Episode 187: National Airlines Flight 102

All right,

if we do a sync point, then I'll come straight in.

A point of synchronization.

Yes, synchronized point.

Yes.

One, two,

three,

mork.

Okay.

It feels strange for it to go up.

I'm used to it going down.

No, no.

Well, I said point of synchronization as opposed to sync point.

Therefore, I had to go backwards.

I see.

I see.

Yeah.

Gotcha.

Listen to her.

She sounds like she's got to die.

I have been sick for so long

and I'm on Manjaro, which means

I'm doing

so.

I'm struggling.

I'm on like a severe caloric deficit and I'm sleeping all the time.

And I have been up for about 25 hours.

Are you pregnant?

Let me get back to you on that one.

I may have to check.

You know what?

Might as well be.

Might as well be.

Yeah.

My God.

I am gone off that Ozempic.

And by which I mean I'm on Ozempic because I'm a fat boy.

And yeah,

I am subject to Ozempic tummy.

So I am similar.

I am in your boat.

It's real bad.

It's real bad.

I mean, yeah, hard to kind of ask for sympathy for that when it's as expensive as it is.

But I needed to get it by surgery and I'm at my...

I'm at my target weight for surgery.

So,

you know, watch the space.

Thank you.

Lost like 30 kilograms in like three months.

I was up really late last night because because I was going completely insane because I realized that the AI data center like water consumption

is

probably a CIA thing.

Yeah, no, it's like fake.

It's like completely fake.

Like you, you, you look, you actually,

everything about AI data center water consumption, like it gives you a flow rate right there, like up front.

And you can just calculate what the size of pipe would need to be to feed the thing.

It's like, oh my God, this is going to drain all the water from the entire county.

And then you run the numbers, and it's like, nah, it's a 10-inch pipe with a five-horsepower pump.

Yeah, just need to see what size of data center they need to build, you know, or want to build.

Before we get any further, I want to reiterate: by the time this goes out, we'll have one day left for the domestic violence dance-a-thon, which makes it sound like we're dancing for domestic violence, but we're not.

We're dancing to prevent domestic violence.

Against domestic violence.

Against domestic violence.

Thank you, Roz.

So give us your money.

There's one more day.

Give me your money, and I'll do a fun dance for you.

Give me your money.

Thank you.

All right.

Excellent.

Links in the description.

Yes, I believe James's fundraiser is also still ongoing.

I didn't check it today,

but that's also going to be down in the description.

Anyway, so

hello and welcome to Will There's 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 am November Kelly.

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

My pronouns are she and her.

Yay, Liam.

Yay, Liam.

Hi.

It is good to be back.

I am Liam McAnderson.

My pronouns are he, him,

and not an advocate for domestic violence, an advocate against that.

Yes.

Just flash that up on screen with like a picture of you.

It's like, not an advocate for domestic violence, but an advocate against domestic violence.

Like a campaign.

Starting a charity that's pro-domestic violence or found.

I guess that's just the Republican Party.

That's the NRA or the NRA.

The FOP, the police one,

the FOP is for domestic violence.

Absolutely.

Yeah,

that is the three of us.

We are edited by Devon and we are research assisted by research assistant Sam.

So thank you to both of them for their work on this one.

What you see before you, and I should say,

the most sleep-deprived member of us is kind of of helming this one.

I did a lot of the slides for this.

So I'm so sorry in advance.

What you see before you is a field in Afghanistan.

It's not supposed to look like that.

No.

Because today we're going to be talking about National Airlines Flight 102, which may ring some bells.

I'm sorry, Carl.

Is this showing 62 total slides?

This is.

Don't worry about that.

Some of them are quite short.

Yeah.

I have been tricked by that before, lady.

That's what they all all say

into hour seven.

We go, and

in order to establish how this plane-shaped, remarkably plane-shaped uh scar on the landscape got there, um, we're going to talk about it over the course of five or six hours.

But first, yes, we have to do the goddamn news

actually.

Side note there, my understanding is that on the first all-hands call with CBS, that's how Barry Weiss ended the call with saying, We're going to do the goddamn news.

The fucking news.

She did the like, you're a goddamn newsman thing,

which is

incredible.

I look forward to CBS nosediving, much like the subject of today's episode.

Oh, yeah, yeah.

Well,

okay, so where to start?

There was a big ice raid in Chicago, among other things which happened in Chicago.

They brought in like Black Hawk helicopter and all kinds of crap and all kinds of like police and

ATF and ICE and FBI and every single kind of law enforcement you can think of, right?

They all descend on this apartment block in the south side.

And

they're like, well, you know, there's probably a couple trendy Aragua people in there.

So we're just going to go in and arrest and evict every single person.

Yeah.

Would you believe that this was done at least partially at the behest of the landlords?

I would

absolutely believe that.

Mao Zedong had some points.

Yeah.

They called this Operation Midway Blitz because they're all Nazis.

Oh, yeah.

I mean, this apartment building, I took a look around here on Google Maps.

This thing's, you know, apparently it is pretty run down as it is.

It's like 600 feet from the beach, though, so I can understand why, you know, the landlord's like, I got to get everyone out so I can gentrify this place.

Um, you know, but also win-win because they get everybody out, and ice gets like their fucking sizzle reel of them, like, you know, exactly

throwing water around.

Look at us putting zip ties around this baby.

Um, yeah, we're the good guys, yeah.

We zip-tied a bunch of babies together and sort of dragged them around like a like a rope.

Oh, that is dark.

Thank you, Ross.

I hate these fucking childs so much.

These, these, these Nazi motherfuckers, somebody's got to start.

I agree, but you still can't say that.

I'm dead serious.

At what point?

If not now, then.

Oh, yeah.

No,

it is good.

I'm going to have to take that out of the episode.

Sorry, Devin.

You're going to get your money's worth here.

I was about to say this is going to be

quite a few.

A bleep-heavy episode.

Quite a few bleeps right there.

Yeah, I mean...

Stuff's getting rowdy in Chicago, it seems, you know, because

they sent in ICE, right?

Everyone's mad about it.

People are like following around ICE in their personal vehicles, honking the horns and screaming, hey, this is ICE vehicle, you know, sort of like the Japanese communists with the van with the speaker on it.

You know, that's that's what it reminded me of.

We need some like noise trucks, yeah.

Yeah, exactly.

And then

what else?

Well, one of those people, this is a separate incident.

They were following around ICE in their personal vehicle, and the ICE guys just decided to stop and shoot her five times.

Yeah, as I said, they're already shooting at you for no reason.

Yeah.

And I mean, shit is shit is popping off in Portland as well.

Or rather, it isn't, right?

Because Donald Trump has insisted and Pam Bondi has insisted that

Portland is a kind of like lawless hellscape of anarchist violence as opposed to what it really is, which is a lawless hellscape of anarchist vegan tray bakes.

And so all of the federal government's most armed chuds are currently sitting around sort of like shooting pepper balls at Presbyterian ministers and like people in fursuits and stuff.

I mean, this is this is, you know, we are seeing the end stage of a very long process of, you know, Fox News saying that every single urban liberal is killed five times a day by crime.

Because the

people in charge actually believe it now.

And they're like, my God, we have to send in the national guard and then they arrest like uh uh you know every single uh you know tortilla lady in the entire damn city and throw them in a concentration camp um

stuff's i i i don't know maybe maybe i'm like uh like falling for it right by saying the thing that dev just had to bleep maybe because like uh Portland as a city is is seemingly like not rising to the provocation and this is making them madder and madder.

Like it really does seem like they're kind of poking the kind of like American

populace with a stick and being like, Come on, do something.

Do something.

Oh, we'll do something.

They want to drop a nuke on Chaz.

Yeah, they do.

I mean, that would do them like no end of,

you know, they'd be very pleased about that if they could nuke Chaz.

But Chaz has to be built first, and that is not or rebuilt.

Yeah, I haven't thought about Chaz in a minute.

I do want to say, as a social worker who works with immigrant populations, get fucked.

Yeah.

Please stop scaring my clients.

Thank you, you dick cheeses.

They keep trying to send the National Guard places.

Did you see that one photo?

And I mean, listen, a Zempic or no Ozempic,

we're still a hearty podcast.

But did you see that one photo of the Texas National Guard?

arriving in Chicago?

It's okay to body shave those people.

Knock yourselves out.

The one thing

about them sending the thing about them sending the nature, the Texas National Guard in particular is like, okay, Governor, what's his face?

So Jackson, is that him or is he the Attorney General?

He's the Attorney General, I think.

Yeah, no, it's

Greg Abbott.

That's right.

Greg Abbott, yeah, one of the big fucking Nazis, yeah.

Yeah.

Was like a while back, he was like, you know, we can't, he, he tried to make a big political statement.

by saying we're going to take all these asylum seekers and undocumented immigrants and we're going to send them up north on coach buses into various major cities,

see how they like it.

Right.

And it turned out, yeah, a major city of like two, three million people can take a couple coach buses of immigrants each day and be fine.

So I, I, everyone got along.

Nothing bad happened.

And I, I guess, this is the culmination of that:

people got so mad.

Now we have to send the Texas National Guard to go terrorize people that Texas kicked out.

Um, yeah, Yeah, yeah.

It's maddening, genuinely.

And I don't know.

I'm speaking now directly to every general officer who was in the audience for Pete Hagseth calling you a fat, gay, woke.

You will be reincarnated as a lotus flower, you know?

Like, it is possible.

just to do it.

Just think about that.

Just bear that in mind.

You know, you went to like staff college, war college, whatever.

You have like sort of like, you know, decades of experience in what you do and you're being bossed around by these fucking Nazis.

Just think about it.

Just maybe, you know,

have a think.

Find the most Corsican guy among you.

Go from there.

I'm not asking you to become Corsican.

I'm saying that one day, when the time is right, you will look in the mirror and you already will be.

Well, in other news.

Yeah, this is some more like the forces of evil are way better at their jobs than I was led to believe by Disney movies.

Shit.

Yeah, I was about to say the

global Samud flotilla, which was delivering aid to Gaza, was waylaid in international waters and everyone was taken prisoner.

And then, you know, the most moral army in the world committed some late war crimes.

Just late war crimes.

It's fine.

Just a little dusting of war crimes.

Yeah, exactly.

I understand many ways.

We're responsible for most of the torture.

Yeah.

In many ways, Israel is as

it's often been kind of the like

innovator, the kind of the like, the tip of the spear for like every suppressed, like suburban fascist

sort of like wankstein in that they actually got to torture Greta Thunberg, which has been the thing thing that all of these sad pricks have been fantasizing about

for the longest time.

Fucking weird as hell, by the way.

Yeah, yeah.

I mean, like,

she's, she's an adult now, so I guess it's legally not child torture, but they, yeah, it's not, it's adult torture.

They wish it was, though.

Fine, yeah, for real.

Yeah,

I and I mean, the thing is, like, part of the point of them doing this was, you know, the kind of awareness raising that if they can, if they can do this to, you know, like Irish senators and like, you know, South African politicians and Greta Thunberg, then how much worse are they doing to Palestinians all the time?

And the answer is a lot.

And that's all out there.

That's, that's written about, people know about it.

It's just,

you, you, you hope to try and make people care a bit more,

which I don't know.

I, I, I hope works.

I think any

sort of action against Israel in that sense, you know, politically is justified.

Um, So

it's just

once again, it's the triumph of these fucking

like multiple

evil lunatics.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I'd say Philistines, but that's an old word for Palestinians.

I just keep calling people maroons thanks to you.

Maroons, yeah.

Well, no, maroons are slaves who escaped their masters and fled into the mountains.

Well, now I feel bad.

Yeah, exactly.

You should feel bad.

I was going on, I was using it instead of moron.

Oh, using it in the Bugs Bunny sense.

Okay.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

You got to use like a Poltroon or something.

Yeah.

And somebody will tell me if that's offensive because I don't know what it means.

I'm going for troglodyte.

There we go.

Troglody.

There you go.

Of course, now a poltroon has a very different sort of meaning to it.

Yeah, it's inverse rods.

Yes.

Now, obviously, okay,

they're trying to do this insane Trump peace deal where they turn Gaza into Miami Beach right now, which is very stupid.

Probably won't work.

The other thing I've got to do is put Tony Blair in charge of it.

Yeah, I know.

It's really bad.

You know, they're just going to flatten everything and everyone's going to be evicted.

And, you know, there'll just be like a horrible genocide.

I don't know if that's going to go anywhere just because I think, you know, probably the Hamas negotiators are smarter than that.

Assumes they get a chance to not get nuked.

Right.

Yeah.

It's, it's,

It's also Trump can commission a kind of like,

you know, Gaza vice, right?

Like

a couple of guys in like white linen suits and loafers.

Yeah,

I don't know what's going to happen other than that, you know,

it's two years since October 7th, like give or take a day.

And

it's just...

everything that has been downstream of it has been grimmer than you can possibly imagine, you know?

One bright spot, though, out of all this did you see greta thunberg's uh autism shirt with the reptile thing firing off two automatics no it was yeah it was the the with the two skeletons with the uh with the guns yeah yeah there's there's a lot of reasons to admire that woman but the fact that she brought a shit post to torture prison is is like an extra one yeah no it's uh it's wonderful uh that was great um yeah i i i have physical support for greta thunberg she's genuinely the as far as I know, she's been on the right side of everything.

Yeah, Greta Thunberg, come on the podcast.

Yeah, absolutely.

Embrace Gressa thought.

Yeah.

Dictatorship of the Gretatariat.

And I guess

in less international news.

So.

I like the Chirons.

Yeah.

Yeah, it doesn't change.

Don't worry about it.

Yeah.

So so now in the previous episode uh i mentioned uh briefly like you know all right it looks like some crazy septa news is about to drop some crazy septa news drop so if we recall uh recently um the republicans in the pennsylvania senate uh refused to pass any kind of budget that provided any kind of funding for SEPTA, the Southeast Pennsylvania Transportation Authority.

And SEPTA was going to contract its network significantly and raise fares in order to cover the insane budget deficit that would result.

Then some lawyer guy was like,

I think all your finances are fake.

You can't do that, actually.

Force them to dig into capital funding in order to

fund operations through the next year when maybe a budget will happen.

Who knows?

Let's just hope that there's no massive need for capital funding, right?

Well,

as of exactly last week from the day of recording, the National Transportation Safety Board sent down a recommendation saying these old trains, the Silver Liner 4s here, they're about 50 years old.

And I think six of them have caught fire in six months.

And so

the NTSB was like, listen.

You guys got to take all of these out of service and

serve problems.

Right.

and that's two-thirds of the regional rail you know commuter rail fleet right

Jesus so

um

we got fucked um yeah really bad

uh it's really not great when people who are like implacably opposed to your existence or you having nice things control the entire federal government is it oh yeah no this is the state government that's the worst part um jesus you know so uh so we we essentially

these are out for inspection at this point.

You know, theoretically, some of these issues can be corrected that are causing the trains to catch fire, but they're 50-year-old cars.

They need to be replaced.

But you need the money that would otherwise be set aside to replace them in order to continue basic operations that some dumbass lawyer and an equally dumbass judge said you have to do.

It's a bad situation to be in.

Also, said dumbass lawyer is about to make them reverse the fare hikes.

I think we're just not going to have like SEPTA in like six months.

Yeah, it's all going to go away.

Everyone's going to have to drive a car or ride a bike and get hit by a car.

Well, good luck, Roz.

Yeah.

Oh, well.

That'll be the end of the podcast.

No, no, we'll still go away.

Maybe everyone will get like sick, but

maybe everyone will get bikes pilled and like Philly will look like Amsterdam in six months.

Oh, well, you know, that would be ideal.

But

Hope Springs Eternal.

So, yeah, that's that's that's that's off the cuff analysis of the current situation.

We're fucked.

Um,

we'll go into detail about that at some point in the future, I think, as the fuckedness increases.

Um,

so that was the goddamn news.

Beautiful.

Okay, so we are going to have a bunch of different, in order to explain the thing, we're going to have to ask ourselves, what is X

before we even...

Terrorism.

It's the use of violence to enact sort of exemplary political change.

And

it's value neutral as far as I'm concerned.

But you know what?

People aren't ready for those kind of like adult international relations discussions.

So we ought to talk about

what is Afghanistan?

That's an illegal thought.

Yeah.

Yeah.

What is Afghanistan?

What is the global war on terror?

Um, a big fat L.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Terror won the war on terror.

Absolutely.

Like, drugs won the war on drugs.

Why should I have to take my shoes off at the airport, you fucker?

Yeah, exactly.

Poverty won the war on poverty.

Like, even back to FDR, want really won the war on want.

Like, you make war on an abstract abstract concept you lose yeah i was about to say i i don't i can't think of any of those wars that anyone won go ahead and write anything lbj came close lbj came close with the war on poverty but then then he was uh you know uh

they they wouldn't let him take the gloves off you know

another another run of rolling thunder against poverty and we would have managed yeah but so afghanistan uh you may be familiar it's the country highlighted in green here um and between 2001 and 2021, the US and a little like coalition of the willing called ISAF

were

like

occupying and engaging in counterinsurgency in, in order to back up a kind of extremely decrepit and corrupt Afghan government,

was sort of like the occupying power of Afghanistan.

And this was part of a broader campaign called the Global War on Terror, which encompassed like not just stuff like the war in Iraq, but also like, you know, down to drone strikes in Somalia,

you name it, the Philippines.

It was all over.

As I say, you may remember some of this stuff.

On the other hand, it's already passing into history.

You know, like you listen to this in a few years and the Zoomers will be like, what is in Afghanistan?

What is the AUMF, right?

Afghanistan.

That's where Saddam Hussein was, right?

Why not Raz?

Yeah,

where he was keeping the WMDs.

Just as a little preview,

where this is going to go.

ISAF, the International Security Assistance Force, which was America plus, you know, in kind of descending order, like Britain.

America and Friends.

France, Germany, yeah.

There was this kind of chauvinistic joke amongst Americans that ISAF stood for I saw Americans fighting on the kind of false belief that the Americans were doing all of the heavy lifting.

I would like to submit that ISAF should stand for inadequately secured American freight.

And we will get into what.

Yes.

Oh, boy.

Okay.

I love to hear inadequately secured freight.

This is a

podcast about cargo.

Next slide, please.

Yes.

So in Afghanistan is a place called Bagram.

Bagram is an ancient city, but it has an airbase next to it.

It's been in the news lately because Trump wants it back and is trying to, like, I guess buy or rent it back from the Talibs.

Are we going to do a Guantanamo Bay thing?

Are we going to...

Yeah, I guess he wants to.

So Vagram was built by the Soviets in the 50s, or at least it was built nominally with Soviet assistance.

I thought the Americans were also involved in some weird way.

Well, so this was real kind of like great game hours between Afghanistan and like Cuba.

But as far as I know, this was a kind of a Soviet assistance project.

Right.

And they did a really good job, though.

Like it's a it's a kind of well situated outside of Kabul in like pretty defensible terrain.

And it had this like

really durable 3,000 meter-long concrete runway, which means you can just land heavy aircraft on it all day, which is very useful if you ever, you know, thinking as the Soviets here, think your head, in case you ever need to invade and occupy Afghanistan.

It's a real kind of poison chalice thing to be like, hey, we got you an airport.

It is, by the way, the airport that that we are going to invade you in if we need to.

Well, that and obviously the railroad they built to Afghanistan to invade.

Yeah.

Yeah.

But so this is this is a great place to run an occupation of Afghanistan out of, which is what the Soviets did

in the sort of Soviet occupation of Afghanistan.

This was like the main Soviet base.

And

when the Soviets were kicked out, it was sort of like left largely intact.

and it became this kind of like Afghan two-fort

because it's so fucking big and this runway is so long.

This is this fairly normal situation during the civil war where the Taliban would be like occupying one end and the Northern Alliance would be occupying the other end and they'd both be shooting at each other and like, you know, firing rockets at each other and denting the fucking runway and occasionally blowing up outbuildings and stuff.

Air traffic control must have been a nightmare.

So, yeah,

this state of affairs lasted until about 2000 when the Taliban kicked the Northern Alliance out.

And they got a year to celebrate before

Bush started the war in Afghanistan.

And

it was captured by us, weirdly, by the British.

Congratulations,

yeah.

You're welcome.

And it became like the largest American base in Afghanistan.

They put in the second runway, which is also concrete, like 3,500 meters.

They put in like a CIA torture prison called the Salt Pit.

But most importantly, they put in, next slide, please, a pizza hut to really soak in those vitamins.

Is that Nate on the phone?

I think so.

I mean,

I guess the general meal deals, look at that.

Actually, could

we have docks to kind of like g watt Nate, then I'm sorry.

But yeah, this is it's a containerized pizza hut.

And American logistics have no superior.

This is sort of where I'm going with this.

Yeah.

Like,

so Bergram was the center of like American logistics.

Everything or almost everything came through there.

If we go to the next slide, please, I'm going to try and explain military logistics to an American.

So imagine a Bergamot.

I'm sorry.

The country, the country that got the ice cream.

Okay.

Okay.

Yes.

No, you are still the best in the world at it.

I know.

I just wanted to get the burger joke in.

All right.

That's all.

I'm imagining a burger cake as you want.

Yes.

Thank you.

Just ate a burger.

I want a burger.

What did you have on your burger?

I got a burger.

It had.

some kind of special sauce.

It had lettuce and onions.

It had Cooper Sharp cheese.

And

some mushrooms.

I got it from Pizza Plus West.

I'm not sure.

A mushroom on burger enthusiast.

Why should November get to go to sleep?

I like

onions.

Anyway, so yeah.

As you may know.

No, I'm not done.

The logistics of the sort of like

U.S.

military and the global war on terror involved this huge long supply chain,

which required not just just kind of a lot of functional stuff, but also a decent amount of luxury in some of these places, which is why Bagram had a Pizza Hut and a Burger King.

It's why the US embassy compound in Iraq had, you know, like the fucking swimming pools and everything, right?

Um, and so for all of this, you've got to move a lot of shit into Afghanistan.

Um, and you can't do that by land because all of the land borders are either A, closed, B, horrendously insecure and kind of geographically inaccessible anyway, or C, Iran.

So, oh,

yeah, everything.

I mean, to be fair, there is a lot of traffic coming over the kind of Iranian-Afghan border.

It's just mostly IEDs and IRGC guys.

So, everything that you want, your Burger King, whatever it is, has to come in by air.

And the U.S.

is

the Afghanistan-Uzbekistan peace bridge is unfortunately nowhere near anything.

Yes.

And I got to run everything on a truck through the Salang tunnel and then everyone dies.

It wasn't really convenient for you to like build a railway in either.

So yeah, everything has to come in by air.

The US is very good at transporting stuff by air, right?

You did the Berlin airlift.

And so the US Air Force has a kind of organic capability to do that, which is what it's doing in the photo.

It's moving the burger.

But at a certain point, you need so much stuff that you're overstretching those resources, which you need for other stuff, particularly, you might need them in Iraq.

And so it's also expensive.

Plus, you have the preeminent factor in any decision-making in the war on terror, which is, can we make a private company run this for profit and extract some money from the federal government?

Oh, I love to eat war crime burgers brought to you by Blackwater.

Well, this was all like contracted to be a lot of people.

There's nothing more patriotic than ripping off your government.

That's true.

Yes, as far as I know, all of the like Boca King stuff was contracted to like Sodexo and like KBR,

Seleg or Halliburton.

There were a ton of companies that were getting rich off of this.

But so in that spirit, if we go to the next slide, please.

We've got a kind of chain of command here, starting on the left with the United States Transportation Command.

or US TransCom.

I am allowed to find that funny.

So Transgender Command exists to

centralize all the different services need for moving transgender people around.

It's under a four-star general.

And the supplies, big tankers full of estradiol.

Yeah, exactly.

KC-135, entirely full of it.

It's hooking up the probe to that.

Yeah.

Basically,

this was kind of formed because in the 80s,

like the kind of war plan,

something which was sort of exercised under the name Reforger,

was

all of the NATO forces in Europe, come a Soviet invasion, would need to

do a fighting retreat to buy time for everything in the US to get shipped to Europe, right?

And the US didn't really have the capacity to do that organically, and it couldn't really build it.

And so, what this was about was about coordinating either contracting with or just straight up commandeering civilian transport in order to move all of your like tanks and your gunships and stuff from the US to Europe.

And so

it

has a bunch of kind of civil like naval transportation in the, I think it's called the Military Sealift Command.

It has an army one, but it also has the Air Force Command, which is the Air Mobility Command.

And the Air Mobility Command runs the Civil Reserve Air Fleet, which is a program by which the U.S.

Air Force contracts with a bunch of American airlines to take up its excess transportation needs.

And so if you deployed to Afghanistan, there is a decent chance that you did part of that journey on

like a passenger airliner.

That's why.

It's like a Delta plane, yeah.

Yeah, yeah, just like that was an airline we had in 2001.

American

CWA is still around?

I don't think so.

I mean, Transworld Airlines would have been apt, I suppose.

Yeah.

Weirdly, I think they contracted with Hawaiian.

Hawaiian and Alaska.

So, yeah, it gets really strange.

But basically, they're there to kind of like take up the slack when the U.S.

Air Force itself is kind of like out of transport capacity because it's too busy like moving the Burger Kings.

So, next slide, please.

One of those airlines is National.

National Airlines,

which is a car.

They deliver the world.

They deliver the world.

Natty Airlines.

Natty Air.

Natty Air.

They're a pretty small operation.

They're a cargo airline out of Ypsilanti, Michigan,

which hadn't really done much of notes.

Their business used to be like ferrying Chrysler employees between plants.

But they got in on this civic

air fleet thing.

very strongly because they had this subsidiary called National Air Cargo.

And basically, they had this relationship where the Air Mobility Command would call National Air Cargo.

National Air Cargo would call National Airlines with, here's what the shit they want to move is, and we'll do it.

Right.

So no questions asked.

And they do a lot of flights in and out of Afghanistan.

Don't open a package.

Yeah, I have simple rules.

Yeah.

And pretty quickly, that becomes a lot of fun.

But Silenti is also home to the world's first dominoes.

Yeah, interesting.

Just coming back to fast food again.

By the way, their business is...

I've got 30 minutes to move this Dunkin' Donuts into this 747.

Their business is so focused on Afghanistan that the FAA can't inspect any of those flights because it's too dangerous and the State Department won't let them come to Afghanistan.

There's genuinely like correspondence from the State Department.

So it actually is the transporter.

Yeah.

Like the State Department's like, we don't want to pay for like armored vehicles for the FAA, so just don't inspect them.

So they're fine.

Shut up.

Yeah.

Like all of the kind of stuff that you have to do to maintain your certification as like an airline, what they do is every couple of years, they just take one of their 747s, fly it around empty between different American cities with the FAA on board.

So they'll like tick off, you know, pilots and stuff

and the plane, but there's no cargo operations actually happening.

And the FAA is just like, that happens in Afghanistan, so it's not our problem.

All right, it's good.

Don't worry about it.

It's good.

We're set up for success here.

Next slide, please.

Yeah.

Sounds like it.

Next, we must ask ourselves, what is the surge?

So the surge.

Oh, dear.

The surge.

This is General Stanley McChrystal.

And this is an unedited screenshot from a Facebook video that his startup consultancy posted about leadership lessons.

And the Chiron there says, expect to fail and celebrate it too.

And that's his podcast.

That's true.

That is true.

But that's also in the finest tradition of his kind of like military leadership.

You might remember Stanley McChrystal.

He was the guy that Obama ended up firing.

He was kind of like the tail who tried to wag the dog in terms of getting the Obama administration to

do what he wanted, which was give him all of the money and all of the troops in the world in order to pursue this kind of strategy of like population-centric counterinsurgence.

And one of the ways he went about this was he got kind of overall command in Afghanistan.

And almost immediately he wrote and then leaked this report saying, if you don't give me everything I want, we're going to lose the war in a year.

So nobody wants to lose the war in a year.

And ultimately, there's this kind of tug of war between

the kind of squishier Dems and the more hawkish Dems, and especially the like military leadership who are like coin-pilled as well,

where

the right wing want sort of like more troops and the sort of liberal wing want those troops to not stay for long.

And Obama, of course, a sort of great compromiser, manages to deliver kind of the worst of both worlds, which is we're going to deploy a lot of troops to Afghanistan, but for three years maximum.

Right.

So, so we're actually, well, is three years a long time?

I don't know.

I mean, it depends on your perspective, but essentially the kind of thing that McChrystal wanted to use them for, and at one point he asked for 85,000 troops, which I'm not sure the US actually had.

He wanted to be doing kind of like institution building that would have taken potentially decades.

Right.

And well, I know that if I'm trying to build stable and durable institutions, I'm going to go send a bunch of 18-year-olds with guns over there to do it.

Well, exactly.

But also, it's mostly it's a form of kind of chaos, right?

Like it's a bad idea in both directions, right?

Both because of like the ideas of kind of counterinsurgency at this time, but also the idea that you're going to half do it anyway, right?

You're going to give him part of what he wants.

And then if it does work, you're going to yank them all back uh just as it starts working um so uh december 2009 obama announces that like 33 000 more troops are going to start the process of deploying and the reasoning or the kind of like gloss that they put on the reasoning is it's going to be like a kind of circuit breaker thing right you get them in quickly and then you get them out quickly um with a like a withdrawal deadline July 2011, three years.

This didn't work, as you may be able to tell by the fact that Afghanistan is an Islamic republic right now.

I was about to say

the Taliban seems to have won that one.

Yes,

sadly.

But the point is, the surge was intended to be like a very time-limited thing with a very sharp upswing and a very sharp drawdown.

This is also when like the real upswing in drone strikes in Pakistan started happening.

So yeah,

we're in a really kind of like dark time in like American sort of military deployments.

This was all like publicly known that this was the idea, right?

Did they not know that the Taliban has television sets they can watch the news?

Yeah, like the guy in the Taliban whose job is to read the New York Times or to read The Atlantic and be like, Thomas Friedman gives it six more months, you know?

Yeah,

he gradually learns to hate Brett Stevens, too.

Taliban guy who does the New York Times, just eventually just flipping through to the crossword.

Next slide, please.

Can you do a crossword in Arabic?

I don't know.

We're going to figure it out.

Oh, boy, glow sticks.

Yeah, I wanted to trigger some reflective PT belt trauma here.

So whether the surge worked or not is mercifully beyond the scope of this paper.

But the point is, it had a very firm deadline on it.

And so all of these guys and all of their shit had to move into Afghanistan very quickly and then it had to get back out very quickly.

Now, these guys are infantry.

That's fine.

You can move them on like, you can move them on anything.

You can crank them.

You can walk.

Fuck them.

That's their job.

Yeah, exactly.

But you may notice these kind of monstrous hulking vehicles behind them that look like they've come out of the world's most evil Lego Technic set.

This brings us.

Next slide.

Grande.

To the Lego Technic episode, yes.

Oh, boy.

At long lasting.

Oh, that'd be fun.

To

we must first understand the MRAP.

So, remember this guy, Donald Rumsfeld?

I do remember this guy.

This is the least flattering photo of him I could find.

I really like it.

It looks like he's giving himself a hernia trying to put on body armor.

So, his deal was, as you may recall, going to war with the army you have, not the army you want.

And so, the US invaded Iraq, particularly, where this photo was taken, with Humvees,

which were not armored in any sort of real way and which therefore got shut up a lot, killed a lot of troops, which it turns out the troops don't like.

I'm not a big fan.

As much as Rumsold was like, ah, fucking get over it.

Eventually, sort of common sense.

Yeah.

Some kind of common sense prevailed, right?

And next slide, please.

They started putting armor on the Humvees.

Initially, this was like farmer armor, right?

It was just like just welding bits of kind of scrap metal to them.

You just put up a plate that you found by the side of the road on the side of your Humvee.

Yeah, literally.

You hope that you keep getting assigned the same Humvee.

Yeah.

I'll be damned if I had to do this again.

Just sort of like strange bits of metal getting attached to it.

And eventually this got kind of legitimized through like various like whatever the American equivalent of an urgent operational requirement is of

sort of like armor kits to apply to Humvees in the field.

A lot of these didn't match color as well, which was fun.

You would see like marines driving around and like a sort of like desert tan humvey with a bunch of green door panels on it, which was, you know, it's really inspiring.

And the thing is about an insurgency.

I'm imagining a sort of harlequin Humvee where every single panel is painted differently.

Yeah, yeah,

I like that adorable.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's very cute.

Yeah.

But yeah, so part of the nature of an insurgency, particularly a kind of like well-funded insurgency or set of insurgencies like you had in Iraq, is it adapts pretty quickly and so uh these started getting defeated too uh and so next slide please they got to get bigger again they got to get bigger and heavier and you got to put more on the outside of them to stop them from getting like shot into or oh yeah i remember these and were they called wasn't these like strikers or something that had no strikers a striker is a

like um

an infantry fighting vehicle but this is this is just an up-armored humve um and you can see it's got like the Popemobile box up here.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I was about to say,

all this must be great for the suspension.

It's not doing well, right?

Also, you can see the big antenna on the back and also the big kind of like

black anarchist flag on the front that is meant to kind of detonate IEDs before it drives over them.

There were some, they did a lot of shit to try and increase the survivability of these and it made them look really weird, which is not, you know, the main point, but this is just to say that

thrown together.

And these, these got blown up.

So, next slide, please.

Make them bigger.

Just keep making them bigger until you've got this kind of greenhouse turgola thing on the top.

And the whole time,

it's becoming Russian.

Yeah.

And overweight, just

turrets, yeah.

So, the whole time in both Iraq and to a lesser extent, Afghanistan, the other guys are working out how to like blow these things up with some success.

And so the Department of Defense go away and have a think.

And they ask themselves, when was the last time a like technologically superior army was occupying a country, getting blown up a lot by insurgents?

And is it a comparison that makes us look good?

Hmm.

I wonder where we could go for inspiration that's going to be kind of politically suitable and like non-problematic.

Next slide, please.

Oh, boy.

Okay.

Yeah.

Pop yours, woke moralists.

So bush wars in both senses, right?

Because

in the 80s, both Rhodesia and apartheid South Africa were engaged in a sort of like early form of counter-insurgency.

We talked about it on the on the Rhodesia episode.

Part of them doing this was developing all sorts of wacky bullshit to try and stop their gay shorts enthusiasts from being blown up.

Next slide, please.

I told you these were short.

Oh, yeah.

So, what they end up with are MRAPs, mine-resistant ambush-protected vehicles.

These are these areas.

Pretty sure I've made some of these in besieged.

Yeah,

these are Buffalo and caspier mraps um and if we if we're looking at kind of features of them you can you can see that they have a lot of armor um but also on the bottom these v-shaped holes so if it drives over a mine it's that energy is going to get directed outwards away from the people inside um you've got like wider spaced tires with higher wheel wells so that if the the tire detonates it again all of that energy is directed outwards

and it has a lot more armor.

Now, this makes for a very like heavy, sort of high-sided, unwieldy vehicle, which doesn't necessarily matter so much if you're trying to enforce your like twisted ideas of white supremacy on the velt, but put a pin in this for later.

They're not very good for driving around in cities as was demonstrated by the National Guard running over a cyclist with them in Washington, D.C.

Yeah, excuse me.

That's with a modern MRAP, not one of these guys.

What you want to drive these around on is completely flat, dry grass,

and then you'll be okay.

Next slide, please.

Surely there's a lot of flat, dry grass in Afghanistan, a country known for being flat and having grass.

This is my favorite one.

This is a Rhodesian leopard security.

What is the point of this?

It's for one guy.

Why does it have racing slicks?

Yeah, it's like a dune buggy for hell.

I genuinely.

A Dune buggy, if you will.

I think the point of this one was to be so light that it didn't detonate mines.

It would just drive over.

Okay, okay.

Yeah.

As far as I know, it's called one out.

Well, exactly, right?

Like,

putting a kind of like gay shorts enthusiast inside the

armored phone booth here and telling him to drive around and try not to get blown up did not preserve white supremacy.

And so seven laps of the 24 hours of Le Man.

Can you imagine taking this thing to lemons, though?

That would fuck.

Oh, hell yeah.

So ultimately, anyone who didn't get blown up in one of these moved to London or Johannesburg.

And the whole kind of like doomed experiment collapsed and itself.

And now it's called Zimbabwe, happily.

However, these ideas did not die.

Next slide, please.

And so if you're trying to maintain like a high rate of survivability and you don't mind getting a bit apartheid with it, then you just build these again.

And that's ultimately what an MRAMP of this generation is, is

a lot more armor built on that same like V-shaped hull design,

which makes them very, very top heavy, especially once you start adding things like remote weapon systems.

So

on the left here, we have a MAT V or an MATV.

And on the right, we have a Cougar.

And the Cougar is a lot heavier.

Cougar.

A Cougar.

Now, my question is...

I'd like this one to talk to me at the bar.

Yeah, the 18-ton Cougar that's extremely well armored, rolls up to you.

What are you doing?

I'm going home for the Cougar, obviously.

Yeah, I guess so.

I don't think I have any

choice

here.

So

the question now becomes, what wins in a fight between one of these, or next slide, please, a single disk of copper with a dent in it?

I'm going to guess the

single...

It's the single disk of copper, yeah.

This is

shaped charges, baby.

Yeah, so I actually have an EOD challenge coin that's shaped like one of these, which I think is a really neat sort of thing.

This is, or rather becomes, something called an explosively formed penetrator,

which is a technology invented by Americans to drill oil, which is ironic.

You sit one of these.

Right, yeah, because

you got to send all those explosives down

the well for, well, various purposes, actually.

Yeah, just blow the whole thing wide open so you get your oil nice and clean.

But so this is a kind of like concave disc.

You sit it on top of a like a shaped charge, and

when that charge fires, this thing turns itself inside out and gets fired like a big kind of molten copper shotgun slug, and it just walks through a lot of armor.

And this was something that,

in particular, with like Iranian guidance,

insurgents in both Iraq and Afghanistan were able to use extremely effective against up-armored Humvees and against MRAPs.

So there's really only one thing for it.

Next slide, please.

Oh, you gotta to make him heavier.

Oh, Jesus.

Make him heavier.

This poor suspension is dying.

This tire is bulging here.

This is not good.

Make him heavier.

Oh, my

God.

It's like something Ross and I would have designed.

We were drunk.

Yeah, man.

What you gotta do is just put a turret.

Look at your boatmobile box.

Put more armor on it.

The truck engine

is also struggling.

Screaming in pain.

Yeah, exactly this is like well i like you still have i don't i don't know what what what uh what manufacturer this is might make it's international you can tell it was square yeah yeah i thought it was you can still see the international harvester body work on the front oh yeah i mean the mat v's were made by oshkosh like these were all truck manufacturers um but you can see it's got some like nice spaced armor on there it's got some slatted armor on the windows it's got a gigantic fully enclosed turret um so this was this was the introduction of something called frag Kit 6.

P17 on land.

Let's do it.

Basically, like when you apply Frag Kit 6 to a regular Humvee, which is like a normal sized vehicle-ish by present-day American standards, it makes it too wide to drive on a highway and all of the doors get too heavy to open by hand.

Oh, so it's got the Rolls-Royce auto-closing doors?

How does, yeah, I was going to ask, you know, so it's like a, it's like a Tesla in that if you crash, you just die.

Oh, you're fucked.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And

every kind of MRAP chassis is bigger and taller than a Humvee already.

And this is where the kind of

weight distribution and the height really gets you, right?

Because roads in Afghanistan, unlike roads in Angola, have

something called turns in them.

Now, obviously, this is going to be unfamiliar to Americans, but it's when a road stops being in one direction and starts being in another direction.

We have the Blue Ridge Park.

Why?

Shut your mouth.

Yeah, don't try and drive one of these down it.

So with all of this shit on top of it, if you try and turn in one of these too fast, and by too fast, I mean like 15 miles an hour,

it will roll over.

And sometimes it will roll over in a way that it rolls down a valley into a river and you drown.

Like it's these things are like coffins, genuine they're very good at preventing you from they put firestones on these things yeah they did rods yeah

actually i uh there is specifically a a michelin uh imprint in one of these that that i'll come back to but yeah that's that's your like story of your oh michelin oh that's who i want manufacturing my tires is the french oh yeah i i am a francophile leave me alone that's what i want as a human being so i know where all the good food is now you have the context for on the left your slightly lighter Matt V, on the right, your heavier Cougar.

It is now 2011, the surge is over.

All of these, or a bunch of these, have to come home, and national airlines are the guys to do it.

At long last, I am ready to talk about the plane.

Next slide, please.

So, this is uh a bone airplane, the 747.

Yeah, 747 400.

Uh, started out for Air France, uh, and as like a kind of mixed passenger freight, and then it was just converted to just straight cargo.

And National Airlines calls it Laurie, which I think is sweet.

It's got a flight crew of three.

And if we go to the next slide, we'll see what I mean by it being a cargo plane.

So it's got this floor built into it.

And this floor is built by a company called Tel Air.

And basically what you have is a bunch of different mounting points for cargo.

And ideally, what you have is your cargo slots into these

kind of

grooves that have roller bearings in them that lock.

And you can just kind of slot it into there and it holds very, very steady.

That's great.

Right.

Yeah, that's great.

If you have stuff that fits, yeah, you got all the nice containers that you can just fit in there.

Yeah.

You know exactly what's going to fit.

I assume we are not going to have stuff that fits because we're.

Oh my goodness, no.

Next slide, please.

So

here on the right is the way you do it ideally, right?

What you have there is a unit load device.

Now,

your large unit loads is just a container functionally.

Like it's of known size and shape, and you know that it's going to slot into the grooves and it's going to lock in.

And that's going to be very, very secure.

And you don't have to worry about it.

This is ideal.

You want to move as much stuff as you can see.

This is just like the normal containers you see at the airport that are, you know, on the back of the baggage trolley, you know, you know, that's these guys right here.

Yes, yes.

However, if it doesn't fit in a unit load device, whatever it is, if your unit load is refused, then you have to put it on the

load.

You have to put down a pallet to like keep it off of the floor, and then you have to use one

billion ratchet straps to just secure it.

Yes.

It's like my father-in-law decided this.

Jesus Christ.

That ain't going anywhere.

That's fine.

You should save the income for every single ratchet strap.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah.

And it's worth noting as well.

The pallet isn't attached to anything itself.

It's like a floating pallet.

It's being squished down by the weight of the thing and the ratchet straps.

So like a log truck.

Yeah, yeah.

And you need all of these straps.

And every kind of correct implementation of it looks like this.

It is this very strange kind of like covered in shredded paper situation.

Horrible spider web.

Hi, it's Justin.

So this is a commercial for the podcast that you're already listening to.

People are annoyed by these, so let me get to the point.

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Back to the show.

It's awful, yeah.

Next slide, please.

Yeah.

So in the military, the person whose job it is to work out how many loads should be refused, how many straps you need for each load,

things of a different nature.

The person who's in charge of like loads and straps is called a load master.

I'm the load master.

Now,

in the military, this is a highly specialized and technical occupation.

It has rigorous standards, training, testing,

because militaries take this stuff seriously.

They have to.

The FAA, on the other hand, does not have a definition of a load master.

You, I, and every single one of the listeners are FAA qualified load masters.

Hell yeah.

Welcome aboard, folks.

I hope you're pleased by this knowledge that, you know, not only are you getting a podcast episode, you're also getting an addition to your CV, to your business card, that you can call yourself a load master.

You don't have to take any training whatsoever.

You could refuse any load, or you could choose not to refuse any load.

Absolutely.

If an airline will hire you

to master its loads, you can be a load master and to be honest that's their problem now yeah absolutely so so national um sends out a load master with three flight crew for this job that they've gotten uh the nature of which i'll explain in the next slide um now this guy this load master he's never transported an MRAP before and his initial training was a week long and then after that he got like three-day annual refreshers all right that sounds it's all it's all the it's probably probably good you know you get your whatever, man.

You know, you just

renew your certification.

It's fine.

I mean, that's more than required.

Let's get real.

That is absolutely true.

Yeah.

So his job is to work out how to secure next slide, please.

Two Matt Vs and three Cougars.

So two of the lighter ones, three of the heavy ones.

For context here,

the Matt Vs weigh about 12 tons each.

It's about 26,500 pounds.

Don't quote me on that.

And the Cougars are about 18 tons.

They weigh about 41,500 pounds.

And so your Loadmaster sits down and tries to work out

how many straps.

No, I think these are American.

But so, because I'm working off of the NTSB report, so I think it's American.

I'm imagining the Loadmaster as Jason Statum.

Me too.

In crank for some reason.

No, no, no.

The transporter is securing the baggage with a bunch of ratchet straps.

No, it's crank, but

great fucking movie.

Go watch it.

That's not going anywhere.

So

each ratchet strap that he has, he knows, has is rated for 5,000 pounds of force.

It's a good ratchet strap.

He puts in, yeah, puts in a safety margin of 75%.

So that means it's rated for effectively 3 750 pounds you do the maths on that and what that gets you to try and keep these things from moving is that you use 24 of these straps for each mat v and 26 for each cougar now because he was making it up as he went along we don't have any photos or any diagrams of how he did this exactly it was just what seemed right

arbitrary yes yeah now he's not doing this just

on vibes because he does have a manual, the cargo operations manual.

Now, the cargo operations manual is written by the airline's chief loadmaster, who also doesn't have to have any particular training.

Wow, this goes all the way up to the top.

You too can be a chief loadmaster if you want to.

And they ask the chief loadmaster later on how he kind of assembled that manual.

And he says, Oh, yeah, I like copied and pasted the charts from Boeing and Teller's manuals and just kind of extrapolated a bit.

I've given myself a promotion by putting a scribble onto my business card,

yeah.

It's I'm actually a senior chief, load master, master chief,

master chief, load master.

Yeah, I played Halo.

Let's do this.

All right, patrol broke.

Yes, yeah, let's go.

Yeah, lieutenant, master chief, uh, general major, load master.

Just raw single.

If you're a female load master does that mistress

yeah

I guess if you're non-binary you could be a load mixtress maybe wow next slide please so this is the actual aircraft and the actual MRAPs being loaded

so our beautiful 747 flies from France to

to Dubai to Camp Bastion uh which is in Lashkargar in like southern Afghanistan.

Camp Bastion is like the main British airbase.

Although these are American vehicles, as far as I can tell, I think they're marine vehicles as well.

Is this one perpendicular to the direction of the aircraft?

It really shouldn't be.

And I don't know why it is because, as far as I know, they were all loaded facing forwards.

I was about to say, that's what all the diagrams I've seen have said.

I looked at this and I was like, maybe, maybe there's something we're not getting here.

Who knows?

Not sure.

Just these guys had to like turn it around 90 degrees.

Basically, that could be the case.

Yeah, I'm surprised if the loading, yeah, the loading crew at Bastion had to make up a kind of pallet system for all of these to sit on, and they had to do that again with no instructions, no training, just do that from first principles.

And so they build these pallets for them to sit on.

They like deflate the tires.

They build this kind of like wooden scaffolding around them so that it's resting on things not going to damage the floor.

But

this is all theories of like of

the behavior of ratchet strap material from first principles.

Yeah.

I mean, these haven't even been ratchet strapped down.

They're being like chained to pallets, which are then kind of ratchet strapped together.

If we go to the next slide, you get some, you get some views of this.

These are taken from the like low loader that actually kind of lifted them onto the aircraft.

And you can see that they're like chained by the chassis and the axle, which is right, which is what they should be,

to these like double pallets.

So, and you see that's that's one of the cougars, which is heavier, so it's got two pallets, and then the mat vis just have the one palette.

Um, next slide, please.

So, we got to do some complex load dynamics here, right?

Um, this is how they should have done it, and it isn't how they did it, but it's how they should have done it.

Um, basically, your load master following his manual, right, and having had sort of not very much training, so it's not his fault.

Um, he does some like quick and dirty maths in the sense that, like, okay, well, each strap is good for 3,750 pounds, which is true, it is rated for that, but it's rated for that in one direction.

Oh, I like one direction.

Uh,

it's it's not

a strong, uh, I miss Liam.

Anything perpendicular to it, right?

Like, if the if the force is at 90 degrees to it, it's its load strength is zero pounds.

Um, if the sort of load force is angled in any in any way, it diminishes very rapidly, um, which is why you have to to have this whole arrangement.

You always get these fun things with like woven materials, they behave differently when you're in different orientations.

It's like carbon fiber has this problem, too.

Yeah, and especially with these straps, they stretch and they jerk as well.

And this needs to be proof against, I think it's like either 9 or 11 G in like every direction because it has to be able to survive an emergency landing and not fly forward and pancake

against the front of the aircraft and squish the flight crew.

So it's got to be secured in every direction.

And that means it needs to have enough straps to hold it still on every angle,

which the correct number turns out to be 60 for the lighter one.

60 ratchet straps.

Easy peasy.

Let's do it.

Yeah.

When the guy was working this out, he also kind of assumed that it had infinity mounting points in every direction, direction, which it doesn't.

And also, the fittings on the floor of the plane aren't all the same, right?

Like you'll notice how most of these are secured to the outermost bit, which is the strongest bit.

A lot of them, it would seem, were secured to the racks that the seats would fit into.

Were it a passenger configuration, right?

Those are actually weaker than the straps are.

Those max out at like 2,800 pounds.

And

on this slide, yeah.

We see the cougar, which is heavier and taller.

Weirdly, because of the orientation of it, it needs fewer straps.

It needs 48 of them.

But it's, again, this very, very kind of spread out thing.

After the fact, Boeing and Teller, the company that makes the like flooring, went over and tried to work out how many of these you could transport safely in one plane.

Boeing's answer was one of the lighter ones, and Telair's answer was none.

Zero.

None.

Oh, none.

Okay.

Yeah.

Like when the people who make your kind of cargo fitting

kind of aircraft are like, this is not an air transportable vehicle, at least not in a 747.

You have to get the like, you know, Antonoff that still exists at this point.

Yeah.

And they had

five of these.

You take the alternative strategy and just hand it over to the Taliban.

You fucking figure it out, assholes.

I mean, they definitely have some that they left behind, yeah.

So really, you shouldn't be doing this, but you especially shouldn't be doing this with five of them parked bumper to bumper.

But so next slide, please.

So we have a little like logic problem here.

We have a little plan X for you.

So you are in Camp Bastion with your cargo of MRAPs, and you have to get it to Dubai, which is the big staging airport for all this stuff.

Now, if you draw me a flight plan from Camp Bastion to Dubai, there are a couple of reasons why it will not work, but you know, please feel free to attempt it.

I would go.

I'd go right over Iranian airspace.

Fuck them.

Yeah.

Yeah.

No, yeah, exactly.

That's Darius.

That's why I double dog Darius.

That's like double dog Dari.

Yeah, shoot this dick down.

Yeah.

So your next

dick down in Dallas, baby.

If you don't want to fly over Iranian airspace you could fly over Pakistan.

Yeah.

The Pakistanis have also closed their airspace to military traffic.

So that's not happening either.

Plus, you're flying it basically over bin Laden's house.

Like, come on.

This, listen, this is easy.

This is how I solved the Konigsberg bridge problem.

Oh, no.

Which no other mathematician has ever done.

I, an engineer, solved it.

How do you do it?

You just go north, right?

You go north until that becomes south, and then you pop up over here yeah yeah no problem that's that's kind of what you've got to do in the sense that you've got to you've got to fly northeast and then loop all the way around the edge of pakistan fly over india and then up the gulf of amman now your problem with that is that

You don't have enough fuel to do that, and Bastion doesn't have enough fuel to refuel you with to do that.

So the sensible thing for you to do is to take off, fly to Bagram, which does have enough fuel and is on your way now anyway,

and refuel there.

And so that's what they do.

And it goes okay.

The flight, you know, perfectly normal.

The three flight crew and the loadmaster just in the cockpit chilling.

Everything seems fine.

Next slide, please.

So then they get on the ground and one of them almost says the name of the podcast.

Co-pilot says, there's your trouble, which is close enough for government work.

Wow.

Good enough.

Yeah.

And basically what's happening.

There's your trouble, Brad.

Unbeknownst to them, one of the straps holding one of the MRAPs has just snapped in flight.

Oh, boy.

Okay.

And

as you can see here on the transcript, the flight crew are pretty nervous about this in kind of a joking way.

But

yeah, they're sort of like, they're worried about this.

And one of them jokes about like, you know, landing the thing and slamming on the brakes and not using reverse and the sort of MRAP coming through the back wall.

Noticeably.

Oh, good.

Thank you, Freddie, foreshadowing.

Yeah.

Noticeably, pilots don't train with loadmasters at all or really interact with them.

So they don't, although technically it's their responsibility, they don't have any way of knowing how secure the load is or isn't except to trust one guy

who is just like.

Oh, yeah, this two days ago.

Yeah.

Yeah, I think this one strap had like a knot in it.

I'm going to tighten everything up.

At one point, he says on the cockpit voice recorder, don't worry, everything moves, which is casual, let's say.

Yeesh.

I'm going to go freshen up on my training material, which is just a DVD copy of

the transporter.

Yeah, the load master, Jason Statham, is here.

He says, he says not to worry about.

He did call me a cunt, though.

Next slide, please.

And we see that here's the conversation with the load master in the room where he's like, Yeah, they just moved a couple of inches because you know it's nylon, you know.

So, at which point one of the pilots says, That's scary, yeah, but

pound symbol scary.

That's fucking scary.

They talk about

putting a camera

on the cargo deck to watch it, and the co-pilot says you'd probably shit yourself.

So, these guys,

they're worried about it in a kind of comedic way, which is bad foreshadowing, I would say.

Fatalistic.

I like that it's all in lowercase.

It looks like a text message conversation.

Yeah.

So he's just, he hasn't even put on remote stars.

He's just like, group chat is skeptical about your load mastering.

He's just, he's, he's cinched everything down real good.

So next slide, please.

I got a date for you to read on this one, Justin.

It's the

afternoon of the 29th of April, 2013.

Yes.

And

this is the view from the control tower at Bagram,

looking west towards runway three.

And we sort of have an arrow pointed at where our plane's going to start sort of taking off from.

So we're a little bit nervous, maybe, but we're refueled.

We're ready to go.

And we're going on a long haul.

all the way around the top of Pakistan.

So

we go and we start our takeoff role.

Yeah, we start.

We start our takeoff role, but first we have to talk about some stuff.

We do.

All right.

Oh, this is beautiful.

What is trim, right?

It's the little clicky wheel.

Trim is very important to what's about to happen.

Oh, yeah.

It's a little clicky wheel.

There's a big wheel that spins around on the Boeing airplanes, you know, so on and so forth.

If you're like me, like I played Microsoft Flight Simulator when I was a small child until Train Simulator came out, you know, in 2001, which was the most significant thing that happened that year.

And if you're like me, you probably figured out some of the basic control surfaces.

You know, but if you haven't, I have good news for you.

I took the liberty of spending some of the Patreon money.

Well, a lot of the Patreon, all of the Patreon money and a big loan on, well, there's your problems, new aerospace testbed platform.

This Boeing 747.

It's about time we have one of those.

I was about to say, our aerospace testbed platform, this Boeing 747, I don't know what to name it.

I've tentatively named it Clipper Problem.

Suggestions and

subscribe to the Patreon now because actually we have a lot of ongoing insurance and maintenance costs we have to deal with.

Yeah, I also have some bad news about the Christmas bonuses.

So anyway, fucking damn it.

At least when I blow my share of the Patreon money on cameras, it's like just my bit.

Yeah, so

well, no, I mean, at this point, it all goes straight to Boeing servicing.

Yeah.

So anyway, control surfaces, right?

You got the ailerons, right?

They're at the end of the wings.

They make the plane roll

one way or the other, right?

You have elevators.

Those guys are on the tail, right?

They make the plane go up or down, or more specifically, they make the front go up and the back go down, or vice versa, right?

Right.

Um, then you got a rudder, right?

That's on the tail, the pointy vertical bit, right?

And that makes the plane do like a sick power slide.

Um,

so anyway, that's where I gave up and moved on to trains.

Uh, very few trains have control surfaces.

Uh, there's

not zero, though.

Um, the Fast Tech 360 prototype Shinkansen had these cool air brakes that popped up like cat ears.

So, anyway, maybe you got farther than that in flight simulator.

You figured out things like, okay, the plane has flaps, right?

And then those go down and they create more lift, but they create more drag so you can't go fast, right?

Or on the front of the wings, there's slats, right?

I don't know what those do.

Make planes slower, I think.

Something like that, yeah.

But then there's something called trim, and I never figured out what trim was because, again, I was eight years old.

Oh, the plane has sunglasses.

I just noticed that.

Here we are to learn about trim.

Planes do a lot of different things on the ground and in the air, right?

Generally speaking, they take off, they go up for a long time, then they cruise at a level altitude for a long time, then they go down for a long time, then they land, right?

Um, if you're a pilot, you could try and mess with the elevators the whole time to keep the flight profile in where it should be, right?

Or you could have a different system to just set it and forget it.

If you say, I want to go up, you just set something that says go up and you're done, right?

So you trim the aircraft so that it generally goes up or it generally goes down or it generally stays level when you're not touching the controls, right?

Setting the resting position of the control surfaces.

Pretty much, yeah.

This is achieved in various ways in various aircraft.

The one we're going to focus on is called a movable horizontal stabilizer.

We'll talk about that on the next slide.

Sometimes you have like little trim tabs.

on the elevators, which sort of use the aerodynamics to force the elevator down, which in turn forces the airplane up, vice versa, so on and so forth.

You also have uh something called a stabilator where the whole horizontal stabilizer is the elevator uh there's probably some other stuff that i don't know about i don't know planes very good

or neither do the rest of us yeah you also it's useful to be able to trim the aircraft for situations where the load distribution is a little weird right like i don't know they shoved all the baggage in the back of the plane or you know the front of the plane is full of thin people and the back is full of fat people or vice versa That's me.

Maybe you're, yeah, maybe you're carrying a huge object with the weird weight distribution, right?

Grotesquely heavy tricycle.

Yeah.

You can trim the plane so that while it would have a natural tendency to go up or down, it flies level when you take your hands off the controls, right?

And this reduces workload.

It means that you, as the pilot, don't have to like, you know, pull on the yoke the whole 30, 40 minutes you're getting up to cruising altitude.

It does also have the consequence, though, that if the plane is improperly trimmed and for some reason you can't fix that,

all of a sudden you have a hell of a time trying to tell it what to do, right?

Sure.

Especially if the plane isn't, you know, fly-by-wire.

And all of a sudden, you have to, you find yourself in a situation where you have to summon the strength of Thor himself just to pull on the yoke to keep the plane level, right?

So, you know, when trim goes bad, it's a bad situation, but that very rarely happens.

Comfort act.

Yeah.

Trim is not altered too many times when you're in flight, right?

And all the alterations are subtle adjustments.

So in a big commercial airliner, we have this assembly, right?

This is a jack screw.

Yeah, and you thought I was nasty for loadmaster.

So

this mechanism is at least common on Boeing aircraft.

I don't know if Airbus uses something different.

I don't understand planes.

So anyway,

your trim requires very fine, but very authoritative adjustments, right?

There's a lot of aerodynamic force on this horizontal stabilizer, which I guess I didn't mention it before.

The horizontal stabilizer.

are like the horizontal tiny wings on the tail, right?

As opposed to, you know, the vertical stabilizer, which is the vertical part of the tail.

Okay, right.

That should be relatively obvious.

Anyway,

so you need something which is very powerful, but very precise.

So on the airliner in question today and most airliners, this is achieved by adjusting the position of the whole horizontal stabilizer by means of the jack screw.

The jack screw is very simple.

You've got this big, heavy, threaded rod, right, that's stuck into an electric motor.

There's a nut in the top of the jack screw, and this is connected through some kind of linkage to the pivot point of the horizontal stabilizer.

It's very difficult for this nut to slip.

It usually, in fact, almost always stays.

Well, it always stays in place.

Let's not even add any qualifiers there, right?

One full turn of the rod is only moving this thing up or down by one thread on the rod.

Here's an enormous amount of mechanical advantage and fine precision in the system.

The only disadvantage, of course, is that it's very slow to adjust, you know, much slower than like an elevator or an aileron or something like that.

But again, this is trim.

That doesn't matter, right?

Yeah.

And also,

because again, you have so much much mechanical advantage, there's not just the motor.

There's cables that go all the way to the cockpit that are attached directly to the terra wheels in there.

Right.

So if for some reason you lose the motor, you can actually still adjust this manually with a crank in the cockpit.

And so, yeah, this jack screw is like dead center.

It's dead center in the back of the plane, right?

Sort of like where where sort of the middle aisle would be, but it's all the way at the back.

Yeah.

Somewhere behind that wall where like all the catering carts are.

So yeah, that's how you adjust the trim.

All right.

I got to explain hydraulics.

Yeah, you got to do the hydraulics.

I did my part.

Hydraulics is easy.

It's fine.

It's the movement juice.

And what you do is

you take a fluid and you compress it a lot until it's very angry, which allows it to exert a a lot of force, which is great.

It's what you need it to do.

And you keep it very angry, very compressed in pipes, and you move this around and it makes the control surfaces control good, right?

And each set of control surfaces is assigned to a different hydraulic system, ideally.

A Boeing 747 has four hydraulic systems.

Each one is moving different things for redundancy, right?

So like you can lose potentially a couple of these at once and still be able to control the aircraft for redundancy's sake.

Yes,

to be clear, there's several of them to be redundant.

And

the system exists for that reason, which is the department.

There's multiple departments.

Yes, of course.

Yeah, there's more than one.

There's many.

Many.

There's more than one.

And the purpose of that is

systems.

Yes.

Yeah.

And you can see if you're interested.

If you're interested, you can see which one moves what.

However, you'll note system two and three here, in the middle of the, right in the middle in the bottom, system two and three control the stabilizer trim.

Very important to be able to control that.

That's the hand crank you mentioned earlier of being able to move the jackscrew.

And so if you can't do that electronically with the motor, you have to do that hydraulically because it's under a lot of kind of aerodynamic force.

You can't do it by hand exactly.

And that's why it's got two separate hydraulic systems.

Next slide.

You still can do it by hand.

It's just very slow and very difficult.

Okay, well, in that case,

I retract that bit completely.

But

in any case, this lets you control all of your control surfaces, right?

And if you lose the hydraulics, then you lose the ability to control those things.

Next slide, please.

So within the plane, the plane is pressurized.

So within it, you have a pressure vessel, right?

Which technically makes it, for me, close enough to being both a steam engine and a nuclear reactor.

This is a diagram.

A submersible.

Yeah, absolutely.

This is a diagram of the like loading.

If you look at the

rightmost label BS2365, that's where the sort of like loading dock ends.

And behind that is the aft pressure bulkhead.

That's where the pressure vessel ends.

Behind that is the empennage or the empennage, which is French for empanada, I believe.

That's where the jack screw lives.

All the hydraulics have got to get through there.

No, it's French or empanadorage.

Shut up.

No, it's French for

sort of like the fletching on an arrow.

No, it's not.

Shut up.

But yeah, this doesn't need to be pressurized, right?

Like, because it's just mechanical back there.

Like, the jack screw doesn't need to be pressurized.

The sort of like back end of the hydraulics don't need to be.

And nobody's going back there.

That's why we've got that big bulkhead separate.

If we go to the next slide, we can see what that bulkhead looks like, in fact.

And just to jump forward a bit, if you're asking why it is

in funky shapes and colors, that's because these are the pieces of it that they found.

So you can kind of see the front.

I got spoilers right there.

Sorry.

But yeah,

this is it as it should be.

And you will note that it's got

the

like a bunch of systems passed through it, but it has to have the hydraulics passed through.

You see on the bottom there, hydraulics three and four,

and then hydraulic one and two off to the right.

And these are designed deliberately to be separated.

So like in an accident, you don't lose, you know, all of them, ideally.

All of it.

Sure.

Yeah, exactly.

So just think about this bulkhead.

Think about like all of the kind of like MRAPs sitting strapped down in front of it.

If we go to the next slide,

we can begin our takeoff roll.

So takeoff roll.

Oh, takeoff rotation crash.

Yes.

Yeah.

Because that's what happens, basically.

The narrative on this one is very simple.

It is a short flight.

Very short.

What happens is they move to takeoff power.

They rotate.

they become airborne.

So the plane is pointing upwards.

And then all of a sudden the plane is pointing way too much upwards,

which is not a situation that you want to be in.

They go to full power and they try to push the nose down.

This does not work.

Plane keeps going up.

Plane stalls.

Plane smacks back down.

And so you have parts littered all over the runway.

and this sort of like wreckage trail.

If we go to the next slide,

that is a still from some unreleased security camera footage, which is very scary.

The plane should not do that.

This is sort of terminating bit with the landing gear still down.

I love that.

This is not a situation you want to find yourself in.

No.

Yes.

Yeah.

This is this is the situation of it having stalled so much it is now falling downwards.

And if we go to the next slide, This is, you may remember this as one of the like OG live league videos.

There was a guy with a dash cam in his car who captured this thing just pancaking down right in front of him.

And it's, it's, it's a, you know, it's a brutal watch.

It's worse in motion.

You know, the screen caps are kind of a mercy here, but you, you see that it kind of falls down on its side.

They're able to level it out at the last second, not that that makes any difference.

And then it just explodes.

Like it just augers in.

Jesus.

Next.

Yeah.

Next slide, please.

Yeah, it just, that's aerodynamic stall for you.

It It just down.

Yeah, plane does not work.

It's really

scary.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And this is a remarkably kind of intact debris field in the sense that you're finding localized bits of each MRAP in the thing.

And you're finding kind of like distinct parts.

Fun detail here, the Taliban immediately claimed responsibility for shooting it down, which is a real kind of like just walk in with your CV kind of optimism.

You got to take your wins where you can get them sometimes.

I suppose.

Yeah, it's just like, yeah, we did that.

Munching block of Kerry Gold butter, you know?

Yeah.

What's that next slide, please?

Not sure.

Probably something with like

C or something.

Yeah.

I got some more footage of the wreckage.

And

if we go to the next slide, we'll do some reconstruction.

We work out who the culprit was.

And I'm afraid we've caught them red-handed because on that aft-pressure bulkhead, there is a big telltale Michelin tire imprint.

That's just a big tire dent, which marries up to the spare tire on a MAT V that has just come backwards and smacked into that pretty much right in the center line as well.

Uh, if we if we go to the next slide, you will see that's not ideal.

No, they've there is a legible Michelin like tire Michelin tire market.

I'm sorry.

That's so grim.

That sucks so bad.

So I think we found the culprit here, right?

If we go to the next slide, they find all of the MRAPs pretty much like, you know, they're crash resistant in this sense.

Like, they find the chassis,

but they also find bits of the pressure bulkhead.

draped all over one of them.

Like it's covered in the kind of entrails of its victim.

There is another fun detail, which is if we if we go.

Yeah.

So the M wrap in question has orange paint on it.

The cockpit voice recorder and flight data recorder, the black boxes are in this little bit that sort of marks as being 104 inches off the floor on the right-hand side.

The MAT V has the orange paint on it because it has just slammed back and destroyed both of these instantly.

So you're not getting any kind of data off of this once it's done that.

It has just like sort of wiped the tapes on its own to cover the sort of like the scene of the crime.

If we go to the next slide, on its way through this bulkhead, it also severs two of the hydraulic system lines.

They find these lines.

They find hydraulic system number two.

which is like you just lose this in flight.

But then if we go to the next slide,

so there's your hydraulic line.

And then if we go to the slide after,

that's your jack jack screw.

Yeah, that's the jack screw.

It's not supposed to look like that.

It's not supposed to have that bend in it.

It is also supposed to be attached to something at the top.

Yes.

What has happened?

Yeah.

So, what has happened?

Well, to do that, we have to go back to our tamed airliner, you know, clipper clipper problem.

Yeah.

Here's the example of the aircraft is previously configured with some kind of heavy cargo in here.

You know, the big, big, big, angry army truck, you know, so on and so forth.

Right.

It's got wheels.

It's got a thing on the back, you know, something incredible.

Yeah.

So pretend, pretend, pretend it's going up at an angle.

Like, look, look at this photo.

Like, tilt your head a bit so it looks like the plane's going at an angle.

All right, I got okay.

So, so anyway, it, you know, slides back and it hits the jack screw back here.

And jack screw, of course, is bent.

It's detached.

What happens?

That's right.

Yoink.

Uncommanded control input.

Yeah, that horizontal stabilizer is now jammed down as far down as it can go.

And the plane has a frowny face at this point.

Yeah.

You are not able at this point to make any kind of command input to that horizontal stabilizer to correct the situation, including if you use the cable, because the cables probably aren't even attached at this point.

That was a big impact, right?

The result of this, of course, is, you know, completely uncommanded trim to make the plane go up as quick, as fast as possible.

And we see here again on our tamed airliner, it's going to space.

Yep.

Yep, yep.

Not a good situation.

Right into the sod, baby.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

More likely, yeah, you wind up in an aerodynamic stall and then you fall down again.

This is a hard situation to recover from.

Falls straight out of the sky.

I don't think there was a way you could recover from this, even if you had any kind of hydraulics at that point.

You're just going to have to use like everything on the airplane to try and counteract bad.

You're just going to eat some shit.

Right.

Yeah, pretty much.

Pretty much.

Supposedly, the NTSB had it that if they had had the hydraulics,

then

they should have been able to just push out of it.

But they didn't because besides shearing off the top of the jack screw, um, the the MAT V coming backwards also took out, I think, two or three hydraulic systems.

Yeah, I mean, you're in a bad situation at that point.

It's just not yeah, it's just you just die.

Like, you are just going to die at that point, and you, you have enough time to know about it, but not do anything about it, which is, which is horrible.

And also, it's taken out the cockpit voice recorder.

So, also, no one's ever going to hear about what you thought or said about it.

Yeah, we don't actually know.

yeah yeah uh next slide please hey it's justin in uh post-production so the reason november and i are in disagreement here on the precise failure mode is that the ntsb ran several simulations to determine the precise failure mechanism here right in one of those cases the horizontal stabilizer was completely disconnected immediately so there was no hope of recovery in another case the damage was significant, but still gave some amount of control, which could have been, with great effort, corrected by means of the ailerons, but this was impossible because of the severed hydraulic lines.

The NTSB couldn't decide on which one because, you know, this crash did not leave a lot of intact evidence.

And forensics is an imperfect science anyway.

And neither of these facts would have any real bearing on the actual conclusion of, you know, what caused it, which was that the load shifted and broke everything.

Anyway, back to the show.

We have a nice diagram here of exactly how that happened, which is it just rolls backwards and the kind of top edge just hits the top of the jack screw and just shears it off.

It also disconnects it from the electric motor on the other end, if that matters, which it kind of doesn't.

Weirdly, this is wholly kind of mechanical rather than center of gravity.

Because the NTSB also thinks that if all five of these had just kind of gently rolled backward, even if they were like bumped up against this bulkhead, so long as they didn't penetrate it, it still would have been controllable.

But so in the end, they think it was just this one rearmost lighter vehicle that just, you know,

like snapped or like broke some of the mountings or the straps and just came backwards with enough force that it just took out the bulkhead, took out the jack screw, and you know, good night, Vienna.

Next slide, please.

And you see how this kind of lines up in the other plane, which is pretty much dead on.

It's just, it's right in the center line for it.

And these are, these are, like I say, it's a 12-ton vehicle moving backwards.

Next slide, please.

And you can see that that spare tire is still going backwards to the point that it just donks off the like inside of the empanage as well.

Oh, God.

Yeah.

All of which leads predictably to the scary live leak video of this thing just goes up but too far and is uncontrollable.

They can't return it to sort of like

any kind of attitude that's compatible with continued flight

and it just slams down into an empty field.

Next slide please.

And that's the horizontal stabilizer which came off it pretty much intact.

I was about to say apparently this is the only safe place on the airplane.

Just riding the horizontal stabilizer, yeah.

Next slide, please.

So as you might imagine, everyone on board dies.

This is seven deaths in total.

Now,

the investigation for this

is because it was

three flight crew.

Actually, I think it's like four light crew.

Four flight crew, the loadmaster and two mechanics aboard.

They all get killed instantly.

Like the cause of death is multiple injuries, which is, you know, it's bad.

And then

the injury is incompatible with life.

Right.

Yeah, yeah.

I mean, at least, you know, terrifying in the kind of like moan up to it, but when it actually happens, you don't know anything about it at least.

So there's an ostensibly Afghan-led investigation.

No disrespect to the Afghan transportation.

people, but like the NTSB kind of just take it over.

And they, you know, go through and piece all this together, basically, literally, you know, writing on the panels with marker pen, like, this is a tire.

And the cause of this is pretty straightforward, right?

Like, you don't have to train a load master or like certify a load master in any meaningful way.

The FAA doesn't have to approve the procedures that they use for loading stuff.

It doesn't have to approve the manuals that they work off of.

And they just have to be convinced by how you're able to say, like,

yep, that's not going anywhere.

Just

slap it down, man.

Yes.

Yeah, I got to slap it down.

Exactly.

So the FAA do the deadliest ads out there.

The FAA do audit everyone's cargo manuals, which is nice, but the NTSB, like, they have a real kind of bureaucratic war with the FAA over this.

And the NTSB, which really comes out of this story as like a sort of a cloutless agency, which is very sad, they keep pushing the FAA for years until 2022, like 11 years

for them to like implement this recommendation of like, you have to regulate what a load master is, like you have to have some kind of oversight for it.

And the FAA just stonewalls them until they're forced to drop it.

And I don't really know why, other than that it would be too expensive, I guess.

They don't want to refuse any loads, you know?

Yeah, must be.

Who's the boy?

Must be?

Yeah.

American commerce is built on loads and they're not refusing of them.

And so that leads me to the kind of scary impulse uh on this one which is there is nothing to stop this from happening again like at least on an american carrier yeah i mean well there is one thing to stop it from happening again which would be the retirement of the 747 but uh yeah no other than that yeah this could happen to any other airplane

it's at any time you have the procedure for it is just vibe it out just just strap it down say that's not going anywhere this this this is one of the potential consequences and i mean it's been been a kind of long walk up to that but if you're on a flight and the passenger next to you is an m rap uh get out get out yeah just get out

yeah yeah it's just i mean it's just like obscenity piled on obscenity right like the uh the the whole war to start with um and then the surge and then the existence of mraps and then the drawdown and then the privatizing of this um just all kind of culminates in and like trying to do stuff cheaply and like profiteering and it just leads to like senseless death yeah i mean it it's kind of it's very similar to our last episode in that regard yeah absolutely yeah it's a real kind of futility season um i i guess weird to say i i'd rather do a nice one you know but on on the engineering disasters podcast but jesus christ alas and alas actually uh actually uh what did we learn uh again uh war don't go to afghanistan bro yeah war is bad yeah that's that down downstream of downstream of war is a bunch of other stuff that kind of doesn't really necessarily register other than

never start a land war in Asia.

No.

Yeah.

No.

That's why the God invented the B-52.

See, I'm changing it from the A-10.

Now it's the B-52 that I'm obsessed with.

Shut up, birds.

Well, that's that's the story of National Airlines Flight 102, as best I can tell it.

And thank you to Sam for finding all of the resources for this.

Oh, yeah.

And yeah, thank you to Sam for being our newest employee so that we can eventually

transform this channel into a sort of bunch of personalities talking about, I don't know, ranking

the best fasteners at

where it turns into like passive income and I don't have to do anything.

And yeah, that sounds horrible.

Exactly.

This is this is where we're going.

But before that happens, we have a segment on this podcast called Safety Third.

Shake hands with danger.

All right.

I'm also supposed to say, you too can submit a safety third.

Email us at wtypppod at gmail.com with your safety third.

A safety third is when there was some kind of workplace accident or near accident, which occurred due to your boss or supervisor's,

you know, stupidity or intrans

disregard for your life.

yeah, blatant disregard.

It could be your stupidity as well.

Um, and uh, yeah, keep them to about a page long.

Add some pictures if you want, okay.

Um, yeah, I gotta like actually write a script out for that at some point.

Um, anyway, there, Justin, Nova, Liam, and esteemed guest.

Wrong, our guest was uh, Clipper Problem.

Oh, I'm so sorry, yeah, yeah.

Well, we do esteem also,

yeah, yeah.

Well, I, I, for the amount we're paying, yeah.

As a chemical engineer in the industrial water treatment business, I get to see a wide variety of sites from the heavy industrial mega facilities to the small sites with a few employees, from the safety conscious to the safety stupid.

I've been catching up on this podcast during my drive time.

for the last few years, but only recently did I encounter something so horrifying that I felt it qualifies for a safety third and possibly also an environmental fourth.

A major fifth.

A corporate industrial landlord, yes, this is a thing, contracted with my company to manage the water treatment at a particular facility.

This site is a World War II-era complex that once manufactured a large amount of one thing.

The various buildings are now rented out for manufacturing, warehousing, and even a school.

Oh, no.

Not a school administration building, but a school building building with actual students.

What the fuck?

Where'd you go to school?

Oh, disused industrial wasteland hide.

You guys are to love it now, right?

Oh,

the shop classes are great, though.

Go fighting.

I learned so much

as I leave shop class with four new heads.

Yeah.

My contract is for boilers and cooling systems, but I was asked by the client to look at a sulfuric acid tank that started to leak.

Next to the school.

They wanted my opinion on the best way to remove this tank quickly.

Two maintenance workers who were tasked with this job took me to see this acid tank.

I hear that through the magic of Nova's flappy hard drive mounts, that there are sometimes visual aids accompanying this podcast.

I've not yet unlocked that secret, but if you have, you may now be looking at this tank.

Boom.

Oh, boy.

Okay.

Yeah, that looks

great.

The danger gunk.

It is a several thousand gallon capacity horizontal cylinder split longitudinally with some ooze seeping out and cracks forming along the saddles that support it.

This is a classic case of a steel sulfuric acid tank with an improperly maintained vent line.

Sorry, I keep you awning.

Yeah.

It's okay.

Mild steel becomes passivated by concentrated acid, but dilute acid dissolves the passivation layer.

That's like a little thin layer between the liquid and the actual steel itself, right?

It dissolves the passivation layer.

Aluminum is very good for that, actually.

That's why aluminum doesn't rust, or it does rust.

It's just the rust forms a layer that prevents the rest of it from rusting.

Anyway,

what the fuck?

The loot acid dissolves the passivation layer and rapidly corrodes the base metal.

There is supposed to be a desiccant on the vent line to remove humidity from the atmospheric air that enters the tank.

If this is not maintained,

moisture enters and condenses on the walls of the tank, dissolves acidic gases, and forms a dilute acid on the walls and at the liquid level.

And your tank eats itself.

The tank eats itself, yes.

The maintenance guys tell me that they were planning to prop a ladder against the tank, climb up and sit on top of the tank, unbolt the flange on the man way, and look inside to see what they're dealing with.

Ah, a bunch of acid, probably.

Yeah, I advise them to run like hell from this job, as the tank could crumble under their weight, giving them a very close look at what they're dealing with.

Oh, yeah.

I don't know if you would suffocate, drown, or dissolve first if you fell into this tank when no one was around.

The worst and most likely outcome would be getting rescued, then slowly dying in a hospital bed from the third-degree chemical burns covering your entire body.

Industrial accidents are so cool, you can have legit reasons to fist fight your own rescuers to stop them.

Since I'm a curious guy, I asked them what the acid was used for.

They directed my attention to the adjacent wastewater treatment building.

They had also been tasked with

cleaning up this building and asked if I could test some water for them.

Inside, I saw a typical arrangement of clarifiers, filter presses, mix tanks, and holding tanks.

They were all full of water, probably a few hundred thousand gallons total.

The maintenance guys were debating if this water should be pumped to the storm drain or the sanitary sewer.

They were leaning towards the storm drain since the water, quote, looked so clean, unquote.

I peered down into one of the tanks, and as you may now be seeing, other than some dust at the surface, it was indeed crystal clear water.

You know those experiments with the open radiation source where it would just kill any animal that got within like 500 feet of it and they just the bodies wouldn't rot?

Yep.

Yep.

Yeah.

I asked if the wastewater plant had been shut down recently and they told me no, this system has been out of service for at least a decade, probably much longer.

I peeked into the water so I could see the bottom of the tank.

There was no bacterial slime, no algae, no insects or mosquitoes.

In fact, no signs of life anywhere, which is a bit unusual for decades-old stagnant water.

Since I'm a curious guy, I start looking around the facility a bit more, which is surprisingly devoid of any cobwebs, despite being abandoned for years.

I quickly came across the two labeled pipes, which you can possibly see here are labeled chrome waste and cyanide waste.

Oh, Jesus wept.

I'm sure you've covered the dangers of hexavalent chromium in an episode at some point, and cyanide needs no introduction.

I don't know if we've talked about hexavalent chromium.

chromium.

It's in some old gas mask filters, weirdly.

There's a big spill of it down at Bartram's Garden.

I'll go check it out.

Report back.

Yeah.

Wear a mask, buddy.

Yeah.

I've already gone through it once on my bike.

I didn't see anything.

Oh, God.

I later learned that there was an electroplating operation at this site long ago that apparently disbanded without properly decommissioning their wastewater plant.

I suggested to the maintenance guys they hold off on pumping the water anywhere, as either the storm drain or the sewer would likely lead to the at least temporary and localized extermination of all life in the receiving water body.

Also, we were probably increasing our risk of cancer just by standing in the building.

I wish I had a more satisfying ending, but landlord's gonna landlord.

I can confirm the acid tank was properly and quickly decontaminated and removed by an environmental contractor, but only because the tenants could see it.

Landlords,

particularly this landlord, should be fed to the alarmingly clear water.

Yeah.

The State Department of Environmental Protection is at least aware of the existence of the wastewater plant, but knowing their competency, they may just tell them to adjust the pH and then send it down the drain.

Last I checked, the wastewater plant was still brimming with the cursed crystal clear water.

At least it was last week when I snuck back in to take some pictures since I selfishly ran out of there the first time without proper consideration for safety third, thank you for going back to do some urban exploration on the scariest thing I've ever heard.

Yeah, real investigative journalism, yeah, by the by the hogs.

Well done, from from your pal, the water boy.

I new fear just dropped.

Um,

crystal Pepsi,

exceptionally clear water, like exceptionally clear water.

Well, yeah, watch out for the exceptionally clear water.

Don't go to the Bahamas, folks.

No, no.

Yeah, no,

they figured that out.

That's all hexavalent chromium in

the water next to like, I don't know, the Disney Cruise Island.

I'm not going on the wiki for people who disappeared mysteriously at sea.

Thank you.

Dumping hexavalent chromium into the like fake canals in the Venetian in Venice, in Vegas.

Vegas.

There you go.

Keeps it nice and clean.

The Venetian in Venice.

They had to build a Venetian in Venice.

Many such cases.

And this.

I'm hungry and I want dinner.

That's for the tour.

You know, if they have to, that was safety third.

Good night, everybody.

This one.

Shake hands with danger.

I mean, time crisis.

Get your toes licked by beautiful women.

Oh.

Our next episode will be on Chernobyl.

Does anyone have any commercials before we go?

Yeah.

Donate to Luther and Sullivan House and the dance-a-thon for TV.

And the GoFundMe.

Yes, and the GoFundMe.

And the GoFundMe.

And yeah, subscribe to the Patreon

because we have to fix the jackscrew and

clipper

problem.

Yeah, that was.

They were buying a luxury car.

You know, you get it cheap and then you get way more in maintenance costs.

Yeah, this is going to be.

I think if we got like 90 or like 150,000 more Patreons.

We could do it.

We could probably get this done in the next five years or so.

Fingers crossed.

Still wouldn't get us a gold plaque, though.

Yeah, well,

we'll burn that bridge when we get to it.

All right.

Well, that was the podcast.

Beautiful.

Good night, everyone.

Bye.