answer to, but now I also want to see that.

It's actually all mentor pilot air crash videos.

I'm like popping open all of my aviation disaster-specific YouTube channels.

They're putting this podcast on the plane.

I'm like, white, yeah, I'll tie in with Delta.

Yeah, yeah, we can be the last fucking

thing.

I'm talking with United, actually.

Yeah,

Getting us to do the safety briefing.

Oh, hell yeah.

Emergency.

It's R, okay.

You ever see the dash cam videos we show up on sometimes where people are listening to us

and then crash their cars.

Yeah.

I'm sorry about your car.

It's very funny when that happens.

It's Sunuel and I've never heard this.

This is the funniest thing I've heard.

I'm not sorry about your car.

Doing the safety briefing, and it's like in the very unlikely event of an emergency and you're told to assume the brace position, you're going to want to get your neck over something so that it snaps as quickly as possible.

And you're just not, you're not present for like whatever happens next, you know?

I'm going off camera and off mic because I got to eat.

So carry on.

Done like, done like three people do that and are the only people who died because it was a perfectly fine landing.

And I am sued for $500 trillion.

Don't do that.

I do the last scene of flight, but it's like I was on my phone.

I'm on my phone now.

I was posting.

I was going to say, most airlines don't tell you to to do the brace position, but most airlines don't really tell you anything of interest because nobody pays attention these days.

That's true, yeah.

They try to make it like a fun little thing.

It's dangerously plausible that we could do one.

Somebody's, I think Delta started making them like a fun little thing, and it just became a trend that nobody cares about because nobody watches the safety briefing.

Oh, safety brief went viral.

Yes, this has happened.

They have talked about this.

It's fucking insane.

So

the United International Safety Brief is like, you know, a fun jaunt through Europe with American in Paris playing in the background.

And

then like, you know,

the safety seems secondary.

Yeah.

Yeah, that's about, that's how that's how most of them are.

Yeah, I always like, I always like the British Airways one.

I usually fly British Airways when I can, if I get a choice, which you basically don't now.

Just because there's something about the corporate affect of British Airways, which has been made so deliberately soulless because all they had was like imperial nostalgia.

And now they don't want to do that so it's just kind of generic airline brackets british which means you know the fly standards wear like grey flannel and stuff um but the affect of the safety brief is is very much like uh

it's like a therapist right when you are being floridly insane just trying to like gently and calmly reassure you that you're not gonna die on the plane

and i i value that i need that i need the kind of banal britishness of like

well, you know, you're probably not going to crash into water, but if you do, there's some things that you can do.

And just think about those, you know?

But you're probably not going to need to.

I like United because I have the confidence that if someone is an asshole, they will break his legs and drag him off the plane.

That is a completely reasonable point.

As far as I'm aware, they have like the strongest union culture of any of the major legacy airlines.

So I assume these are somehow related to each other.

Oh, my God.

They get the biggest fucking thugs out there to take a dumb asshole yeah yeah

italian american airlines yeah

united go fuck yourself

yeah the the the average safety briefing now i on delta they do they will actually right now they talk about their corporate history because it's their 100th anniversary this year, which is not relevant and stupid.

Or you fly a low-cost airline with no screens or on regional.

And so you just have the flight attendants giving you the most straight-laced thing of your life, which they do not want to do and nobody's paying attention to.

Particularly, like the, God, I flew Frontier to Philly for the live show, and that was the most, that was the most unattentive and like vaguely, I don't want to say uncivilized, but like, I don't know, that crowd was, that crowd was questionable.

Anyways, sorry, I keep talking about Delta.

It's the only airline I fly to because I fly to Seattle.

52 minutes in.

We're on slide one.

Let's go.

Okay.

Next slide.

The good news.

So the good news is the videotape thing on the right, I already talked about on accident.

This was by the time the 90s came around, videotape was a lot more common.

So you could start doing the whole individual in-seat entertainment system.

The one on the left here, this is what Swissera had before, the one we're going to talk about in a minute.

This is the coolest thing I've ever seen in my life.

I need to control more things in my life with controls like this.

i mean if it if it was more like uh is the word like skewomorphic uh if it if it had more like clicky clacky buttons and panels and stuff then i would be more in favor of it but this is really good still yes yeah this was

this is why people still like blackberries

yeah i mean i i kind of agree with that at this point so

i get the point

This is so basically these just act as sort of a control hub for a videotape player that can also seek left and right.

It's complex to explain in a way that doesn't actually matter.

But by the time the early 90s come around,

somebody had decided to come up with the interactive in-flight entertainment system.

And the first company to do this, if you click the next slide,

was actually Nintendo of all companies.

Oh my God.

Okay.

So

they were sort of the first major company to explore this.

They developed what they call the Nintendo Gateway System, which is very hard to find documentation about.

So

some of this is like off, some of this is best guesswork.

This is like similar to the phone they charged you $5,000 if you touched.

Actually, yes, this is the yeah, yeah.

So, this was the sort of first, I quote-unquote interactive setup that was really installed.

It was installed on Northwest Airlines and a bunch of Japanese airlines and like Air Canada and British Airways, I think.

It was fancy because you could pay to play Super Nintendo and eventually Game Boy games.

Ooh.

Which, you know, they also introduced this system in hotels and

one other scenario that I suddenly can't think of.

You had to work so hard to be like a gamer back in the day.

Oh, yeah.

Oh, yeah.

Well,

this wasn't even the first in-flight video game system, but the first one is so stupidly con

the first

one was also on a 1925 British plane, but it's like

you line up in the aisle and play quite,

and technically that counts.

Yeah, you know,

you see the system installed.

You see the system installed in a hotel and like you have to pay extra to play Leisure Shoot.

Leisure Shoot Larry.

Hell yeah.

Yeah.

You get like three hours entertainment out of that game.

That's worth paying five bucks for.

I mean, not in 1990, it wasn't.

Oh, yeah.

No.

Yeah.

Last time I played the first Leisure Shoot Larry, I cheated the whole way through.

So that's just how it goes.

So, yeah, this was sort of the first basic, like, interactive one.

It's kind of sort of the basic roadmap for what we have nowadays, the more common systems that we have nowadays.

I don't know when these were retired.

I really don't know anything about how they worked or how much they cost.

I know how much it cost in hotels because that was like $5 an hour to play Super Nintendo or N64 games, which is somewhat ridiculous, but never mind.

It was higher than minimum wage.

You're going to find like some YouTuber flying to an island off the coast of Chile or something um in a plane that still has one of these in it and he's taken that flight solely in order to find this like

annoyingly this sounds like something i would do so i can't actually say anything in negative no no it's it's really cool like i'm a big fan of a guy who uh just goes to like different bits of central america looking for old planes that are still flying so yeah no i i wish i wish i had the money to do this or else i i Fortunately, I can't.

And unfortunately, I can't go to Iran for old planes anymore because we blew up some of them the other day.

The S-15.

That was a bad decision.

If Israel touches a single F-14,

tie me to the fucking ICBM and fire it at Televis.

They blew up one, and they said that it was one that was like, quote-unquote, minutes from takeoff, but it was obviously one that they were just using for spare parts.

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah.

Well, tie me to the ICBM, I guess.

Yeah,

they got the 747 SP out there, too.

Not anymore.

They just have the 200, which I think Israel also blew up one of those.

God fucking damn it.

Can we not have anything nice in the world?

Not only, right?

Not only do you start a war.

Like, it's not just Israel.

It's like the U.S., it's Russia as well.

It's like, not only do you start a war, but you also destroy a bunch of really interesting aircraft.

I am still mad about that, Antonov.

I will be mad about that until the end of the day.

Yeah, I'm mad about that.

I think everybody, I think most people are.

It's pretty reasonable, yeah.

I mean, they still want to rebuild it.

They still want to rebuild it out of the other one that was like half done.

Yeah.

They're going to find the money for it.

You're going to have to.

I mean, that was a very important aircraft globally for removing big stuff.

Like global logistical choke points.

Like, for real.

So that was sort of the first stab in an interactive in-flight entertainment system.

The second, more relevant one today, if you go to the next slide, we're actually going to get into the stuff that's relevant to this specific plane.

What are we doing on time so far?

An hour?

An hour?

Doing great?

Starting a story now.

So in the year 1994, Yuri Itkis, a Soviet-born engineer who had immigrated to Las Vegas, Nevada,

first mistake,

started a company called Interactive Flight Technologies Incorporated.

The company's vision was to develop a state-of-the-art interactive in-flight entertainment system, close quote, they could integrate and sell to any airlines that wanted such a thing on any aircraft, any long-haul aircraft, I should say.

As I've written here, the company's other vision was presumably to enrich the family, because as far as I could tell, the company started with five employees, all of which in the immediate family of the first guy we mentioned.

Oh, yeah.

The nepotism angle and the small business owner angle will come back in quite a few times.

So, this is something to keep in mind.

You can't even get into the in-flight entertainment system business if you're not an itkus.

Yeah, so I know you've seen this exact map.

Yes,

this is familiar.

Yeah, this is when they invented that relief map that you have spent hours bored out of your mind looking at.

Yeah, yeah.

Are we there yet?

No, are we there yet?

No.

It's like, damn,

I know what our like ground airspeed is.

That's useful information to me.

Like, yes.

Oh, we can watch LA Confidential.

It's kind of monitoring the situation.

It's a good film.

I am.

Yeah, that is the benefit of the big map is you do get to be like, I'm pretty sure.

Like, yeah, I have no input over what the pilot's doing, but I'm monitoring.

I'm supervising.

I'm pretty sure.

I'm monitoring the situation.

If something goes wrong

in the cockpit, I've done an ocular pat down.

I can go up there and resolve any problem that may occur.

Actually, something, something I didn't mention that's relevant to that.

Uh, in the 70s, American Airlines and a couple others started putting cameras in the cockpit that they would broadcast to the cabin for passengers to look at.

Whoa, um, and they did that until American Airlines 191 happened and an engine fell off, and they all watched themselves fly into the ground at high speed.

Nice, and then they stopped doing that.

Oh, oh, but if I were there monitoring the situation,

I wouldn't have gone down like that.

Yeah, exactly, exactly.

Oh, that's that's the that's that's the McDonnell Douglas/slash Boeing seal quality there to be.

Oh, stewardess, I've played Microsoft Flight Simulator.

I'm going to remind you that you can buy from the store, which is going to be in the links, a McDonnell Douglas will kill you t-shirt.

I saw someone wearing one to the Trash Future live show.

It looked good as hell.

I saw someone wearing one at the Philly live show, and

I went up and introduced myself like, hey, was something.

Sorry, go ahead.

And they didn't recognize who I was instantly, which is quite funny, but I'm completely understandable.

That was somebody wearing a meat deck shirt at the London show.

Yeah, so we bought one.

Yeah, fine.

Yeah, amazingly.

I gotta get one of them.

Purchase our merchandise from the water.

Our merch or poom.

People order our merchandise.

So by 1995, Interactive Flight Technologies, IFT,

they developed the first generation system.

As far as I can tell, they sold this to one airline, which is Alitalia.

They really wanted to show you Silo.

They were obsessed about it.

It was fucked up, to be honest.

It's not for everyone.

It is a cinematic masterpiece.

I understand.

Yeah, yeah.

Alitalia doesn't exist anymore, so I can call them absolute freaks on the internet without libeling anyone.

Oh, yeah.

I just forget.

I've got a bunch of like spaghetti westerns on there.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah, we're all gonna sit there and watch uh duck you sucker for 16 hours.

I do miss Alitalia.

Beautiful livery, beautiful livery when applied to rally cars as well.

Oh, yeah, absolutely.

Yeah, also, it was a livery that hadn't been changed in 40 years, which notably is the secret to not having a good livery these days.

Yep, yep, yep.

Put it on the Lancia Stratos, and yeah,

yeah.

Um, so after uh, they bought it for the one plane, which was the McDonnell Douglas MD-11, which is is the relevant plane type for this entire episode, but for here specifically.

They bought it explicitly as a test and that they would expand it to other planes in their fleet if they decided it worked good enough.

Alitalio did not buy it for any more aircraft based on the documentation I have seen.

Just like we tested it, we found it to be shit.

Yes.

Wasn't good enough.

I couldn't see

the orgy as clearly as I wanted to.

By 1995, IFT had relocated to Phoenix, Arizona.

What if it's the opposite?

What if Alitalia was like screening Salo, not because they're absolute freaks, but because they're like absolute like cinema nuts.

And they were screening like, I don't know, eight and a half or like Laventura or something.

And they're like, well, this fucking sucks.

I'm not moved to

crying.

I'm not moved to tears by the beauty of this artistic achievement at all.

I can hardly see the fucking thing.

I'm switching over to the map instead of this.

This is an insult to Italian city.

Exactly.

That's a good point there.

I miss when there is a big screen at the front of the plane.

You know, obviously what they need to do is constantly fly at a lower pitch so you have cinema seating so you can see the big screen at the front of the plane.

Just one big vomit comet.

I mean, one thing that I was going to say about British Airways earlier is that I kind of miss airline nationalism.

in the sense that like, you remember how when you were a little kid and you went to the airport and you were like, oh my God, there's people from from all over the world, there's planes from all over the world, everywhere has a culture, and they're all wonderful, you know.

And you're like, that's that's the Alitalia plane.

I don't know why everybody's crying, but like, that's the Alitalia plane.

It's like white, green, and red.

It looks beautiful.

It likes, it's, it's like emblematic, right?

Um, and then you fly a different airline, and you're like, oh fuck, I'm experiencing the culture of Tajikistan because they're giving me like Tajik food.

And now they kind of don't really do that.

You get the same food and you get the same movies just off of a kind of Netflix thing.

And it's like, I want to take the, I want to take Air France and I want them to start showing me God of movies, you know?

No, no, you go on, you go on

British Airways and there's no movies.

There's just a selection of Adrian Childs articles.

Yeah, no, what it is, is it's it's Love Island.

Wow, yeah.

My wife is currently watching Love Island, which makes me want to throw up in my mouth.

Saluting.

You're welcome to our cultural iceboard.

Yeah.

Airline food edition.

We've never really, the judges on Great British Baking So are pervert.

They're all gross.

What you got to watch is the Great Australian Bake Off, which is now going to be hosted by a friend of the show, Tom Walker.

Oh, hell yeah.

Yeah.

He's got a.

He's got a, you know, drive a car 900 miles an hour into there.

I'm going to have to put that as as the second entry on cooking shows I actually want to watch.

Yes.

I had to live there with Iron Chef, which will be there until the end of time.

This is a lesson, a salutary lesson for all of us.

If you drive yourself insane for long enough on the internet, eventually you will land a lucrative job.

Oh, God.

Fuck when I've waited for so long.

I'm so poor, and I don't have the lucrative, insane internet job yet.

So once IFT started designing the second generation of the system, which they did after relocating to Phoenix, they started building it around a standard Intel-based computer that ran Microsoft Windows NT server,

which did kind of vastly expand the capabilities that they could do because they were installing a whole Intel-based computer under every seat in the aircraft.

Oh, sick.

Yeah, now the main problem with running like standard computer silicon in an embedded application like that is that, of course, computers tend to get quite warm.

Yes.

Even though I'm doing the Liam's room kind of temperature gradient.

I'm dying.

I'm

actually also doing the my living room temperature gradient right now, to be fair.

If you have to run the heating in winter, you don't own enough computers.

That's right, baby.

Yeah.

Oh, you'll never betray me, will you?

3080 exhaust.

No, you won't.

And the fan noise blends right into the engine noise.

This is true.

Karen told me, she's like, I actually find the server hum really soothing.

And I was like, yeah, I bet you do.

We all float down here, baby.

As far as I have read, I think that the thing about the server fans blending in with the engine noise was actually a part of their calculus.

Amazing.

Yeah.

So that bleed air just goes straight through as it wants through cooling.

So all of these machines ran very hot, and it was something that IFT knew about, but to term it was not actually that detrimental to operation because it didn't affect the main server, which was a much less compact unit that was integrated into the internal wiring harnesses of of the aircraft.

Yeah, we took out one of the toilets to put in like a filing cabinet-sized server, and that's what calls hope floats.

Well,

every airliner basically has one of these.

It's just under the cockpit.

If you've never seen a picture of one, it's very interesting.

It's just a bunch of avionics gear that looks like server gear in like regular ass racks.

It's crazy shit.

At least on modern planes, obviously.

We've built a lot of computers into these things nowadays.

I put this shit in a 727 and it's like just a closet with servers haphazardly thrown in there.

Like my controller, the sink is still there.

God, Jesus Christ.

I will, to be clear, I have a 3D printer right here.

If you need hard drive adapters, I will gladly.

They are seated in trays.

They're just not like secured into those trays.

I'm so mad at you.

It's press fit.

It's fine.

The holes on the trays don't marry up with the screw holes on the hard drive.

Yes, they do.

No, they don't.

I'm doing fucking Steam logic puzzles here to

try and match them up, and they don't match up.

Listen, when I get, I'm going to get evicted in like three months' time.

I'm going to have to move house, and I'm going to have to pick up this computer and move it again, right?

So, like,

I don't know.

There's a decent chance this ends with the podcast buying a new computer.

Yeah, don't worry.

I throw it on the credit card.

We got it.

I understand both sides of this because I have the 3D printer that can do hard drive packets, but also like next to me is a laptop that

the hard drive is literally floating around inside of.

So I get both sides of this argument.

Granted, this is 20 years old, so a bit of a different scenario.

What if we secured it in some kind of like jelly situation, like an aspect?

Some embedded hardware actually does this.

Not like aspect, but

it's just

floating around in like honey.

It is like

a D and D, like slime.

It's just in the.

So they decided that the seats units running hot wasn't a problem because, of course, they didn't get hot enough to cause a problem, at least as far as they could tell.

And it didn't affect the main server.

So

only under every seat.

Yes.

Yeah.

So they finished developing this and made it deployable.

And they called it,

what was it, the Inflight Entertainment Network.

Since this was the second generation, the whole system was called IFEN-2.

It really rolls off the tongue.

Yeah, catch it.

Yes.

What you're looking at right now is a picture of the configuration they gave to Swissair.

You'll notice the films thing, and they have the nice touch screens where you can select between different languages on a film.

You can watch LA Confidential in French, which would make it an interesting, even more interesting film.

Rollo Tomasi.

C'est vu.

Yeah, no, I have some thoughts about Swiss air that I'll get into later.

Sure.

Makes sense for the multi-language thing, I guess, because

otherwise you would have riots.

You know, you gotta have French and German at least on that.

None of these films are in Romance.

Yeah, this is bullshit.

Swiss Federal Council, please bankrupt Swissa.

Oh, wait.

Oh, that was a good one.

I'm still mad about that.

I'll be mad about that for a long time.

We'll get into it.

What the fuck is a Swiss International Airlines?

I'll kill you.

So IFT would eventually get lucky and would sign a memorandum of understanding with the national flag carrier of Switzerland, Swissair.

Oh,

yes.

May 1st, 1996, outlining a deal to install the system on 16 McDonnell Douglas MD-11s and five Boeing 747s.

And would involve a bizarre revenue and cost-sharing model that I did not really understand, involving IFT paying to maintain the system on some planes and paying for some others.

Not really that relevant.

It was just fucking weird.

Average airline financing for anything.

Yeah, that's about right, actually.

IFEN2, notably, had a killer feature that the original system did not have.

That being, go to the next slide, please.

Gambling.

Gambling.

Gambling.

Gambling.

Yes.

Gambling.

IFT designed a system that had three games, Kino, Slots, and something called Risco, a game that I can't actually find any details of.

It's presumably not the board game, which is based off of Risk, which would be fun to gamble on.

No, that'd be pretty fun.

I think they should

love to gamble on Risk.

Yeah, no, that'd be pretty good.

I mean, if you made that skill-based, you know, I mean, so much of gambling, gambling just isn't what it used to be anymore, you know, these days.

Yeah.

You just start gambling on board games.

Can we do like professional board games?

No gambling on Shadow Doge.

Yeah.

IFT themselves would run the gambling services.

The financial side of things would be handled by the Swiss lottery, which makes this a multinational partnership, I think.

You would swipe your credit card and you would be allowed to spend up to $200 and win up to $3,500, which would be great.

Oh, yeah.

It seems like

that's a no-brainer, baby.

What happens if I spend up to $200 before I win $3,500?

That is a good question.

I assume the answer is fuck you.

Yeah.

Yeah.

That's extra money.

Yeah.

Excuse me.

Excuse me.

Stewardess.

I didn't win my $3,500.

There's something wrong with the system.

So, yeah, the gambling system or the, sorry, the Federal Aviation Administration

approved IFT is overseeing the gambling operation, which, as far as I can tell, legally made them in the same class as a casino.

Which is interesting.

They are based out of Vegas, right?

No, they're based out of Phoenix at this point, which is a worse place, an even worse place to be.

Phoenix casinos.

Yes.

So all the gambling was paid out by the Swiss National Lottery, but all the infrastructure was running out of Phoenix.

It's a very strange setup.

But they advertise gambling as the revenue driver, especially for those in business first class.

Yeah, I mean, first class fires absolutely have that kind of money to burn and are stupid.

So, yeah.

No, that's the shit that high rollers like is slot machines.

They don't like the things where they're sitting at a table and doing like I want to play a bunch of cards

and shit.

Yeah, yeah, no, no, no, no, that's what real James Bond would go straight for the slot machine and just keep pulling the lever.

Yeah, yes,

uh, there is a you can play slots on this, it's what's going on in the bottom right there, but uh, it appears to be a bizarre nautical themed slots with fish.

Um, Swissair had actually agreed to install it on all three of the classes, first, business, and coach.

Um, but you know, the gambling was like they can they they can fleece first and business class travelers something fierce here

um okay so the the part about it being installed in three classes is relevant for the next slide which next slide please thank you oh diagrams yes uh the system was or was actually initially originally designed for the first and business class cabins and was designed to run on the same power distribution unit as the cabin, which is normal for how in-flight entertainment systems work for presumably obvious reasons.

You know, it's in the cabin.

Ah, yes.

This meant that it would be powered by

the electrical system called the cabin bus.

All caps.

Yes,

just writing down what it says in the official reports and in the cockpit.

I don't really know why it's all caps.

That's important.

Yes.

When you read it, you have to shout it.

Cabin bus.

Cabin bus.

Dave with an air of wonder: the cabin bus.

Yes.

Cabin bus.

You would have a matching cabin bus breaker that would be labeled as such in the cockpit.

And pulling said breaker would, in an emergency, kill all power to everything in the cabin minus essential systems.

This was obviously considered essential and was on a fair amount of emergency checklists from both Swissair and McDonnell Douglas themselves, including the one for quote, smoke from unknown origin, close quote.

Oh, dollar man.

You smoke in the top of the airplane to be a candle with a cigarette, right?

And somebody

shuts off all the gambling.

It's like, god, fucking damn it.

Yes.

As

where's my $3,500?

As Swissair had requested that they install it on every seat on the aircraft, IFT found that the cabin power distribution would not have enough power to drive the entertainment system.

The decision to install it in the coach cabin called for an entire second equipment rack in the forward main cabin.

Basically, the big server unit, they were going to put two of them in there at the same time.

That's what this diagram shows.

You can see the first rack there towards the forward of the aircraft and the second rack there towards sort of center of the aircraft.

This is all from emerged from

investigative reports afterwards.

Jesus, excuse me.

All this just to facilitate slot machines.

Yeah, that's essentially the case.

Yes.

And Riskio.

Yeah.

Receico.

Recico, excuse me.

I think.

The decision was made to wire it directly into the second of the aircraft's two AC electrical distribution systems, meaning it was isolated from any and all cabin safety measures, although it could theoretically still safely be shut down in an emergency as long as the essential AC bus remained online.

Oh, okay.

So you just wire it in anywhere, basically.

Yes, great.

Yeah, it looks good.

Yeah, it's just spice it in there, it's fine, it's good.

Going down the checklist, and it's like, what does it what do you mean, shut down half the slot machines?

Guys, uh, circuit breaker controls uh,

the right engine and gambling.

Oh, that is a tricky wiring, that is.

The Federal Aviation Administration, who was overseeing this because IFT was an American company and McDonnell Douglas was an American company, despite Swissair being a European carrier, would approve installing the system like this in one single aircraft.

Meaning that they were legally allowed to install it on other MD-11s as long as they were configured identically and the systems were installed identically to one another.

This was mainly as a testing feature, although, as far as I can aware, they just kind of ran with it.

Yeah, looks good.

Looks good to me.

Better to ask for forgiveness than permission.

Yeah.

Right until we go.

They don't like that saying at the FAA, I understand.

The FAA would also approve this despite the decision to use a different, less flame-retardant Mylar material compared to the rest of the aircraft's wiring systems.

It's long USB cord.

It's fine.

Yes.

Despite USB, this is like fucking SCSI or some shit.

1997, USB existed.

It was just the slowest, the absolute slowest server.

Yep.

And Windows didn't support it yet.

Jeez.

Windows still doesn't really support it.

It's Firewire.

That actually didn't exist yet.

Firewire 800.

Yeah, that's how we're fucking doing this.

I would rule, actually.

I have so many Firewire cables right next to me.

Despite using what essentially amounted to two separate systems, they decided to wire both of them into AC into AC Bus 2, despite the fact that they could have wired one of them into the cabin bus as originally planned, which would have been more complex, but would have been easier to shut it down.

Okay, so now you just don't, you can't shut down the slot machines.

Yeah, yeah, they all say slot machines, dead man switchment only for slot machines.

Wings falling off, engines falling off, stabilizers gone, slot machines still gone, operational.

That's like the titanium bathtub, but they're titanium slot machines.

This is a flight data recorder and slot machine payout box.

Yeah, yeah.

The pilot has like

a lever in the cockpit to increase or decrease the odds on the slot machines.

I'm sorry that your loved one was killed.

However, we recovered the cockpit data recorder and we found that

they were screaming a lot, but they are entitled to about $100 worth of credit card refunds from slot machines.

Yeah, actually, you know, the payout goes directly to the pilots, so there were chips flying around.

Yeah.

The pneumatic tube full of chips.

Yeah.

So they went ahead with installing this on all the aircraft they had originally agreed to.

The first unit was installed in an MD-11 in January 1997, with the plan to be to install the system in one to two planes per month up through February 1998.

Depending on maintenance schedules, they weren't going to bother unless it was in the hangar for something else, obviously.

Swissair, the Swiss Lottery, and

IFT were contractually obligated to service the system until December 31st, 2003.

Swissair, after introducing the system to public fanfare in January 1997 with a ton of press photos, some of which I've already used several times, would consider it a success, although for reasons I can't really figure out, they would disable it in the coach cabin by April 1997, meaning the entire power distribution issue was entirely moot and they could have switched back.

Just like they could have switched back.

We're not making any money off these people, but we got to keep the sort of like wiring architecture to do it.

Yep.

Just in case.

Yep.

Yes.

Which, you know,

I could see the justification for not rewiring the plane,

if not for everything that's about to happen.

Next slide.

This is another one of them press photos I just talked about.

Because I just need to talk about the system for a minute.

Swissair would get a.

Oh, I could get info.

You could.

Oh, and chance.

Chance.

I really like

just air show.

That's why I said it.

I know it's a map, Maria.

They have a chance, but where's community chest?

Oh, it's in your ass, Roz.

What?

It's in your ass.

It's in your butt.

Okay.

I have a fun aside about that since I

we were on total.

What did you do to my ass?

An assign, if you will.

I was talking to Jay when we were setting up for Philly for the fill more.

And he's like, oh, do you have this this cable?

And I was like, I think it's probably in your butt.

And I'm about to say, I think it's probably in your butt.

And Jay cuts me off because I've been making this joke six nights in a row and goes, I swear to God, if you say it's in my ass, I'll fuck you up.

I've never seen a man like break composure like this.

I think it was just like, shut the fuck up.

And I was like, oh, he's broken composure.

I've done it.

The joke is your normal.

You're declaring victory at that moment.

I want to go to what is, what do you think they got behind the paid film uh paywall.

I was gonna ask, yeah, what's one of the free one of the free films?

I didn't notice this when I was putting it together.

I wonder, I have to wonder what the free films were, and if it was just safety, the safety video have to pay for it with a master card as well.

Also,

train arriving at the station.

What else?

Uh, maybe some Buster Keaton,

uh, you know, that's not a bad deal.

I'd watch some Buster Keats.

That would actually be pretty good.

You know, that's probably behind the paywall, actually.

They didn't even have the term paywall yet, that's how like primitive they were.

So, back then, you had to put a MasterCard logo on there, yeah, to let them know: no, no Visa, no American Express, only MasterCard.

Sometimes I wonder if I've fallen off, and then I feel then I remember that American Express exists, and I feel a lot better.

That's a good point there, yeah.

They don't even deliver stuff anymore.

What the fuck?

American Unhurried.

Yeah, so American Express and Western Union,

two of the biggest crash outs of, I was going to say our time, but that's a much different time.

Yeah.

Look, Western Union is still going somehow.

I don't know what people use it for.

Remittances, genuinely.

I was going to say they use it for money transfer.

They used to use it for money transfer to get scammed, but that's now they just use cryptocurrency for it.

Yeah.

No, no, Western Union is like propping up the economy of a bunch of like poorer countries.

Yeah, this is actually true.

So

MoneyGram is as well for the same reason.

Yeah.

So, sorry, hang on.

Where was I?

That's right.

I had one drink.

I shouldn't be this out of it.

So, Swissair got a fair bit of positive industry press.

Passengers liked it a lot, although the features would not be as thrilling as expected.

In March of 1997, Swissair told the Securities and Exchange Commission that a total of 50 people had gambled up to the $200 limit.

50 Swiss whales.

Those high rollers, as I said,

they love the

They don't want that kind of in-person interaction where they can like you know intimidate their fellow high rollers at like a, you know, a poker table or like a

blackjack table.

No, they just want to pull the lever.

I mean, I'm not turning down $10,000.

Like, that's not bad.

It was $2,600.

No, all those people won $3,500.

That's

shit.

You know what I'm saying?

The passenger always wins.

By the middle of 1997, Alitalia would take a second stab at it because

they were really committed to showing this one film.

They would install it in five MD-11s as a second test.

They would also sign some sort of agreement with

Debonair from the UK and Qantas from Australia.

I don't think either one of those happened, uh, as far as I can tell.

I think both IFT and Debonair ran out of money before they could even really try.

I've never even heard of Debonair, so like oh, it's Devon's uh

yeah, Devon's Devon's airline, Devon's airline,

yeah, Devon's airline, yeah, Devonair, Debonair.

They were wherever they oh, they flew out of London, Luton.

So that's weird, yeah, okay.

I think EasyJet started doing that, So not as weird as it sounds, but yeah.

I mean, it's, I mean, for 1996, oh, they really existed for four years.

Okay, that's nice.

Well done.

For 1996, that would be revolutionary because, of course,

every low-cost carrier hadn't realized that people will pay to get screwed in every fashion

like we have nowadays.

Have the spirit in the frontier airlines

of Europe here.

Anyway.

Swissair themselves would have some financial difficulties.

Not the bigger ones later.

Yeah, I was going to say.

Yeah.

I mean, yes, but not yet.

So combining that with some technical difficulties, the system had only been installed on five on six planes by 1998.

At some point in the later half of 1997, Swissair had complained that the individual systems under the seats were getting so hot that the hard drives were dying.

Oh, it's like no one's computer.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Wow.

No, well, there's just a bunch of loose hard drives under every seat.

Right.

You know, when someone like stows their bag underneath underneath the seat in front of them, it like fucks up all the hard drives.

I hate to say it.

IFT blamed the company that supplied the hard drives.

I can't find out who that is, but if you know some of the companies that were making hard drives at the time, I could be

pretty short list.

I could, in fact, believe that IBM was making drives that exploded like that, but I would also be tempted to blame both sides here.

All right, this is like, you know,

this is before we had solid state drives.

So, you know, it's like a platter, you know, and it, it's like a fucking disc that just explodes.

After there, after those two problems, Swissair didn't have any other major issues.

You know, that was really it up until

you'll go to the next slide.

Oh, this is this is gorgeous.

This is the bit where I get to talk about Swissair.

So, so, like, I'm, I'm sort of in, I'm adjacent to this one, right?

So, like, um, this, this may set off a spasm of people trying to, like, investigate me for like podcast nepotism.

My dad

lived in Switzerland for a long time when I was growing up.

And so basically, because my parents were divorced and they had like shared custody, I would like fly out regularly.

I would like commute as a kid on a Swiss airplane between London and Geneva.

This is the least relatable story I have ever told.

But

it sounds nice, though.

It was really nice.

I was flying on my own, which meant that if you're a kid doing that,

the stewardesses make a huge fuss of you.

You were allowed to go into the cockpit because they didn't know that kids could do 9-11 yet because Zoro and Mandani hadn't been elected yet.

Or Roz, yeah.

I'm allowed to.

It's not even illegal.

So, like, every time I got off one of these planes, I would have like a little set of like pilots' wings and a little tiny model of the plane and a little like gift bag.

Oh, my God.

and like a 1% more thing, and a 1% more wire in my brain between

older women being nice to me and me feeling a bunch of strange feelings.

So, did the pilot ever ask you about a drugstore?

Gladiator movies.

Weirdly, weirdly, I never got sexually harassed

as a kid on a Swiss air flight, but I did get sexually harassed as a kid the first time I went to Utah.

So, just derive from that what you read.

I mean, that makes sense.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

But so, um, yeah, I used to fly on these all the time at a time contemporaneous with when we're talking about.

I remember these planes, I feel very fondly towards them.

I think the livery is beautiful.

And again, it was a time of like strong brand identity that was based around.

I don't know.

I didn't know what the fuck Swissness was, despite spending half my time there.

But I was like,

Switzerland is when a lot of extremely beautiful women are very solicitous and very nice to you.

And I kind of still believe that today.

See, Nova, you hang around a gymnasium.

See, now I'm actually jealous because

I was born in a time and did not fly for the first time until well after 9-11.

So, of course, the cockpit was a foreign land where, no, where people were not allowed to be.

Also, I phrased that wrong.

I was not born after 9-11.

Jesus Christ.

Not giving myself enough credit here.

People who are born after 9-11 are adults now.

It's crazy.

Yeah, like that shit.

Presumably some of them.

Presumably some of them.

I still know that it used to be you could just go to the airport terminal and hang around and watch the airplanes.

Yeah.

We used to be a proper country.

You could do that in Seattle, but you still have to go through TSA, which why would you do that?

I think you could do that in Philly now, too, but you also still have to go through TSA.

You used to be able to do it in Pittsburgh, and then they started ruining the terminal by building a new one.

Oh, right.

Yeah.

No, they're getting rid of the good postmodern terminal and replacing with some bullshit.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I mean, listen, there are seats behind me that are from the Pittsburgh airport terminal.

I am very mad about what they are doing to my airport.

Anyways,

the thing about air thing about airline nationalism is also weird because we didn't...

We never had a flag carrier in the U.S.

We just had like Pan Am, right?

Yeah.

Right.

We just had like Pan Am as a sign of global dominance.

But like, I think for, I think at the time in like the mid-century, the sign of American dominance was the fact that we built the planes, which we don't do anymore.

Yeah, nah, we don't do that anymore.

Pan Am got subsumed into, of all things, CSX.

That's true, yeah.

Chicken shit express, yeah.

Yeah.

There's actually, there's a weird travel agency that paid Iceland Air to put a Pan Am livery on one of their planes so they can charter it as like a retro future type thing,

which is fucking crazy.

It's like $100,000 a ticket for a global for a global itinerary.

The people yearn for the brands.

They want the old brand identities.

They do, except they do.

Swiss airback, you sons of bitches, right?

Demand the brands.

Demand brand.

The travel agency that's running this also did it on the cheap.

So it's not a real version of the Pan Am livery.

And it's also on a 757, which they're going to take on around the world, which is a fascinating choice.

That is interesting.

Yeah.

I want Swiss airback.

I want to return with a V.

I want to be too young to experience gender dysphoria yet and have a bunch of very beautiful women be nice to me.

That's true.

I'm jealous of the cockpit thing, but

I understand the yearning for the older women.

That part I get.

Anyways, on the topic here, the aircraft we are looking at right now is

in McDonnell Douglas MD-11 built in 1991.

it is registered hb-iwf uh it is named i believe that's pronounced vaud i don't know it's it's vaux vaux

vaux is the canton immediately north of geneva uh it's it's where lausanne is it's where montreau is it's very very pretty um yeah it's like the whole kind of

north shore of lake geneva yeah it's where smoke on the water occurred it is where smoke on the water occurred it's also got a cool flag if you're into swiss cantonal flags, then why shouldn't you be?

Yeah,

we're all here for vexiology.

I meant to look up how that was pronounced

before I came here today, and then I didn't.

So it shows what I know.

It's all good.

Canton Vo.

The system, the IFEN-2 system, was built into this aircraft between the 21st of August and the 9th of September, 1997.

There were some part problems that wouldn't actually get done until February of 1998.

Vaux would be assigned to fly Swiss Air Flight 111 between John F.

Kennedy International Airport in New York and Geneva Airport in Geneva on September 2nd, 1998.

Oh boy.

Swiss Air 111, Swiss Air 111 was sometimes called the UN Express due to its route and the fact that it took off after the workday ended in New York.

Yeah,

people don't necessarily know this about Geneva, but it's kind of a company town for the UN and NGOs more generally.

And so if you spend a lot of time in Geneva,

and as an English speaker, right, you're mostly around UN people, Red Cross people, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, and their kids.

And

it's weird.

It's a weird vibe.

It's a weird little company town, but it's cool.

Makes sense.

Yeah.

All the bulk of the UN bureaucracy is in Geneva.

New York is just where the

important stuff.

you know, the stuff that all the support functions are supporting is in New York.

Yes.

It's where they won't be able to send Netanyahu now that we have Zoron.

Now we have Zoron.

That will be a very interesting turn of events, whatever it undoubtedly happens.

Anyway.

Anyways, on September 2nd, 1998, Swissair 111 would take off from John F.

Kennedy International Airport at 8.18 Eastern Daylight Time.

28 minutes late.

28 minutes after it's scheduled to happen.

I had to replace a bunch of hard drives because people are gambling too much.

It's probably about fair, yeah.

All the like two people in first class

who were pulling the lever because that's the highest class form of gambling.

Yeah, that's right.

With the UN credit card, presumably.

Yeah.

You're gambling UN money.

That's going to feel good as hell.

Yeah.

Yeah.

In command of the aircraft was...

All right, put it all on a Hutus.

Let's go.

In command of the aircraft was Captain, I don't know how that's pronounced, so I'm going to go with Ers Zimmerman.

Yep, pretty good.

Okay, good luck.

A 49-year-old Swiss Air Force veteran whose birthday was September 3rd.

Being a Swiss Air Force veteran is really funny to me because it's like, yeah, cool.

You flew, I presume, fast jets

over a country that a fast jet crosses in about 10 minutes.

The coolest thing I ever saw was in Switzerland.

We were staying.

A family was sitting on.

We were staying in

a rented

chalet.

You know,

down the road is down the road is a, whatchamacallit, a sort of a hotel there where I had one of the best bologneses I've had in my life, like a spaghetti bolognese, right?

But they had a back deck and at the other side of the back deck was a cliff.

And the cliff went down, you know, several thousand feet.

This was, what, this was in the village of Hoflu, which is just near Meiringen, which is like, I forget what the canton is.

Um, and you could, you know, when I was there, you could look over the side of the railing, you could see the Swiss Air Force doing maneuvers below you, down

on like the matloop, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Meyringen is in Bern, by the way, just if you're curious.

I know,

no, it's not, is that, oh, is the whole thing a canton of Bern?

So, so there's two cantons: there's there's um, like Bernstadt and um

another one um just like burn like canton right so it's it's two the city and the thing oh i see i see i was thinking of uh oh shit because it took a long time to get the bern from there well not not that long of a time because the trains are very good um wait no i'm i'm i'm stupid i'm confusing baseline bern um but yeah it is in burn gotcha okay what's the other thing about that trip that was relevant i forget up that not not i mean i i can keep throwing swiss facts in i had the the freshest nicest bottle of milk in my life that i've ever had in a hotel in lausanne very very very positive experiences in switzerland yeah well i think this i'm really funny for the the arc of this podcast to be glazing switzerland like not that we don't deserve it but like it's quite it's quite ideologically interesting yes yes

it's like yeah you know

We could all just move there and be neutral.

Politics are over.

The only problem is we'd all had to get together in a big town meeting and Nova wouldn't be able to vote.

It's fine.

I'm not using it.

It's fine.

But yeah, so the Swiss Air Force, really, really cool.

They used to fly BF-109s, which are the only BF-109s you're allowed to acceptably think are cool because they're not Nazis.

They're just neutral.

They used to fly F-A-18s as well.

And the only other thing I know about the Swiss Air Force is that, in terms of like air defense and air interception, they keep office hours, which I think is one of the funniest things because it's such a small country.

They will like intercept aircraft over Switzerland Monday to Friday, nine to five, out with that as France and Germany's problem.

Yeah, that makes sense.

This conversation is very funny to me who's never been anywhere particularly near the European continent.

It's good.

They got good milk.

I got two very conflicting, very conflicting arguments there in both ears.

Nice milk, nice cheese.

Nazis.

Nazism, yeah.

Good chocolate as well.

Music.

Chocolate's good.

Yeah, good chocolate.

Watches are pretty good.

Yeah, we can all agree.

Oh, Switzerland live show, but just at a watch shop.

I would be thrilled to do a

Switzerland live show.

I would also go to the watch live show, even though every watch I wear is a casio right now.

So we're going to do it on the bridge in Luzern.

Yeah.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah.

No, they got to, we have to do it at the transport museum, but we need to meet Swiss Gareth Dennis first.

Oh, I love that.

We got to, well, we do it in Montreux, you know, like what as soon as the jazz festival clears out, we do it in Montreux on the lakefront and then just make sure the venue catches fire.

Yeah, we shouldn't tell them that first.

No, no, no.

There'll be a surprise.

Second in command on board this aircraft

was First Officer Stefan Lowe.

I believe this time I actually went and looked it up during that last diversion.

And I might still be wrong, but that's what Google Translate told me, so I can blame them.

He was a 36-year-old with relatively low hours in commercial aviation, but was also a Swiss Air Force veteran.

These two guys have both flown F-A-18s in circles over the same Alp together.

Yes.

Yes.

They can only turn left.

Also on board the flight were 11 flight attendants and one purser, bringing the total crew to 14 alongside 215 passengers, meaning we had a total of 229 people on board this aircraft.

This was not a full flight.

It was about 72% of revenue passenger seats occupied.

Imagine being able to sit and gamble on not a full flight and you can still smoke the dream.

The dream.

You're going from New York to Geneva.

It's, yeah, no, fantastic.

Unfortunately, you're probably not going to Geneva as we're going to get into it.

No, you're going into it.

Yeah, you're not going to space today.

Yes.

I mean, there's going to be a lot of smoke involved.

It's just not coming from the cigarette that you're holding in first class.

In any case,

in any case, about 15 minutes after takeoff, the aircraft would experience a radio blackout for 14 minutes.

This was just kind of determined to be a crew error that did not represent any sort of functional issues with the aircraft.

They had just tuned the radio wrong, but it was mentioned in the official report, so I felt like I had to put it here.

Just like it would like,

yeah,

they got the old-fashioned tuner with like the you know, the

physical thing that went back and forth.

You know,

hold on, I think I can get Limbaugh.

My dad and your dad just agreeing and disagreeing, but howling at each other over the Swiss air.

Yeah, that's funny.

Oh, if my dad and your dad were piloting the first officer, oh, yeah, I've just seen

you guys ever seen a fist fight on a plane

At 10.10 p.m.

Atlantic Daylight Time.

Uh-oh, I've been there.

So 58 minutes after takeoff while flying over the south coast of Nova Scotia, Captain Zimmerman detects the distinct smell of smoke, but a visual inspection did not confirm the presence of smoke.

Cockpit crew initially dismissed it as normal smoke from the air conditioning system being configured incorrectly, which happens sometimes on these older MT-11s, and the smell went away after a brief moment.

I mean, there's a lot of like weird bad smells you can get on planes.

Yeah, because like, you know, all the air that's coming in, you're getting from the bleed air system, so it goes through the engine, yes.

You know, and this is this is like uh, you know, just one of those things that happens on airplanes.

Sometimes you, you know, it inhales a bunch of air that happens to have smoke in it.

But, you know, the other thing which is interesting about this one is this is back before, you know, the cockpit door had to be locked.

Yes.

You know, back then you could just walk in.

It was also before cockpit crews were banned from smoking up there, notably.

So I don't, not that that was a factor, but it's probably something worth considering in terms of the smell of the idle smell of smoke someplace.

All right, you should probably be allowed to smoke.

Sometimes it's a really stressful situation or dip or something.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

It's like, I just saw the movie Flight, and the thesis of the movie Flight is that drinking makes you a bad pilot, but cocaine kind of cancels it out.

Yeah,

speedball, yeah.

No, yeah,

exactly, you know.

Uh, but I believe, I believe that uh, China only banned smoking for the in for the cockpit cruise in 2017.

Amazing, uh, which is why they have way better cigarettes there, like the best colours.

That's all so true.

I imagine, like, the Chinese cigarettes are probably good for you, yeah, they probably have that now.

We smoke, we smoke in the Changhuas aboard the uh, or the Colmac-built aircraft, except they actually hadn't, they actually hadn't built any of those in 2017, so never mind.

hi it's justin uh so this is a commercial for the podcast that you're already listening to uh people are annoyed by these so let me get to the point we have this thing called patreon right the deal is you give us two bucks a month and we give you an extra episode once a month Sometimes it's a little inconsistent, but you know, it's two bucks.

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Or don't.

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Back to the show.

If you'll go to the next slide, please, there's a few pictures on this one.

These are the two most suspecting men I've ever seen in my life.

These guys have done some

stuff.

Yeah.

These images conjure up like Fondu and Rushdie to me.

Like, these are, yeah, sure.

Yeah,

this is actually the only reason I included the pictures because they looked to be the most European men alive.

On the left,

sorry.

That's a good word.

They should have chosen better words.

This guy could be like a really good cop in an 80s movie.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah.

Well, but they both could is the thing.

Actually, though, yeah.

Buddy Cop movie.

Yeah, no, we need to get these folks on film.

I mean, they're dead, but we really need to get them on film.

He's got, if you got rid of the mustache, he's got like a Phil Collins thing going on almost.

True, yeah.

They don't make guys who are bald this way anymore.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah.

For which I'm desperately glad, but like

everyone's gotten a shame.

He's got the Dracula flow.

It's crazy.

Yeah, actually, I was going to point out the widow speaker there.

That's impressive.

The guy whose hair we're making, the dead guy whose hair we're making fun of on the left, that's Captain Zimmerman.

On the right, the first officer low.

I don't know that it's right to say that we're doing it on the left.

Just because we're a leftist podcast doesn't mean it's got like a class character to it yeah

look pilots are in unions they're workers that's true yeah that's true

four minutes later at 10 14 p.m smoke smell comes back and this time actual visual smoke that color comes alongside it captain zimmerman declares a pan-pan situation which indicates extreme urgency but not necessarily an emergency which is not the sort of thing you typically do whenever there's smoke in the cockpit but never mind he also requests that the plane be vectored vectored to return to quote a convenient place, which is what the transcript says.

Right.

Immediately deciding that Boston was the best option, Boston being 270 miles away.

Not really sure what the thought process was there.

All right, the plane goes pretty fast.

It's probably fine.

Yeah.

I don't know.

Well,

Moncton Center, that would be Moncton in Canada.

Don't go there, never fucking go there.

That town.

Yeah.

Ruined our lives.

Same New Jersey, but somehow hotter and much worse.

It was 101 degrees there.

It was 101 when we were in Moncton, yeah.

God.

Horrible.

Moncton responds by saying that they can vector them to Boston, but they could also do it to Halifax, which is 76 miles away as opposed to 270.

The Swiss air crew responds with the quote, we prefer Halifax from our position, which is...

interesting passive language.

I'm not really sure what caused that.

A bunch of smoke inhalation.

Well, yes, because at this point they also put on the big oxygen mask they have for the cockpit crew.

Well, the captain had to think for a moment and he was like, okay, I need to go somewhere where I can slide over the hood of a police cruiser.

Yeah,

yeah.

Boston made a lot of sense, but like then he realized, no, Halifax is probably also using Ford Crown Victorias at this point.

That's a good point, yeah.

Yeah.

10.19, the Halifax controller starts lining them up for for the runway there.

Tells them that they are 35 miles from the runway, which is just a couple minutes of flying time, give or take.

Which is, you know,

this is the good place.

You want to be two minutes from the runway if your plane is actively smoking at you from an unknown source.

The plane being on fire is very, very bad because there's not much you can do.

Yes, generally true.

This is

the big through line through anytime you look at a plane that's been on fire, that does tend to happen.

Dan Rogers?

Oh, God.

Yes.

We'll get to that.

I was going to mention that as my example, but interestingly, that didn't really catch fire super hard until they were on the ground.

So they opened the door and all the oxygen and made everything explode.

Anyway, the Swiss air crew responds by saying they're too high, which is kind of reasonable.

Halifax responds by vectoring them via a longer approach to give them a few more minutes to actually get the plane closer to the ground.

At 1021.

As

some folks are not super familiar with the dynamics of an airliner, it is difficult to go down fast sometimes.

Unless you want to kill everybody.

Yeah,

it's pretty bad if you're approaching the runway and you're going 400 miles an hour.

That's bad.

You want to avoid that situation.

The brakes don't work good.

The brakes are good.

They're not that good.

1021.

Yeah, two minutes later, Halifax asked them the amount of fuel and the number of souls they have on board the aircraft.

They always use the term souls

in aircraft accident reports.

I've never quite understood it.

Just bizarre.

I just assumed it to be a convenient way of including everybody who's on board.

Yeah.

Oh, it seems, I mean, I don't want to say it sounds weirdly religious, but like it sounds a little bit weirdly religious.

It is weirdly religious.

I think it's probably a nautical holdover as much as anything.

Oh, that's a good point there, yeah.

It's also like if you need something that encompasses crew, passengers, and miscellaneous, you know.

Yeah, it's a good point.

It's a good point.

It's going to be difficult if you're carrying a lot of like philosophical zombies.

Oh, that's not going to make weight.

That's a shame.

Say your number of souls.

Well, like observed, or

yeah.

Also, of course, we have to have a debate about this now.

Also, of course, people that sold their souls with a Swiss national lottery at one point or another could fear it.

It'd be pose some sort of problem there.

It's a good point.

It's a good point.

Yeah,

got to check some people off the list.

They spent their $200.

Wait a second.

We have some people who work at the World Intellectual Property Organization on here.

Stewardess!

Swiss air crew responds to that with the realization that, oh, we probably have a little bit too much fuel to guarantee a safe landing and asked to be taken out over a body of water to dump the fuel.

At 10:22, one minute later, they turn to the south, now flying away from the airport, but still within 45 minutes of the airport.

I don't know what a Monday morning quarterback on my Monday on my Monday morning quarterbacking podcast, but the kind of decision-making here and the kind of

forward thinking or lack thereof, it feels

this feels lurching from one thing to the next, you know, which I understand they are busy and also presumably terrified, but

it's been six minutes.

Yeah,

it has been a total of six minutes, yes.

Yeah, but the short duration of this is

pretty fucking difficult for me to cope with when I had to put this slideshow together.

At the same time, the captain was having this conversation, the first officer was working through the checklist for smoke/slash fumes of unknown origin.

Pictured here on the right is a different smoke checklist from the Swiss air

emergency checklist.

This is for air conditioning smoke.

It is basically of the same thing.

As a matter of fact, this is the first thing you're supposed to do if this is a smoke of unknown origin notice down at the bottom it says refer to emergency procedure smoke slash fumes of unknown origin if smoke is not of air conditioning origin this checklist is relatively important excuse me because i would hope so yes

this is i believe something like 90 of piloting is working through checklists and that includes in this situation and indeed as a result of reading through the checklist sometime between 1022 and 1024 crew cut power to the cabin bus in accordance with checklist, which would ideally have cut off continued flow of electricity to a fire in the cabin systems.

However, of course, as previously mentioned, the in-flight entertainment system was not wired into that system.

So

power continued flowing to it.

Cut off everything except the slot machines.

Yeah, no, no, the gamble.

Why don't they build the whole plane out of the slot machines?

So you're seeing the lights go off, the emergency lights come on, and you're still able to watch LA Confidential.

It hasn't even paused.

That's a concern.

Well, the other thing that the bus cut off, however, were there were circulating fans in the upper cabin ceiling, which kept the air supply to the cabin.

It's effectively isolated from the other parts of the aircraft wiring systems.

As of course, the as of course,

at this point, unknown fire was at the very forward cabin.

So you can see a progression map of it at the top, at the bottom left there, which is rather low res, but hopefully you'll get the picture.

This effectively gave it a grand total of one place to go, which is forward and directly into the cockpit ceiling.

Oh, good.

Not ideal.

Not ideal.

I would say that that probably is not good.

At 1024, so we're whatever.

What are we here?

We are basically at like less than a minute after they turned, they turned off the electricity to the cabin.

While still en route to dump fuel, Swiss air crew told the Halifax controller, quote, at this time, we must fly manually.

indicating that autopilot systems had already been damaged enough that they disconnected and they had to control the airplane entirely by hand.

17 seconds later, they finally choose to declare an emergency.

And about 15, hold on, 20 seconds after that,

they declare an emergency for the second time.

Not really sure why they did it twice, but to be fair, I guess they're done because they're not doing it at all,

which was what they had done previously.

I like to underline, per my previous scream for help.

This was the last radio transmission that received from the aircraft directly.

35 seconds later, 10, 25, and 40 seconds, the aircraft's flight data recorder stops recording because of course the fire was now destroying that part of things.

One second after that the cockpit voice recorder also stops recording and therefore everything that happens after this is some general is some flavor of conjecture because there's literally nothing to go off of except for various forensic conclusions.

I forgot that.

That's

gone poorly.

Yes.

24 seconds later at 1026.04,

the transponder stops transmitting entirely, meaning that nobody can see any data from the aircraft with the exception of the primary radar at Halifax, which can see it because it's radar and not because it's transmitting anything.

Notably, they can't see the aircraft's speed or the aircraft's altitude at this point.

Somewhere in the next three minutes, the fire has gotten bad enough that it is now visible in the cockpit and presumably the forward cabin.

We don't know that for sure.

Nightman.

Yes.

Captain Zimmerman gets up out of his seat to fight the fire himself.

The details of what happened here are pretty impossible to determine, but they've but considering they found what they did of him nowhere near his seat,

that seems like a relatively safe bet.

They also found them pretty close, and I believe the term used at one point was fused to some of Swiss, to some of the

Swissair's MD-11 flight manuals.

The basic conclusion I think forensic scientists have come to is that Zimmerman got up to fight the fire, and he used the manual to do so.

I mean, as a kind of like

video game logic, you use manual on problem.

It's more literal, but like,

maybe this is a naive question, and not that it would have done anything, which is probably why there isn't, but you'd think there would be like a fire extinguisher in the cockpit, right?

I think my understanding is that there is, but I am guessing it was on the part of the cockpit that was currently on fire.

And it's

problematic.

You got to extinguish the fire on the fire extinguisher in order to use the fire extinguisher to extinguish the rest of the fire.

Yeah, most aircraft have a sort of a little handheld extinguisher.

I believe it's close to the door.

I don't really know.

Obviously, it varies from aircraft to aircraft.

I think some of the newer ones will mount it under the seat, which is a smarter place for it to be.

But either way, obviously this doesn't really work.

He's going out to just sort of bat it with some paper.

I mean, you know, it's a valiant effort, but insufficient.

Yeah.

Based on what investigators have been able to piece together, because that's what we're operating on at this point.

Captain was likely either incapacitated or already dead, or already dead whenever the aircraft crashed.

Even the first officer is the sole living living person in the cockpit to control the plane.

Your plane is burning down around you, and your boss has also just been burned to death immediately behind you.

Is what a terrible day at the office, yeah.

Yeah,

probably continuing to burn to death again.

He's already dead, Roz.

Maybe, I don't know.

We closer to play this in our own ways

Somewhere around 10.30, which

attempted to stop, drop, and roll, but there's not a lot of space in there.

Yeah.

That's true.

Yeah.

Somewhere around 10.30, so about a minute, somewhere between a minute and two minutes after

the captain gets up to fight the fire and then immediately dies.

First Officer Lowe shuts down the second engine, which is the one in the tail.

This almost certainly has no effect on the aircraft's flyability.

And there's obviously no reason, no way for us to know why he did that.

Wouldn't really have done anything.

Yeah, he's hitting buttons at this point.

At this point in time, for the last one minute and 18 seconds of flight, we have no idea what really happened.

So all there is is a couple of different theories.

Most of them revolve around the fact that the first officer was flying the plane by himself at night with no instruments, with a cockpit full of smoke and fire, and a large oxygen mask in front of him.

And therefore, while it was possibly still somewhat controllable to an extent we don't know, we're never going to know, it's not not really reasonable for any sort of normal human to control it under that that many uh that many different circumstances going on at one point in time right

yeah is the md11 uh does it still have direct cables from the controls to the control surfaces um

i don't i this would have this was the this was the fly-by-wire era that md11 was designed in the late 80s i don't know the answer to that off the top of my head um

but all we can say is is

Don Douglas living up to the slogan once again.

Yes.

That slogan again, folks, will kill you.

I don't know off the top of my head.

But in any case, it doesn't.

In any case, if that were the case, then it wouldn't have mattered because, of course, flight control cables would have been very burned through.

But in any situation, it didn't really matter because even if the first officer was not

struggling to see or incapacitated,

yeah, I mean, he had all that to deal with.

If the controls didn't work or if he shut the engine down, it doesn't really matter one way or another.

we're moving towards sort of the same general end to end point here yes

um at 10 31 and 18 seconds so exactly 17 minutes in total after the crew first transmitted the pan pan call and asked to fly 300 miles to boston the aircraft hit the ocean nose down at a speed of about 345 miles per hour

exerting a force of 350 of 350 g's across the aircraft and its contents meaning it has turned to dust killing all 229 people on board not including people that had already died before impact, which was probably at least one, but given that the fire was also above the camera, it could have been more than that.

We don't really know.

You always hope to, you know, that everybody gets like peacefully-ish incapacitated by smoke inhalation rather than being terrified and burning to death and then plunging directly into the ocean.

Yeah, of course.

But notably, of course, even if they had done that, they still would have seen the smoke and fire.

So peacefully is still probably not going to be a good thing.

Peacefully-ish, relatively.

Just about, you know, you have the button on your seat rest that makes the engine fall off or that makes the plane crash.

Yeah.

And on this flight, someone did that.

It happened.

Yeah.

So

that is the end of this aircraft.

229 people are now dead somewhere in, they're somewhere in the water near Halifax.

It crashed directly into the Titanic.

The only reason we know where we know when it crashed was because it set off a seismometer nearby.

Jesus.

We don't exist.

Because, you know, at this point, all they had really was the primary radar that didn't really show any details.

So

if the entire plane had disappeared from the radar, I assume they would have assumed it crashed, but like they wouldn't have had any way of knowing if it was just

more things failing.

In any case, that's the end of this plane and the end of these two guys and the end of a bunch of other people as well.

And the end of whoever won their

$3,500.

Now it's a water log, too, on top of everything else.

Yes, that's true.

And he was one day away from his birthday as well.

Yes, from turning 50 specifically.

Wow.

Yeah.

I feel a little bad for him.

Particularly because

he notably did not die in the crash directly.

He died before that.

Puts him in sort of a really strange position.

Yeah.

Well, I understand 50 is when you start getting reactionary politics, right?

So I don't know.

The age keeps increasing every year, though, so I don't know.

Next slide.

Now that we're done talking about the act of flight, here is what that same plane from two slides ago looks like at this point in time.

It was crazy to me how much, how well all the structural bits are able to hold up to the stuff that

liquefies every person in board.

Yeah,

metal is a very strong material.

Shout out to metal.

Yes.

Big fan of metal.

Yes.

Yeah, metal's pretty good.

Yeah.

Hence the problem with the wood planes we talked about quite a bit earlier.

That was, we figured that we figured that out pretty early on, but it still took about 20 years of commercial flight for us to get that far.

If they had a piano on this plane, though.

A structural piano, of course.

Yeah.

Well, actually,

they had two Picasso paintings on board it, which obviously did not survive this.

Oh, so there was some form of art, just not piano, some form of culture, I should say.

The search and rescue operation, which the Royal Canadian Armed Forces called Operation Persistence.

Just kind of pick something that sounds vaguely positive.

Operation Midnight Hammer.

We're going to find someone alive.

No.

No.

Never mind.

Yes.

Mikey Shannon is the.

You call it Operation Persistence if you're expecting not to find very much for a long time.

Because you're persistent.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Well, seeing as they actually, there was no way for anybody to know it crashed on the official side because, of course,

they had no idea what was going on with the radar.

All they had, notably, was a couple of guys, local, who called 911, I believe, is

calling into the Moncton police to be like, hey, I think I just saw a bunch of Swiss guys get turned into soup.

Yeah, I mean,

that's roughly what happened for them to realize that they had lost it, I believe.

The seismometer thing I mentioned, but they didn't realize that till later.

It's just how we know what time it was.

Pretty much immediately, once they got there, they would find a field of wreckage and would start to call off most of the rescue part of the search and rescue operations about three hours after it started or about 3:30 a.m.

Atlantic time.

Once the operations began, they're switched to salvage.

It was mostly guided by underwater sonar and diving operations, initially mostly using American Navy ships and sailors from the U.S.'s grapple based out of Philadelphia.

Way at night.

They would find the flight data recorder on September 6th and the cockpit voice recorder on September 11th, 1998, to be clear.

Yeah.

Next slide.

Oh, this is cool.

The fucking like

NTSB Kintsugi frame.

Yeah.

Oh, this is the Canadian one.

Do they have multiple of these or do they just have one that they keep reaching?

Shovel around?

You've got to have a different one for each aircraft, surely.

That's a good noise.

Yeah, that's true.

The one for TWA 800 they had in a hangar until like last year, I think.

Wow.

Actually, when was that?

Because I remember there being a big deal about it because people make a big deal out of the one plane crash.

And I can't find it quickly enough.

In any case.

Something disturbing about the velvet rope in front of it.

That's a good point, yeah.

Well, notably, that's a CTV reporter.

He's got the CTV hat on standing in front of there, so they probably didn't want them getting too close to the horrible, horribly mangled pieces of metal.

Yeah, that's a good point, yeah.

As authorities recovered more of the aircraft, they gradually reconstructed just the forward section of the aircraft from the cockpit sec from the cockpit back to just the first-class cabin.

This is this is the entirety of what they managed to recover and successfully piece together.

Wow.

You'll notice it's not super complete.

They did retrieve,

what was it, 98% of aircraft debris by December 1999.

So notably in the intervening year I had been born, which is cool.

Investigators in the press would find a specific concern to focus on by the first week of October 1998, less than a month into the investigation.

Next slide.

Okay, we're going to do some real like

crash detective shit here.

Okay.

Ideal.

The TSB, the Transportation Safety Board, that's the Canadian one, I remember now, find one very peculiar part of the aircraft's wiring harnesses, that being multiple segments of wire that had damaged insulation.

All these segments of wire were components leading to the power supply of the in-flight entertainment system.

Several segments of wire here had become so damaged that the copper was fully exposed, obviously, before it had been crushed for 350 G.

Anyway,

in fact, it had gotten hot enough that the copper core had actually started to melt, which you can, in fact, see the picture of here.

This is very melted looking.

It's wild to be able to pull these cables out of the ocean and identify them by function as well.

Yeah, I mean, that's, yeah, I mean, that's what these investigatory boards are made to do, but I guess I never really thought about that.

That's pretty fucked up, pretty important.

That's their job.

You know,

they have this, and then, you know, as long as they don't accidentally pick up a piece of the transatlantic cable, which presumably could have happened here, and then completely cut off America and Europe,

leading to World War III.

Of course,

the generally accepted explanation for this that the TSB would come up with, which was not verifiable for obviously a number of reasons regarding the fact that the plane had exploded, basically, was that

the in-flight entertainment network system drew so much power that the wires, which were too thin for that level of power drop, would actually have the insulation melt off of it in certain places, leaving the bare metal entirely exposed.

The electrified copper core of the wires then came in contact with the mylar blankets that were insulating the entire system beneath it.

Of course, this was an essential part of the aircraft's insulation system entirely, but the fact that you had electrified wire touching it is not great, and it means that it tends to arc.

Yeah,

everything's patch or chemicals.

Yep, And some of it's less flammable than others, but

it turns out it's old dead trees, even when it's not wood.

That's true.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Now, mylar is a microphone.

Everything's made of wood.

Yeah.

That's a good point there.

Mylar is a material with a high enough ignition point that it's generally considered somewhat fireproof to an extent.

But the conclusion that the TSB came to was that the arc happened enough times and was hot enough that it probably damaged the mylar, either ignited it or the blanket that it was, or the insulation blanket that it was covering, which is, of course, much more flammable.

Oh, you set fire to your fireproofing.

You don't want to do that.

That's the opposite of what's going on.

That's not good.

That's not good.

Why didn't they use asbestos?

That's a great point.

Listen, I know a lot of people have some problems with the Trump administration saying asbestos is okay in certain applications now.

But

it's

not made of wood.

It's one of the few things we have that's not made of wood.

It's made of rocks.

It's made of rocks.

It's rocks.

Yeah.

Could build a whole airplane out of rocks.

That would be a good thing.

If we made the whole airplane out of asbestos, you imagine it has like, you know, you walk in the airplane and like the floor islioma, though.

No, the floor is like the nine by nine tile that your grandma's kitchen has.

Nice.

So basically, what, of course, happens whenever you have

an arcing wire that is hot enough to melt a Mylar covering is that, of course, you get a fire that

sparks and burns very, very, very hot.

Oh, good.

So, in a part of the aircraft that is filled with active electrical wiring of many gauges and many thermal insulation material, this would also mean a fire that would spread extremely fast,

particularly given whether whether or not it was fueled by active electrical current, which, of course, would have increased the heat.

At a point, it doesn't really matter too much.

The fire is its own thing.

But one thing that you can do to keep it to spread, is keep it from spreading to

particularly sensitive systems above the cockpit, is to not turn off the recirculating fans that cut off airflow from that part of the aircraft to the cockpit.

Which is an essential step on the checklist.

Yes,

great.

The MD-11 in particular was designed to use a circuit breaker system that

would not trip whenever it detected arcing and would trip based on a calculation of time occurrent correlation that I don't really understand.

But it meant that the aircraft would think that everything was perfectly fine and nothing out of the ordinary was going on throughout any of this because it was presumably, as far as we could tell, arcing for

quite a lot longer than just the one flight.

So, yeah,

you could have flown on this exact plane and had this be be like arcing against the fireproofing the whole time.

And it's just you just get unlucky that it happens like six minutes into this one, you know?

Yeah, it's about yeah, the flight from Geneva the previous day, I imagine, I imagine this was

back in my head about when I took flights where.

The next slide, that's all I have for that one.

The diagrams there are rather are an interesting demonstration of wire, but really the part with the melted copper was sort of the most important thing there.

It was like that doesn't really happen unless things get much hotter than they ever than anybody would ever reasonably consider.

Ideally, you don't have metal melting on the plane.

Yes, the Transportation Safety Board of Canada would release the preliminary report on the crash of Swiss Air Flight 111 on August 30th, 2000.

The report concluded everything we discussed on the last slide, but that the primary fault for the accident lied with the Mylar material being considered too flammable, albeit still within standard.

The quote that I put here is: aircraft certification standards for material flammability were inadequate in that they allowed the use of materials that could be ignited and sustained or propagate fire.

Consequently, flammable material propagated a fire that started above the ceiling on the right side of the cockpit.

The fire spread and intensified rapidly to the extent that it degraded aircraft systems and et cetera, et cetera.

To some extent, this is a football kick, more so,

rather, kicking the football.

My phrasing was a bit weird there.

It was really the only conclusion they could come to beyond any reasonable doubt because they could not really conclude, given the forensic evidence that they had, i.e., the remains of the aircraft, they couldn't really conclude if it was directly the fault of the in-flight entertainment system.

But, like, the main source of the damage was the wiring going to the in-flight entertainment system that everybody had previously complained ran too hot.

Good enough.

Yeah, and this is one of those ones where they got off on a technicality.

Yeah, yes.

Well, you know, it could have been something else.

It's probably this.

It could have been something else.

Yes.

And also, between also, another conclusion was that the transp the TS sorry, another conclusion the TSB reached was that the crew didn't have any way of knowing how severe the fire was whenever they shut down the fans.

So they couldn't really be blamed for doing that, even though it was it did eventually was what killed the aircraft as far as we know.

It was it was on the checklist.

You're supposed to follow the checklist.

Yeah,

follow the checklist.

That's like

the pilots seem to have done everything that was could be reasonably expected.

Yeah, this is including trying to fight a fire with a three-ring binder.

Yes.

Yeah, this is the crew very much worked by the book here, except the problem was literally itself.

Yes.

And again, literally.

The release of the preliminary report led to a coalition of involved parties, namely Swissair, Delta Airlines, who had co-chaired

Swissair on the flight and were

and were also an American company, so it's easier to get damages out of them, and Boeing, who had would bought McDonnell Douglas,

to offer families of the victims an undisclosed settlement.

You are Boeing to receive an undisclosed settlement.

Actually, you're not.

They're not Boeing to receive an undisclosed settlement.

The families involved voted to reject taking that settlement entirely.

Good for them.

Instead, opting to sue all of those companies, also DuPont, who made the Mylar, and Interactive Flight Technology.

Remember the name from earlier, back now,

totaling $19.8 billion in sought damages.

The U.S.

judge would rule against punitive damages in 2002, but various dealings meant that they still received some compensation.

The numbers aren't really clear there.

It doesn't

really matter too much.

It's just a good way to bring IFT back into the picture.

Because in the real world, the press immediately started asking questions about what the wiring was hooked up to, which was, of course, the in-flight entertainment system.

There we go.

Which Swiss had like advertised very heavily.

Yes, and presumably they lost huge amounts of money on

because they lost $3,300 each time.

That's true.

Swissair would go out of their way to turn it off on all aircraft by October 29th, 1998, and promised that they would remove it as soon as the maintenance schedule allowed for it.

And of course, everybody else who had contracted IFT.

immediately canceled any and all contracts they had with them for you know reasonable

guy guy working for alitalia just just going through and with his bare hands ripping terminals out of the seatbacks.

It was later reported by USA Today, actually, that the IFEN2 system had been certified by a subcontractor named Santa Barbara Aerospace, who the FAA determined had not properly audited or tested the system, and their approval of it was technically invalid to begin with.

Oh, good.

One quoted certification engineer whose name is here, the last name that I can't really pronounce, but his first name is Edward.

Edward Milanošik.

Milanochik.

That's what they come to the podcast for.

Hell yeah.

We're all here.

And between us, we can all pronounce one Polish last name.

Shouldn't you be able to do this?

No.

I mean, my wife's Polish and doesn't know how to pronounce her own last name.

So I understand.

He said, or he's also said to USA Today that I have to come to him with the request that he certify the original system in 1994 as quickly as possible because they were rapidly running out of operating capital.

Oh, good, okay, yeah.

Just we need you to say this is safe because we are running out of money.

He did notably, he did not sign off on this,

which uh presumably this is for good, presumably, for good reason.

I mean, the first system wasn't what failed, but uh, to be fair, they only installed it on one plane and then took it out immediately afterwards, so just like immediately catches fire, yeah, it's like homer simpson's bowl of cereal

so by by any uh any reasonable conclusion uh by any reasonable assertation assertion i don't know where i pulled that word from or any reasonable assertion uh ift was the primary party at fault here as did everybody else who was not bound by legal investigatory restrictions so this isn't very good for them

all right this is uh i would not like to be in this situation if i were

now what now I would like to further now if we go to the next slide going to do a sort of where are they now here with these dead

they break my fucking heart why don't you yes march by march 2001 swissair was losing one million francs per day and was nearing bankruptcy

listen is it a bad business decision to kill a bunch of your own passengers and is it a bad business decision to be heavily over leveraged and everything and is it a bad business decision to allegedly maybe have a bunch of embezzlement.

Yes.

Right.

All those good Swiss francs.

I've spent a Swiss franc before, and it's not very much money compared to a dollar.

That's also true.

That's also true.

But is that a good enough reason to take away a beautiful whole corporate language from the world and replace it with something that looks like a budget hotel chain?

Could I sustain losing 1 million Swiss francs per day?

No.

but an airline, that should be fine.

Basically, what an airline does is sustain vast amounts of financial losses.

Anyway,

I missed this stuff.

I still have a little shoulder bag cabin luggage thing with the old Swiss air brand on it, and I'm going to keep it for as long as I possibly can until it falls apart.

They should have switched, they should have switched currency to something that was even cheaper, like I don't know, Turkish lira or something.

Yeah, if you measure it in Zloti, it's not so bad.

Yeah, it's not bad at all.

Yeah.

Rubles.

What do they have at India?

Rupees.

Rupees.

Yeah, rupees.

But then you have to do like crores and locks.

That's like more difficult.

Yeah.

Yeah.

The various financial difficulties of Swiss air here.

Some of them are.

There's a main tragedy here, to be clear.

Yeah.

There was a lot of them that came that were sort of rooted in stuff that happened before this crash, but it didn't really do them any favors

for a couple of reasons.

Number one is that, of course, crashing a plane tends to cost money.

Yeah.

But also, of course.

No repeat customers, yeah.

Yeah.

Also, of course, tend also, of course,

people don't really want to fly on you that much, particularly if it looks, even if it looks at first like it might have been your crew's fault or whatever, or your airline's fault.

And even if it wasn't.

And like, to be clear, it was kind of their fault here.

So, you know, not really great for business.

Pretty certain I was still getting packed onto and off of these things.

Well, I mean, that's reasonably fair.

I mean, they they oper I mean, they operated for l like three years after uh four years after that accident happened.

So it's clearly not not it was a more terminal decline that was probably already going to happen at the time, but didn't really help them.

I see you're presumably in smaller planes that didn't have the entertainment system.

That's also, yeah, that's true.

They only had it in the MD-11s and like some of the some of the seven fours, and they took it out of all of them anyways.

Um, now, of course, Swissair was losing a million francs per day in March 2001.

Uh, the travel market would get much worse in September 2001 for

reasons.

Oh, Roz.

Yes.

No, I didn't do that.

That was some foreigners.

Roz.

And one 10-year-old, apparently.

If you believe Andrew Cuomo.

On October 5th, by October 5th, Swissair effectively collapsed.

Swiss government

would promise a loan to keep operations running in the short term, which they later increased to cover the entire operating, the entire winter operating season, at which point all aircraft and operations will be transported to swiss regional airline crossair which was renamed swiss international airlines

uh this last swiss air flight flew on april 1st 2002 april spools swiss international airlines is still the flag carrier of switzerland

they try they try and fucking trick you by being just like swiss not the same

you Well, my understanding is they wanted to keep the Swiss air brand, but there was a bizarre sort of copyright and legal legal restriction from them doing so.

Yeah, I think like the federal government owned it or something.

I don't remember how it worked out, but yeah.

Yeah, this is

very, very strange.

I mean, there's obviously a sort of brand image thing consideration there, but also there was a leak.

The legal side of it was very strange and confusing.

In any case, they would retire the MD-11s by 2005 because, of course, they weren't great airplanes.

We talked about this last time I was on the podcast.

Interactive flight technologies, under the weight of scrutiny from the global press and investigatory authorities alike, would simply bail from the situation and declare bankruptcy in 1999.

Yeah.

The CEO of the company, Mikhail Itkus, the son of the first CEO we talked about way earlier, would go on to change his name to Mike Snow in 2004 and start a new company.

Like the DJ?

Yeah, like

the guy who made the, yeah, the

songs.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I get a little bit Genghis Khan.

Don't want you to get it on with anyone but me.

Yeah.

Banger.

I mean, fantastic.

That's a very good one.

Yes.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

That is

a music video about killing James Bond.

That is true.

That is true.

Oh, shit.

That's a good point there.

Yeah.

Yeah.

In 2004, he would start a new company called Interstate Cargo, which manufactured cargo trailers, established in association with, at the time, the current governor of Arkansas.

If you click the next slide.

Oh.

That would be Mike Huckabee.

Mike Huckabee, the funny Republican.

Yeah, I remember.

The guy who looks like a sort of like slightly melted Kevin Spacey.

Spacey.

Yeah.

Yes, yes.

The guy who accidentally tipped the hand about like Operation Midnight Hammer by tweeting a kind of prayers up tweet 40 minutes early.

That sounds about right.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I mean, but one of them was bound to do it.

This is true.

Yes.

Current U.S.

ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee.

Oh, I forgot.

Yeah, I keep forgetting about that.

Yeah.

The thing about the Trump administration part two is

like the biggest piece of shit you've ever heard of is just like in a federal government job, and you don't know about this, and you'll find out about it, and you'll take some psychic damage.

And you'll be like,

It's not enough.

I need Chris Christie to be appointed to something.

Where can Trump exile him to?

Where governor, governor, like

a fucking ambassador to like the South Sandwich Islands or something?

Yeah, nice.

He's ambassador to the island that's only like penguins

and he's enforcing the tariffs.

The trailer company, Interstate Cargo, does still exist.

Mike Snow is still CEO of it.

His LinkedIn doesn't list any employers prior to the year 2000, which is interesting.

I didn't do it.

Yeah.

And I would like to actually close this by pointing out that he still has a Twitter account.

If you'll go to the next slide, I've included

some of the people that he follows on that.

Incredible.

Okay, great.

So, this is, of course, the CEO of a trailer manufacturer who previously built an in-flight entertainment system that killed 229 people.

And he loves the Babylon B.

He does.

Yeah.

And Cats hurt.

Doge, Dogecoin.

I like the logical kind of progression of thought there.

JD Vance and, of course, Scott Adams, who is responsible for a similarly heinous crime in the form of the comic strip Dilbert.

That's true.

That's a good point there.

Jesus Christ.

The modern Republican Party really is just a drain for all of these guys to fucking sink into, isn't it?

Yes.

It's like, hey, come, come hang out with the Republican Party.

We got Cat Turd.

We got the guy who killed a bunch of Swiss people.

Maybe

that's why Chris Christie hasn't been

taken into the machine because he has too much integrity.

And I know for a fact that

one time he took a phone call in the quiet car on Amtrak, but then realized his mistake and left.

You know, which is something Joe Biden didn't do.

Yeah, I was going to say, actually, this is a relatively high bar.

Yeah.

So that was the end of this story.

I just wanted to include this last slide as a nice demonstration of

a better life awaits you as a right-wing child.

You know, you can get away with anything.

I was about to say, yeah, maybe we should pivot to being wing.

I don't know.

I think some of us would find it harder than others.

It would be very difficult.

It'd be very difficult.

You say that.

You say that.

I don't know.

I could do that.

I could run the D-transgrift where you just go, like, I'm detransitioning because of the, I was tricked into it by doctors who forced me into it.

And then you just don't detransition.

What if you do a false backstory and you say you're detransitioning into a woman?

Yeah, that's interesting.

That's interesting.

I could buy that.

Yeah.

Yeah, no, maybe I was a

little girl who was forced onto testosterone through the sick machinations of the National Health Service.

And now I'm rediscovering

my little brain.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Anyways,

that's the time a guy pressed the wings fall off button and killed 230 people.

Someone did it.

Someone pressed the wings fall off.

off.

I guess in this case, it's more like he caused the wings fall off button to be there for someone else to press inadversely.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I mean, I always use the general we, not the guy pictured here, but like also the guy, also the guy pictured here designed the button more than anything else.

Yeah.

Jesus Christ.

This is this has been a harrowing one.

Like it's been a minute since we we had one that gave me the real fear.

Yeah, because I,

whenever I accidentally mentioned it last time, it was

you noted how the horrifying the concept of the in-flight entertainment system that kills you was.

Yeah.

So I was like, okay, this is a good one because this is purely engineering.

This is electrical and structural engineering and fire engineering, which I don't know if that's a thing.

And

it is.

And in service of the gambling industry, which is

one of the worst things on earth.

Great.

Fantastic.

I mean, what did we learn?

Folks, don't gamble.

Gambling's bad.

Yeah.

Don't watch the movie on the plane.

I know this is telling this to capitalists, and

all hitherto existing history is a process of class struggle, right?

And it's a sort of historical inevitability that it ends up this way.

But please

be more careful with your flag carrier intellectual property rights.

Yes.

Please don't kill a bunch of people, not least because you'll kill a bunch of people, which is bad, but also because...

the result will be a less compellingly branded airline.

Yeah.

Swiss International does own the Swiss air brand these days.

They just don't do anything with it.

What the fuck?

What the fuck?

Okay.

It's interesting because I normally end a really harrowing episode on a downer, but this is one where I'm ending angry.

Sorry.

I will say, you know, it does seem like this

problem occurred, but we seem to have largely solved it because there have been very few airline accidents until quite recently when they got the guy from MTV's road rules to run the Department of Transportation.

Oh, fuck.

We completely forgot to put in the Air India crash because we got overtaken by events.

It's fine.

We'll talk about it next time when we know more about it.

I'm reading here from the Wikipedia page.

To prevent the trademark from becoming void through disuse, Swiss licensed it to Hopscotch Air, which operates a fleet of Cirrus SR-22 planes in the US, which are just little Cessna type things.

In Switzerland, the trademark is protected through its use by an aviation sports club.

Undignified.

They got to just put it on a big plane.

Infuriating.

They haven't even done it.

I don't even think they've done the retrojet thing that most of the airlines have.

I might be wrong about that.

No.

That'd be a smart thing to do.

Yeah.

I mean, people like seeing Swissair.

Anyway,

so we have a segment on this podcast called Safety Third.

Shake hands with danger.

So, hello, Justin, Liam, November, et al.

Sure.

That's probably the most reasonable one that I've heard so far, I think.

I'm writing to you with tales of poisoning at the botanical garden.

Thank you for the perfect opening sentence of as soon as a safety third.

Real quick, before we get into it, if they want to send in safety thirds, where do they send them?

Where do you send safety thirds?

You send them to our email,

which is somewhere on the YouTube page.

I don't believe we're

wtypod at gmail.com.

I'm pretty certain.

Yes, that should be about a page long.

And send us some pictures if you want.

Yeah.

And I think you can submit them on the site, but it doesn't work very well.

We have a website also.

Anything you say, we will read on the air.

Yes.

Well, maybe.

We get like more than one a week, and we only podcast once a week, theoretically.

Yeah.

And in practice, less than that.

I'm working on it.

All right.

Look, we're all working on it.

We all have, anyway, safety third.

I would like to clarify real quick that that is a poisoning exclamation point at the botanical garden.

Yeah.

Of course.

Of course.

Much like panic at the disco.

Yes.

Yes.

Just wanted to make sure that was conveyed because I feel it's important.

Yes.

I am a horticulturist, which is a glorified gardener at an unnamed public botanic garden.

I have been working this job for nearly three years against my better judgment.

The following events unfolded two years ago when I was still a fresh new gardener who believed in the inherent goodness of people and non-profit organizations.

That's such a bad idea.

At this unnamed garden, us horticulturalists operate out of an office/slash greenhouse building.

While we spend the majority of our days toiling away outside in the Georgia heat, we return regularly to our home base office for water refills, Gatorade chugging, and hand washing.

The horticulture office draws its water from a well on the property, unlike the public visitor center and administrative offices, which use city water.

One early spring day, the white porcelain sink in our horticulture office turned blue.

No true.

Being idiots and assuming the greenhouse guys were just washing chemicals down the drain or something else which was normal, none of us worried too much.

The sink remained dyed blue for the better part of three months.

Not great.

That is until one day when the greenhouse assistant saw me refilling my water bottle from the kitchen sink and said, You guys aren't drinking that water, right?

Oh, God.

Oh, God.

Okay.

It turns out the horticulture manager had sent the well water off for testing weeks before after the sink first turned blue.

The results showed seven times the EPA limit of copper and noticeably high levels of nitrates.

Delicious fertilizer.

Yeah, that's good.

Delicious.

That's good for you, right?

Copper?

I'm not sure.

It's what plants crave or something.

Yeah, I know, copper, definitely.

Further, that's why Gatorade is blue.

It's because it's what

plants crave.

Yeah, yeah.

Further investigation revealed that years ago, in an attempt to simplify the irrigation lines running from the well to the greenhouse, the manager had inadvertently removed the backflow preventer.

This crucial piece of plumbing kept the tank of concentrated plant fertilizer from backwashing into the well, the same well that us gardeners had been drinking out of for our entire respective tenures.

Oh god.

When horticulture manager had figured this out weeks before, he had neglected to tell anyone but his greenhouse assistant.

Myself and three other gardeners continued to drink the water for weeks after the contamination was discovered.

By our best guess, the semi-constant influx of nitrogen-based fertilizer, or the blue, began to corrode our copper water lines, which were also bluish, and these combined factors caused the distinctive blue staining in our sink.

Horrifyingly, when we hammered open the filter in the Britter Pitcher we recently adopted, it was also stained neon blue.

I could write pages about HR's inhuman response to our collective poisoning, the fiasco that was our blood testing and subsequent medical bills, and the administration's ultimate refusal to do anything to remedy the contaminated well.

But I shan't.

Too long.

Don't read.

Gardeners still drink out of bottled water coolers to this day.

I am

having the thing that we last got with the

sort of cat litter one, where I'm like, I think if you haven't already, you need to speak to a lawyer about this.

Yeah, I was about to say, you know, this is

poisoned.

Yeah, no, the company should be able to give you water.

Yeah.

Even the government lets you drink water.

Come on.

You should do something about this.

And

yeah, I'm not, I don't know if I can say what, but you should do something about this.

Yes.

My senior co-worker quit over the contaminated water, which she had been unknowingly drinking for five years before discovery.

She got pregnant nearly a year after quitting and had to be induced early due to the liver damage caused by her poisoning.

Jesus.

Jesus Christ.

It's a comedy podcast, folks.

It's a comedy podcast about engineering disasters.

Very funny things occur.

Yeah, but I mean, I always, I had someone ask me about what I did for a living the other day, and I had to explain.

And I said it was a, it's a true crime podcast, but the crime is social murder.

Yes.

And

I stick by that one.

And Jesus, it's not always a fun time, is it?

Yeah, no, it's not good, not good.

I mean, even something that's like, you know, it seems kind of,

how do you say,

trivial.

It's like, no, don't drink the blue water.

Yeah.

This is thoroughly reinforcing my whole contamination anxiety thing.

I will, I look forward to washing out every glass I drink from about five or six dozen times.

Yeah, wow.

Well, what water are you using to do that?

Oh, I mean, I'm also worrying about that separately, so don't worry.

I'm worrying about the worrying as well.

Yeah,

you got to get good city water through good lead pipes.

No copper pipes.

Got to be lead.

See, I was going to make a quip about using bottled water, but notably the UK is where...

Coca-Cola tried to sell bottled water and it also came out poison.

Oh, good.

Yeah.

No, listen, Glasgow tap water water is very, very good.

Comes straight down from a lock, tastes fantastic.

Um, big fan, so yeah, I know my water is good because it comes out of the school cool and it goes through a nuclear reactor on the way here.

Oh, fuck.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

No contaminants, just pure unfiltered radiation, which is fine,

genuinely, though.

Yeah, anyway, cheers and fuck the A asterisks, B asterisks, G asterisk dash.

Hold on.

Let me tap back over to the thing so I can read this.

What?

Yeah, no, I'm not.

I'm not certain what this is.

I presume it's the name of the garden based on the

case.

Yeah.

The B and the G, I would assume, is botanical garden.

Oh, yeah, that's a good point.

From Kelsey, they, them.

Thank you, Kelsey.

Thank you, Kelsey.

Please, please take these people to the cleaners.

Oh, yeah.

Like,

that's not good.

It's no good.

Yeah.

Troubling.

Anyway, our next episode will be.

Oh, that was safety third.

Yeah.

Oh, shit.

Do the thinking.

Shake hands with danger.

Our next episode will be Entre Noble.

Does anyone have any commercials before we go?

Maya.

Yeah,

let me do my usual self-promotion.

For the most part, you can find most of the things that I do at my website, which is

MayaWalkwith.me.

I am currently in the middle.

Currently in the middle.

I hope you liked the, I did the poster just for the header.

I don't know if you've ever looked at it, but I don't know if I do a lot of effort for that.

I'm currently actually doing a run of photography prints using equipment that I bought from the large pharmacy chain that's going out of business here in the United States.

This is purely a novelty thing, but people seem to like my photography.

Except these aren't selling particularly well, so I'm going to plug them here.

They're only a limited set of 10 per each one.

So, you know, this is not a big deal.

This was like half for a joke anyway, but one way or another.

That can also be found on my website.

It can also be,

you just have to put shop in front of the URL.

You can find me on Twitter and Blue Sky, both of which are some variation of Maya Walk With Me.

Those are kind of the important ones.

My sub stack is linked in all of those.

That's the important one.

My podcast is actually only on Twitter because, like I said, I haven't dealt with it in a year.

So I need to get back to that.

It will probably be on Blue Sky

the time you people hear this.

I don't actually know.

I'm trying to think what else I have.

I don't know.

I'm poor.

Give me money.

That's all I could really advise.

There you go.

That's the important part.

Yes.

Yeah.

Yes.

Look at this core part of it all.

Put your money in other places.

That's true.

All right.

I don't have anything to plug.

I don't know what happened to Liam.

Did I mute myself again?

God damn it.

You might have.

Oh, yeah.

You haven't said anything for like the past like 20 minutes to half an hour.

Yeah, I was muted.

That's my bad.

That's okay.

That's okay, folks.

I went to the bathroom and came back.

And then I, I, yeah, it's fine.

All right.

Well,

sorry, we were talking over you.

No, we didn't hear you.

I'm sure someone will leave a hurtful comment about how they liked it better.

Wow, wow, wow.

Well, we have closure now, at least.

All right.

Good night, everybody.

All right.

Good night, everyone.

That was a podcast.