Episode 174: Air Florida Flight 90

Three, two,

one,

mark.

Okie dokie.

Oh, my hands really hurt.

I clapped too hard.

Oh, poor baby.

And let me start.

Oh, my gosh.

The slideshow.

I need everyone to know that I'm a very sleepy boy, so if you get the delirium early, that's what's happening to me.

That's reasonable.

I'm fully nocturnal at this point, so I'm good.

I'm locked in.

I'm good to go.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Didn't nap at nursery, so this afternoon was

that's sorry, Devin, can you b bleep uh just in case bleep that name?

Um, the little one was uh did not sleep in nursery, so put down was interesting.

Um, she was just crying the whole evening, so poor, poor little one.

Um, just emoche, you know.

Anyway, that's that's what they do.

That's what they're programmed to do.

She's very good normally.

She's just a good sport, so when she's crying, it's normally there's something, something serious up, or she's just completely knackered.

In this case, it was the latter.

She's just like me in that respect.

Yeah, me too.

I also cry when I'm tired.

I've had had to lock milkshake out of the room because he was getting really aggressive about trying to get on my head.

Because he's, yeah, he's just hard.

He's just

like a parasocial relationship with you.

Yes, this is true.

I can't believe this creature that I feed and house has affection for me and also wants to hop my head, maybe.

All right.

All right.

Enough jumps.

Welcome to Wilares Your Problem.

It's a podcast about engineering disasters with slides.

I'm Justin Rozniak.

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

My pronouns are he and him.

Okay, go.

I'm November Kelly.

I'm the person who's talking now.

My pronouns are she and her.

Yay, Liam.

You okay there, buddy?

Yeah, I'm great.

Yay, Liam.

Hi, I'm Liam McAnderson.

I'm the person talking right now.

Very sleepy.

Sleam, if you will.

Very sleepy Liam.

You sound like, you know, the bit in Howl's Moving Castle where he's kind of like mostly goo?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I'm 30% goo.

Not the fun kind, the bad kind.

It's all drop and run goo.

Oh, we get to we get to talk about goo later in this episode.

Are people turning forward to go?

Is there some sort of goo?

No, there's goo involved.

Oh, I don't like it when there's goo involved.

Uh, and uh, I'll bringing up the rear is uh Gareth.

It's me, Gareth Price.

It's the other guy, the

other um temp co-host of um WTRP.

Yeah, my name is Gareth Dennis.

Uh, my pronouns are he and him.

And

I was forced under duress to change a slider position on my GoXLR Mini that had been in position for months under instruction of Nova of this parish.

I was forced to, under sort of violent, threat of violence by a certain Dr.

Eleanor Yaniger.

I've now readjusted it back to where it was supposed to

be again.

We hate to like ever change anything on our audio mixes.

Yes.

To ask me to do so is like you threatened me to cut off a limb.

Right.

Yeah.

Yeah, exactly.

Of course,

I've got the same mediocre audio setup I've always had, and I'll ride it into oblivion.

The problem with audio setups is it's like, you know, you put it together once and you're like, I'm never touching this.

Oh, yeah.

No, no, I, I,

I mean, you guys have heard travel setups V1 through 17 or whatever I'm on now.

I remember you're on a beach, I think, once in a long past episode, like we're talking like a long time ago.

And you like

a mic stand, which then you lost on the way to the beach.

These are the setups that are, you know,

lost

history.

Screaming into like half of a hollowed-out coconut on a stray.

You guys see Castaway, right?

Bean top eggs.

Castaway on the Jersey shore.

That's thematic because in Castaway, there is an aviation incident of a sort.

And

we're pretty looking at one of those now.

Yes.

Yeah, I don't think it's supposed to look like that.

What you see here is the tale of a Boeing 737200 being lifted

by a crane out of the Potomac River in Washington, D.C.

And you're telling me that this was caused by a goo?

A lack of goo.

Oh, is this going to be the nano?

Is this going to be the gray goo theory, but just for devouring 737s?

No, we'll get to that in a bit.

Today we're going to talk about the exciting story of Air Florida Flight 90.

There's nothing exciting about Florida, man.

Well, yeah,

it's kind of a, you know, well,

the land that God forgot.

Even in this case, they've exported their excitement to the Potomac River in this instance.

You can go to Epcot.

You don't have to do that.

You can get killed by a hurricane.

You can meet

the influencer lady, Carol What's Herface?

no the the the the

carol basket no if you live in

campa if you live in campaign no um

who the fuck caroline calloway you can meet caroline oh the yeah i don't know who that is okay okay well this whole conversation was just yeah

i told i told you that delirium had set in and it was up to me we're gonna make this thing last three hours of some form of self-flagellation i want us to do just the opposite i want to try i want us to try and answer the critics by taking out all of the tangents.

We just keep in the stuff that's like, you know, straight down the line engineering material.

Every podcast is 12 minutes long.

No, I would

show before we do that.

Shut off the podcast right now.

Go watch the mentor pilot video.

That's only about 30 minutes.

This is not going to be 30 minutes.

None of us are pilots as well.

Yeah, exactly.

Exactly.

In fact, we have...

In fact, instead of a pilot, we have a railway engineer on.

Yeah, you can do that.

We kind of were like the opposite of authority.

And this is the thing, right?

And this is something that's been bothering me lately.

So, in order to, this is a sequence of events in itself.

In order to look up when we are doing our own tour,

I had to Google it to just to double check.

And that led me to the realization that we have a subreddit, right?

Which appears to be comprised entirely of people who used to listen to this podcast and now don't for one reason or another.

And there are two threads on there that aren't just like, hey, the new episode is out.

And they're both about me being confidently wrong about things.

So it's brutal.

Apparently, I likes that.

Yeah, there's a, there's a, you know,

no, it's genuinely, it's genuinely like two sets of people going, hey, is anyone else noticing that November is kind of a fucking idiot?

And it's like, oh,

I'm aware of this, but like, I I have things to disagree with upon that statement.

Abby said something useful on a recent Kill James Bond, if I recall, which is that the reviews are not for you.

That's true, but when they're kind of pointed in your direction, I mean, I try to keep a healthy sense of perspective, right?

Because of the people who are like maddest at me that I could tell, they were maddest at me for disrespecting Rania Khalek and disrespecting Barney the dinosaur.

So

on both of those bases, I feel okay.

But yeah, I just have to remind people that I'm not an expert in anything, right?

And if I sound confident about things, it's just because I'm trying to make jokes.

I don't know anything about anything.

That's what we're all here to learn.

You're a comedian.

That's your whole point.

Don't tell us.

You're officially an idiot.

Don't tell us that we're comedians.

I don't want to have to father.

I'm like, I know.

I think my webcam's on.

I don't remember but i'm like i'm hunched over clutching this seltzer wishing for the end times

oh yeah

last episode recording where like it fro your cam your webcam froze with your head with you with your head in your hands i i i i thought well that's this is this is funny and then it continued and we're like is is liam okay have we broken liam uh sort of genuinely concerned no it's just fucking it's just fucking zencaster again

uh

before we talk about the end show we have to do oh we do have announcements i forgot to put the slide in no that's fine we can sing it we can put it

we have a tour if you want to find out where it is go to our subreddit scroll past all the threads making fun of me for not knowing what i'm talking about um and uh yeah it'll be on there there are dates still still uh well it'll also be in the description as well oh it's way simpler yeah yeah exactly we're nearly sold out in Washington, D.C.

We are sold out in D.C., dude.

We are sold out in D.C.

Yeah, we sold out in D.C.

You know, if you want to come see us on a Tuesday in New York,

there are still tickets to that show, and there are still a good amount of tickets left at the Fillmore.

We do need to fill more seats at the Fillmore.

Did you see the email we got today from an unnamed venue that didn't want us there the first time?

No, I did not.

I come crawling back.

They all bend the knee.

They all bend the knee.

I texted my wife as soon as I got that fucking email, and I was like,

and it was actually, I can name the venue that really didn't want us because we're never going to play there as long as I can help it, which is World Cafe Live.

What's up, you motherfuckers?

I couldn't think of another venue that, yeah, that's the only one.

I knew they didn't like us.

Anyway,

I totally on the subreddit.

Sorry,

I've been trying not to obsess over this fucking thing for like two days now.

Okay.

Don't look at the subreddit.

No.

You know, and I anyway.

What should you be able to get a sense of World Cafe live?

I already did that, bud.

Well, yeah, that's a good point.

Okay.

Oh, you will take that tone.

Yeah.

Let's do the goddamn news before we impugn anyone else.

I barely, barely impugned them.

I love you all so, so much.

We're going to have to take a couple mulligans on

the news from last week.

Fuck that up real quick.

Because I actually

fuckers for a decade where weeks happen.

And what did I get?

More weeks where decades happen.

I was about to say, yeah, I mean, especially given the release cycle of this podcast, some even more wild shit will have happened by the time this comes out.

Anyway, so while we were recording the previous episode, the wildfires were really bad in Los Angeles, and they got significantly worse over the course of recording them.

So I said something along the lines of, well, it's only affecting the houses of the multi-millionaires and the billionaires.

Hasn't come down the mountain down to the ordinary millionaires.

No, it pretty much destroyed the entire town of

Alcadina's like destroyed now.

It's really bad.

And I mean, this is kind of a general problem with the goddamn news generally, right?

Is that, first of all, it moves faster than we do because we're a very lethargic and like sluggish podcast.

Yes,

we like to conserve energy.

All of our tummies hurt.

But also, we're trying to do a comedy podcast about horrible things.

And it's like genuinely like we don't always, yeah, we don't always hit the tone of the moment.

We don't always hit the mark.

Yeah.

We sometimes miss the mark.

Yeah.

And I think this was one of them, right?

Where

I mean, it's not even out yet, so I don't even know, but like,

it's one of those things where we were really like on a kind of tightrope there of of trying to be like what can we possibly say about this and that's that's like more and more you know um but i think it's still worth doing it's just you know how are we not going to talk about a bunch of cars getting crushed by a bulldozer

where we think about like some things some things are best left to stew and and and look at the aftermath but Some things are so apocalyptic that you've got to, it'd be, it'd be a bit, you know, we'd be get called, you know, we'd get called out if we didn't engage with it, right?

Yeah, so good point.

It's a good point.

You know, I didn't say now we're in, we're starting to look into the cleanup section of the uh, the, the, the whole situation.

And it's like Gavin Newsom has decided, okay, we're going to suspend environmental laws so we can rebuild more quickly on these places that probably shouldn't have houses on them.

Yeah, we're going to, we're going to build them even more shoddily and you know, even more sort of fire prone just to get to build them back quickly.

Build them out of balsa, right?

Build back

Build back.

Build them out of a burner.

Yeah, exactly.

God forbid you put any multifamily in there, like, you know, try and concentrate housing in areas that are less fire-prone.

No, it's going to be all single-family homes forever.

As a kind of like Glasgow resident, I have some exposure of this strange phenomenon whereby anything burning down somehow turns to property developers' advantage.

Every time, yeah, it's a real mystery, right?

Maybe we'll get with it because none of the new houses will be insurable.

So

we do have that on our side.

50 stories of real of apartments on top of the Charles Rennie McIntosh School.

Yeah.

Yeah.

There's one of them

burned down again.

It's burned down again.

It's time to put another 50 stories on top.

Every single time, it just grows.

It just becomes a type Hei 101 after two fires.

Yeah, yeah, but yeah, yeah, so so this is this is fucking horrifying as ever.

Like, I feel like most of what we talk about now is fucking horrifying.

Yeah,

and yeah, I was following Noah's Noah's feed closely on the night after we finished, even after we finished recording, actually, when I should have been in bed because it was 2 a.m.

But I have to say,

it was just pretty harrowing watching it getting watching it going through Altadina.

It was just, yeah.

And then, of course, all the misinformation happened because the number of AI-generated pictures of like Lamborghinis with firearms and shit then was being spewed out.

It's just like we really are in the fucking end times.

A lot of conspiracies around it, too.

There's a lot of, you know, people saying, oh my God, you know, the space laser, you know, it's a space laser again.

No,

you've got to be more careful with that thing.

I, I, well, I shouldn't be drunk when I operate it, but that's neither here nor there.

And what else?

The, you know, the insufficient water supply to the

high-pressure system is like somehow

was deliberate or something.

No, I just think this is a larger fire than was anticipated for the water system.

Well, it's deliberate in the sense that we decided that California decided all the water should go to that like one couple that grew pistachios, but otherwise the Resniks, yeah, yeah, yeah.

No, I don't think like Antifa were going around like starting fires like people were afraid of.

Um, I mean, yeah, there's the other thing about this is that it might not to do no gods, no mares, um, end the career of the mayor of Los Angeles, Karen Bass, because she was on vacation for much of this

and then has fucked up every single press conference she's done in a new and like alarming way.

And the most recent one I saw was where she was asked, like, okay, well, do you feel bad that you're on vacation?

Do you think you should have come back earlier?

She's like, no, no,

no.

Can't say that.

No, I can't say that.

Yeah.

Can't do that.

Just lie.

Just say, of course.

It's not hard.

Probably wouldn't have helped, but you know, yeah, you probably have to probably have to at least say, yeah, I should be there.

It's a real, it's a real question anticipating the answer, yes, right?

Well, I mean, good on her for doing self-care and not making her job her life.

I was doing work-life balance.

How dare you?

Yes.

We'll also point out that the fires are still going.

Oh, yeah.

They're a a lot more contained than they were when we recorded last week, but they are favorable winds and stuff, right?

So it has slowed down, but yeah.

The real winners here are the guys who like to draw like exquisite art of planes.

Because

if you want to see some like really, really beautiful art of, you know, the like Boeing super tanker or whatever, there's a bunch of guys on Twitter who have got you covered.

And they're all like, you think we feel bad or feel conflicted?

They're all like, oh, I mean, you know, obviously it's not like a good thing.

It's a really bad thing.

And I feel for everyone involved, but I love this fucking plane so bad.

And you know what?

I respect that a great deal, having a kind of like sort of deep attraction to the spirit of John Muir and being like planes one of the people.

They want to fuck the plane.

They want to fuck the plane.

It's like a noble calling, as far as I'm concerned.

If they're putting out art like this, it's like saying that, like, you know, Michelangelo wanted to fuck the statues.

It's like,

okay, fine, worth it, I guess, you know.

Like,

one thing I did notice was the drones, right?

The people were flying over and taking drone footage and crashing into firefighting planes.

Yeah, they put a hole in the wings of one of them, like, and like grounded all the fixed-wing firefighters.

There were flight restrictions, like very well-advertised flight restrictions out for these guys out kind of getting glory-hunting drone shots.

Um, that they were to be grounded, and nope, they were just out and flying.

It's just, yeah,

not good, stupid drones, yeah.

Um, and yeah, like that grounded that firefighting aircraft, so that was less firefighting capacity against these fires.

So, great work of the guys flying the drones around.

The other thing that I wanted to mention about this is uh, you know, of course, that California continues to use uh prison labor as firefighting, um,

like in the I think hundreds of

people here.

And this is, this is, this is coercive.

It's like functionally slave labor.

And I don't want to be, you know, I don't want to talk about the UAE or, you know, Saudi and talk about kafala, not mention this here.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah.

I mean, it's, it's definitely a, you know, it's a hell of a, it's a hell of a system they have out there in California.

I'm glad.

I'm just sometimes I'm like, thank God I don't live there.

And it's one of those things where it's like, knowing that this is going to get worse every year and seeing how precarious it is this year and how bad it is this year,

you just think, you know, this is just going to get more and more tenuous until something's going to like break seriously, you know?

And I mean, this is, this is what it looks like when it works just about.

And it's still like...

I was about to say this is not as

not anywhere as bad as it could have been.

Yeah.

But it was still exponentially worse than anything else that's happening there.

Yeah.

Like

looking at like, you know,

hundreds of people getting the houses burned down, thousands of people getting evacuated, and, you know, whatever death toll it turns out to be, and going, well, you know,

this is the success story, right?

It just feels like the success story gets a little bit less successful all the time.

Yes.

However, there was a success story

in other news.

Oh, nailed that.

Yeah, so there's a ceasefire now.

John Trump has negotiated a ceasefire in Gaza.

You hate to say it, but deals really are the man's art form.

I'm kind of, I was like, you know, it did seem like for a while there, there were some people who were contrarians who were just like, well, maybe Trump will, you know, negotiate a ceasefire.

And I was like, no, they'll never do that.

Anyway, he did that.

Yeah.

Like,

I remember seeing there was one of the dumbest motherfuckers to ever do it, Matt Iglesias,

posted, like, maybe I'm maybe I'm an out-of-touch elitist, but people really seem to think there's a like ceasefire button in Biden's office that he's refusing to press.

Oh, yes,

and then Donald Trump, confusing it with the Diet Coke summoning button, pressed that button by accident.

And, and, uh,

sort of like, lo and behold, you get, you get a ceasefire which has not happened yet um to be clear israel is still like bombing gaza it's still killing people they never respect ceasefires right you look they're still bombing they're still attacking and bombing and and wrecking up lebanon's sovereignty right absolutely well

there's this kind of like institutional knowledge in in the idf that like what you do in the face of a ceasefire is you you try and like

take and hold as much territory and inflict as much damage as you can before it starts to try and like get the most favorable position.

They're not very good at not using their guns on their own the IDF.

You know, they're very, very, uh, very much like, I don't know, maybe they all got carpal tunnel syndrome, so they're firing their guns constantly when they're holding them.

I mean, they're also not very good at using their guns because I wouldn't not do it, I would not describe anything that the IDF have done as being precise or

competent or good.

Yeah, they are moral, however.

In fact, the most alarm is moral.

The most moral.

So we keep hearing.

But yeah, so if this works, which it may still not, but I think everyone hopes that it does.

Israel saw surround of fire.

Yeah.

What the fuck happens next?

Well, so what happens next is there's an exchange of like all of the hostages for about like a thousand Palestinian, I'll say hostages as well, right?

Which gives you a sense of scale in terms of like number of Palestinians held prisoner in Israel versus number of Israelis held prisoner in Gaza.

And then theoretically, there's like

an Israeli withdrawal.

There's no like mention of sort of like interdicting Hamas from governing Gaza.

So they're going to do that again.

And supposedly

everybody gets to go back to what is left of their homes, including in the north of Gaza.

I was about to say the reconstruction here is going to take a very, very long time, especially if any of those Israeli material restrictions are still in in place.

Yeah.

Who's going to go in and do it?

Because, you know,

I mean,

the residents of Gaza are unbelievably sort of creative and resourceful, but there's only so much you can do with sort of like

toxic, the genuinely toxic rubble that has been left behind by Israel.

Yeah, I mean,

the Fidel of like asbestos and crap, yeah.

Yeah.

The Biden plan, you know, I don't want to like sort of dignify it with the name, right?

Was sort of vaguely gestured at the idea of like the Gulf states and Saudi were going to

come in and invest,

which

we'll see.

Turn the Gaza Strip into Neom.

Yeah, I was going to say it was

a pretty beautiful city before.

It'll be fucking horrible if the Emiratis get their hands on it.

Jesus.

Yeah.

But I mean, I don't know, right?

And I don't know that many people do, really.

But,

you know,

a starting point, this is, you know, it's better than more bombing.

Yeah, it's better than not be bombed.

You know, maybe you can find the time to reinstall some windows or something.

Yeah.

I mean, over the course of the war, right?

I mean, we didn't see it turn into like a regional war.

We did see like Iran strike Israel, which was fucking wild, but it didn't like broaden beyond that.

Yeah.

I've got to be thankful for that, I guess.

Yeah, on the other hand, uh, you know, uh, sort of like Gaza has been sort of uh

functionally destroyed, uh,

Lebanon has been like brutalized, Syria has had, uh, like half this mountain stolen off of it, um, and Hamas and Hezbollah have been decimated, and God knows what that looks like as they try and rebuild, right?

Um, bad to say, I don't think, I think that when we, when we get the

final death toll figures, if they're able to be figured out, because I believe they destroyed all the records in gaza yeah um it's going to be an ugly number it's going to be a very ugly number i think it's going to be a lot worse than anything the health ministry has put out um yeah and i mean ultimately like

what you hope for is still war crimes prosecutions right you you hope for like uh israeli leadership to end up in the fucking hague but it really seems like this is just the best you can get for the moment, right?

And I mean, for the people of Gaza to have survived this long, those that have, and to have like endured these crimes is sort of like

this incredible testament, right?

But also

just kind of horrifying in terms of what the implications are for the future, not just in Gaza, but anywhere, right?

Like, I think

having this kind of outcome of like,

well, nothing kind of really changes except you do all the crimes, you get away with it.

And then I think the feeling in Israel is as likely as not to be, well, you know, in a few years, we just do it all over again.

Right.

If that's the feeling, then it's not going to kind of deter anyone from doing the same thing anywhere else.

Except when we were growing up, Nova, you and I, same age, pretty much.

The big news injustice that I sort of grew up with, that I remember, the first one that I remember actually was

growing up very little, but it was the siege of Sarajevo, right?

And this is this incredible urban siege of, you know, awful experience for the residents of Sarajevo as

the Serbs

basically

sniper rifles, firing missiles, just obliterating their city and attacking their city, making life miserable.

And

that looks like a walk in the park compared to

what we've seen happen to Gaza City and

to the whole Gaza Strip.

incompress like absolutely inconceivable cruelty and destruction and i i just it will say a lot.

And I know that I know that they will rebuild because you can see we've seen the resilience of the of the Palestinian people over the last sort of year and a half.

But the uh but but I mean they will rebuild and it'll be incredible that they will and you know

but it's the what's the long-term future for for them?

You know, what is this just gonna are we just gonna cycle into this again probably and that's depressing as fuck.

Yeah.

We gotta give the Palestinians their own iron dome.

Yeah, genuinely.

Give them the nuke.

Yeah, why not?

Yeah, sure.

Let's go with that.

Just like kicking yourself into the sort of top left,

no, bottom-left libertarian leftist quadrant of the political campus and be like, everybody's sovereignty enforced by nuclear weapons.

I mean, at this point, I've heard worse ideas, you know?

Yes.

Okay.

We've found a...

Long-lasting solution to the crisis.

Yeah, exactly.

Arm everyone with nuclear weapons.

Just me fleeing my stance on nuclear disarmament in real time.

Yeah, let's go.

Nuclear armament.

We're just giving them out.

Yeah.

Doing like evangelism.

Stack of suitcase nukes on like a stall.

And you know,

take the liberal eccentrist stance is that you can deliver the nuke via the US little jetty they built.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

That's it.

That's not even still there.

That scoop is the best.

Have you heard the good news of our Lord and Savior, the Davy Crockett?

Davy Crockett.

All right.

Well, that was depressing, but let's go to a piece of fun news,

which we also got wrong in the last episode.

Yeah, so it's done now.

After two years of this thing taking up all the space

politically discourse-wise, in the city of Philadelphia, the downtown or the center city,

Sixers Arena, has been at the very last second after all the legislation was passed, people got arrested.

You know, all this crap.

They're like, nah, we're going to stay in South Philly.

Resistance to all oppressors, give the residents of Chinatown a nuke.

Yeah.

Yep.

It's my understanding is this has something to do with NBC getting the broadcast rights to the NBA.

Some kind of shady backroom deal occurred.

You know, and consider,

I know at least some people who think Mayor Parker stole the election specifically to get this project through.

What?

No, we wanted two candidates to believe the exact same thing against each other, and Cheryl Parker won.

Liam, have you been, have you and Tom been covering this at all in 10K losses?

Like, we're covering it on Friday, actually, but we have to do it.

Okay, so yeah, I look forward to tuning because I don't know what the's going on and i i'm i'm fascinated to know your take yeah yeah

no there's a lot of there's a lot of stuff here that uh really um uh

you know it is is beyond me um you know

in the last episode i was definitely like you know because it's hard to find a reason to like be firmly against this at least for me because

the campaigners would have found uh oh sorry to be against it sorry forgive me yeah okay fair point i was thinking like a legal thing to to topple it and they hadn't found it but you know to actually be because it was kind of like okay okay, I mean, the ball is not that great.

You know, it would wreck the train station for a while.

Well, possibly permanently because you would have less light coming in there.

But, you know, it didn't seem like conceptually a terrible idea.

But when you realize, oh, wait, the whole thing was bait and switch.

I mean, it would be hard to be against it.

particularly for that reason through the whole process, but I feel like everyone who was against it is vindicated.

You know, and it is really funny to see our city council try and, you know, spin this as some sort of win when they all just, you know, expended all the political capital they have to get this thing forced through.

It's, it's kind of

incredible.

I don't know.

It's really funny that it's not happening.

All this over what looks like a kind of like a big picnic basket or a mall in like a sort of Central Asian country.

exactly.

You know, all architecture is shit nowadays.

I mean, what the fuck is this?

It's just,

this is Ulaanbaatar's premier shopping destination.

Exactly.

Yeah.

Oh, the, the, the Qatari slash Saudis slash Emiratiification of everything is just, yeah.

Yeah, I mean, what we've sort of wound up with now is I believe the Sixers now own just two huge chunks of Center City real estate.

They should lean into this.

They should have it be like a kind of like feudal liberty, like the Savoy, you know, where it's like

these two blocks.

Like this, that's basically how the city of London started.

Just do that.

Just be like, you know, this, this whole area is under the jurisdiction of the 76ers.

Oh, the fiefdom.

Yeah, you get arrested by like the basketball cops.

The sixdom.

Yeah.

Oh, that'll be, that'll be like a Keystone opportunity zone, but more.

Yeah.

Maybe you pay all your taxes directly to to the Sixers.

The Philadelphia 76ers economics,

like exclusive economic area or whatever.

Arm the Sixers with a nuke.

Yeah.

Chinatown gets a nuke, the Sixers get a nuke.

Problem solved.

Yeah, exactly.

We give every

registered community organization a nuke.

Doing this to maintain sop,

you know, we're doing this to maintain the peace.

Giving the green party of england and wales a nuke i i

i kind of support that yeah sure i think carla daniel should be quite yeah yeah exactly give carla yeah that that would be i i would like that yeah

um that you know i've spun them on hs2 now we can get them sort of get to flip them on something that i also don't agree with which is nuclear you know proliferation let's let's let's crack on yeah

Greenham Common War Camp.

I guess that is just the base at Greenham Common.

I was trying to conceptualize the opposite of the peace camp, and it's just like, that's just the thing they're outside the wire of.

Yeah, exactly.

You just let them in.

Yeah, yeah.

Good moral lanyard.

So, yeah,

this is very funny.

I mean, there's nothing you can say about it other than this is really, really funny.

Yeah, this is not one I feel morally conflicted about.

I feel pretty good about this one.

Just very funny, yeah.

Well,

that was the goddamn news.

Get mad at us in the comments.

Yes, I'm sure they will.

Okay.

All right.

So let's start the Socratic method here.

I hate when we do this.

Yeah.

What is Washington National Airport?

Hell, it's very bumpy.

It's very greebled.

This is a grebled.

It is.

They've really.

That, or it looks like it's one of those models that you make out of just like cereal boxes with a Stanley knife, very carefully calculated.

Can I rammer you had to make at 4 a.m.

because your kid was like, I have a project due tomorrow and I haven't started it yet.

First day using my lathe and I've made the air traffic control tower at Washington National Airport.

I actually quite like the interior of this airport.

It's sort of, it was all designed by Caesar Pelly.

It's all, it's got a bunch of like yellow decorative ironwork in it.

Yeah, it's good.

It's quite digital.

It's like a big, big Pomo do that.

Yeah, it's like, or is it high-tech?

It looks like it's Art Nouveau.

Hold on, let me get a picture here.

And I mean, you know, good sort of like nice views of the planes if you're one of those guys who likes to

want to fuck the planes.

As we all do.

Yeah.

I don't necessarily want to fuck the plane.

I just want to pick out the 737 maxes and laugh at them.

Hold on.

Here we go.

Plane shaming.

Yeah.

High your tent, Boeing.

Okay, here's what the inside looks like.

Oh, that's lovely.

That's funny.

That's right.

It's kind of like, you know, cathedral-ish.

Yeah, I was going to say secular cathedral with that vaulting.

Yeah.

Fair play.

I actually quite like that.

It is Pomo.

It's a very, it's very Pomo.

I like that.

It's very, very postmodern, yeah.

Okay, but a little bit of Pomo.

Sorry, none of us have answered the question you've set us, Ross.

It's true.

Fuck up.

Washington National Airport is the airport in Washington, D.C.

It's a land of contracts.

But it's not actually in Washington, D.C.

It's in Arlington.

Or is it in Alexandria?

I don't remember.

It's in

one of the kind of hellscapes that surround

it.

It is in northern Virginia.

It's an airport that Congress.

It's technically Crystal City, I think, but who gives a shit about that?

Well, I think Crystal City is unincorporated.

I believe you're right.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So this is an airport that Congressmen like to get mad at.

Reasonable.

Kind of like Westminster Tube Station.

Yeah.

Because

it's Washington, D.C.'s local airport.

That's why you call it a national airport.

Yep.

Okay, that makes sense.

There's one further away, Washington Dulles International Airport.

That's where the long-haul flights are supposed to come in.

Yeah, that's the one I know about.

Yeah.

This one is supposed to be more for regional flights.

I think there's like a hard limit on flights coming into this airport of like 1,250 miles.

But every once in a while, a congressman gets mad that there isn't a direct flight from where they live to the airport.

And they submit some legislation that then lets one flight violate that rule.

Incredible.

That's kind of like the MP

direct train to their constituency to London situation.

Exactly.

That's literally the same thing.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So this airport has two names.

It's National Airport if you're a Democrat or left-leaning, and it's Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport if you're a Republican or you lean right.

Ronald Reagan and Alan Dulles.

What a pair of, I guess it's John Foster Dulles, but like still, like, like, what a pair of guys to name your airports after.

Yeah, exactly.

Sir Good Marshall got BWI.

Kind of perverse to name an airport after a guy with one of the biggest influences in causing 9-11.

And who, you know, fired all the air traffic

controls and also physically one of the least aerodynamic presidents I think the U.S.

has ever had as well.

Doing doing graphing presidents by aerodynamic quality is a great shame.

What's their bluff body ratio?

Yeah.

Oh, Johnson loses this at a landslide.

No, no, no.

It's Taft.

Taft is the least aerodynamic president.

He's the most buoyant president, though.

Yeah, great shit.

Terrible aircraft.

Possibly a good air balloon.

Graphing presidents by land speed, air speed, and like buoyancy.

Imagine a president that's perfectly spherical and of uniform density.

Yeah, with him how it tufted.

Yeah.

This airport was, I guess, not an early get.

I guess it was sort of in the medium term of, you know, the Ronald Reagan Memorial Committee on naming things after Ronald Reagan.

It was the commissi beso, to be honest.

Yeah, I mean, this was the lots of things got named after Ronald Reagan in like the 90s.

I believe the air traffic controller still refused to call it Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport.

It's interesting because they just say natural airport.

There's very little that's named the Margaret Thatcher XY or Z in the UK.

So, you know, it did better than his contemporary on this side of the puddle.

But this is the airport.

This is the airport that's like close in to Washington, D.C.

We'll see how close in shortly.

Now, another important thing is, what is the 14th Street Bridge complex?

Oh, God, this is some real like me playing city skylines gore

and figuring out four different times that i need to cross this body of water yes

yeah testing out the different vanilla bridge types that you get all in a row yeah uh-huh

i should throw a rail bridge on there too probably i guess i gotta be

right yeah i mean just around the corner from the course where the triskelion is here uh that's uh that's just around the corner That is actually sort of how that works, how that worked on this one.

There has been some kind of bridge on this location since 1809,

generally with some kind of draw span on it.

So, from bottom to top here, this is the 1904 Long Bridge.

Why is it called the Long Bridge?

It's really long.

Yeah, it's pretty long.

It's like a mile.

Yeah, yeah.

Dang, that's it.

I was hoping for a guy named Long

Long rides again.

Isaiah Long III or something.

Yeah.

This is built in 1904 to replace the previous structure.

Here is the the 1983 Charles R.

Fenwick Bridge that carries the metro over the river.

Okay, so we're two for two on rail bridges.

Happy with that.

Nice.

There will soon actually be a third one, I think, downstream of the long bridge here for extra capacity for the commuter trains.

Nice.

Yeah.

Big rail.

Love it.

I mean, you know, it's taken them 10 years to plan a bridge over a three-foot-deep river, but that's a different conversation.

This is

the 1950, formerly called the Rochambeau Bridge, which is

Louisiana, I guess.

Yeah.

This is now the Arlen D.

Williams Jr.

Memorial Bridge that'll come up later.

That carries I-395 northbound.

This is the 1971 current Rochambeau Bridge.

that carries the I-395 express lanes, which from experience, not not very express.

And then at the very top here, this is the 1962 George Mason Memorial Bridge, which carries I-95 or I-395 southbound.

And one of the fun things about this spot is that when you're going over it, either on a train or on a metro or in a car, you can see every form of transportation.

You can see boats.

but you can also see planes flying very low overhead.

You get a little like achievement if you're here.

Yeah, exactly.

Exactly.

You get the achievement if you see a boat and a plane and a train and a car and a truck and a bus all at the same time.

So that's actually what determines if you get to heaven.

Like,

it's unfair and it's not like written down anywhere in like the Bible or anything, but that is what it is.

If you, if you like, you know,

died before the invention of any of those things, you would have to go to the bottom.

Sucks, sucks.

Yeah, sucks.

Now, those are the three bridges, the three kind of bridges in the four,

the first three, do they all have a drawbridge?

They all of them have a lifty bit.

So the long bridge has a draw span.

The Roche Chambeau bridge has a draw span, or the former Roche Chambeau bridge has a draw span.

The Yellow Line Bridge does not have a draw span because they actually decided when they built the two northern spans, yeah, we really don't need boats coming up this far.

Fuck you, boats.

Fuck you.

Exactly.

Yeah, okay, fair enough.

Yeah,

I'm with that.

I think the last time either of these two bridges opened was 1967.

Okay, yeah, fine.

Finding myself very opinionated this episode.

I'm changing my opinions on nukes, and I'm very anti-boat.

It's just some emerging pictures.

Pro-nuke, anti-boat.

Nuke every boat.

That's it.

The only thing about it is I do think the okay, the next bridge up the river, the Memorial Bridge, that had the wildest draw span I think

has ever been designed,

which was also welded shut as a result.

Let me see if I can find a picture of this.

Hold on.

You're doing great.

No, there's no way I'm finding this quickly.

God damn it.

Fuck you.

Google now utterly useless.

Thank you, Google.

Thank you.

Thank you, AI.

We love your slop.

Okay, here we go.

Oh my god, what the goddamn shit is this?

What?

Why would you do it that way?

It's a bit like a thing to keep.

That's a thing to keep Andreessen's head in place.

No, they kept the because the rest of the bridge are these sorts of sort of low, large arches, right?

So the actual draw span was the same kind of arch done in cast iron.

And then they had to.

Yeah.

It's a nice idea, but it looks like it's been designed to capture a kaiju.

Like, what?

Didn't they use this in Skyrim?

This is what it looks like closed.

Yeah, it's very nice.

They've done a nice job.

It's a lovely flat, shallow arch that.

It's nice.

It's lovely.

But I have no idea when the last time that opened.

It was probably earlier than 1967.

Many years ago.

It's all welded shut.

Yeah.

So

we've got trains, we've got buses, we've got cars, we've got trucks, we've got boats, and we've got planes all in the same place.

Why?

Why?

Why?

Why?

The express lanes here were actually supposed to originally be bus-only lanes, and then they gave up and made them high-occupancy vehicle lanes.

Oh, that's

sad.

Yeah, but this is

all the bridges are right here because I guess it's a convenient spot to put them.

That's where you all go.

That's where we go to hang out.

And they all converge sort of into 14th Street or into I-395,

which goes east-west through DC.

So, and of course, they are located.

If we look, okay, here's the White House, right?

Here's the Capitol.

Here's Jesus Christ.

How did the Pentagon not get like 9-11 earlier?

It's in line with one of the runways.

Yes, the Pentagon is in line with one of the runways.

I don't think they usually take off going that direction.

They got to do a whole different approach and shit.

It's real weird.

But yeah, here's the 14th Street bridges.

Here is the airport.

Here's the Pentagon.

What else is interesting here?

Just like I'm visualizing flight restrictions in my head and I'm seeing like big red and orange shapes desolating with each other and overlapping and shit.

Or if you deviate from your flight plan by like a tenth of an inch and you are shot down by a Patriot missile.

It's Sam battery right to the dome.

Yeah.

Not quite, but yes, the approach and departure routes from this airport are very strict.

They're very specific here.

Yeah.

This is a kind of pilot nightmare to me in my imagination.

This is running the gauntlet because if you

one fell swoop and you are you are Chunky Marinera and everybody you've ever known is Chunky Marinera.

There were some really bizarre restrictions on flights in and out of the airport just after 9-11.

Oh, yeah, like the passenger amount, right?

Wasn't that restricted?

They restricted the number of passengers on the flight.

One of the restrictions was, I believe, if a passenger stood up within 30 minutes of arrival or departure, the plane had to be redirected to a nearby military base.

Oh, okay.

All right.

Under fighter jet

escort.

I have to go to the bathroom and I get everybody cavity searched by the fence.

That's it.

The actual approach into the airport is the river approach.

So you come

as you get towards Roslyn here, which annoyingly has a bunch of tall buildings, the river visual just brings you down the river and onto the runway.

And

because, you know, right next to you, very restricted airspace and then even more restricted airspace.

So, yeah,

figure it out.

Don't fuck that up, kids.

Don't fuck it up.

Yeah.

I guess if you're going to be like a commercial airline pilot, they kind of select against you having anxiety.

But this seems like a great way to start, you know?

Yeah, I would, oh, we would be, we would, we, we would be the opposite of Sully of the Hudson.

We would be in the Potomac, but yeah, none of us are getting that alive out of this.

Yeah, shredded aluminium type situation.

I'd have anxiety doing this in flight simulator.

I'd worry the FBI would show up to my door if I messed up.

Surely it would be like the FAA cops, right?

Does the FAA have cops?

They got help.

Oh,

sure.

Yeah, like, yeah, yeah.

We're preemptively revoking your pilot's license, even though you don't have one.

The FAA SWAT team just come and like break your yoke off your desk.

Open up, FAA.

Surely gotta have it.

Is it on an artificial island or did it just completely sack off a nice natural island to build on?

A big, big chunk of this is Phil, I want to say.

Interesting.

But I'm not 100% certain about that.

If it's a real island, it's probably one of the ones where like Aaron Burr was getting into duels and shit, you know?

Yeah,

this airport is in its second location because it actually used to be where the Pentagon is.

Oh, this must have been very confusing.

If you were to say that.

It suddenly all makes sense.

Now, aviation had a vendetta against the Pentagon.

Ah, because they made it move house.

Okay.

Yeah.

I'll make more sense.

Okay, right.

So, our next question.

What is Air Florida?

It feels like the aircraft, it feels like the common carrier of my fucking nightmares.

Feels like the plane should have a mullet.

It kind of does here.

Back left on the tail.

tail yeah business class in the front party class in the back yeah

it's got a little mustache yeah yeah so pilot tries to get your attention by saying where you is every 15 minutes

so Air Florida was originally an intrastate railroad

airline that railroad airline it would have been a lot cooler if air florida were a railroad dude yeah agreed that that would be very florida

so bright line with wings well they did have the seaboard airline.

So

this was founded in 1971 with one airplane, which was an X-Pan Am Boeing 707.

You got to start somewhere.

Weak sauce.

A one-plane airline is a really compelling bit to me.

You're just hanging out, basically.

Yeah.

As the airline only flew within the state of Florida, it was not subject to regulation of routes and ticket prices and so on and so forth that interstate airlines will.

Like a loophole like the FAA can't touch you because you're regulated by the way worse Florida Aviation Authority.

Back then it was the Civil Aviation Board, but basically, yes.

In 1978, well, okay, so despite not being subject to regulations, the airline still lost money hand over fist.

It was not profitable.

They still fumbled a bag despite the fact they were.

Oh, brilliant.

Nice work.

Okay, good.

In 1978, Congress passed the Airline Deregulation Act.

Now,

serious boo.

Now, Air Florida could easily expand outside the state of Florida, and they did actually very successfully.

They weren't necessarily, let's say, pioneering the low-cost airline model, but they shared some characteristics, right?

Most notably, hiring mainly new and young pilots who would settle for lower wages.

Great, of course.

Tremendous.

Yeah, paid and exposure.

Yeah, exactly.

They did not, uh, they did not do other things that low-cost airlines do, like having, you know, all new airplanes or like a uniform fleet of airplanes.

Oh, boy.

This must have been some of the jankiest flying you could have done in the time, you know?

To be like, hey, do you want to get on our completely non-uniform fleet of planes and just like, we will pay you dog shit.

You will have to,

yeah, you have to live in Jacksonville, and you're doing this basically four flight hours logged.

But you don't have to pay extra for a carry-on, though.

So, it's who's to say if it's bad or not, right?

Yeah, exactly.

Also, really funny to be doing this in the 70s.

So, all of these young pilots are like, oh, man, I can't wait to make it to the big leagues.

And the big leagues is like you get hired by, I don't know, Lufthansa or something, Pan Am, Easter,

and get killed instantly when your plane is blown up by the like 15 bombs smuggled onto every flight, or you get hijacked and have to fly it to Libya or whatever the fuck.

I'll get that in a second.

Oh, God.

Air Florida gets really big really quick.

They even managed to expand operations to Europe and South America.

What?

Europeans shouldn't know about Florida.

I'm proof of that.

It damages you.

They had a direct flight from Stockholm to Florida.

The weirdest accent colour.

Swedes going to be

what

Florida is like the anti-Sweden.

There is it's it's the least Swedish place you can possibly imagine.

That's why, you know, just

a Swedish uh expert.

Uh, you know, what the hell are your people doing going to Florida?

I have questions.

Avenging the uh, what is it, the vaga?

What was the big ship that we

got?

Yeah, the vasa, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

We're gonna, we're gonna, we're gonna, yeah, we're gonna make them pay for their crimes.

I like the idea in my old history universe that the Vasa was sunk by Floridians, yeah,

And Michael Mouse is no friend of mine.

So once deregulation happened, this was the darling of investors.

This was the little airline that could, right?

Oh, boy.

It was also a favorite airline of hijackers.

Oh,

just you hijacker playing the pilots, not even really getting paid to be there.

Yeah.

It's like, okay, man, whatever.

Help yourself.

You know, you want something out of the galley?

Just a seat for you as I get up.

August 10th, 1980, Air Florida Flight 4 with 35 people on board, operated by a Boeing 737 from Miami International Airport to Key West, was taken over by a hijacker who demanded to be flown to Cuba.

He later surrendered in Havana.

It worked.

It worked.

August 13th, 1980, Air Florida Flight 707, another Boeing 737.

Two days later.

Flying the opposite direction.

74 people on board was hijacked by seven people.

They demanded to be taken to Cuba, but later surrendered.

At this point, just do flights to Cuba.

Just go to Havana.

It'll be easier.

February 2nd, 1982, Air Florida Flight 710, a Boeing 737-200 with 77 people on board from Niami International to Key West was hijacked.

Why is that even a flight?

The hijacker wanted to be taken to Cuba, but later surrendered.

It's just a case of just functionally

that guy.

That's like a four, it's like a Miami two Havana flight with a loophole.

You know, it's like a fake leaf over it.

July 7th, 1983, Air Florida Flight 8 with 47 people on board was flying from Fort Lauderdale International Airport to Tampa.

One of the passengers handed a note to one of the flight attendants saying that he had a bomb and telling them to fly the plane to Cuba.

You don't just go to Cuba.

It's like, you don't need the bomb.

This is what we normally do.

Just get comfy.

There's just like slightly too loud of a noise from the passenger cabin and on reflex they divert to Havana.

There's like one of the buttons in the armrest is just the take the plane to Cuba button.

Divert to the split.

I'm trying to hand a note to the flight attendant asking for another Coke and she doesn't read it and she just diverts the plane to Cuba.

I read it as Cuba Libre and I got scared.

The airplane was diverted to Havana, Jose Marti International Airport and the hijacker was taken into custody by Cuban authorities.

Do you think that's like Cuban shit libs who refuse to call it Jose Marti Airport on the same basis as like, you know, Reagan National Airport?

I'm sure.

Probably, yeah.

What happens to these hijackers after they make it to Cuba?

I mean,

you probably get like debriefed by the Cuban Secret Service to make sure you're not doing doing some kind of double-agent thing to assassinate Castro.

Castro ignores that, comes up and kisses you on the lips for like way too long.

You instantly fall in love with him, irrespective of gender, and like settle down to a beautiful life together.

Sounds pretty good, to be honest.

That sounds pretty good.

Ready to go or something?

He has a little like room by the airport for this.

This used to be a motel 8 before.

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 uh sometimes it's a little inconsistent but you know it's two bucks you get what you pay for um it also gets you our full back catalog of bonus episodes so you can learn about exciting topics like guns, pickup trucks, or pickup trucks with guns on them.

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Join at patreon.com forward slash WTYP pod.

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Back to the show.

All right.

Not all the flights went to Cuba, though.

Just most of them.

Yeah.

Let's talk about the airplane.

Oh, I don't like that livery.

That's kind of obsessing to me, that blue and green color.

Yeah, I don't like the livery, but I have to say, I do love a 737200 beautiful little Diddy

airplane.

Yeah, it's not.

They're very sleek.

They look so you compare this to the flipping Maxes with their enormous, bulbous, horrible engines totally out of balance.

These are lovely.

Look at those little engines.

Very well proportioned, yeah.

This is a Boeing 737-200 built for United Airlines in 1969.

Registered N62AF.

Sold to Air Florida in 1980.

Shit, it's got N62AF.

Yeah.

This has your old-fashioned, low-bypass Pratt ⁇ Whitney engines and everything.

Yeah.

The crew is Captain Larry Wheaton.

He's 34 years old.

He has 2,322 hours of commercial jet flight time, but he's only done eight takeoffs and landings in snowy conditions.

Oh, fuck.

Okay.

Foreshadowing.

Got you.

First officer Roger Petit is 31.

He has 3,353 flight hours.

He was a former.

He's an office, actually, but ironically.

He's a former F-15 pilot.

He has only two takeoffs and landings in snowy conditions.

I figure once you've made it two times, you're like, I can do a third.

It's pretty cool.

I'm sure there's no pertinence to the fact that you're mentioning that, Ros, right?

They fly for Air Florida, so you know, a lot of the airports don't get a lot of snow.

Yeah, how often are you mostly flying?

I'm sure it doesn't snow for shit in Havana.

Right, I'm sure this won't come up again.

Yeah, I'm sure there's nothing to be worried about.

So, on January 13th, 1982, they are going to take this 737, which just arrived earlier from Miami.

To Havana.

To Havana, right, of course.

Well,

we don't know that.

But maybe.

They're taking it from Washington National Airport to Fort Lauderdale Hollywood International Airport by way of Tampa.

Shouldn't get to call it Hollywood International Airport.

It's misleading.

It's deceptive, not be saying.

So,

you know, this flight is in, fuck you, it's January.

So

going to Fort lauderdale in january uh okay so like what's that that's like people who missed seeing their like elderly relatives for christmas and they're trying to make it up to them in a hurry right yeah sure yeah damn we got to do christmas too

oh no i hate christmas too i don't even really like christmas one man

so we got to talk about de-icing airplanes right

oh okay so ice and snow can affect the aerodynamic properties of the airplane and make them more difficult to fly or impossible to fly.

Ice and snow can also affect various sensors on the aircraft and cause instruments to give false readings.

Commercial aircraft in flight use bleed air, which is the warm air that comes out of the engines, to warm the surface of the wings.

But on the ground, this doesn't really work too good because there's not much bleed air to go around, right?

So the aircraft is manually de-iced by guys and cherry pickers.

That's these trucks over here.

And they spray the goo on the plane, some kind of antifreeze, right?

And to the goo, I goo.

Sometimes isopropyl alcohol, sometimes some kind of salt solution, maybe some Austrian wine.

They spray that all over.

They're never going to live that down.

Not from us.

Yeah, they spray that all over the plane until there's no ice left.

And then once you've been de-iced, you high high tail it to the runway right um you have these like de-icing pads that are like designated areas to do this in right yes yeah

this is well yeah okay so this is still a time when it they hadn't brought in the rules about exactly how long you could be like like the yeah like how long you could be stood post de-icing before you could take off like that got tightened up quite a lot i think in the 90s if i'm uh remembering my air crash investigation properly it actually got tightened up uh very shortly after this incident.

Oh, interesting.

Oh, okay.

Spoiler alert.

Okay, cool.

It's worth saying.

So it's okay.

It's worth saying, yeah, if you get ice on the wing, it's not just that it makes it like fly a bit rougher.

It can have like really weird effect, like unpredictable effects.

And those effects can be quite, they can be onset quite suddenly as well.

So like plane decides it doesn't want to fly anymore.

Yeah, exactly.

Like there are lots of popular regional uh aircraft that that are very efficient turboprop type things but there's a there's there's there's one particular atr aircraft that uh or family of aircraft that had had for a long time had a really nasty um uh icing problem uh and would just like throw itself into the fucking ground um if if uh if the conditions were perfect for kind of icing and flying

plane with intrusive thoughts

literally yeah

the the boeing 737200 it was known that if it were improperly de-iced what it would like to do is to pitch up as steeply as possible.

Oh, hell yeah.

Oh, yeah.

Oh, yeah, that's good, I believe.

Yes, definitely good.

And that could be a good one.

It beats the alternative, right?

Like, of all the directions you want a plane to go.

Yeah, hopefully you go up.

There's going to be some problems.

Yeah, they're definitely going to be a lot more likely.

Me finding out about a stall for the first time.

Oh, that sucks.

Fuck it.

I thought if you pull back, the plane goes up.

Literally, the first officer on that Air France flight that like pancaked into the ocean off of Brazil did that almost verbatim.

So yeah.

Why would it be bad for the plane to go too much up?

It's where it's supposed to go.

Yeah, exactly.

It's where planes live in the sky.

They haven't left one up there yet.

Yeah.

So airports.

Airports in snowier climates often have dedicated de-icing pads next to the runway, while those in warmer clines usually require de-icing at the gate.

Isn't they seen kind of cold in winter?

Like, that's the whole point of Die Hard 2, I think.

It used to be.

Holy fuck.

Okay.

Yeah.

You would get a really good snowstorm like once every two years or so, I would say.

I do remember the one week that, you know, we were completely out of school for a whole week.

It was great.

And that was also the first week in recorded history that the District of Columbia recorded zero zero murders.

Everyone didn't want to go outside.

There was too much snow.

Then again, John McClain racked up a bunch of murders in that snowstorm.

So National Airport is one of the latter kind.

It does not have de-icing pads to this day because this is a very rare occurrence.

So you just get your de-icing at the

gate.

And then hope that you get your clearance to fly off the runway fairly quickly.

Yeah.

So you, a little foreshadower, you hoping you make it off the runway.

Well, indeed.

Don't worry about why I said that.

Don't worry about why.

Oh, yeah.

No, just a random set of words together.

I'm just talking crazy.

A non-portentous set of words from my good friend Liam.

All right.

So this flight is scheduled departure 12.15 Eastern Standard Time.

This is 2.15.

2.15.

Did I say?

You said 12.15.

I am a moron.

Anyway.

No, you're not handsome.

This is a a cool pushback truck.

Yeah.

Oh,

there aren't really the three genders there.

I'm a moron.

No, you're not.

I love you.

Cool truck.

Yeah.

This is

a touch.

And therefore, you can see it's in blackface, unfortunately, there.

It's gone poorly.

So this blizzard had moved in over Washington, D.C.

on this day, right?

There's very little visibility.

The runway was quickly covered in snow.

So the airport was closed for about 90 minutes for the sake of snow removal.

I bet they have a really cool truck for that.

Big snowblower type thing.

Big snowplow, yeah.

So the captain tried to time his de-icing about as close to the airport's reopening time as possible in order to get a good spot in line.

Oh, no.

So first he tried to get it de-iced at 2.30.

Right.

But then the tower called him up and said, you're not moving for another 30 minutes or so.

Right.

So the real de-icing began at 2.50.

This de-icing was done by one guy who had a shift change halfway through.

You ever want to see it?

Yeah.

So the first guy did the left half of the airplane with a 30 to 40 percent glycol solution.

Oh my god.

Oh, dear.

The second guy had different temperature readings and used a 20 to 30 percent glycol solution.

That's probably not a big deal.

How hard, how, how, how difficult is it for those two guys to talk to each other?

To talk to each other?

I don't know.

They're locked in the little

box on top of the truck.

Get a radio.

I just picture these guys like the last two Jews in Afghanistan, where they're just like

talk to each other.

We're just mad at each other.

So there's about two to three inches of wet snow on the ground, right?

This pushback truck shows up, right?

And try as they might, they can't move the damn aircraft.

Oh my god.

The tug just spins its wheels and the horrible snow and slush and glycol goo all over the ramp.

Oh no.

She goo on my snow.

No.

Is that a thing?

Is that something?

Yeah.

No, I'm not.

I had enough.

That's something.

It's not.

The captain radioed the pushback truck and asked if he wanted them to use the uh reverse thrust and the guys in the truck said no it's against company policy also there's certain problems with this plane that can can occur if you use reverse thrust in a you know icy environment so please don't do that okay fair enough so he does that oh okay

oh

he deploys the big bucket type thrust reversers on this big pratt and whitney low bypass turbofan engine

And the engines roar to life and for about

the people say about 30 to 90 seconds, the plane is surrounded by swirling snow, ice, and glycol.

When they powered down and everything settled, they had accomplished absolutely nothing.

So, what we've done is we've like dad trying to move like family station wagon out of mud by like just gunning the engine in the same game.

Yeah, exactly.

And try that again, but in the aircraft, you'd love to be the person that the little nerdy kid standing

looking out of the glass at this aircraft, you know, nosed in towards the building if it's having to push, push back, and use reverse thrust.

And then all of a sudden, you just get an absolute like the screaming dirt smacking the window, like the windows are rattling, snow falling out as this reverse thrust ramps up for 90 seconds.

Fucking hell.

Pilot sticking his head out the window, trying to figure out what's going on.

Yeah,

he's like bobbing on the clutch, you know.

The fires are spinning, the throw is mad all over it.

Like, there's not a single window you can see out of from the inside.

Yeah.

Surprised didn't shatter windows.

Okay, yeah.

So, about 30 minutes pass.

At 3:30, a second pushback truck was called.

This one had snow chains on it.

Ah, boom.

Yeah, this worked.

Air Florida Flight 90 was now pushed back and ready to taxi to the runway.

There's 74 passengers and five crew on board.

40 minutes since de-icing, I think.

Yes.

Oh, yeah, okay.

So, Captain Larry Whedon really wants to get this aircraft off the ground, but he's stuck in line for a long time because everyone else wants to do the same thing.

He's a little bit worried about how long it's been since the aircraft was de-iced, but he really, really doesn't want to go back to the gate and do it over again.

List of consequences, right?

On the one hand, I and everyone else dies.

On the other hand, I have to go back and do this shit.

I mean, that's related.

It's absolutely relatable

So here we are.

This is straight from the report at 1540.15.

The cockpit voice recorder

recorded a comment by the captain:

something, something, go over to the hangar and get it de-iced, to which the first officer replied, yeah, definitely.

The captain then made some additional comment that was not clear, but contained the word de-iced, to which the first officer again replied, yeah, that's about it.

1540, 42 seconds.

The first officer continued to say, It's been a while since we've been de-iced at 1546 and 21 seconds.

The captain said, Tell you what, my windshield will be de-iced, but I don't know about my wings.

The first officer then commented, Well, all we need is the inside of the wings anyway.

The wing tips are going to speed up on 80 anyway.

They'll chuck all that other stuff off.

Uh-huh.

Now, can you tell what's happening here?

It's like the opposite of crew resource management.

It's

two

guys trying to negotiate their way to not having to go back to the thing.

Yes, the captain has come up with a clever plan that means they don't have to de-ice, which is tailgating.

Yeah.

They're just going to sit behind somebody else.

The plane in front of them was a DC-9, I believe, operated by New York Air, which is another one of those weird regional airlines that existed back then.

So he's like, okay, we're going to get up real close to that plane.

DC-9 has the engines all the way in the back, and I'm just going to let the exhaust from his engines take the ice off the airplane by just sort of wiggling it around, you know?

You try your best not to make the Florida jokes.

Right.

Yeah.

I mean.

There are other things that extremely high thrust forces can do to your aircraft other than take ice off the wings and probably wouldn't take ice off the wings at the process.

Yes, this is all kinds of a bad idea, but yeah, he's sort of trying this stunt.

It's like, okay, that de-iced the windshield.

Good.

He tries to de-ice one wing and the other wing.

He tries it a couple of times.

It even almost seems to be working.

Imagine being in the DC-9, and you're like, the guy behind this is wiggling around on

this.

Yeah, what exactly is going on here?

Oh, my God.

It's like, yeah, it's like when you've got a a white dim BMW up your ass on the fast lane on the M1, you're just like, come on, I'm in a panda, I'm going to 74 miles an hour, leave me alone.

At

353 in 21 seconds, the first officer says, boy, this is a losing battle here on trying to de-ice those things.

It gives you a false sense of security.

That's all it does.

Oh, that inspires confidence.

Let's do this, boys.

What's actually happening here is the exhaust from the DC-9's engines is melting the snow and ice.

Yes, but then the water just pulls on the wing and it all becomes ice, which is even more tightly adhered to the wing.

Oh, good.

Oh, good.

Okay, so we're converting the soft, slushy ice into rime ice.

Excellent.

Yes.

Tremendous.

There's another thing happening simultaneously, and I don't think anyone's established why this was not fixed by the pilots, but something strange is happening to the engines, right?

There's a thing called engine pressure ratio, right?

And

there's a sensor at the front of the engine that measures the air pressure, and there's a sensor at the back of the engine also measures the air pressure.

The ratio of the pressure at the back of the engine over the front of the engine is your engine pressure ratio.

So if you have a pressure of like near one, you're idle.

If you have a pressure of like two, I don't know how high up they go, that means you're producing a whole big bunch of thrust, right?

You know, so the higher the number, the more thrust you're producing.

Um, this is how you measure the thrust out of the engine.

This is how lots of systems on the plane sort of regulate how much to open or close the throttle.

Um, you know, this is uh this is an important source of data for the airplane, right?

Um, there can be issues with these sensors, though, that might give you a bad reading.

specifically in this case, ice and snow building up on the pressure gauge and blocking it.

Yeah, and it turns out that like just kind of taxiing behind another plane, blowing like ice and slush into your engines might make that worse, too.

Yeah, it does not.

That's not that's not a very good situation because usually it's of course

inaccurate.

Yeah, and it's the sensor at the front that's going to get all the ice and slush, which, of course, crucially is what gives you your kind of background air pressure.

Yeah.

So if that one gets sticky,

you get an artificially high thrust

reading, right?

Yes.

Yeah, because that's the denominator.

And

that means, you know, when you try to adjust the throttle for the amount of thrust you need, you're going to do it less than you otherwise would, which is bad if you're trying to take off and, you know, climb, right?

This is why these engines are equipped with a de-icing system to compensate for this.

You just run the hot bleed air through the front of the engine, and hey, problem solved.

Uh-huh.

Uh-huh.

So they do that, right?

So, yeah, that's fine.

Problem solved.

Well, yeah, it has no performance impact.

There's no reason not to use it, especially in weather like this.

So, anyway, they don't use it.

Tremendous.

Tremendous.

Do we know why not, team?

This is one of the more confusing parts because you can hear very clearly on the cockpit voice record recorder.

Um, you know, when they're, when they're doing the checks at the beginning, uh, engine anti-ice off.

Okay.

Brilliant.

Yeah.

Again, these people are not used to flying in the wintertime.

It could just be, you know, a brain fart.

It's a pretty serious brain fart.

But they went into autopilot, as it were.

Yeah.

Yeah, exactly.

All these guys are talking about on the runway is how much the de-icing hasn't worked and how to get the thing de-iced, and then they don't remember that the engine anti-iceds.

There's a switch

that solves some of their problems.

Yeah, yeah, I'm not 100% certain, but I think you have to switch that on in flight anyway.

Um, you know, just because it's cold up there, right?

Yeah,

so anyway, air traffic control radios in to say that Air Florida 90 is clear for immediate takeoff.

This is after quite a while more of waiting.

Um,

and also there's an inbound plane about two and a half miles behind them.

So move.

Move.

Yeah, hurry it up.

Hurry it up, tickets.

Apparently, they like to get a lot of use out of this runway, which I think is usually the only runway they use.

In this case, it's runway 36, which I believe is now numbered one.

I don't know why they changed the numbers.

That's weird.

I always thought the numbers are the same because they refer to the angle of the, you know, the compass bearing of the thing.

That's weird.

Yeah.

Like 36 would be 360 degrees.

Yeah, well, one would be, I guess it'd be 10 degrees.

Yeah, exactly.

I think

sometimes they have a little bit of leeway on there if it makes it more convenient for the instruments somehow, which I think there's like a problem with a runway 1836.

I don't fully understand that.

But I do know they have renumbered the runways.

Interesting.

Yeah.

So they've done their pre-takeoff checklist, right?

They've set the engines for an engine pressure ratio of 2.04, which is a little higher than usual, but appropriate for this kind of weather, right?

The captain hands off the controls to the first officer, who is going to be the pilot flying for this leg.

Captain's going to be pilot monitoring, right?

And yeah, this is when they don't turn on the engine anti-ice.

Oh, good.

Yeah.

They start to take a look at the iceberg.

They start to take place all when they don't turn on the engine anti-ice.

Well, this is true.

This is true.

The whole battery is trade.

They start to take off just around 3.59 and 45 seconds.

Okay.

yes, yeah, and things immediately seem off to the first officer, right?

This is the nightmare you like a pre-like CRM shit where you're like, something feels wrong, but the guy who's kind of my boss is like, Yeah, it's fine, it's fine, I've got no words.

I've been gunning it the whole time, it's fine.

The plane, the plane feels a bit slow, you know, it's sluggish, like a wet sponge.

Oh, Britain, yeah, yeah,

This plane feels British.

Yeah.

They're using way more runway than they usually would.

The captain is constantly reassuring the first officer who's like,

very, very, very uncertain about this.

Nah, it's fine.

Don't worry.

They start the takeoff rotation and the plane violently pitches up.

Oh, good.

We learned that that's good.

Plane.

Yeah, I remember from earlier.

I specifically remember that that means that the wings are completely uninterrupted, full aerodynamic.

Four covered in ice.

Yeah, yeah.

You get more altitude for a second.

Oh, yeah, for a little bit.

It's like the vomit comet.

Yeah.

Wee!

The captain yells forward, forward.

The stick shaker starts going.

That's the indicator that you're in aerodynamic stall.

The stall warning also starts, which is another indication that you're in an aerodynamic stall, right?

Yeah, that sort of thing.

You know, this 737 had done exactly what it was known to do in icy conditions, which was to violently pitch up.

I'm looking at the cockpit voice recorder transcript here.

And as they're on takeoff roll,

the first officer is like, and this is Roberti, who says, nah, I don't think that's right.

Maybe it is.

And then he says, I don't know.

And I want to be clear, like, not to do spoilers here, this man will be dead 40 seconds after saying this.

Yep.

This could happen to any of us.

God gotta worry about your last words.

Speak carefully.

Oh, yeah,

I'm looking for the ISA button on my chair in case I die in 20 seconds.

Oh man, why don't they make the whole Liam out of the black box?

Oh, well,

the only button I have on my chair is, oh, wait, that takes the chair to Cuba.

Fascinating.

Fantastic.

I mean, I'm pushing that button all the time.

Yeah, let's do this, man.

I had too many buttons on this fucker.

I've got like three, like three-way adjustable armrests and recline.

I, yeah.

So, you know, I wouldn't be surprised if there was a Cuban thing in here.

So, despite the situation, they have an unreliable engine pressure ratio reading.

The sudden stall, the bad aerodynamics here, they do manage to climb for a bit.

Oh, how long is a bit?

Are we talking minutes or are we talking nanoseconds?

They get up up to 352 feet?

Oh, so you really do beat a bit, huh?

Yeah.

Yeah, that's just some height.

It's taller than I am, I guess.

Yeah, that's higher than I can jump.

100 meters.

Well,

I could jump down from there once.

Yeah, that's true.

By the way, at this point, like during the

takeoff roll, the passengers in the back are so alarmed that some of them are putting themselves into the brace position.

Yeah, there are a few people who are like, Yeah, this is this looks like it's going to go poorly.

People are

assuming the brace position.

Apparently, it was a very, very, very rough uh takeoff role.

Funniest thing you can do in this situation is get up and go, take me to Cuba.

Yeah, no, you can't stand up, of course, because then the jets come along and turn you to Jets.

No, no, no, no, they had they hadn't invented 9-11 yet.

Oh,

I think they were about to, yeah,

so they they get off the ground.

They're going.

They start to turn.

Oh.

Right.

And they go down.

Oh, yeah.

Figure two is not.

Oh, there are some other objects involved in this as well.

Okay.

Oh.

Yeah.

So this is,

you know, there's four o'clock and 39 seconds.

Sound of stick shaker starts and continues until impact.

The tower,

you know, contacts them and says, TWR Palm 90, contact departure control.

The captain at this point is saying, Forward, forward, easy.

We only want 500.

Talking to a

horse.

Forward, just barely climb.

And he says, Stalling, we're falling.

And then the first officer is like, Larry, we're going down.

Larry.

Half an hour.

Yeah.

You die with a Larry.

You know?

That already dates it.

You just, just, just use it.

Just use a fake name.

The name of something different at that point.

You know, that culprit voice recorder is going to be on telly.

So just like, you know, pick a different name.

Yeah.

Then

the first, the captain's like, I know.

Then sound of impact.

Square brackets, sound of impact.

Yeah.

I mean, going from going from I don't know to sound of impact in like 40 seconds is like this is an official method of

very, very rapid disaster.

Ending your own life.

You know, this is one of those things you didn't have the chance to die quickly.

You only have the chance to die quickly.

Now, this is a point where I can add some local flavor that the air crash investigation channels can't, which is, I have fallen into this river in the winter.

Off the Rochambeau Bridge, or it's actually very close to this location, yeah.

Oh, shit.

Oh, um, I can say the thing about the Potomac is: okay, a lot of it's very shallow.

Uh, this part is not because this is where they used to do dredging.

Um, you know, so this is this, this is a situation, and I will say the the Potomac River, even when there's not ice on it, very, very cold.

You know, you got that fresh, natural water from the Shenandoah Valley coming in.

This is the kind of like detail, you know, that we that people like this for.

Yeah.

You don't get that shit on the Discovery Channel, do you, you pricks?

Yeah.

Air crash investigation never tell you that like you're crashing at like, you know, 300 miles an hour into a, into a river that's cold.

Yeah, the river's cold.

It's really cold.

I have lived experience.

This is really adding insult to injury.

You know, your last kind of conscious thoughts as your like elbows are driven through your skull are like, is that water cold?

Oh, that sucks.

Is that a fish I see?

So at 4.01 p.m., Flight 90 crashed directly into the Rochambeau bridge.

It skidded across the bridge deck.

It hit six cars in a truck.

It took out 97 feet of guardrail, and then it fell in a river.

Again, the Potomac generally, a lot of it's like three feet deep.

This part's 12 feet deep, which is exactly the height of a Boeing 737 fuselage.

Yeah, incredible.

Flop, splash.

Yeah, good.

And nothing else.

You've watched the glycol, you know, goop off of it.

That's a good point.

Yeah.

Both pilots and most of the passengers are killed instantly, as well as several people on the bridge.

But a few people seated at the very rear of the plane are still alive and the wreckage is just barely above water or rather above ice you're in a you're in a bad situation there you know yeah

in in the tail section of this thing above like an icy river uh everybody else forward of you is dead and you're like 40 seconds ago you were you know thinking get me out of national airport

yes exactly cuba yeah to cuba exactly yeah

i mean what

Thinking about this in the moment and being like, oh man, it seems like my plan to hijack the aircraft and take it to Cuba is really not going in the direction I hoped.

There's a PLO guy in the back, like, oh.

All of these guys from different 70s terrorist groups looking at each other.

Damn it.

Yeah, they're all just looking across the aisle at each other, just like, just shaking their head like that.

You got a PLO guy,

you got the Korean guy, then the COVID.

It's like the opening of Naked Gun 2.

So, this, this, this small group of survivors are clinging on to the tail section.

They're about 200 feet from shore.

I'm not, I just, I mean, how thick is that ice and how deep is the river?

Because just get out and walk.

You know, it's not, it's not thick enough.

Oh, boy.

Oh, geez.

Okay.

So, this is where we talk about the rescue efforts.

One thing that happens in Washington, D.C.

is snow days, right?

When it snows hard enough, the federal government shuts down.

They tell everyone to go home or tell everyone not to come into work that day.

And usually, everyone else follows suit.

You know,

wonderful cultural thing in D.C.

is there's just, you know, the government says no work today because it's snowing.

Yes, I'm going home.

Yeah.

Nice.

It's nice.

It's good.

This is one of those days where the government shut down late, right?

So there was this early rush hour, and everyone was trying to beat everyone else back home.

Oh, boy.

And this is also slightly before the Washington Metro opened into Northern Virginia.

So, and there's no commuter trains.

So, everyone's driving, right?

I'm sure we've not talked in previous episode, indeed, the last one we recorded about, you know, traffic blocking the way for emergency vehicles.

That's, that's not going to come up in this story, I'm sure.

Oh, well, the traffic was so bad, it was damn near impossible for emergency vehicles to get to the crash site.

Oh, no.

I can't

see this.

The nearest Coast Guard vessel was the tugboat Capstan, but it was pretty far downriver.

And ironically, it was on another search and rescue mission.

It's like the tugboat is almost reaching you as you fall in the river, and it just turns around.

And it's just like the needs of the many.

In one instance, in order to get around traffic, one ambulance was forced to divert around heavy traffic by climbing the curb and driving on the sidewalk right in front of the White House.

Just the president.

Wait a minute.

What year is it?

Yeah, just coming out and going, hey, you kids, get off my yard.

So there's a guy.

There's a guy, Roger Olean.

He was the first man on the scene.

He wasn't an emergency responder.

He didn't have any training.

He was just a guy, right?

We love a guy.

Of such stuff, a real American hero is made of.

Yeah.

Well, several staff from the Pentagon looked on.

He jumped into the icy river, made it a few yards out, then came back because, fuck, it's cold in there.

Yeah.

Such stuff a true American hero.

That'll do it.

The guys from the Pentagon told him, don't do that again, but he insisted he was going to make a second go of it.

This time with a rope to get him back to the shore, right?

Not a bad idea.

This time he made it about 30 feet and then had to be hauled back and he spent the rest of the incident warming up in someone's car.

Yeah, that's that's about what's pretty dumb.

I mean, yeah,

very heroic, but like

pretty dumb.

The first emergency workers on the scene were some folks in a park police helicopter called Eagle One.

They show up nearly 20 minutes after the wreck.

Hell yeah.

Fucking idiots.

They don't have cold water rescue equipment or anything like that.

All they have are ropes.

Oh boy.

And they use the ropes thusly.

It's like a fucking team-building exercise, except, you know, real and deadly.

Yeah, they get to go on outward bound.

The helicopter would drop a rope down to the survivors and then just drag them 200 feet through the icy river to the shore.

Oh, no, no, no.

That, Jesus.

Just like you get to the end and your legs have just frostbitten off.

They just come off shattered from ice.

No, thank you.

I don't want to be turned into a slush puppy.

I believe a few of the people who were rescued did break a bunch of ribs in this process.

Yeah.

This is also a very delicate operation because the helicopter is, of course, operating at low altitude between the two bridges.

Just dumping a sort of helicopter crash on top of your plane crash.

I believe there's some footage here where they were flying so low that

the runners of the helicopter actually dipped below water.

Wow.

Jesus.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I remember that.

Oh, yeah.

No, not good.

So, and of course, the inherent nature of the helicopter is that you're spending the whole time trying to stop it from crashing.

That thing

yearns for death.

Yes.

30,000 moving parts looking for a place to crash.

Yeah.

So the first person rescued was Burt Hamilton, who was in the water near the aircraft.

They dragged him to shore.

They went back, handed the line off to Arlen D.

Williams Jr.,

but he gave it away because he couldn't get free of the wreckage.

So instead, flight attendant Kelly Duncan was towed to shore.

Next, through the innovative technique of using two ropes,

Joe Stiley, Priscilla Torado, and Nikki Felch were towed away.

And Arlen D.

Williams again gave up the rope since he was still stuck.

Right.

Torado and Felch

both lost their grip on the rope and fell fell off.

Strikey.

It just kind of reining more people across this rope.

There's a man.

There's people everywhere at this point.

There was a man of better constitution than Roger Ollion witnessing this.

He was a staffer for the Congressional Budget Office named Lenny Skutnick.

Lenny's not Sputnik, Skutnik.

These real local news names.

He was watching from the shore when he saw Torado and Felch lose grip on the rope.

And without a single thought for self-preservation, he stripped off his coat and boots and jumped into the icy Potomac River and amazingly managed to grab Torado and drag her back to shore.

And then the helicopter managed to get close enough to Nikki Felch for a paramedic to step out onto the runners and get her out of the water.

Right.

Jesus, they really threw this together like, you know, out of nothing.

Yeah.

Arlen D.

Williams, meanwhile, was still stuck in the tail section section, and he was still trying to unstrap himself, and the tail section fell over.

Oh.

Yeah, so he was the only death by drowning in the incident.

All of this was caught by local media who managed to beat rescuers to the scene.

Arlen's selflessness became national news.

Although, again, he was stuck.

It's thought that possibly as many as 19 other people may have survived the initial crash, but succumbed to hypothermia before they could be rescued.

Graham.

Bloody hell.

Yeah, this is quite an ugly way to go on this flight, I would say.

So the impact force, so that means a lot of people, a sizable number of people died from, is that just the shock of impact with the bridge or with the water?

Question, because honestly, this was, you know, in terms of like actual impact forces, this was relatively tame.

Like if they hadn't hit the bridge, this would be much more survivable.

Yeah, because the whole point is the thing's not going fast.

That's the reason it's in the ditch.

Like, it's it's you know, it's it's it's in the drink.

It's faster vertically than it should, but you know, other than that, I mean, I don't know, this, this could have been if the bridge hadn't been there, well, the break, they still would have crashed into the next bridge, but sure, um,

yeah, I suppose, like the diagram in figure two in the previous slides showed it, you know, it stalled, so it's landed belly, yeah, you know, it's landed on its belly, so I guess it kind of probably broke up on its

between between hitting the bridge and hitting the drink, it probably broke up at that point and most people break out

is one of the big issues.

And, you know,

water is a much softer target than a bridge.

So, yeah.

Yeah, those speeds for sure.

Yeah, yeah.

So anyway, all said and done, 74 of the 79 people on the plane were dead.

Jesus.

Four people driving over the bridge were also killed.

Four people on the bridge were also only injured, and I don't know how do you explain that to insurance.

Well, at least back in the day, you could get a human being on the phone.

You could, yeah.

Okay, there's not a box on the phone to take for hit by a plane.

To take my car to Cuba,

Lowe's State Farm.

Yes, someone crashed a plane into my car.

There's a box on there for like actions of Floridians.

Yeah.

Reconstructions by the NTSB determined that due to anti-ice being turned off, the plane was at a 1.7 uh engine pressure ratio rather than the 2.04 as recommended for takeoff in these conditions that's enough to get off the ground but not enough to compensate for the icing or to get out of a stall and you know ultimately this came down to pilot error right um

when you say pilot error in the airline industry that's a lot different from like i don't know the the railroad industry where it would be like well the engineer fucked up and everyone moves on with their lives.

Yeah.

Yeah, there's nothing we can do.

Airline regulators actually look into these things and make recommendations to stop this from happening, right?

It was found that the flight crew was probably too inexperienced.

The training programs at Air Florida were not comprehensive.

Generally, Air Florida needed to change their procedures and really emphasize how to operate the aircraft in winter, especially now that they weren't just flying exclusively in sunny Florida now.

They're flying into Stockholm.

stockholm is particularly snowy this is the thing right this is a sort of like

danger inherent to a kind of like meteoric capitalist rise right like this is a business success story it's going great investors love these guys and it's like yeah and they're growing in a way that is like unsustainable and unsafe yes yeah it's a really common story in air crashes actually that story particularly with low costs um Indonesia have had this, like Thailand had it, of the massive rapid rise of low-cost

airlines and the staffing can't keep up.

So everyone's inexperienced training can't keep up.

You know, the aircraft, getting enough new aircraft in or keeping on top of maintenance can't keep up.

Yeah, yeah, really common, really common story.

Yeah, and ultimately it was determined that

had any one thing not gone wrong here, right?

If there had been more substantial de-icing,

if they had activated the anti-ice on the engine, or if they even just anticipated and quickly pulled out of the stall, this flight would have been recoverable.

You would have been able to keep going.

The classic Florida cheese model.

Yes, exactly.

Yeah,

why they didn't apply more throttle when they

both of them were feeling that there wasn't.

Well, okay,

the first officer as pilot flying was feeling that it was not moved.

Apply more throttle.

Get more thrall in there.

I don't exactly know how that works because I'm not sure if they were using the auto throttle.

Oh, don't worry about it.

We'll about it in the comments would have would have come come out come and like been confused by the uh epr reading or i i don't know i'm gonna be honest um you know it's one of those things where but you can always override it you know if you apply if if if they you know if if the pilots have you know pushed onto the throttle and applied it you know they they

it you know it's a 737200 it's not you know it's not an airbus so you know you you push the throttle forward you get more throttle it would automatically deactivate the auto throttle so yeah i'm stumped by why they they didn't.

But, you know, this isn't, it's not entirely on them.

Their training was inadequate.

They were too collectively too inexperienced.

Like, they could have had one of them inexperienced, but the other one more experienced, but they didn't do that.

Yeah, it's,

as you say, one thing would have solved this.

Yeah, no, they managed to do,

all the things went poorly.

Everything went wrong.

Yeah.

Air Florida's reputation was ruined.

Their finances were already a little shakier than they were during their meteoric rise in the late 70s.

But this accident really put a bunch of nails in the coffin, right?

Passengers stopped booking Air Florida

unless they were trying to go to Cuba.

The airlines started shrinking, but they refused to cut their unprofitable prestige routes to like Europe and to the northeast of the United States, which at that point, the northeast routes to Florida were dominated by Eastern Airlines,

which was a stalwart of the industry and would never go under, obviously.

They filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 1984, and they were absorbed into Midway Airlines over the next 10 months or so.

And then I think Midway went bankrupt not too, too long afterwards.

The airline industry was not in a great place in this sort of decade or so.

Lenny Skutnick was invited to Ronald Reagan's State of the Union address, and he became a meme.

yeah, a 1980s meme.

Yes.

Whenever the president invites some regular Joe to the State of the Union, the local press now just calls them a Lenny Skutnick.

Oh, that's a

great photo.

That's why the guy's got an incredible moustache as well.

Oh, nice.

Love a mustache.

Says guy with mustache.

I'm Bud.

Roger Olean and Lenny Skutnick both received the Coast Guard's gold life-saving medal.

Arlon Williams Jr.

also received the award posthumously,

even though the only person Roger Ollion had to rescue was himself.

It's like, you know, points, points for trying.

Come on where we can get a man.

Speaks to Lenny Skutnick's money.

For not being like, that guy gets the same thing as me.

He did fuck all.

What's he doing here?

Yeah, the Coast Guard gold medal for attempted life-saving.

And the previously unnamed middle middle span of the 14th Street Bridge complex was renamed to the Roche Chambeau Bridge.

And the span the plane hit was renamed from the Roche Chambeau Bridge to the Arlon D.

Williams Jr.

Memorial Bridge.

And the circle is complete.

That makes sense.

There we go.

Yeah.

R.I.P.

to that guy who was stuck, but also didn't coach that guy.

That is a good thing to do if you're stuck in a plane crash in a freezing river.

And it is kind of, you know, you look at where they're taking the back of the plane out, and that is pretty close to shore.

You know, it's like, damn.

I can imagine it might have, I can, I can imagine it drifting, though.

I can see the thing kind of drifting along a bit by the time they're pulling out of there.

You know, it took them 20 minutes to get the helicopter in.

So this is probably happening hours and an hour later.

Yeah.

Like also, but the other thing is like right around where the plane hit the

river, it's like six feet deep at most.

Um, they really, it really did hit in just the wrong spot, yeah, yeah.

Oof, I mean, it looks fucking cold, let's be quite honest here.

Oh, yeah, that like photo is one of the like sort of more viscerally freezing things I've seen, not like that, yeah, yeah.

Well,

what did we learn?

Don't fly Air Florida unless you want to go to Havana.

No, de-ice your own plane, dickheads.

Do not try and like improvise a de-icing solution by just like you know, tailgating.

Again, de-icing is much more strictly regulated and there's a lot more, you know, mathematics behind it now.

You know, it's,

there's a lot of stuff that pilots have to do in terms of like calculating how long they have between de-icing and actually getting to the runway and also making sure the plane has been properly de-iced, all this other stuff.

You know,

the safety manual is written in blood.

Yeah.

This is definitely an instance of that.

Blood and scoop.

You don't have assist stuff.

Yeah.

Yeah, and goop.

The Potomac River became a little bit more goopy that day.

Yeah, it's pretty goopy already.

Yeah, that's true.

The Anacostia is goopy.

The Potomac is beautiful, clear waters of the Shenandoah River.

And the other river, I forget which one.

What are the two?

For a brief time, it was made gloopier.

Yes.

Gloopier.

By a bunch of Floridians.

Well, just two, actually, in this instance.

Well, we have a segment on this podcast called Safety Third.

Shake hands with danger.

Okay.

Hell yeah.

My dad had this car.

I mean, not this exact car, but like this kind of similar type.

What is this?

An E28?

Yeah,

in silver as well.

I'm looking.

I like the BMW 2002s.

Those are good.

Yeah.

Oh, I don't know.

Maybe it's

E28.

No, I might not be getting my if it's because anyway.

Okay, it's a beamer of that era.

It's E28 era-ish.

Comments, shout at me.

It's fine.

Ahoy, November.

Yar, Liam, G'day, Roz, Avas, Devin, and hello to the kid that likes the trains.

Hey, I've found out recently I'm possibly the oldest person here.

I'm pirate Jeff, and I'm going to regale you with a tale of the time I was the scurvy dog on the front line of retail entertainment and commerce.

Oh, gosh.

My time as an escape room host.

Oh no.

Whoever told you my secret strategy for escape rooms?

Don't go, just burst through the walls like the jug of cool man.

No, you just don't go in in the first place.

Then you've already escaped.

Yeah, that'll, yeah.

Yeah, yeah, that works.

I've beaten every escape room.

Anyway,

I worked in a multinational arcade arcade and bowling corporation that had special chains of high-end.

I'm going to assume this is supposed to be barcades, but it says barcodes.

A licensed bowling alley that sells a premium experience.

Oh, no.

That includes

two escape rooms.

Escape from the bowling alley.

Back of the disco.

You get stuck in the pin machine.

I don't want to do that.

No, that's terrifying.

That is bad.

I imagine those things can really mutilate you if you up.

Oh,

I look forward to our bowling machine mutilation safety third.

Didn't we?

Wtyp at gmail.com right then.

I got didn't we have a bowling machine safety third years ago.

We, uh, not me.

I was just a lowly listener at the time.

I'm sure you did.

I got sucked into the ball return.

I'll show you a ball return.

Um,

oh, here he is.

Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh.

One of these escape rooms was based on old pirates' tales, and the other was based on the myth of Poseidon and the lost city of Atlantis.

They were both rooms lined with polystyrene drywalls, complicated puzzle electronics that were handmade for the rooms, which all ran off a strawberry pie.

Is that a new kind of raspberry pie?

Yeah, I don't that would be an error.

I don't know.

And wired to work on a European power board even though it was in Australia Okay, management liked to run the room with the main lights off to make it harder That also meant you couldn't see the trip hazards on the floor or really read the clues The place was a fire hazard, so they built it right next to the fire exit just in case.

Oh, yeah, that makes it completely safe.

Fine, good.

Yep.

Okay.

Atlantis had a waterfall made out of a single line of hose and a fish tank pump.

It needed a chlorine pill in it every time we filled it up because the water would evaporate inside because the air conditioning was broken and caused black mold to grow in the walls.

I was checking wrong, south.

Patrons would either be drunk or eight years old, so they would just yank and tear at anything that might look like a clue.

They were ripping lights out of their sockets and clawing like rats at puzzle boxes.

Oh no, incredible.

Also, really enjoyed yank and tear from the kids' bop version of the doom soundtrack.

I had to watch and monitor their progress on a screen with headphones on.

So imagine having to listen to escape room audio for over four hours each shift.

Children screaming at the most basic stimulation.

Adults traumatizing and yelling at their children.

Having to listen to a moron solve a puzzle.

you know like the back of your hand.

It drove me mad.

I once got chastised by a manager in short pants that didn't like that I had evacuated the escape room when the fire alarm went off because the floor manager hadn't said to do that over the radio yet.

I eventually got fired when, after a long shift at work, I got drunk at the bar and decided to drive drunk on Wagwan Midnight, which is some kind of Japanese car game, I believe.

I used my staff card to upgrade my BMW 2002 turbo and erase other customers.

what I heard drive drunk and I'm like okay don't not not a fan of this but now now you tell me that this is how you drove drunk yeah you drove drunk on an arcade cabinet that's that's cool like doing the actually i'm not only am i good to drive but like it makes me a better driver yeah

they said

the number of hours i played driver two half half-cut.

Like, yeah, that's like absolutely good stuff.

They said I had stolen $50

worth of value from the company for using my staff card to play free games.

Yeah, fuck them.

No fun allowed.

Turns out later, they had criminally underpaid me for my work, so they had to pay out upwards of $1,000 redues,

which is what they call them in Australia.

Yes.

Famously, yeah.

Yarg Boy Boy now works in the dodgy world of exhibitions and events set up.

Thanks for all your hard work.

Pirate Jeff.

P.S.

Give November her goddamn mail.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

That's real.

That's real.

Thanks, thanks, Pirate Jeff.

Thank you, Pirate Jeff.

Thank you, Pirate Jeff.

Getting lapped by a pirate in a BMW 2002 type.

Yarr.

Yarr.

That's the sound.

That's the engine note.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Turbo charged.

No.

Really, really getting an urge to play it.

Well, the people will be sounding off in the comments about that, too.

I'm really getting an urge to play driver now.

I just, I don't know why it's reminding me of that game particularly, but

the sound of the turbo dumping is like a game.

Maybe it's absolutely

Havana so many times.

That's maybe what it was.

So, yeah.

Because you could drive around Havana in the first game, of course.

Take this video game to Havana.

Yes.

Well, you're going to have to,

you know,

to Air Florida and Flight Simulator first.

Yeah.

All right.

Let's get out of here under two hours.

Yeah.

I know.

Look at this.

One hour, 58, 41 seconds.

That was safety third.

Shake hands with danger.

Our next episode will be on Chernobyl.

Does anyone have any commercials before we go?

Buy Garris Book.

Buy the tickets of the tour.

Buy the book.

Buy the tickets.

Buy tour tickets.

Stay tuned for all the exciting tour news that hasn't already come out.

Actually, I don't know if there is any exciting tour news coming up, but the tour, buy the tickets.

Listen to all of our respective many podcasts, of which there are dozens.

And

have a nice time.

Don't fly Air Florida, which you can't anymore because never use Reddit.

Never use Reddit.

Yeah,

never use Reddit and also always.

Never go on Reddit.

Yeah, that's it.

Yeah, exactly.

Just always, never go on Reddit.

Good night, everybody.

Night.

Good night, everyone.

Good night.