Original subtitles

A 747 plummets towards the Pacific Ocean.

People just popped up like popcorn.

Engines 1, 2 and 3 have lost thrust!

This airplane is totally out of control.

It is going to crash.

In two minutes, China Airlines Flight 006 drops

10 kilometers through the clouds.

Airspeed 2-seventy... 2-eighty... 2-ninety.

The plane begins to tear itself apart

as it spirals toward the sea.

I closed my eyes. I thought I was gone.

Altitude 15-thousand feet... 12-thousand feet...

10-thousand feet... Emergency... Emergency.

February the 19th, 1985.

A China Airlines flight

cruises across the Pacific to Los Angeles.

At 12-thousand metres, it's racing towards the dawn.

For the passengers and crew on board, it's past midnight.

A two-man relief crew is in charge of the plane...

as it sails above the ocean on autopilot.

The main crew get several hours off in the middle of the trip

so they're rested for the landing.

But Captain Mmyuan Ho is restless.

Good morning gentlemen.

Even though he's not officially on duty yet,

Captain Ho returns to the cockpit.

Thought I'd keep you company.

The Captain isn't the only one up.

Best friends Seksan Caniyo

and Alex Noll have something to celebrate.

I feel like I'm in first class.

It's Seksan's 30th birthday.

I had the longest birthday

because I just gained my twelve hours back.

We'd been drinking champagne, celebrating,

forty-one thousand feet in the air.

You know, not too many people get to do that.

Bill Peacock is in first class.

He's traveled all over the world for the American government.

There was nothing special.

It was a routine commercial flight.

I had a very nice first class seat.

Sat there and read some books. Went to sleep.

By now, the plane is nearing the coast of California.

Good morning ladies and gentlemen.

We will shortly be serving you breakfast.

For those of you who wish to adjust your watches,

the local time in Los Angeles is now seven a.m.

Sleep well?

Very well, sir. Thank you.

Good morning captain.

After their five-hour break,

the flight crew is reunited in the cockpit.

Soon after, the plane runs into some stiff winds.

Ladies and gentlemen, this is your captain speaking.

We're experiencing some light air turbulence.

Please fasten your seat belts.

The autopilot is set to keep the plane

flying at 4-hundred and 70 kilometres an hour.

But with the wind blowing hard,

it's increasingly difficult to maintain the speed.

For the crew, the bumpy ride suddenly gets more worrying.

Engine four is giving us weak thrust.

There's a problem with one of the engines.

The flight engineer throttles up the engine.

But it doesn't respond. We're losing speed.

Back in economy,

Seksan Caniyo has also noticed something.

You notice the light on that wing

isn't flashing anymore.

So what?

I thought there was some light

blinking at the tip of the wing.

It looked like a cone.

But when I looked back this time, I didn't see no cone.

Well, the light on that wing is still flashing.

I think you've had a few buddy. Have a seat.

In the cockpit,

the strange situation suddenly gets much worse.

Engine four flamed out.

The fourth engine stops working completely.

Take a look at the engine out procedures.

Work out a 3-engine cruise altitude.

The problem with the fourth engine

isn't a complete surprise.

At the pre-flight briefing, Captain Ho was told that

a repair crew had worked on engine four before the flight.

Perhaps the engine still wasn't working properly.

We had a SNAG Advisory on engine four

before we took off - maybe that's it.

Without the fourth engine,

the plane continues to slow down.

Airspeed 2-forty.

Call Oakland Center and request a lower altitude.

Oakland Center. Dynasty 006.

Requesting new altitude.

Dynasty 006. Standby.

Re-ignite engine four. Yes captain.

At this altitude, there isn't much oxygen,

so the chances of a successful relight are slim.

No response captain.

As the crew try to restart their engine,

their plane slowly begins to roll to the right.

Dynasty 006, you are cleared to Flight 2-forty.

We're banking right, captain. Airspeed 2-thirty.

As the plane continues to turn and slow down,

it's in danger of stalling.

Altitude, hold off. Nose down.

Hoping to increase his speed,

Captain Ho tries pushing the plane's nose down.

Nothing the crew does seems to help.

Their jet is banking more and more steeply.

Dynasty, Flight 006. Oakland Center.

How do you hear me? Air speed 2-twenty!

We're banking right captain! I'm disengaging autopilot.

For the first time,

Captain Ho takes manual control of the plane.

Seatbelts!

He struggles with the controls.

But the plane has veered into thick cloud.

And he can't see the horizon as he tries to keep his jet level.

I've lost ADI!

The ADIs have malfunctioned!

It's going out of limits!

Just minutes after their fourth engine stopped

working, the China Airlines flight suddenly stalls

and begins falling from the sky.

People just popped up like popcorn, hitting the cabin.

And all the tray was flying, hot teapot, noodles...

And all the luggage from the compartments was hitting people.

You could hear rivets popping.

It sounded like bullets were hitting

the outside of the aircraft.

Which, you know, we're out in the middle of the ocean.

Nobody's shooting at us.

At that time, we didn't know

if we were gonna live or die.

China Airlines flight 006 is out of control,

and hurtling towards the ocean.

A China Airlines jet is tumbling out of the sky.

After losing power to one engine,

the jet is spinning out of control.

It's dropping fast, straight towards the Pacific Ocean.

You can see the stewardesses, all these

people who didn't have their seatbelts on, they were flying.

Dynasty 006, Oakland Center, how do you hear me?

The crew are stunned -

blind-sided by their jet's bizarre behavior.

Engines one, two and three have lost thrust!

No response captain!

Dynasty 006, Oakland Center, how do you hear me?

Air speed 2-seventy... 2-eighty... 2-ninety!

Dynasty 006, Oakland Center, how do you hear me?

Struggling against the plane's wild motion,

the flight engineer tries again to restart his fourth engine.

Ignition negative!

The G-forces are so powerful

that the flight engineer is pinned to the control pedestal.

Dynasty 006, Oakland Center, do you copy?

You need to see this.

In Oakland, Air Traffic control spots

the plane's sudden descent.

In a matter of seconds,

the plane falls almost three thousand metres.

Altitude, 3-7-0... 3-6-0... 3-5-0!

In the cabin, the G-forces are punishing.

I closed my eyes. I thought I was gone.

I thought the plane just blew up in the mid-air.

The plane is about to exceed its maximum speed.

Approaching VMO!

Tumbling madly through the clouds,

the 747 finally starts to pull out of its nosedive.

As the plane rights itself, the G-forces change direction.

The passengers are pressed to the floor,

feeling five times their normal weight.

I remember looking over at this dignified older

Chinese gentleman who was sitting across the aisle

from me and his face was being contorted like this,

like he was lying on his side in a wax museum in a fire.

I mean his face was just all contorted.

As the crew struggles to regain

control of the plane, it begins to slow down.

Airspeed 1-eighty knots and falling.

Dynasty 006, Oakland Center, how do you read me?

Airspeed 1-forty knots and falling.

The jet is still dropping - but not as fast.

This could be the crew's chance to regain control.

I knew we were in real trouble,

because the G-forces instead of being horizontal started

moving around to the vertical.

So we were being pushed down into our seats

instead of sideways.

As their speed continues to fall,

the Flight Engineer reaches desperately

for the engine throttles.

Airspeed eighty knots and falling!

But the engines don't respond.

There's no response. The engines have flamed out.

After tumbling three thousand metres in 30 seconds,

the jumbo jet plunges again into another freefall.

The second time, when it went down, this time it plunged.

I mean, it went down.

The change is swift.

Once again, the passengers feel pulled

towards the nose of the plane.

You know, this airplane is totally out of control.

It is going to crash.

Stuff was falling around and flying around.

Shoved to one side then stuffed to one side.

So it was kind of like being on a boat that the gear has

broken loose and it's just

going back and forth with the waves. Ugly!

My stomach was up to my throat.

The smell of people urinating in their pants.

I really made peace with the Lord.

And I said to myself, I've really had a wonderful life.

And if this is the end, I'm ready to do it.

Altitude, 2-5-0! Airspeed 2-ninety!

As the plane spins toward the ocean,

the airspeed increases rapidly.

Dynasty 006, Oakland Center, do you hear me?

With the crew struggling to control the plane,

six separate calls from air traffic control go unanswered.

The stress of the dive

tears the landing gear doors off the plane.

In less than a minute, the plane drops six kilometers.

Hold on! Let's link arms.

He said, 'I love you man.'

And I told him, 'I love you man.'

And we said goodbye to our wife.

And he said something about his belonging,

he give all his belonging to his wife.

And, and that's when we just

start pushing our chair back together.

Altitude, 15-thousand feet.

With no visible horizon line,

Captain Ho doesn't know which way is up.

We passed VMO.

Without a reference,

he can't stop the plane from spinning.

Emergency... emergency!

After blindly plunging thousands of metres,

the plane finally breaks free from cloud.

When this thing was falling down,

it looked like you had a magnifying glass

and you went like that.

And, all of a sudden, the white water break

coming closer and closer and faster and faster.

It's like incredible. We thought we were gonna die.

Altitude, 12-thousand feet.

As he struggles for control,

Captain Ho has only thirty seconds

before his crippled plane smashes into the ocean.

I can see the horizon!

Altitude, 10-thousand feet!

For the first time

since beginning his harrowing descent, the Captain can

now use the horizon line as a reference in leveling the plane.

As he tries to pull the plane out of its dive,

the passengers pay the price.

Their bodies are forced into their seats,

battered by another dramatic change in direction.

The G-force was so strong.

And I weigh 2-hundred pounds,

so my weight was almost twelve hundred pound.

It's a race against time,

and the plane starts to win.

ADI is coming back!

As the plane finally begins to level,

the attitude indicators return to normal.

ADI is coming in.

More importantly, as mysteriously as the incident

began, three of the plane's engines regain power.

Engines one, two and three are coming back.

Engine four is still negative. Re-ignite engine four.

Yes, captain.

Once again, the flight engineer

tries to re-ignite the fourth engine - but this time...

Engine four re-ignited.

For the first time in minutes,

the plane is flying under control.

They saved the airplane.

They pulled the aircraft out of this acrobatic

maneuver at an altitude of 9500 feet.

They popped out of the clouds at 11000 feet

and they had the plane in stable level flight

by nine thousand five hundred feet.

That was a masterpiece of flying.

Ladies and gentlemen, this is your captain speaking.

Is anyone hurt? Do we have a doctor on board?

This gentleman sitting behind me...

he was all splattered in blood from hitting the compartment.

So we kept flying.

And next thing I knew that the whole plane

was quiet, real quiet.

Nobody talked very much.

If they talked they were whispering

because we still do know if we're going to live or die.

Dynasty 006 fell off my screen, but she's back.

A new controller, Brian Campbell,

has taken over control of Dynasty 006.

Dynasty OO6, Oakland Center, do you hear me?

Can you fly the plane? 006, we are flamed out.

We, ah... emergency. We are niner thousand, niner thousand.

Roger, roger. We have radar contact.

Oakland Center. Dynasty 006. We can control the aircraft.

Roger, roger.

Less than ten minutes after

the start of their problems, everything seems normal again.

Oakland Center request radar vectors to return to course.

There really is nothing I can do to assist.

He's the pilot, he's flying the airplane.

I'm going to give him a safe altitude to descend to.

I'm giving him a destination.

It appeared to me that he was well in control of his aircraft.

Dynasty 006, Oakland Center.

Are you declaring an emergency?

Do you want to divert to San Francisco?

Negative Oakland Center. Condition normal now.

We will continue to Los Angeles.

Air Traffic Control clears the plane

to climb to 10-thousand 5-hundred metres.

But a new problem soon arises. Roger Oakland Center.

Captain, our landing gear is down and locked.

Can you bring them up? Negative.

The hydraulic fluid in system one is empty.

For some reason, the plane's landing gear is down.

Hydraulic fluid, which controls the gear

and many other parts of the plane, is also leaking away.

Oakland Center, Dynasty 006.

Request new clearance to maintain flight level 2-7-0.

Dynasty 006, Oakland Center. Do you have injuries?

Standby Oakland Center. Sir, are you okay?

One passenger has suffered serious injuries,

and two-dozen others have cuts and bruises.

Oakland Center, Dynasty 006.

We have at least two injuries on board.

Dynasty 006, Oakland Center.

Are you declaring an emergency?

Do you want to divert to San Francisco?

Standby, Oakland Center.

Oakland Center, Dynasty 006.

We are declaring an emergency.

We request a direct route to San Francisco.

They cleared all the other airplanes out of the way.

They give him clear runway. So nobody was waiting.

He didn't have to wait for anybody else.

He went straight in for a landing.

Dynasty 006, Oakland Center. You are now cleared.

You are free to descend at pilots' discretion.

Captain Ho not only has injuries on board,

the plane itself has been severely damaged.

His rear elevators, which help control

the altitude of the plane, don't seem to be working.

Without them, landing his jet safely

will be extremely difficult.

The problem is it's a very big airplane,

and it responds very slowly.

And you just might not do it before you run out of air.

You might hit the ocean. What you need is a very cool head.

Captain Ho must now land using varying

amounts of engine thrust.

After pulling the plane out of its terrifying dive,

if he makes one mistake, Flight 006 could still end in disaster.

Nearing the end of a trip across the Pacific

ocean, China Airlines flight 006 falls suddenly from the sky.

No response... The engines have flamed out!

Emergency! Emergency!

After a terrifying plunge,

the crew manages to wrestle the plane level again.

But the jet is badly crippled. The elevators aren't working.

Without them, Captain Ho has to land

mostly by reducing power to his engines.

It's a controlled fall towards the runway.

As we came in, we flew over the house in Atherton

where I had lived with my kids and been born.

And I looked down and said boy this if fitting.

If we don't make it down or if this plane explodes

on landing because it's been so badly torqued and ruptured.

You know, at least I got to see that.

He made one of the best landings I've ever seen.

I mean, it was just a perfect touchdown.

Ladies and gentlemen, this is Captain Ho speaking,

wishing you a safe journey.

I hope you enjoyed our, uh, an eventful flight.

Thank you for flying China Airlines.

I thought he was a hero. He saved our lives.

I mean, how can, we fell, very,

we didn't know how far we fell at that time.

We thought he was a hero and everything was fine.

On the ground,

the full extent of the damage to the plane can be seen.

I saw this enormous piece of extremely complicated

machinery that is much larger than most buildings,

sitting there on the tarmac with bits ripped off it.

Parts of the entire tail plane at the end,

were ripped off as if a tornado had come through or a crane

had been in and ripped pieces out of it.

It was a very sobering experience.

It's clear why the crew

had such a hard time landing the plane.

Enormous chunks of the tail are missing -

either torn off by the stress of the dive,

or crushed when the landing gear doors broke loose.

If the damage had been much more severe,

the crew wouldn't have been able to regain control of their jet.

Two dozen passengers have minor injuries.

Only one requires hospitalization -

but is soon released.

A near disaster was avoided -

but what had gone wrong in the first place?

The National Transportation Safety Board arrive

that very day - and launch their investigation.

The cockpit voice recorder is sent to Washington.

But it's designed to tape over itself every thirty minutes.

None of what happened in the cockpit

during the terrifying plunge from the sky remains.

Without a cockpit voice recorder, we had to

reconstruct what the crew, uh, said and how they interpreted

things and what was going on in the cockpit, to the best

of our abilities, with the other data that was available to us.

A record of the plane's instrument

activity during the flight has been captured

by the flight data recorder.

But, again, the team runs into a problem.

The flight data recorder experienced unprecedented

stress during the dive.

There were electrical interruptions too -

which cause gaps in the recording.

The FDR information will have to be recovered using

painstaking techniques of reconstruction.

It's a frustrating start to the investigation.

Investigators begin with what they do have.

Passengers and crew report that just before the failure

of the jet's fourth engine,

the plane flew through unexpected turbulence.

Had this caused the engine to fail?

Satellite weather maps reveal that there was indeed heavy

air turbulence over the Pacific.

But it wasn't severe enough to cause engine failure.

The jet's four engines are tested and studied.

Even after the horrific dive through the sky,

they're found to be in working order.

However, given the previous history of problems

with engine four, it receives particular scrutiny.

They had an anomaly with one of the engines.

They believed that the engine had flamed out

or that there was something seriously wrong with the engine.

The wear on a small

throttle valve trimmer is measured.

It's worn down by only 4 one-thousandths of an inch.

But that's enough to restrict the fuel flow to engine four.

Engine four is giving us weak thrust.

Investigators determine

that at 12-thousand meters engine four did indeed

deliver weaker than normal thrust.

It's known as a hung engine.

The aircraft logbook reveals that engine four had been

written up on two previous occasions just the week before.

Perhaps the engine wasn't properly fixed--

which led to the China Airlines mishap.

The NTSB decide to dig deeper into the history

of maintenance on engine 4.

We had a SNAG Advisory on engine four

before we took off - maybe that's it.

But after weeks of investigation, the NTSB

concludes that the engine didn't need to be replaced.

All the repairs were done according to the book.

A faulty engine was not the cause of the accident.

And even with the loss of one engine the plane shouldn't

have been in immediate danger.

Engine four flamed out.

A 747 is designed to fly on only three engines.

The loss of thrust on a four-engine airplane

is a minor event.

It's an event, you have to take care of it

but the airplane is easily re-trimmed and the airplane

will fly on three engines with, with no difficulty.

We're banking right, captain. Air speed 2-thirty.

The airplane is perfectly capable of flying,

it's not as efficient because it has this big round,

drag producing device out there not producing any thrust

but given that it's not going to get quite so many

miles per gallon otherwise it's perfectly flyable.

Take a look at engine out procedures.

Work out a three-engine cruise altitude.

Yes, captain.

There are standard procedures to follow

in the case of an engine failure.

But the crew of the China Airlines flight

hadn't followed them.

They tried to re-ignite the engine

immediately instead of descending.

Re-ignite engine four. Yes captain.

They attempted to re-start much too high.

You are supposed to attempt to re-start an engine

only below 30-thousand feet.

They were at 41-thousand.

What is a little curious to me

is why they didn't use the normal relight procedure.

They were starting to try to relight

the engine at altitude and that would likely not relight.

No response, Captain.

It's a mistake.

But it shouldn't have led to the plane spiraling

out of control... So how had a manageable problem

turned into a near disaster?

I've lost ADI.

The ADIs have malfunctioned.

It's going out of limits.

To get more information on what was

happening in the cockpit,

investigators interview the flight crew.

I heard the captain report the ADI was lost.

And then I saw the standby ADI was also going out of limits.

The crew tell investigators that their ADIs -

which measure how level the plane is - weren't working.

They could have said, this can't possibly be right.

And looking at their indicators, can't possibly be right.

And therefore they must have failed.

The attitude indicator had indicated a position

so implausible that it looked like

it had to be a failed instrument.

This couldn't be what the plane was really doing.

But, in fact, when the ADI's are studied

by the NTSB-- they're all found to be perfectly normal.

When we started banking right engine four

was already flamed out.

We started to descend faster and engines 1,2 and 3 also failed.

Engines one, two and three have lost thrust.

NTSB investigators are even more confused

when the crew tells them that all of their engines had failed.

With the exception of engine 4,

the flight data recorder indicates that the other

three engines were working the entire flight.

If the engines had all failed,

there would have been a host of other problems--

such as cabin de-pressurization-- but that didn't happen.

Engines one, two and three are coming back.

Finally when we descended lower in altitude, one, two and

three came back and we were able to re-ignite engine number four.

Engine four, re-ignited.

At the end of the dive, the crew had

the plane under full power - it was a remarkable recovery.

But to investigators, it's a puzzle.

The story the crew is telling doesn't

match up with the evidence they've uncovered.

After months of investigation,

the NTSB team slowly piece together a reenactment

of the plane's near catastrophe over the Pacific.

It includes information from the reconstructed flight recorder,

personal interviews, and the air traffic control transcript.

When the work is complete, there's only one conclusion.

Apart from a problem with a small valve, there was

nothing wrong with the 747 before it plunged from the sky.

In fact, it was the crew that made a series of fateful

decisions that almost crashed the plane.

Just after ten o'clock Pacific time,

engine four starts to lose thrust.

Engine four is giving us weak thrust.

The flight engineer struggles to fix the problem.

But investigators discover that he doesn't take

one of the most basic steps he should have.

He leaves the engine's bleed air valve on.

The bleed air valve takes air generated by the engine

to help cool the plane.

When an engine isn't working properly,

the valve is supposed to be closed,

so the engine can use all available air to restart.

It's a little puzzling that the flight engineer

didn't shut off bleed air.

And in my mind the most likely

reason for it is that he didn't expect to be

told to re-start the engine at forty one thousand feet.

And so when the captain instructed him to try some

re-starts he just wasn't ready with his checklists.

He was doing something out of order.

And that's why it didn't occur to him

to shut down the bleed air.

The end result is that the engine,

which is slow to start, won't start at all.

Unwittingly the flight engineer

has started a ticking clock.

Engine four is slowly losing its ability to stay lit.

We're losing speed.

With more engine power on the left wing

than the right, the China Airlines flight begins turning.

In order to keep it from turning to the right,

the proper thing to do would have been to step on the rudder.

That would have produce a twisting force so to speak

that would have overcome the imbalance of the engines.

But instead of adjusting the rudder himself,

Captain Ho continues to let the autopilot fly the jet.

The autopilot is designed not to move the rudder.

The autopilot can adjust the ailerons

and spoilers on the plane's wings.

But these flaps aren't strong enough to overcome

the imbalance that the plane is experiencing.

Without the help of the rudder,

the plane's turn becomes steeper and steeper.

Now, it's possible that he'd forgotten

that the autopilot didn't use the rudder.

He may have been assuming all along that the autopilot

was just flying the airplane the way a human being would have,

which it wasn't.

Engine four flamed out.

Investigators discover that after losing

power to his fourth engine,

Captain Ho continues to leave the autopilot on.

He doesn't take complete control of the plane.

He doesn't adjust the plane's rudder with his left foot.

Airspeed 2-forty.

He didn't use the rudder to compensate

for the lack of thrust on the right outboard engine.

The airplane started to lose speed

and one thing led to another and, in the end,

it was really that little error of airmanship,

the failure to step on that left rudder pedal

that triggered everything else.

Re-ignite engine four. Yes, captain.

Rather than taking control of flying the plane,

Captain Ho's attention seems to be focused

on his engine problem--

something that his flight engineer

could handle on his own.

No response, Captain.

It's really critical that attention be paid

to flying the airplane.

But, it's happened over and over again in aviation that, uh,

the crew gets focused on a problem with a system,

in this case an engine but it could have been a light bulb,

it could have been any uh other malfunction.

And if everybody's focused on that and nobody is flying,

then they're not prepared for

what's happening to the airplane.

The plane enters a critical moment.

It's about to flip on its side and enter a nosedive.

The NTSB believes that the captain was concentrating

on his airspeed indicator, but seemingly fails to notice

the instrument directly beside it, his attitude indicator.

This instrument would have warned him

that his plane was starting to roll alarmingly to the right.

They concentrated on one part of the phenomenon

and lost the full picture.

And, as they lost the full picture,

they lost apparently a very important part of any

instrument flying, which is the scan.

You look at all the primary instruments one after

another and whatever is going on you look at them all constantly.

During the plane's nosedive,

it flies through thick cloud.

With no visual horizon as a reference,

the flight crew must trust their instruments to level the plane.

I've lost ADI!

Instead, what investigators believe

happened is that the crew became spatially disoriented.

They decided that their instruments were failing.

They simply didn't believe what they were seeing,

and they thought they had lost their attitude instruments.

They hadn't lost their attitude instruments.

The airplane was in fact embarking on

an aerobatic maneuver.

The most probable reason for all three crew members

believing something so unlikely as that all attitude

indicators could malfunction in the same way at the same

time is that the way in which they malfunctioned was

so unexpected and strange that it didn't seem to correspond

to any possible thing that the airplane could be doing.

The airplane had in fact rolled over on to its back

and gone into a vertical dive.

And that's something that Boeing 747's don't typically do.

As the plane begins tumbling toward the ocean,

another critical lapse in judgment occurs.

The standby ADI was also going out of limits.

I tried to restart...

During interviews, the flight engineer told

the NTSB that all three of the plane's working engines failed.

We started to descend faster.

And engines one, two and three also failed.

But the flight data recorder shows that,

in fact, they were still working.

In the heat of the crisis,

the engineer had made an enormous mistake.

Engines one, two and three have lost thrust!

The investigation reveals that, as the plane fell,

the thrust in each engine was indeed reduced dramatically.

But the cause wasn't engine trouble.

The engine throttles had been lowered to idle -

in an attempt to slow the furious fall of the jet.

It was something the engineer missed in the chaos of the dive.

You can understand why the Flight Engineer might

have been confused about this situation if he had not

seen the captain pull the power to idle on the engines.

He would reasonably assume that the fact that they

went to idle was a problem, rather than intentional.

Investigators also believe that they know why

the engines didn't give the crew more power

when the engineer tried to throttle them up.

The cold temperatures at 9-thousand meters would

stop them from responding quickly.

No response, Captain!

But in the heat of the moment,

the engineer could have taken their slow

response as another indication that they failed.

The NTSB discovers that indeed gauges in the generator

panel behind the engineer showed that

the three engines were still firing.

Ignition, negative!

But the gravitational force became so powerful--

the engineer couldn't look back.

After months of painstaking recreation,

the NTSB investigators believe they understand what happened

inside the cockpit of China Airlines flight 006.

But what they don't understand is why.

The crew's medical records are examined.

Was there something wrong with the captain that might

explain the bizarre behavior?

Nothing turns up.

You know it wasn't just the three stooges who,

you know, won a trip on a seven forty seven or something.

It was a trained crew, highly experienced, thousands of hours.

How could an experienced crew make

so many fundamental mistakes?

The investigators find the answers

in the hours before the incident.

What they uncover is a potential danger

that affects pilots around the world.

In 1985 a series of small pilot errors

lead to a terrifying plunge from the sky.

Spinning wildly out of control, a China Airlines flight

tumbled ten kilometers towards the Pacific ocean.

By the time the crew regained control,

the plane was badly damaged.

Amazingly, everyone on board survived.

Investigators have uncovered a series of mistakes which nearly

led to the death of everyone on board China Airlines Flight 006.

But how could an experienced, well-trained

and healthy crew make so many mistakes?

The NTSB team decides to examine all of the factors affecting

human behavior, including a new field of research.

For the first time as far as I know in a report,

the circadian rhythms, the bio-rhythms,

the day and night functioning of the body was seriously

taken into account as a possible explanation of why

an extremely experienced Boeing 747 captain didn't notice

things that to other pilots might have seemed obvious.

Such as the fact that his airplane was busy flipping on

its back when he was attempting to deal with an engine problem.

Although Captain Ho had the required

fifteen hours off-duty before flying that day,

the NTSB investigators take a closer look

at the captain's schedule before the night of the flight.

I do not think I was fatigued.

I can't say I slept well during the flight.

This accident occurred at what would be 2 am local time.

And that's pretty significant.

Most people are asleep at two am.

So this incident occurred at a point in his what is were

called circadian rhythms, his body clock,

where he would be at his deepest sleep.

I remember also he had gone back,

there is a crew rest area on 747's

and he said he rested for five hours and slept for two.

But the other thing I remember from his interview is

he said, uh, 'You never really sleep well on the airplane.'

A captain never sleeps well during a flight.

I worked many years for this airline.

But I never had this problem before.

It seemed like a very true statement.

It's hard to get a really solid sleep on the airplane.

Particularly if you are the person in command, as he was.

So putting it all together, we saw that this was

an experienced crew, a qualified crew.

And they were flying a schedule that would make them susceptible

to some of the negative or adverse affects of fatigue.

During six flights in the previous six days,

Captain Ho had covered a total of 18 time zones.

I thought I'd keep you company.

The NTSB research suggests that

de-synchronosis, or jet lag, may have been a cause.

And I think all of these factors certainly would

have contributed to his performing at less

than his full potential at the time.

Investigators also take a closer

look at the very machinery that is supposed to make

long-distance flying easier.

Take a look at engine out procedures.

Work at three-engine cruise altitude.

Yes, captain.

We have people in the front of airplanes

because we believe that,

in circumstances that nobody has foreseen, the human being

in front of the airplane can react creatively,

can solve a problem that nobody has thought about before,

in real time.

And automation can't solve problems that no-one has

thought of before in real time, in quite the same way.

The NTSB concludes that,

possibly fatigued from air travel,

and bored by the monotony of his tasks...

We're banking right, captain.

I'm disengaging auto-pilot.

...the Captain relied on his auto-pilot for too long.

When he should have taken direct control, he hesitated,

trusting his systems.

That is obviously a failure.

The crew didn't behave as they should have behaved.

Pilot error.

As a result of the China Airlines near mishap,

and other incidents around the same time,

aircraft manufacturers began to rethink

the design of their automated systems.

The idea of the automation

is that it is going to help the human do the human's job.

It's going help the human take the airplane from the gate

to the gate at the other end.

And it's going to help along the way.

Boeing makes use of this particular incident to say

we still want the crew to have full authority

so that they can move the controls as far

as it is physically possible to move them.

And to manage the airplane even if it may bend the airplane.

Because it is better to do than rather than to restrict

the pilot's authority then have him guess

whether or not he's in charge or the computer's in charge.

Whatever mistakes the flight crew made that day

they did succeed in their ultimate task.

They flew the airplane well.

They did an excellent job of the approach afterward.

They were careful with the airplane,

they knew the airplane had been damaged.

They didn't know the severity of it.

They were gentle with the maneuvering and yet tested

enough to make sure they wouldn't get themselves

into further trouble as they made the approach to landing.

The one big thing they did right, and one only

ever needs to do one big thing, is they saved the airplane.

And, in principle, that's all you ever need to do right,

when something happens to your airplane.

You need to save the airplane

and you need to save the passengers

and that's what they did.

How can you forget something like that.

That I survived through that.

So it's hard for me to forget that I was lucky

and it wasn't my time yet.

The pilot saved our lives.

He got us into it, but he got us out of it.

And perhaps there was one other hero that day.

The Boeing 747 itself.

It was put through maneuvers

and stresses that far-outweighed its known limits.

And yet, despite it all,

the aircraft survived and landed safely.