Original subtitles

Miami Beach, Florida.

Sun, sand and calm, blue seas.

But when a tourist points his camera towards the sky,

he captures a scene of horror.

A plane is falling to the sea.

We have a Code Four, repeat, Code Four,

a plane down in the water.

As soon as I saw this, I realized,

I'm like, oh, no, this is chalk's airplane crashing.

The downed plane

is Chalk's Ocean Airways

Flight 101, bound for the Bahamas.

Could it have been a collision with an object?

Could it have been a fire?

Could it have actually been a criminal act?

Let's notify the FBI.

The incredibly rare video may hold the answers.

Can you enhance that for me?

An airline renowned for safety

has made a fatal error.

But it will take investigators hundreds of hours

to finally uncover it.

Bingo.

Ladies and gentlemen,

we are starting our approach.

We lost both engines!

Put the mask over your nose.

Emergency descent.

Mayday, mayday.

Brace for impact!

I think I lost one.

Investigation starting...

He's gonna crash!

The port of Miami, December 19, 2005.

Giant freighters and oceangoing cruise ships are a common sight.

But there's another much smaller craft

that's often seen in this port.

Chalk's Ocean Airways flies seaplanes

in and out of this busy waterway.

Today, Flight 101 from Fort Lauderdale

is making a brief stopover here on its way to the Bahamas.

Feather propellers.

Check.

Shut down engine number one.

Shutting down engine number one.

Chalk's flies to two regular destinations,

both in the Bahamas.

Bimini, where Flight 101 is scheduled to land this afternoon

and paradise island.

Ladies and gentlemen, this is your captain speaking.

We're just making a short stopover here in Miami

to pick up a couple passengers.

We apologize for the delay.

We'll be on our way again soon.

How many are we picking up?

Just two, but they're VIPs.

For a small community like Bimini,

chalk's seaplanes are a lifeline.

It's just so much easier in the seaplane

to get to the north island where most of the population is

than going to the airport down there.

So that was the main thing, it was a convenience factor.

Welcome aboard.

Can I see your boarding passes?

Certainly.

Sergio Danguillecourt is a Bacardi rum executive.

He's the great-great-grandson of the company's founder.

The family is well-known in the local Cuban community

for their anti-Castro politics.

He and his wife are flying to the Bahamas to buy a yacht.

Are the passengers settled in?

We're all set.

Good afternoon, folks.

We'd like to welcome you aboard

Chalk's Ocean Airways Flight 101 to Bimini.

Our travel time to Bimini will be 25 minutes.

Hope you enjoy the flight.

Let's have the startup checklist, please.

Roger.

Michele Marks is in command of today's flight.

She was promoted to captain earlier this year.

First officer Paul Desanctis joined the airline

eight months ago.

Starter on.

Starter on.

This is his first flight with captain Marks.

All clear to taxi?

All clear.

The Grumman Mallard is a twin turbo-prop design.

It has a V-shaped hull and under-wing pontoons.

It's designed to carry up to 17 passengers.

The plane has retractable landing gear,

so it can operate on either land or sea.

Gear coming up.

The takeoff on the Mallard, depending on the days,

it could be a lot of fun or it could be a real challenge.

Weight and balance check.

We're good.

The Miami seaplane base has no control tower.

The crew has to keep a lookout for boat traffic

as they taxi through one of the busiest ports in the world.

Taking off in, out of Miami in the shipping channel,

it's kind of like trying to take off

during rush hour traffic.

You've got boat traffic, wave traffic, the wind,

the airplane to deal with,

and everybody's going different speeds,

and you're trying to get up and go

and navigate around everybody, so it was always a handful.

Flight 101 will take off from X44,

a seaplane base near a channel known as government cut.

Prepare for takeoff.

Roger. Ready to take off.

Both pilots have their hand on the throttles.

It's to prevent the captain from inadvertently pulling back

if the plane hits a wave.

45 knots.

50 knots.

This is the moment most passengers are paying for--

the takeoff.

Half speedboat, half plane, it's a unique thrill.

75 knots, 80 knots.

For the pilots, accelerating through the waves

is often the most difficult part of the flight.

The airplane itself was really hard to fly

as far as on the water, getting onto the step,

which was what we call getting on a plane.

And in rough sea conditions and in rough wave conditions,

it could be a real challenge.

But this takeoff goes smoothly.

Flight 101 is no longer a boat;

it's now a plane en route to Bimini.

It's 2:38 in the afternoon.

The plane's flight path takes it past South Beach,

where sunbathers and surfers are out in force.

Just less than a minute into the flight,

the Grumman Mallard is climbing through 500 feet,

well below the clouds.

Then...

The plane rolls violently and dives.

The pilots barely have time to register what's happening.

Their struggles are in vain.

By chance, a tourist from New York

catches Flight 101's final moments on his camera.

60 seconds after takeoff, the plane slams into the ocean.

Lucas Bocanegra is a lifeguard stationed on South Beach,

near the Chalk's Ocean Airways sea lane.

As soon as I saw this, I realized.

I'm like, oh, no, this is the Chalk's airplane crashing.

We have a code four, repeat, code four,

a plane down in the water.

This is Lucas, we're launching the jet ski.

The two lifeguards are the first rescuers

to go looking for the plane.

We drove as fast as we could

to the scene of the accident.

There was a lot of things coming through my head.

I was nervous, scared, I was kind of full of adrenaline.

I wanted to go in

and try to rescue as many people as we could,

but at the same time,

we've never trained for a situation like this.

As soon as we turned government cut

at those jetty rocks,

we noticed that it was very calm, very quiet.

It wasn't like the ocean side, where it was very rough.

There was no waves, it was very, kind of very eerie.

At first, Lucas Bocanegra

finds no sign of Flight 101

or any of the passengers.

Little by little, we started seeing debris float up

onto the surface of the water.

And we saw some chairs, some luggage here and there.

And suddenly, we noticed there was a body in the water.

As soon as we put the body on our jet ski,

we realized that from his injuries

that there was nothing we could do.

From there, it was just try to recover as many bodies,

you know, bring them back for their families.

News crews swarm the beach.

Chalk's Flight 101 plummeted into the channel

in full view of tourists lining Miami Beach.

In a fraction of a second,

the whole plane was engulfed in flames.

Black smoke and then an explosion.

Pure fire in the sky.

It was so surreal,

we couldn't believe that we actually witnessed that.

Chopper four over the wreckage

as Miami Beach coastguard look for any survivors.

But the effort is futile.

We retrieved some of the bodies,

but we were unable to find anyone that had survived.

All 20 people on board are dead,

including pilots Paul Desanctis

and Michele Marks.

The residents of Bimini are devastated by the horrific news.

It was very sad for the crew

and the friends that I had lost on the airplane.

You never expect an accident to actually happen.

And to see that on television like I did,

it was very, very sad.

In Washington, senior NTSB investigator Bill English

is put on the case.

I was just in my office

doing some routine paperwork for something else,

and the director stuck his head around and the corner

and said there's been an accident.

And I said well, what is it?

And he mentioned a Grumman Mallard.

So I immediately knew it had to be Chalk's.

Within hours,

investigators are at the crash site,

where 19 bodies have been recovered.

One is still missing.

I was very familiar with Chalk's Airways.

I'm a seaplane rated pilot myself,

and there is their reputation, the legend of Chalk's Airways,

the oldest continuously operating airline.

Chalk's has a long and rich history.

The airline was founded in 1917.

During the prohibition era,

passenger lists included notorious rumrunners.

And later, Hollywood movie stars.

Chalk's planes even patrolled for German U-boats

during World War II.

The novelty of flying at Chalk's

was just all that history, all the people that have gone.

And it was a really great place to work for that.

The Grumman Mallard flying boat that crashed

was built in 1947.

Chalk's Ocean Airways is the only airline that uses mallards

to transport passengers.

They're not really a mainstream type of airplane,

and so there's always that nostalgia about them.

Salvage crews find the plane's black box.

Investigators send it to the NTSB in Washington.

The box promises to reveal critical information

about what the pilots were doing

in the seconds leading up to the tragic midair disaster.

In any investigation, the flight data recorder

and the cockpit voice recorder are a great desire.

The more data, the better.

We can always learn something.

But Bill English knows

he isn't going to get all the data he wants.

Ok, thanks.

The only recorder on board the Mallard

was a cockpit voice recorder, or CVR.

Most airline aircraft have two flight recorders.

The flight data recorder, depending on the aircraft,

will record all sorts of parameters of the flight--

altitude, airspeed, control positions, and so on.

The Chalk's airplane was not equipped

with a flight data recorder.

It did have a cockpit voice recorder.

Though the lack of flight data

is a big disappointment,

media coverage of the crash

gives investigators a very rare piece of evidence.

Reporter: Authorities revealed that the final seconds

of Flight 101 were captured on amateur video.

The dramatic footage was shot by a tourist on South Beach.

Let's get a copy of that video.

Ok, let's see it.

The video only captured

the final seconds of the plane crash,

but it confirms eyewitness reports

that a wing ripped off in midair.

Can you enhance that for me?

The video showed the wing

just after separation from the aircraft,

the main part of the aircraft fuselage

rolling off in the other direction

and the fire and smoke starting from that.

It was quite startling

that the wing would fall off on this plane.

It was a beautiful day,

the water wasn't rough on the takeoff,

and all of a sudden, this wing just dropped off.

It must have been absolutely devastating.

However, the video can't reveal

why the wing came off.

Answers to that question may lie at the crash site,

where salvage crews are finishing their recovery

of the wreckage of Flight 101.

The right wing is found separate from the plane,

but largely intact.

Wings falling off aircraft,

in modern day situations, is a very rare, extreme event,

and there's only been a few cases of them

in the past 20 or 30 years.

In Washington,

another type of examination is already underway.

At the NTSB lab, technicians are busy

analyzing the Mallard's cockpit voice recorder.

The cockpit voice recorder, or CVR,

which does what it sounds like, records the pilots' voices,

talking to each other or on the microphones.

But the tape is a jumble of voices and sounds.

Technicians can't retrieve any useful information.

It turned out that the erase-head function,

it's just like a tape recorder

that most people are familiar with,

it didn't erase the old stuff.

So every subsequent flight kept getting recorded over

and over and over again and just became a muddled sound,

and it wasn't audible to us, or useful.

It's another setback.

Ok, let's revisit this again,

because we're running out of options here.

Investigators have

fewer and fewer tools to work with.

Bill English considers the possibility that Flight 101

hit turbulence so violent that it tore the plane apart.

But the weather on the day of the crash

doesn't support that theory.

There were no storms

that could have caused such severe turbulence.

Clearly, something else had torn this plane apart.

There's a possibility the Mallard collided with something

in the water before takeoff.

Seaplanes don't take off of a conventional runway,

they're in water where there could be things like logs

or other debris, which could potentially cause

structural issues with an aircraft.

But before they can reach

a conclusion on that theory,

investigators consider some other intriguing evidence.

It's an urgent advisory

issued by the Federal Aviation Administration, or FAA.

It warns that due to a faulty part,

the propellers on the Mallard could come off during flight.

You're kidding me.

Something such as a blade separation,

losing part of the propeller,

could cause a great structural load on the aircraft.

English now has a solid lead.

But his team is still missing the evidence they need

to prove their case.

The entire island is devastated by the loss of life

as investigators searching for answers

wait for more wreckage to be pulled from the sea.

In the aftermath of the crash,

Chalk's Ocean Airways grounds its remaining fleet

of four Grumman Mallards.

At the NTSB's Miami command post,

they're working to identify various plane fragments

and other debris from the crash.

We started out with the wing itself that separated,

the spar, which is the main part of the structure of the wing

and any of the other fracture surfaces,

looking for obvious initiation factors.

They carefully examine the propellers,

looking for evidence that might confirm suspicions

raised by the FAA advisory.

But it's another dead end.

We were able to determine

all the blades were attached

and the bending that we saw was the expected pattern

from proper operation when those blades hit the water.

Once again, they're back to square one.

This is what I want you to look at.

Investigators focus their attention

on the fractured wing.

They've noticed sooting on parts of it.

It's evidence of a very rapid fire.

We want to find anything

that could be the initiating factor for the wing separation.

Could it have been a collision with an object?

Could it have been a fire?

Could it have actually been a criminal act?

The burn marks raise a sinister possibility.

An explosion.

A bomb.

This now falls outside the NTSB's area of expertise

and authority.

Let's notify the FBI.

The FBI helps us in many of our investigations,

and we'll utilize some of their experts

to rule out terrorism or a criminal act.

If it was a bomb that brought down Flight 101,

a likely target could have been one of the 18 passengers.

Thanks for coming in,

we're going to need your help on this.

So I got the list here...

One name stands out on the passenger manifest--

Sergio Danguillecourt.

Welcome aboard.

Can I see your boarding passes?

Certainly.

There are rumors on the Internet

that the crash was an assassination plot

and Danguillecourt was the target.

His family made a fortune in pre-Castro Cuba.

They were so opposed to Fidel Castro's regime

that they had allegedly supported clandestine attempts

to overthrow his communist government.

This is your copy, all right.

Now, there's something I wanted to show you.

We can't tell if it's just soot or it's explosive residue.

A bomb will leave chemical traces

and distinctive patterns in the torn metal.

FBI technicians are specially trained to detect them.

The samples from the wreckage will be tested at FBI labs

in Quantico, Virginia.

Four days after the accident,

salvage crews are still bringing in wing fragments

found at the crash site.

So, we need everything

that looks like it'd come from the right wing.

Can we get some light over here?

Over-stress.

Most of the damage they see

is from over-stress fractures,

areas where the metal was literally ripped apart

when the wing tore off.

Come here.

That's the same.

When metal is suddenly stressed

to the point of breaking,

the fracture leaves a very distinctive rough edge.

It's easy to distinguish it from fractures

that have developed slowly over time.

Cut this from here to here

and get it to Clint in Washington.

As we started to examine the right wing, spar,

and other components on scene at the coast guard station

or the seaplane base, this was a visual examination there.

We didn't have the sophisticated lab tools

that we have at headquarters.

They identify parts to be shipped to the lab

in Washington, where they hope closer inspection will reveal

exactly what went wrong with the wing.

Hey, Clint.

Clint, we're sending you as much of the wing as we have your way.

Yeah, ok.

Yeah, I know, I'm still waiting for that report.

The results from the FBI explosive test come in.

A midair bombing assassination could explain everything.

But there is no explosive residue on the wreckage.

Ok, so that rules that out.

Structural failure is now the chief suspect

in the downing of Chalk's Flight 101.

Well, that's all that's left.

That's tomorrow.

It was obvious the airplane

had a catastrophic structural failure.

So, we needed to find out the cause,

the initiating factor of that structural failure.

He needs to know more about the long history

of this particular Grumman Mallard.

It's very typical in any accident investigation,

we want to look at the maintenance history

of an aircraft.

For an aircraft that's 60 years old,

that's even more so important.

Clint Crookshanks is a structures investigator

for the NTSB.

When we go into an investigation,

we try to go in with a very open mind

and look at the wreckage

and let it tell the story for what happened.

We wanted to look at every piece that broke on the right wing

to determine if this was an age-related failure

or if it was something that was caused by a structural overload.

As with most aircraft,

the Mallard's wings are built from aluminum alloy.

The spars run the length of each wing.

In between the spars are stringers

that give added support.

Together, these parts make up the wing box,

which also doubles as a fuel tank.

And then the skin is over top

of all of that structure

to kind of give a smooth, aerodynamic look to the wing.

All of these together work to carry the flight loads

that the wing is designed to carry.

Once you compromise one piece of that structure,

the ability to carry the normal flight loads

has been compromised.

Thanks.

Over the years,

the wing box had been repaired many times.

Chalk's mechanics had patched up areas damaged by corrosion,

which is not unusual for an aging aircraft,

especially a seaplane.

The fact that they land on water

means that their takeoff and landing loads are different

than you would have on an land-based airplane.

Also, they're always in water,

and the corrosive effects of water are going to happen

more readily on those airplanes.

But when investigators examine

the rest of the Chalk's fleet,

they find that the Mallards are in far worse shape

than they imagined.

Corrosion repairs.

Corrosion.

Corrosion, corrosion, corrosion.

Corrosion repairs.

Lots of them.

The accident airplane and the other airplanes in Chalk's fleet

were rife with maintenance issues.

Corrosion was rampant on all the airplanes.

There was evidence of shoddy maintenance practices

on all of their other airplanes.

Many, many of the repairs exhibited

extremely poor workmanship and quality,

double, triple drilling of holes,

excessive grinding of corrosion, scars on the material.

And this involved the structural repairs

that were made to the aircraft over the past few years.

Crookshanks' attention is drawn

to a section of the lower right wing.

There is a metal patch,

called a doubler, on the surface of the wing's skin.

A doubler is simply a sheet of metal

that goes over top of the skin and it acts as a load transfer,

it acts as a second piece of skin to patch the crack.

It's kind of like the patch on a pair of jeans.

This is a big repair job.

You sure we don't have anything on this?

It's an intriguing discovery.

The patch is located exactly where the wing broke off

from the rest of the plane.

When he takes a closer look at this section of the wing,

Crookshanks notices the edges are smooth and shiny,

totally unlike the rough edges

he's been seeing on other debris.

We've got to see what's under this.

This crack is not from over-stress.

Instead, Crookshanks suspects it developed over many years

as the result of metal fatigue.

Metal fatigue is a process by which

any piece of metal, a wing spar or anything,

is repetitively loaded and unloaded.

You can think of it as bending a paper clip back and forth,

and everyone's done this,

and after a while, it eventually breaks.

Metal fatigue in the wings is caused

by the stress of flight over the lifetime of the aircraft.

Crookshanks is eager to find out

what's underneath the metal patch.

Ok, let's see what this doubler's hiding.

They find even more metal fatigue.

Deep cracks cut across the wing.

The extent of the damage is staggering.

A crack nearly 16 inches long.

Man, oh, man.

Investigating further,

Crookshanks makes another disturbing find.

Three machine holes in the skin

forward of the leading edge.

All three appear to be stop drill holes.

The holes indicate that Chalk's mechanics

had been trying to stop the crack from spreading further.

Years earlier, a mechanic had spotted the crack

on the lower surface of the wing.

He repaired it by drilling a hole in the path of the crack.

It's called a stop drill hole.

The end of a crack,

you could see even with the naked eye,

is sharp, it comes to a point.

That tends to want to develop a crack more.

By drilling a hole at the end of the crack,

then would spread out the stress,

and the idea is to stop the growth of the crack there.

But the stop drill holes didn't work.

An attempt was made to repair that skin

on three different occasions by stop drilling.

Even as mechanics put in more holes,

the crack kept growing.

After the third stop drill,

an attempt was made to further repair the wing

by attaching doublers on the interior and exterior surface

of the skin.

But the doublers didn't work either.

The crack on the plane's skin continued to grow.

Investigators now know the right wing was damaged

long before the day of the accident.

What they don't understand

is why the crack could not be stopped.

But a glimmer of an answer comes

when they learn the plane was sending out warning signs

of a deeper, more serious problem.

The Chalk's airplane involved in the accident

was showing evidence of chronic fuel leaks

for a long period of time, for many years.

According to the log,

fuel leaks from the right wing were repaired again and again.

But they kept happening.

The crews started to notice repeated fuel leaks

during standard operations,

and we tried to bring it up to attention of management,

just for our concerns.

Just two days before the crash,

it happened again.

While doing routine maintenance on the Mallard,

a mechanic came across fuel dripping from the right wing.

They always address the problem

with trying to reseal the fuel tanks

or trying to fix whatever problem they thought they had.

It always seemed to be a reoccurring issue.

The procedure for plugging a leak

was to apply a chemical sealant

to the inside of the empty fuel tank.

The sealant would take a day to dry.

Then the plane could be refueled and returned to service.

The leaks should have been a clue

that the crack in the wing skin was just the tip of the iceberg,

that there was a much more dangerous problem

with the wing's interior structure.

Fuel leaks in this particular aircraft

are indicative of a problem with the wing structure.

In fact, Grumman put out a service bulletin back in 1963

that warned mechanics, chronic fuel leaks are an indicator

of a structural issue with the aircraft.

Ok, let's see what we got here.

Crookshanks examines the pieces

that make up the right fuel tank.

Some kind of sealant.

He wonders why the fuel leaks persisted

in spite of the constant efforts to repair them.

Hand me that scraper, please.

Thank you.

Beneath the layers of sealant, he finds the answer.

Bingo.

Cracks in a critical support beam

called a Z-stringer.

It's the piece that the plane's skin was directly attached to.

Alright, will you finish cleaning this off

and then get some pictures, ok?

Thank you.

Crookshanks finds evidence

that Chalk's mechanics had tried to repair the stringer.

It appears that they did some grinding

on this Z-stringer to remove a fatigue crack.

However, they never went back in and reinspected that area.

Instead, they only applied chemical sealant

to the area, to make it leak-proof.

And in the process, concealed the damage.

Chalk's made repeated attempts

to repair the airplane

by stop drilling the wing skin cracks,

adding doublers over top of the cracks,

but they never addressed the root of the problem,

which was the cracked Z-stringer.

The reason they couldn't address the Z-stringer

is it was covered in fuel tank sealant.

The broken Z-stringer weakened the entire wing.

Now with every takeoff and landing,

the plane's skin was absorbing the forces.

Over time, the skin began to crack as well.

The final outcome was inevitable.

The fatigue cracking reached critical length

and the wing separated from the airplane.

Investigators conclude that a hidden crack

in a key component of the right wing

led to the devastating crash of Flight 101.

Chalk's failure to identify such a serious problem

now forces investigators to reexamine

the airline's long history.

Chalk's Ocean Airways had an image

as one of the safest airlines in the world.

Despite the age of their fleet,

the airline had an outstanding record of safety,

dating back almost 90 years.

Chalk's safety record was great.

They had never lost a passenger in all their years of operation.

Chalk was an old, established company.

But it seems to me that somewhere along the line

the management and the quality of the work done

had slipped quite a bit from in the past years.

What have you got

on the financial state of this company?

Investigators are beginning to suspect

that the company's reputation for safety

may have been undermined in recent years by money problems.

Financial issues in an airline,

especially a small carrier like this,

can manifest themselves in many ways.

Personnel are sometimes one of the first things to go.

A search of Chalk's financial history

uncovers some trouble.

In the 1980s, Chalk's went through a string of owners

before going bankrupt in 1999.

The airline was revived by a Miami businessman,

but it kept losing money.

Just a few months before the crash,

the last attempt to sell the business fell through.

Not doing so well.

It wasn't a secret

that we were having financial difficulty.

The pilots had taken pay cuts,

and the captains had taken concessions,

and you know, we downsized a lot as far as personnel.

It wasn't just personnel who felt the pinch.

It was difficult for Chalk's to find spare parts

and to do some of their repairs.

Chalk's had a number of other un-flyable aircraft

that they owned that they would cannibalize for spare parts.

There were maybe only 50 or 55 aircraft ever built.

In that case, the original manufacturer, Grumman,

was no longer in production of that aircraft,

they no longer supplied parts.

The airline's deteriorating health

and the shortage of spare parts had a direct impact on safety.

There's so much regulation

and there's so much just necessity

to make the airplane fly,

it's hard to skimp on maintenance

and not impact reliability.

And if you don't have reliability,

then you're just spiraling downhill.

But no matter how tight the finances were,

as a commercial airline,

Chalk's should have been closely monitored

by the Federal Aviation Administration.

In fact, the FAA did assign an inspector

to work closely with Chalk's.

The FAA inspector,

which is called a Principal Maintenance Inspector,

was responsible for the oversight

of the maintenance program, as carried out by Chalk.

The inspector was aware

the plane was suffering from chronic fuel leaks.

And yet, inexplicably, he gave Chalk's a clean bill of health,

just two months before the crash.

What was this guy doing?

Investigators are at a loss to explain

why the FAA inspector didn't pick up on warning signs

the Chalk's seaplane was giving off.

The fact that Chalk was an old, established carrier,

maybe they just accepted, well,

there's only two or three planes, it's a small operation,

they only fly during the nice weathers,

and they're good old boys over there,

they know what they're doing.

The FAA may not have found fault with Chalk's,

but it turns out that several people

very close to the airline did.

We did talk to this group of pilots

who had left Chalk's prior to the accident.

And every single one of them did have some story

about maintenance aspects on their aircraft.

Whether it had to do with fuel leaks

or other maintenance aspects,

they all had some level of concern

about the way Chalk's was taking care

of these very old airplanes.

In fact, the pilots were so concerned

that in the year leading up to the crash,

many of them met to discuss the problem

of declining maintenance.

One major issue that had happened,

we had an elevator cable that had snapped in flight,

and the crew, luckily, was able to get the airplane down

using power and different settings and shifting people.

But in most scenarios,

that would have been an accident in itself.

In aviation there's error chains that they talk about,

and you have to just--

and if you keep compiling one link after another,

it's only a matter of time before an accident will occur.

And from my point of view,

I thought that if they kept going down the same road

that they were going down, something could happen.

Eventually, captain Weber decided

he'd seen enough close calls.

My turning point and why I decided to leave Chalk's,

was I just had seen too many things in the recent months,

too many mechanical issues that were major issues in my mind.

And I had three engine failures myself that year.

And I had a wife at home that was pregnant.

I had lost, I guess, my confidence

in the company's ability or the airplane,

and I just had had enough.

The NTSB's report on the crash of Flight 101

harshly criticizes the FAA

for not detecting growing maintenance

and financial problems at Chalk's.

Had the maintenance program or the FAA stepped back

and said these aircraft need more than just a one-time fix,

they need something much deeper than this,

the accident probably would not have happened.

It also uncovers a loophole

in the FAA's aging aircraft regulations,

which require extra inspections for older planes.

But those rules didn't apply to Mallards.

The Grumman Mallard

was manufactured in 1947.

It only carried 17 passengers,

and it was not a transport category airplane.

Therefore, it was exempt from these supplemental inspections.

What we have here is

the FAA has made an aging airplane safety rule,

and they've exempted the oldest airplanes in the fleet.

The NTSB recommends that the FAA expand

its oversight of aging planes.

I think we've used this accident to point towards

the industry and the FAA

to make sure that they take a look at the overall picture

of what's going on at an air carrier.

Flight 101 spelled the end

of Chalk's Ocean Airways.

A few months after the report was released,

the airline shut down.

There was a lot of history

and a lot of family community involved with the passengers,

as well as the people in the airline.

So to see the whole airline and everything else

kind of go down with the airplane

is additionally emotional for everybody that ever worked there

or ever loved the airplanes.