Original subtitles

3000.

We're not getting any oxygen.

We are in an emergency.

Modern airliners are among the most

complex and reliable machines in common use.

But occasionally, delays in fixing a known defect have led to disaster.

This is a story of one of the most terrifying

and avoidable accidents in recent history.

When a 747 suffered a devastating explosion at high altitude,

the crew and passengers faced an unprecedented crisis.

It is also a story of how one family's grief

led to a relentless investigation

to uncover the full, disturbing truth.

Lee can't have died for nothing.

You know, you've got to find out why he died

and you've got to make sure that it never happens again.

And it reveals how other known problems in aircraft design

have continued to go uncorrected

causing further avoidable accidents.

So would I be surprised if it happened again?

I would be surprised if it didn't happen again.

It is a matter of time.

One of the most shocking cases of a known design flaw

being ignored for years would finally take its toll

on the United Airlines 747

bound from Honolulu to Auckland, New Zealand.

As flight 811 prepared for take-off,

the crew were concerned with another kind of threat

that had recently led to tragedy.

We were in the aftermath of Lockarbee.

And I had instructed the crew to be particularly aware

because it was a through flight from Los Angeles

going through to New Zealand.

So in my pre-flight briefing,

I had asked them to make sure that they checked any baggage

that looked suspicious or anything because we wanted to be extra cautious.

Flight 811 was heavily loaded.

337 passengers, packed cargo holds, and a full fuel load.

The doors closed on time and the plane left the gate

just before 2 o'clock in the morning

for a routine 8-hour flight.

Well, we were going to New Zealand on vacation.

Someplace that we had really thought was interesting.

And somebody had told us how beautiful it was,

so this was kind of a dream come true.

I was seated in what's called the upper deck.

I hadn't had a vacation in five years

and I took all my MileagePlus points from United Airlines

and I purchased a business-class ticket

to Auckland, New Zealand, and Sydney, Australia.

I was going to finally make that dream vacation

I'd always wanted, to get to Australia

and lie on a beach somewhere,

and forget about airplanes, forget about accidents

and get this out of my mind for a while.

On the flight deck, Captain Dave Cronin was hugely experienced.

Just two months short of retirement.

Rotate.

I flew almost 35 years with United.

I've got over 30 000 hours of flight time

in just about everything. Military as well as civilian.

My co-pilot or first officer was Al Slaytor.

And I've known Al at that time for probably 20 years.

And the second officer, Mark Thomas,

it was the first time I had flown with him,

but we got along real well.

Tell them we can handle 33,

if it's available. - Okay.

The pilots wanted to climb to 33 000 feet

above the Pacific Ocean to avoid turbulence from bad weather.

We did notice that there were thunderstorms

a hundred miles south right on course,

which is rather unusual for that time of night,

so I left the seat belt sign on.

Capt Cronin's decision to keep people fastened in their seats

would save the lives of many.

We were still climbing out and the seatbelt sign was still on.

And uh... just basically getting ready

to serve beverages, and then to tuck everyone in for the evening

because it was going to be a long flight down to New Zealand.

Okay, tell them we are going to detour over to the left.

Centre? United 811 heavy.

We're going to be detouring over some weather here.

It will be to the left, of course.

100 miles from Honolulu,

as flight 811 climbed through 23 000 feet,

a critical malfunction was about to occur.

There was now a huge air pressure difference

between the inside and outside of the aircraft.

Suddenly, passengers sitting just above

and behind the cargo door heard a noise.

There was kind of a grinding noise.

I heard like a thud.

What the hell?

In the next nanosecond,

it was pure unadulterated pandemonium.

- We lost number three. - Going down.

It looks like we've lost number three engine.

And we are descending rapidly.

Coming back.

The next thing I knew, I found myself on the stairwell

hanging onto the rungs

and I immediately knew it was an explosive decompression.

The cargo door had torn off

and ripped a huge section of the plane with it.

The pressurized air inside blasted out

with explosive force.

I immediately thought of Lockarbee.

We actually thought it was a bomb that went off.

It was hell on earth.

Everything on the airplane that wasn't fastened down,

tied down, or secured became airborne.

The noise was incredible.

Everything in front of us was gone.

Where we were sitting, we were about six inches from the hole.

So, there was nothing in front of us or to the side of us.

The whole side of the plane was gone.

Actually, our feet were dangling on the hole.

And I first thought we weren't going to make it.

I just didn't think there was any hope.

With the pressurized air blown out,

the lack of oxygen at 23 000 feet

was now suffocating the passengers and the crew.

It felt like someone had kicked me in the stomach.

Knocked the wind out of me.

And I remember trying to catch my breath...

and couldn't.

We were re supposed to grab those oxygen masks and put them on.

Except those oxygen masks in that cabin,

they were ripped out of the ceiling and they weren't there.

And... I remember thinking to myself:

"This is what it feels like to suffocate."

United 811 heavy.

We are doing an emergency decent.

The pilots could tell from their instruments

that the number 3 engine was failing,

but they couldn't tell the full extent of the damage.

Their priority was to get the plane down to a level

where they could breathe normally.

Put your mask on, Dave.

But the pilots didn't know that the explosion

had destroyed the entire oxygen supply.

Can't get any oxygen.

We're not getting any oxygen.

You getting any? - I can't get any either.

With the plane heading steeply down

and no word from the cockpit,

the cabin crew feared the worst.

I remember thinking that the cockpit,

which is in the upper deck,

had probably blown off the airplane too.

Because as far up as we could see, there was nothing there.

Now we're doing this... nose dive,

my next thought was:

Oh my God, we're just going straight down.

We're just going to crash into the sea."

With its airframe ruptured,

severe damage to the right wing and engines

and the crew forcing it down in an emergency decent,

the problems on Flight 811 had only just begun.

Two minutes after suffering

a devastating explosive decompression,

Flight 811 was still in a steep emergency decent

passing rapidly through 15 000 feet

to reach breathable air.

United 811 heavy. State your altitude now.

Even 15. United 811 heavy.

We're on a 15.5.

United 811. Roger.

I think we blew a door or something.

Tell the flight attendant to get prepared for an evacuation.

The crew finally began to level out at a safer altitude.

But they now faced a barrage of problems.

The most immediate was the disintegration

of the number 3 engine nearest to the explosion.

We don't have any fire indications?

I... I don't have anything.

Okay, we lost number 3.

Let's shut it down.

Yeah, okay.

Ready for number 3. Shut down checklist.

Number 3... Before you shut down number 3,

the generator went off.

It looks alright to try it now.

Well, that stopped the vibration anyway.

Fuel jettison procedure.

Main boost pumps. On.

Centre. United 811.

We need the equipment standing by,

company notified please.

We got a control problem.

Centre wing, left right valves, on.

- Start dumping the fuel. - I am dumping.

One stewardess had been seriously injured by falling debris.

As Laura Brentlinger helped her,

the full gravity of their situation suddenly became clear.

As I am holding her in my arms,

I looked up and as I looked up,

that was the first time I saw this tremendous hole

on the side of the aircraft that was just a void,

and seats were missing and I immediately knew

that we had lost passengers.

Five rows of seats had been blown out

in the decompression, killing nine passengers.

On the flight deck, the crew had turned

the stricken plane back to Honolulu,

but with 80 miles still to go,

the crisis now got far worse.

We got a helluva control problem here.

I got almost full rudder on this thing.

Are you dumping as fast as you can?

I'm dumping everything.

We got a problem with number 4 engine?

Yeah.

Debris from the explosion

had also damaged the number 4 engine.

If it fell completely, the implications were severe.

If you're on two engines

and you weigh 700 pounds, that is a big deal.

Simply because with that kind of weight,

two engines are not going to keep you in the air.

You are going to come down.

- Can you maintain 240? - Just barely.

We're losing altitude.

I know it.

Centre. United 811 heavy.

Do you have a fix on us?

Affirmative, sir, I have you on radar.

Okay, we've lost engine number 3

and we don't have full power on engine number 4.

We can't hold altitude right now.

We're dumping fuel so... 811 heavy, roger.

I see you're 60 miles south of Honolulu at this time.

Roger.

I haven't talked to anybody yet.

I can't get to them.

You want me to go downstairs and take a look?

Yeah, let's see what's happening down there.

I think we lost a compressor, but--

Can't hold... can't hold altitude.

- I told them that-- - Get some axe on there.

I got to take off power on this thing.

Whatever you need, Captain.

Although their number 4 engine was failing,

the pilots pushed it, along with the remaining engines to full power.

A setting they should not be running for more than four minutes.

But the nearest land was 50 minutes away.

I look out the window on the right-hand side

and I see flames, big flames.

And I know what flames in an engine means.

It's not good.

The pilots were unaware

that the number 4 engine was now on fire.

You've got 250 knots now, that's good.

7000...

Yeah. We're getting more rumble.

Watch your heading, watch your heading,

you want to go direct to Honolulu.

Okay. I'm gonna go downstairs

and see what the hell is going on.

Go ahead and run down and see what's happening.

I saw the flight engineer descend down the stairwell.

And when I saw him, my relief was:

"Oh my God, they're alive."

And there was a huge sense of relief for me.

He saw the hole and turned as white as a sheet.

And I screamed to him: "Dear God, please get us down."

We got a fire out there.

Oh yeah. We got a fire on number 4.

Go through the procedure.

Shut down the engine.

We're not gonna be able to hold this altitude on two.

We got a fire on the right side.

We're on two engines now.

The whole right side is just gone

from about the one right back to uh... It's just open.

You're just looking outside.

- What do you mean? - It looks like a bomb.

- Fuselage? - Yeah, the fuselage.

It's just... It's just open.

Okay, it looks like we've got a bomb

that went off on the right side.

The whole right side is gone.

Yeah, from about the one right back to uh...

Anybody...

Some people are probably gone, I don't know.

I knew that we had lost people.

I didn't know how many.

In fact, I didn't know until the next day

how many were lost.

But...

You know, it's a terrible thing

when you're a captain of an airplane

and you lose passengers.

Lee Campbell flying home to New Zealand

was sitting in row 10 just in front of the cargo door.

I woke up with such a start

because I had seen Lee standing by the bed.

Just with a gray jacket over his arm

and a small smile on his face.

Of course as I woke up, it had faded. He was not there.

And when we woke up in the morning, we discussed this.

I said, it was strange, in the night.

It was such a vivid dream, Lee was standing there.

And then, the radio came on

and the first item of news

was that there'd been a problem with the United aircraft.

And I said, that was Lee. That's Lee's.

And my blood just ran cold.

I knew he was dead from that moment.

Centre, do you read?

We evidently had a bomb or something.

A big section of the right side of the airplane is missing.

United 811 heavy, roger.

I wouldn't go any faster than I had to.

Because that pull... I mean, I wouldn't get it over 250 knots

because that's a big-- - Okay. What's our stall speed?

- I wouldn't go below 240. - Yeah.

I don't know if we're going to make this.

We didn't know that we were going to make it back.

So we were actually preparing to ditch that plane at night

in the Pacific Ocean which has never been done before.

In the cabin, the crew prepared for the worst.

My training kicked in and I got up from my jump seat

and started instructing the crew

that we have to prepare the cabin.

We have to... prepare for a ditching

which I thought was inevitable.

We were running around getting life vests on

and I do remember thinking:

"I am not sure this is going to matter

because when we hit the water,

you know, I just imagine the plane is going to split apart."

I knew that if we hit the water,

it would be tantamount to hitting the ground

and there would be very few if any survivors,

so my mind went to...

...the things that meant something to me

and at that point in my life, it was my son.

Believing they were going to die,

one passenger took these photographs,

in the hope they'd be found in the wreckage

and give clues to the cause of the crash.

For 15 minutes, the plane steadily lost altitude.

Then, at 4000 feet, the first glimmer of hope.

After an imponderable time, I remember,

one of the passengers began to point

out one of the windows on the right side.

And everybody looked

and we looked through this little window

from wherever we were,

and we could see a point of light.

And another point of light, and another point...

And pretty soon, you could make out a coastline.

Okay, I got lights over here.

Okay.

Okay.

We're at 4, we're 21 miles out.

We're in good shape.

At Honolulu airport, an emergency was declared.

All other aircraft were diverted

and the rescue services prepared for the crash landing

of a fully loaded airliner.

You want to give me some speeds?

Yeah.

150 is going to be your 2 engine.

Use 160.

I need souls on board if you have it?

Okay, souls on board.

- 160 is the minimum. - Standby, United 811 heavy.

I don't know how many are on board.

200 and uh... I don't have the paperwork in front of me here.

Uh, we're too busy right now.

200 and something.

Okay.

Six minutes from the airport.

The crew now had to slow the overweight plane for landing.

But the effect of this was unknown.

What's going to happen when I start coming out

with flaps and landing gear,

we're either going to land on the airport,

in the water or downtown Honolulu.

Okay, we'll try ten.

Okay, inboards are coming at ten.

How do the controls feel?

Alright, so far.

But the flaps were damaged and could not fully extend.

This meant that flight 811

would have to land dangerously fast.

United 811 heavy.

Do you have the airport in sight?

It's over here to the right, Captain.

- Okay. - Okay, we have the airport.

United 811 heavy.

811 is cleared to land 8 left.

Equipment standing by.

Wind is 0-5-0-1-2.

Clear to land.

8 left. United 811 heavy.

As the unstable 747 lined up for landing,

the pilots knew they would only have one attempt.

But even if they got it on the runway,

the nagging question remained:

would the stress of impact cause the damaged

and overweight aircraft to disintegrate?

Severely damaged with an unstable airframe

and losing altitude on just two engines,

Flight 811 now began its final approach to Honolulu airport.

Two engine approach.

Two engine approach.

We still had no idea how far off the ground we were,

if we were going to make it to Honolulu or not.

But that seemed like an appropriate time

if we were somewhere around land,

that we're probably going to try and land somewhere,

to get the passengers in their brace positions.

So that's when we started yelling

for them to get down in their brace positions.

Every molecule in my body combined to express:

Get this damn airplane on the ground.

How we doing on the hydraulics?

Hydraulics are... good.

Have we got brakes?

Normal hydraulics.

So, we've got brakes, but we're only going to have

reversing on one and two.

Though I thought maybe there was a chance

that we were going to actually be able to attempt to land,

the thought came to my mind:

"What happens now, on impact, do we explode?

Do we fall off this huge hole?"

Despite dumping fuel,

the aircraft was still critically overweight.

But without full flaps to keep it in the air,

it had to approach fast.

1000 down.

The danger was that the under carriage

could shear off and the plane break up.

A dot and half high.

190...

185...

A little slow, a little slow, Dave.

It's below what we want.

Coming up on the glide slope.

Okay.

Now, let's try the gear.

No one knew if the explosion had damaged the landing gear.

I remember Laura saying to me

that she didn't hear the landing gear go down.

And it was loud. It was still loud.

And I didn't hear the landing gear go down.

So that's another thought:

"Maybe they can't get their landing gear down.

Maybe it's not down."

I've got...

Gear down and we're clear to land

and everything is taken care of, as far as we know.

200.

195.

Half a dot high.

Looking... Looking good.

192.

195.

I'm off on the power.

100 feet.

50 feet.

Set other trim. Set other trim.

30...

10...

Zero.

We're on.

Gear's holding.

We landed. It felt fast.

And that was my next concern,

that we weren't going to stop at the end of the runway,

that we were just going to keep going.

And all of a sudden, we were slowing down,

slowing down and I said,

"Oh my God, we've landed, we're on the ground.

And the people started applauding.

Probably the best landing I've ever made.

When we finally stopped on the runway,

we deployed all the ten shoots

and the flight attendants evacuated all the passengers.

It's amazing how fast everyone went.

My understanding is that in less than 45 seconds,

330 people were off the airplane.

We were probably 20 feet off the ground

and I would have stepped out of that airplane without a slide.

I wanted to get off so bad.

Fortunately, there was a slide, I stepped into the abyss,

fell into the slide, whooshed down to the bottom of the thing.

And then, you hit, feet running.

The slide kind of kicked me up

and flew me up into the air and my thought was:

"Oh my God, I am going to survive this whole thing

and I am going to get wiped out here

on the evacuation," because it just really threw me.

And I landed and scraped up my legs pretty badly

and landed on my feet and it wasn't until that moment

that I had the sense of,

"I am here. I'm okay. I'm on the ground."

When we got all our switches off,

I ran through the airplane to make sure there was

no one else on the airplane, came up to the door one left,

I went down the slide and came around the front

and I saw that humungous hole

on the side and I just couldn't believe it.

By the grace of God, we made it.

And it was an awesome experience.

I would never want to go through that again.

It was crazy, it was wild,

it was scary all at the same time.

Um...

I just thought that that was the end

and we were going to die.

I mean, that was my first thought, that this is the end.

But for the families of the nine people

who were killed,

the ordeal was only beginning.

Kevin and Susan Campbell's son, Lee, had been flying home.

About 3 o'clock in the afternoon,

I think they said that there was no New Zealanders involved,

but we just knew that it was Lee.

And then, about, I suppose, a quarter of an hour later,

we got a phone call from Chicago

and they just said that they regret to inform us

that our son was missing, presumed dead.

And I guess about another hour after that,

a policeman arrived at the door

and he took one look at us and he says:

"I can see that you've had the news."

So um... it was just an awful, awful day.

And it certainly didn't get much better for a long, long time.

Although Lee's body had not been recovered,

the Campbells' flew straight

to the wrecked aircraft in Honolulu.

Your initial feeling is that you want to be as close

to the spot where your relative died.

And that was the aircraft.

So we had to immediately go and see the aircraft.

The damage inside was horrific.

Just... a total mess.

And the hole in the side of the aircraft

was much bigger than I had thought it would be,

even though we had seen television newsreel reports.

And it was so sad to get in

and actually see where Lee's seat had been.

The legs of the seat were still there.

There was a good bit of fuselage beside him.

And still a window.

But the Campbell's desire to find the cause of Lee's death

inevitably brought them face to face with dreadful details.

They took us to the medical examiner's office as well...

because they had found body parts and that sort of thing.

So...

They didn't actually show us the body parts,

but they showed us bits and pieces

they had recovered from the engines.

And we got the medical examiner's report

on what they had recovered.

So, we really would have preferred that it was Lee

that went through the engine

because it would have been an immediate death,

whereas it was a four-minute fall down to the ocean

and we know that the people could have been alive

as they were falling,

and when you think about that, that is just horrific.

As it became clear that their son's body would never be found,

the Campbells' need to find the cause of the accident

that killed him grew stronger.

Lee can't have died for nothing.

You've got to find out why he died.

And you just gotta make sure that it never happens again.

The Campbells embarked on a relentless

personal investigation that would last nearly two years.

The loss of their son meant they would stop at nothing to uncover the truth.

The engines number three and four...

Two months after the accident on Flight 811,

when the National Transportation Safety Board

held preliminary hearings,

the Campbells made sure they were there.

But they soon grew frustrated.

The NTSB would not complete its report for months.

So the Campbells took matters into their own hands.

We certainly weren't going to leave it to the NTSB

to come up with the findings, we were going to follow through.

And when the hearings ended, they had said that we could take

whatever we wanted off the press table

and Susan walked up to the top table and said:

"Oh, there's a really good set up here."

So, grabbed a box

and loaded all of the documents we could find up there.

Kevin's the most honest of people, I know,

but here he was taking something

that we hadn't specifically been told we could take.

And we were heading out the door, just as the NTSB

were arriving back in with a trolley to pick up all the documents.

So we were out the door and into a taxi and gone.

So we quickly realized

we had got a really good set of papers.

With a lot of things that hadn't been released to the public.

We were able to really start our investigation

in earnest at that stage.

The unpublished documents

revealed a disturbing catalogue of problems

with the forward cargo door,

going right back to its original design.

Instead of a plugged door that gets jammed into its frame as the aircraft pressurizes,

Boeing opted for an outward opening door.

This allowed for more cargo space,

but was not fail-safe like the plug design.

So Boeing built what they believed

was a fool-proof locking mechanism.

What they do is they built in multiple redundancies

to make sure the door is properly latched

and does not open.

And you build it in to a point

that is extremely improbable that the door would ever open.

So what went wrong on Flight 811?

The Campbells soon discovered that the problem

lay in the design of the locking mechanism.

To lock the cargo door on the 747,

electric motors rotate C-shaped latches

around pins in the door frame.

A handle then moves arms known as locking sectors

over top of the C-latches to prevent them from re-opening.

But as early as 1975,

problems were found with the locking sectors.

Kevin Campbell, an engineer by training,

built a model to show the weakness in the Boeing design.

Initially, the locking sectors were made in aluminum,

and in 1975, Boeing realized that they weren't strong enough.

And they actually doubled up the aluminum

to make it double thickness.

But it still wasn't strong enough

and a lot of the airlines

didn't even put the doublers on anyway.

The weakness of the aluminum

drastically increased the risk

of the door accidentally opening.

With the aluminum locking sectors,

if the C-locks tried to back wind,

open electrically,

it would just push the locking sector out of the way.

It simply wasn't up to the job it was designed for.

For 20 years, 747s have been flying

with this crucial weakness.

The Campbells wondered what else remained to be revealed.

They redoubled their efforts to uncover the full truth

behind the accident that had killed their son.

We bought a car and set off in the United States

to see as many people who were involved with the accident as possible.

We started at Seattle, down to Denver,

across to Chicago, through to Washington DC,

down to Kentucky, on to Miami,

and back across to San Diego,

back up through San Francisco and back to Seattle.

And that was just one trip.

The Campbells soon found that a shockingly similar incident

to Flight 811 had given clear warnings

of the dangers in the cargo door.

In 1987, two years before flight 811,

a PAN AM 747 had been climbing out of Heathrow

when it failed to pressurize at 20 000 feet.

The pilots had to turn back.

When they got back to Heathrow,

they found out the door was hanging open an inch and a half

at the bottom and all of the locks were open.

When they got to the maintenance base,

they found that all of the locking sectors

were either bent or broken.

Why had the C-latches turned

and bent back the locking sectors?

Boeing claimed that the ground crew

must have mishandled the mechanism.

The door had been closed manually

and what they said happened was that the guy wound

the C-latch closed, 98 turns of a speed wrench.

He closed the... outer handle

and then wound it open again.

And to be in the position that they were found in

when the aircraft got back,

he would have had to wind them open 98 turns.

And this is just absolutely ridiculous.

But the Campbells' investigation uncovered

another vital clue to why the C-latches are turned.

A report by PAN AM engineers

highlighted problems with the doors' electrical system.

It had a fault in the S2 master lock switch,

that should have turned off the power to the door

when the outer handle was closed.

This was an alarming finding.

When the outer handle was closed,

the S2 master lock switch was meant to disconnect

the power supply and stop the C-latch motors from turning.

So could this have failed,

allowing the motors to open the door?

To find out, Boeing asked the airlines to do a simple test.

Close the outer handle, then press the switch

to open the door and see what happens.

When they hit the switch, it actually worked

and Boeing thought this is not going to work.

But it actually worked.

There was power to the door locks

with the outer handle closed,

and the lock started to move

and it started to force

the locking sectors out of the way.

And a few days later,

the airline started ringing in

and saying it was damaging their planes.

So Boeing stopped the test.

But it meant that on those aircraft,

the S2 switch had failed which is a silent failure.

And all of those aircraft

were likely to have the same problem as 811.

They were just waiting for a short circuit to open the doors.

The Campbells now became convinced that the accident

on Flight 811 began with a failure of the S2 switch.

Power remained on to the C-latch motors.

All it took was a short circuit in the 20-year-old wiring

which had been found to be frayed on other aircraft to start the motors up.

The aluminum locking sectors were too weak

to stop the latches turning and the cargo door burst open.

The National Transportation Safety Board determines

that the probable cause of this accident...

After waiting a year for the NTSB report,

Kevin and Susan Campbell expected it to match

their theory of what had led to the accident on Flight 811.

I assumed that we would have a report come out

that this was an electrical malfunction.

And we were staggerd when they came out

and said that the door had been mishandled.

The report focussed entirely on the fact

that the door lock must've been mishandled by the ramp attendant.

That was disappointing and we felt

that they must've been at a different hearing

from the one we were at.

So how had the NTSB come to their conclusion?

There was other evidence that we had found

during our investigation of improper procedures

by the United mechanics and ramp people.

So we were convinced that there was,

we could use the word "abuse", being done on the doors.

The doors were sort of abused

and weren't maintained very well.

We concluded that the probable cause was mechanical.

For the Campbells, the NTSB's failure to mention

the electrical problems just wasn't good enough.

What they said happened was,

the door was closed,

the locks didn't fully close,

they just partially closed, just hanging on... the pins.

And then they closed the outer handle,

but that simply can't happen

because that part of the locking sector is still intact.

It just simply cannot happen.

You can't close the outer handle

unless these are in the fully locked position.

It's the only way that the outer handle will close.

And just closing this manually,

you can't exert enough force to actually damage

this part of the locking sector.

All it does is just butts up against there.

If the locks aren't fully closed,

it just simply butts up against them

and goes no further.

They went back to investigating the accident on Flight 811.

And soon found disturbing evidence

of how it could and should have been prevented.

After the PAN AM incident in 1987,

it turned out that Boeing had issued a directive

to the airlines on how to correct

the weak aluminum locking sectors.

The airworthiness directive that came out

was to replace the aluminum sectors with steel sectors

that could not be bent.

And there was some additionally interim requirements

for inspections to be performed until what they call

the terminating action, the steal sectors were installed.

The fix was cheap and simple, but getting it done was not.

The actual cost of the modification,

changing these locking sectors to steel

was 2 000 US dollars per aircraft,

but it took ten hours to do it.

And that's where the money was...

Taking these aircrafts out of service for ten hours.

That's millions of dollars.

The Campbells found that back in 1987,

the Federal Aviation Admin, who were meant

to enforce improvements,

had given the airlines 18 months

to comply with the modification.

Within a year, Lee Campbell and eight others would die

in an avoidable accident.

So why weren't the airlines

forced to fix the problem sooner?

If these airplanes, these large commercial airplanes,

are grounded,

it's an economic disaster.

So what they do is they lobby

with the regulatory agency,

in the United States, it's the FAA,

to allow them to do the fixes over time,

when the airplanes are in for normal maintenance.

And that way, they are not taken out of service.

But when they do that, when they allow the airlines,

the air carriers and the manufacturers to fix these over time,

in essence what the FAA is doing

is gambling with the lives of the passengers and the crew

that are flying the airplanes

during the time they are not fixed.

After the deaths on flight 811,

the FAA instantly shortened the deadline

for fixing the cargo door from 18 months to just 30 days.

It was only when United had gone from one of the airlines

of first resort to one of the airlines of last resort

in New Zealand that they... just totally out of the blue,

we got a letter inviting us over to see them.

And when we got there, they were just going to do a PR exercise on us.

But we just laid into them,

pointed out where they had got it wrong.

And you could see them changing during it

to realizing that we did know what we were talking about.

That we had put a lot of serious effort into it.

One of them actually broke down.

Because they'd never had to meet next of kin before.

And it ended up with the Vice President of United

taking us around the maintenance facility.

And he had people running off in all directions,

just to get the information that we wanted,

getting questions answered.

We could go anywhere that we wanted.

And we just... Everything was laid on for us

because at that stage they realised

that we really did know what we were talking about.

The pressure of the Campbells' campaign

eventually began to pay off.

The vital piece of evidence that could prove them right,

the cargo door, still lay two miles down in the Pacific Ocean.

But as articles appeared in the American press,

the NTSB commissioned the US Navy to search for it.

A hundred miles south of Honolulu,

a deep submersible began to trawl the sea bed.

We went to Honolulu.

And waited there while they had their attempts.

And they finally recovered the door

from 14 000 feet of water

which was the deepest recovery ever at that time.

And we were phoned within an hour of it coming out of the water.

But before the Campbells could see it,

the door was swiftly removed to Boeing's plant in Seattle.

The Campbells went in hot pursuit.

We went over to Boeing and they wouldn't show it to us.

So, they reckoned that the crucial pieces

had gone to the NTSB.

So again, we got in the car

and drove across to Washington DC.

We arrived at Ron Leesh's office.

And Ron looks at his watch and he says,

"I can give you 5 minutes."

So, about three hours later,

we had the pieces that were recovered in our hand.

And they acknowledged that we were definitely correct,

it was an electrical malfunction.

And they said they would fix the planes,

they would make sure it never happened again,

but just don't hold your breath

that the report would ever be changed.

Even with the evidence of an electrical malfunction

in their hands, the NTSB refused to change their report.

Then, in June 1991, fate intervened.

A four-year-old United 747

was sitting on the apron in New York,

when the C-latch motor started up and the door opened itself.

There was no way that they could hide it any longer.

They simply couldn't deny

that it was an electrical malfunction

that was covering it.

Finally, the NTSB publicly issued a revised report

that concurred with the Campbells' version.

There was an inadvertent failure of either the switch

or the wiring that caused an uncommanded opening of the door.

It's nice that other people know that you are right

and had been all along

and the support that they were giving you was vindicated.

The Campbells spent thousands of dollars of their own money

on their campaign.

They were never interested in a financial settlement

for Lee's death, but they did persuade

United and Boeing to set up

a university scholarship in his name.

I couldn't have lived with myself

if we had done no investigating ourselves.

It was just something we both felt we needed to do.

We didn't even discuss it.

We just knew that's what we would do.

Yeah.

But despite long and public campaigns

like that of the Campbells',

critics fear that the airline industry

has not learned the lessons from Flight 811.

The regulatory agencies, they have a dual charge.

One is to encourage aviation

and the other is aviation safety.

And when you get into a position

where you have economics up against air safety,

they tend to err on the side of economics rather than safety.

Serious accidents caused by known defects have continued to occur.

In the 1990s, known problems with icing on aircraft wings

caused a series of crashes.

At least three planes have had fatal fails

due to known dangers from flammable insulation material.

And in 1996, a fully laden 747 blew itself up

when known faults in the wiring

are thought to have ignited flammable vapours

in the fuel tanks.

Inevitably, experts are skeptical

about the aviation industry's record

of balancing profit against prevention.

We've seen the wiring problem in both United 811

which eventually turned out to be the cause of that accident,

and also in TWA 800 where we had an explosion in the fuel tank.

The industry's answer to 20 and 30-year-old wiring...

And when the wiring can fray, break, crack, cause a short,

which can either ignite fuel like in TWA 800,

or open a cargo door like in United 811.

What the industry says:

"Don't touch it.

Don't go in there. Don't inspect it.

Don't try to fix it. Don't try to remove it.

Because it is so brittle

that if you go in there to try to fix it,

you're gonna do more damage than you can do good."

And that's what I call the ostrich approach

to maintenance and safety.

You know, we've decided that you can have

a spark of ignition in a fuel tank of a large air carrier.

But so far, we've been lucky,

we've only had one every ten years.

We've only blown up three or four airplanes.

You know, to go in and replace this wiring,

to ground all these airplanes,

would be astronomically expensive.

You know, one airplane every ten years,

one airplane every five years,

200 or 300 people... Cost of doing business.

Cost of doing business.

And that's a great economic analysis

and unless your mother or your child

is on board one of these airplanes

that happens to pay the price for their economic satisfaction.

For some of the survivors of Flight 811

the cost has been heavy.

Each crew member handled it differently.

I know that there are still two crew members

that have never set foot on an aircraft again.

It was very difficult for me.

I was diagnosed with severe post-traumatic stress disorder.

You can't reason, you can't think,

making the slightest decision is... very difficult.

You are just at a total loss.

So it was very difficult to cope with.

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