Original subtitles

A Boeing 747 slams into the English countryside.

Hello!

It was like a battlefield.

Complete and utter devastation.

Where was this 747?

Investigators have all the clues they need

to figure out what caused the accident.

The aircraft took off with the same defect

that it had arrived with.

But they can't explain

why no one on board did anything to prevent it.

They seem to be ignoring the alarms completely.

The first officer was about to die,

and he didn't say anything.

How can this happen?

The answer lies not at the crash site

but thousands of miles away...

Buried in hundreds of years of history.

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!

Gary Dann is enjoying the Christmas holiday

at his home just north of London.

I told you I don't like them.

It was a Christmas-y family get-together.

We were just exchanging the presents,

and that's when I heard the noise

of the plane coming over.

It got louder and louder.

It was almost like the plane was going to take the chimneys off.

I felt and heard the noise that close to the house.

Living just a mile and a half

from Stansted airport,

Dann is used to hearing jets.

But not this close.

I looked out the window, saw the plane coming over

with fire coming out of the engines.

As it came over, it sort of banked heavily left

and then just kept banking and banking.

A Korean Air 747 slams into a forest

in the village of Great Hallingbury.

This was just a huge, huge explosion

that you're watching it happen

with a plume of fire coming towards you.

I collected a torch and ran downstairs saying,

"the plane's gone down, we've got to go and help".

My brother and I ran outside

and ran towards where it happened.

We were racing towards where we could see

the plume of smoke and fire

because there was still lots of aviation fuel

popping around the area.

We ran and jumped into a very large crater just shouting out.

Hello!

You know, any survivors, please shout.

Hello! Can anybody hear me?

The aircraft had created a 30-foot-plus crater.

Wreckage was spread over at least half a mile.

It was like a battlefield.

We dialed 999.

A plane's gone down in Hatfield Forest

in Great Hallingbury.

It takes nearly half an hour

for rescue workers to arrive.

They quickly determine that there are no survivors.

A multi-million-dollar plane and thousands of pounds of cargo

are completely destroyed.

It's up to the UK's air accidents investigation branch

to figure out why.

This is a very sophisticated aircraft

flown by a trained crew,

and somehow they had lost control of this aircraft.

How can this happen?

Stansted airport on London's northeastern edge.

The airport is a major European hub

for low cost passenger carriers and cargo flights

from around the world.

It really was buzzing.

Lots of people there queuing up, checking in, people arriving,

lots of meeters and greeters, lots of coaches.

So it really was a fairly busy hub

just on that run-up to Christmas.

Flight 8509 is a Korean Air cargo plane.

The aircraft was a Boeing 747 freighter.

As the name suggests, it was not configured with passenger seats,

but the interior was full-up with freight.

Departing from Seoul, South Korea,

the jumbo jet stopped in Tashkent, Uzbekistan,

before arriving at Stansted.

It will now continue on to Milan, Italy,

with a new captain and crew.

In the hold, a load controller directs

the loading and offloading of cargo.

He makes sure that the nearly 139,000 pounds of freight

is stowed safely and securely.

More than just stacking boxes,

the job can have a critical effect

on the flight characteristics of the plane itself.

Loading the aircraft has to be done in a manner

that keeps the weight distribution within limits

so that you can't put all the heavy stuff in the back

and all the light stuff in the front, for example,

because it would tend to tip up and make control difficult.

And that would be very dangerous.

Captain Park Duk-Kyu is a highly respected commander.

Sir.

And a former colonel in the Korean Air Force

with thousands of hours of flying time on the 747.

Park Duk-Kyu is flight 8509's flight engineer

responsible for monitoring the aircraft's mechanical systems.

First officer Yoon Ki-Sik is new to the 747,

with 195 hours flying time on the aircraft.

On this night there were the three crew

and a Korean engineer.

The engineer has overseen

some minor maintenance work on the aircraft

and will now accompany flight 8509 back to Seoul.

All right, gentlemen, if departure goes smoothly

we may just make our scheduled time.

Let's proceed.

Stansted clearance, delivery Korean Air 8509

requesting clearance to Milan.

Korean Air 8509, we have no flight plan.

Cannot clear you.

Copy that.

Stansted, stand by for flight plan.

Every commercial airplane

needs to file a flight plan before it can leave the ground.

Contact our people

and get them to re-file the flight plan.

Hurry up!

Ground control, standing by for new flight plan to Milan.

Korean Air 8509 must wait

while the document detailing their planned route is filed.

As far as the air traffic

control system was concerned, it's just another airplane.

It has to obey all the same operational rules and procedures

as any other aircraft, passenger or freight.

Korean Air 8509, cleared to Milan via Dover-six-Romeo.

Korean Air 8509 cleared to Dover-six-Romeo squawk 2230.

Now nearly an hour behind schedule,

the crew gets clearance to taxi.

It's 6:25 p.m.

Korean Air 8509, line up on runway 23.

Position on hold runway 23, Korean Air 8509.

Captain Park is well aware

they have no hope of arriving in Milan on time.

Korean 8509, clear takeoff runway 23.

Finally.

80 knots.

Roger.

V-1.

Rotate.

The plane takes off from Stansted airport

at 6:36 p.m.

Positive rate confirmed.

Gear up.

Gear up.

Passing 900 feet.

The aircraft had taken off

and climbed to about 2,500 feet.

Shortly after takeoff the aircraft was making a turn.

Left turn at 1.5 D-M-E.

Copy that. Left turn at 1.5 D-M-E.

The aircraft started its turn to the left.

Heading standby, sir.

Heading 1-5-8.

The captain's artificial horizon

tells him that the plane isn't turning.

Bank's not working.

Bank! Bank!

Look! Bank!

For some reason, the 747 has gone

from takeoff to total destruction

in less than 60 seconds.

Korean Air flight 8509 lies in pieces

just a few miles from one of the busiest airports in the world.

We had no wreckage really that was above knee height.

Where was this 747?

After any major crash,

Britain's air accidents investigation branch

deploys a safety specialist to the site.

I'd like to take a look around if I could.

Sid Hawkins' job is to assess the level of danger

at the crash site.

One of the key things to do

is to get investigators into site to start work.

And for somebody like me who's looking after their safety,

there's always a challenge for me

to try and hold them at bay

until we've done our initial site assessment.

His first concern: The 33 tons of fuel

the 747 was carrying on takeoff.

Is that fuel still on site?

If it is, that poses quite an immediate hazard

for the team there.

In addition to that, what sort of cargo are we dealing with?

Are we dealing with just general cargo,

or are we dealing with dangerous goods?

Let's shut down the scene for the night.

It's too dark and dangerous.

Notify your people.

There was no lighting

and it actually was very, very dangerous

for the investigators and the rescue services.

Investigation of the crash site

will have to wait till morning.

But before they leave the area they make a key find...

One of the plane's two black boxes.

This was crucial,

the discovery of the recorders on the day.

The cockpit voice recorder is extremely important

dealing with any accident where we have no crew that survived.

It tells us what they were saying.

It gives us an idea of the environment in the cockpit.

And it records the sounds from the cautions and warnings

that go off in the cockpit.

But this black box has suffered extreme damage.

It's too soon to say whether the CVR holds valuable clues

that could help explain the sudden crash,

or if the last recorded moments of flight 8509

are gone for good.

Bank!

Meanwhile the AAIB has begun work

closer to the Stansted terminal on the airport runway.

The team's operations investigator is David Miller.

We had been out on the runway

having received a report from the airport

that the runway was covered in debris.

With Miller at the airport

is engineering investigator Steve Moss.

The things that go through your mind

are possibly what's known as an uncontained engine failure,

which means that the engine has burst

and left bits on the runway.

Investigators wonder if the plane

actually began to disintegrate on takeoff.

Among the small pieces of wreckage on the runway

is an especially chilling piece of evidence.

Something that looked very much like a human jawbone.

And of course then your mind starts to race.

What on earth's gone wrong?

You know, has somebody been hit by the aircraft as it took off?

We wondered whether somebody had committed suicide,

had run towards the aircraft

and thrown themselves into the engine,

affected its performance, and that had brought it down.

We really didn't know.

The runway investigation

has stopped all flights

in and out of Stansted airport.

The shutdown comes just days before Christmas.

The terminal was seething with people.

The pressure on us was tremendous

to get that runway open.

Korean Airline representatives

arrived at Stansted airport this morning.

They're here to talk to accident investigators

both to try to assess what's known about the crash

as well as to answer questions.

And there are sure to be a lot of questions.

The destruction of flight 8509

is the fifth major accident for Korean Air

in the past two and a half years.

If the AAIB can figure out what happened near Stansted,

they may be able to break this deadly pattern.

Daylight, and the remains of a 747

lying in a path of destruction

on the edge of an English village.

It was a very confusing debris field.

It takes a while for one to absorb the scene

and to try and make sense of it all.

By daylight they get their first good look

at the point of impact...

A massive crater surrounded on all Sides by scattered debris.

In fact what we were seeing on the runway

was debris from the explosion,

which had blown debris high into the air

and had been carried downwind

and just happened to deposit on the runway.

The far-flung wreckage

also helped solve the mystery

of what seemed to be a jawbone on the runway.

Closer examination the following morning

revealed that it actually was a bit of twisted plastic.

Safety specialist Sid Hawkins

now turns his attention

to the shattered remnants of the plane's cargo.

If you can imagine 40, 50 tons of cargo,

almost all of it packed in, in cardboard boxes,

and the explosion being so severe

that every piece had been destroyed,

then it gives you an indication really of just how severe

this, this explosion was.

He needs to know if any of it

poses a risk to investigators.

We had a consignment of corrosive materials.

Hawkins learns that flight 8509 also carried

military detonating cord,

two tons of whisky,

color printer cartridges,

even an x-ray machine.

But he soon establishes

that none of it poses a serious threat.

We were able to determine

that the dangerous goods from this aircraft

had all been destroyed.

But there is one more significant risk

Hawkins must assess...

One that stems from the design of the plane itself.

We know that this aircraft

carries depleted uranium in its tail section,

both in the rudder and in the elevators.

The 747-200 series uses depleted uranium as ballast

to improve stability in flight .

But tests show that none of the radioactive material

has escaped.

You feel then that it's safe enough

for the guys to start work.

Meanwhile,

investigators are still trying to learn

if the aircraft broke up before crashing.

I did see a glow,

which could have been the plane alight.

I noticed the engines were on fire before it hit.

I explained to the investigators

that when I looked out the window

I saw the plane coming over,

and then I saw flames coming out of an engine.

Dann's observation raises the possibility

that the left side engines flamed out,

causing the plane to roll to one side.

It's safe. But be careful down in through there.

To determine if the plane hit the ground intact,

they carry out what they call the four corners search.

Have we got both wings? Have we got the tail plane?

Have we got the fin, rudder?

And the answer, eventually, was yes, we have.

And we were satisfied that there had not been

a structural failure of the aircraft in the air.

While locating the four corners,

investigators also discover

some very distinctive marks on the ground.

It was a long, slender gash

which was made by the wing,

and then you could see

where the nose had impacted further on.

From the shape of the ground marks,

you try and understand what attitude the aircraft was in

when it hit the ground.

The ground scar gives investigators

a revealing glimpse into the flight's final seconds.

The aircraft struck the ground at high speed,

steep left bank, steep nose down

and with an almighty amount of energy.

Of course it could be that somehow or other

the pilot's been misled by his instruments

and has become what we call disorientated.

The team brings back

some of the aircraft's instruments

to the AAIB labs for examination.

We found a few pieces of the ADIs.

The ADI, or attitude director indicator,

is a flight instrument

that displays the plane's bank and pitch.

When you're flying at night, in cloud,

there are no visual cues.

So he has an artificial horizon

or an attitude direction indicator in front of him.

Modern aircraft have three instruments...

One in front of each pilot

and a standby one in the center panel.

So if one of them should fail

the pilots can compare their instruments

with the standby instrument

and see which two agree and which one disagrees.

We found only fragments.

And we were able to forensically examine these.

They discover that the captain's artificial horizon

seems to have malfunctioned.

It was showing the plane flying level at the point of impact.

That contradicts evidence found at the crash site.

But without the plane's flight data recorder,

investigators can't explain the discrepancy.

What we needed was that recorder

to give us the confirmation

of the exact flight path of the aircraft.

Pre-flight maintenance records

would normally shed some light on the situation,

but not in this case.

The technical log from this flight

was not available to us.

It had been destroyed in the impact,

and unfortunately a copy was not left at Stansted.

It should have been.

For more information,

investigators interview the crew that flew the plane

to Stansted on the previous leg of the flight.

I need you to walk me through exactly what happened.

They told us that when they departed from Tashkent

the day before, in good weather, in daylight conditions,

they had to carry out a turn to the left.

As the captain commenced the turn,

his artificial horizon did not work in roll.

In the daylight the pilot was able

to get his bearings from the horizon outside.

In order to resolve this issue,

the captain selected number three as his source,

and his instrument worked perfectly.

They continued the flight and landed uneventfully at Stansted.

After landing, the inbound crew

left the terminal before the replacement crew arrived.

And the normal practice is if a crew...inbound crew...

Were to meet the outbound crew,

there would be a verbal handover,

a debrief, if you like, of the state of the aircraft.

But that didn't happen.

Instead the only person who heard about the ADI problem

is the Korean Air maintenance engineer.

Okay. I'll have a look.

Korean Airlines had dispatched an engineer

to take charge of any work that needed to be done on it.

The Korean engineer

didn't have the tools he needed for the job.

So he enlisted some local help.

I need you to remove the captain's ADI.

The story of the repair only deepens the mystery.

The inbound crew knew they had a faulty instrument,

and they had it fixed.

And yet, on takeoff,

captain Park's artificial horizon did not work

according to the evidence found at the crash site.

The Korean engineer is dead.

The only person they can ask about the repair

is the British mechanic who helped him.

The locally based engineer told us

he removed the instrument from the panel,

unplugged the wires at the back.

Alright, that's our problem.

Can you reset the pin?

And found what he believed to be a problem

with the connector pins at the back of the instrument.

He replaced the connector in the right way,

put the instrument back into the instrument panel

and then carried out a test.

Looks good.

As far as the engineer was concerned,

the problem was solved.

Had the maintenance actions actually fixed the defect?

They hope the answer will be found

on the flight data recorder.

It has finally been recovered at the crash site.

To find that in amongst all the wreckage

at the bottom of a 30-foot crater

took a considerable effort.

It took seven days to find it.

But when they download the data,

something doesn't add up.

The readout is showing that the plane's roll angle

never exceeded two degrees.

Clearly it had gone in at a much steeper roll angle

than that, like 90 degrees.

So that set the alarm bells ringing.

Why should that occur?

Why a Korean Air 747 crashed

just moments after takeoff from London's Stansted airport

is a mystery investigators are only beginning to unravel.

The flight data recorder from Korean Air 8509

reveals that the faulty ADI reported by the previous crew

seems not to have been fixed after all.

They need to understand

how the fault in the plane's navigation system

was for some reason misdiagnosed.

How exactly did your crew report this problem?

Upon landing, the inbound crew's flight engineer

noted the problem with the ADI

by entering a code in his technical log.

He then mentioned it to the maintenance engineer.

Okay. I'll have a look.

The normal action is to take the code that's entered

and then look in the corresponding

fault isolation manual,

which has the same corresponding numbers.

And that would then tell him what the fault was

and what he had to do about it to fix it.

But the Korean Air engineer

didn't have a copy of the fault isolation manual.

Without it he couldn't correctly identify the proper repair.

Instead he tried to troubleshoot the problem as best he could.

Alright, that's our problem.

This is when we go into the detailed evaluation

of the aircraft manuals, the component manuals,

right down to the wiring manuals.

After an in-depth analysis

of the plane's navigation system,

they finally figure out what was wrong

with the captain's artificial horizon.

It was being fed corrupt information.

The real problem lay deeper,

with a device called an inertial navigation unit, or INU.

Units deep inside the airplane send pitch and roll data

to the captain and first officer's ADI.

Investigators conclude

that one of the INUs short-circuited.

It simply ended up in corrupting the roll information

that was fed to the,

both the flight data recorder and the captain's ADI.

All the maintenance work done on flight 8509

was misdirected.

What they had repaired was never the problem at all.

Really they were barking up the wrong tree.

I need you to remove the captain's ADI.

If the fault isolation manual had been available,

they might have deduced that the correct maintenance action

was to replace the number one INU, not the captain's ADI.

The rectification action was completely ineffective.

The aircraft took off

with the same defect that it had arrived with.

An instrument failure is a rare occurrence.

However, crews are trained to deal with it.

Checking each of the three ADIs

should have allowed the captain to identify the problem.

The recorded flight data shows

that both the first officer's ADI

and the backup instrument

displayed the plane's correct bank angle.

Only the captain's artificial horizon was wrong.

How the crew dealt with that defect

in the seconds after takeoff

could be the key to understanding

why the flight ended in disaster.

Investigators finally have new insight

into those crucial last moments.

Sir.

AAIB technicians have salvaged the recording

from the badly damaged CVR.

One of the most important things

that was on that recorder

was the sound of a warning horn going off in the cockpit

as the aircraft departed from Stansted.

But even more significant

than the sound of the alarm is what is not on the tape.

They seem to be ignoring the alarms completely.

There was no discussion about the fault

with the artificial horizon.

The alarm is telling the pilots

one of their ADIs is malfunctioning.

They should check the third instrument

to see which ADI is correct.

But the pilots remain strangely silent.

The flight engineer saw the standby horizon,

looked at the other instruments,

and actually pointed out this problem to the captain.

Bank's not working.

But the captain did not respond to that,

either in words or deeds.

Investigators are also troubled by the fact

that the first officer, who had a working ADI,

did nothing to save the plane.

Why didn't the first officer say anything?

Here he was in a situation where he was about to die.

He knew that the instruments were at fault.

The comparator buzzer was going off, and he said nothing.

Bank! Bank!

The copilot should have said to the captain

your ADI is not reading correctly.

He should have forcefully said to the captain:

Mine's correct. I have control.

Let me take control.

I have control.

The correct response to that would have been:

Yes, you have control.

But the copilot said nothing.

The CVR also answers a lingering question

concerning some of the eyewitness accounts

of the crash.

The CVR gave no indication

that there was a fire on board the aircraft.

You would have heard an engine fire bell,

which is a very distinctive warning.

And we didn't hear that.

The fact that some witnesses were wrong

doesn't surprise Moss.

There's all sorts of things people can see

in bad weather conditions at night.

Reflections of the aircraft's lights

or the navigation lights

sometimes can mislead people

into thinking there's a fire there.

Investigators now want to know

more about the crew members

who let a minor malfunction lead to a catastrophic crash.

We listened to the words on the tape.

But of course they were in Korean.

We had the translation in front of us,

but it was very difficult to determine the tone

of what was said and how it was said.

And we had someone who spoke Korean

listening to this conversation

telling us the social interaction

between the two crew.

They can hear that prior to takeoff

the captain was becoming more and more agitated by the delays.

Korean Air 8509, please explain your delay.

Answer them!

They're asking how long the delay will be.

And make sure you understand what they're saying

before you speak.

Stansted clearance, standing by

for a new flight plan for Milan.

The captain was very overbearing.

He was very critical of the first officer.

And the first officer

was quite subservient in this conversation.

He did all the listening. The captain did all the talking.

So you'd say he's being condescending.

Miller can't help but wonder what would have happened

if the captain had listened to the engineer's warning.

He wants to know if there was enough time to save the plane.

Using a flight simulator and data from the flight recorder,

they recreate the entire flight.

The simulation reveals that impact with the ground

was not inevitable.

It was possible, just possible,

to recover the aircraft about 500 feet above the ground

doing about 260 knots at 80 degrees of bank.

If you knew what was happening,

you could have just recovered that aircraft,

just skimming the ground in doing so.

The results convince Miller and his team

that they need to better understand

how Korean Air trains its flight crews.

It was obvious from this accident

that the crew interaction played a big part in this accident.

So we needed to go to Korea to see how the crew were trained.

In Korea, Miller gets an opportunity

to observe Korean Air flight training first hand.

There was definitely a hierarchy between pilots.

The captain was the, supposedly the older, the wiser,

the more experienced,

and the first officer was

the younger, inexperienced apprentice.

Crews were working in a very procedural way.

There was not really much free thinking

to deal with an unusual situation.

The crew dynamic observed

in the Korean Air training session

is strikingly similar to what was recorded

in the cockpit of flight 8509.

Investigators dig into captain Park's personal history.

A lot of the captains in Korean Air

were people that had developed their skills in the military.

Captain Park had been a colonel,

a pilot with a distinguished career

flying small, lightweight fighter jets.

Korean culture at the time

suggested that these pilots needed to hold a position

that was commensurate with the rank that they had

when they were in the military.

So it would be a great loss of face

for a colonel in the military

to be given the job of a first officer.

He would go into the company as a captain.

Park became a captain

even though his experience was flying solo in fighter jets,

not as part of a crew on large commercial jets.

By piecing together the puzzle of miscommunications,

unexpected glitches, and crew dynamics,

investigators believe they finally understand

why Korean Air 8509 hit the ground

less than 60 seconds after lifting off from the runway.

This is inexcusable.

If we hit one more delay.

Korean 8509, clear takeoff runway 23.

Clear for takeoff runway 23.

Korean 8509 clear for takeoff.

Finally.

A series of delays put flight 8509 behind schedule,

testing the patience of the captain.

The first officer remained quiet,

trying to avoid conflict with a senior colleague.

To operate any aircraft,

you need the crew to be working as a team.

You don't want an autocrat in one seat

and somebody who's very subservient in the other.

V-1.

Rotate.

Positive rate confirmed.

Gear up.

Gear up.

You have to have the crew talking to each other,

feeling free to comment and criticize if necessary

what the other's doing.

The critical moment came

as the captain turned his control column to the left.

His artificial horizon didn't move.

And that would have been very confusing.

He would have wondered why.

And in fact what he did was put more bank on,

and more bank,

and continued to increase the turn rate.

Bank! Bank!

The flight engineer knew that the aircraft

was starting to bank at an extreme angle,

but captain Park ignored all warnings.

In fact he had received a reprimand some months before

because he had not correctly followed

an instrument departure procedure.

And we think that this was uppermost in his mind

that he had to follow the correct procedure

to avoid getting another rap across the knuckles, I suppose.

To make matters worse,

he had no visual reference

and likely couldn't feel the drastic bank.

If the instrument is saying no, you're straight and level,

then that's what you believe

even though the aircraft is banked at quite a high angle.

Crews are trained to trust their instruments

and not their senses.

Captain Park trusted his ADI

in spite of overwhelming evidence that it was wrong.

The first officer should have said to the captain:

Look at the warning buzzers going off.

It's very difficult to understand his reactions

or lack of reactions.

But I think a lot of it is embedded within the culture,

or was at that time.

Fearing dishonor more than death itself,

the first officer did not dare criticize his captain

or even attempt to correct his actions.

This crew were not operating as a crew.

They were operating as one man with a couple of assistants.

The aircraft just continued to roll to 30 degrees,

40, 50, 60, 70, 80, 90 degrees of bank.

Investigators now suspect

that the seeds of the deadly crash were sown

hundreds of years before the 747 ever left the ground.

Sir.

For centuries a rigid class structure

based on social hierarchy defined Korean culture.

Investigators have come to see how the Korean military,

an honor bound institution,

has strongly influenced commercial aviation.

It's now clear that strict adherence to cultural norms

put the crew of Korean Air 8509 in danger

from the moment they entered the cockpit.

It's very difficult to overcome entrenched cultural values.

The different stature of the two pilots

was also reinforced by a disparity in military rank.

We believe that the cultural values

within which these two people were raised

was overwhelming in this instance.

The relationship between the two pilots

was not that of equals.

Just two and a half years earlier,

a Korean Air flight went down in the south pacific

killing more than 200 people.

Korean Air had been going through quite a rough patch.

One of their aircraft had been involved in an accident in Guam.

Poor crew communication

and longstanding rules of hierarchy

had also contributed to the crash in Guam.

Their reputation was not good.

Then this accident had come along.

The U .S. Military stops using Korean Air

to ferry its personnel in the pacific region.

The airline comes under strict scrutiny around the world.

With the crash of flight 8509,

Korean Air's reputation is in ruins.

At a news conference the Korean Airline officials

made the startling admission that military pilots,

many of whom were recruited by the airline,

sometimes take unnecessary risks.

Despite all the negative publicity

for the struggling airline,

investigators see a way to help Korean Air

overcome its safety problems.

I think all accidents have a lesson

or lessons to be learned

that will improve aviation safety.

The AAIB recommends

that all imported training materials

be modified to better accommodate Korean culture.

Korean Air's training programs

are radically overhauled to improve pilot performance

and foster a completely new culture within the cockpit.

After the accident in 1999, Korean Air, I believe,

entered into a significant program

to improve its safety record.

That company have introduced a much more rigorous process.

And they really have invested very, very heavily

in the flight safety aspects that came out of this accident.

In this case the issues of communication,

the issues of how aircraft are maintained,

and also the very important conclusions

regarding cockpit resource management.

The statistics show that the safety record

of Korean Air since these events around 1999

is such that it is now regarded as a very safe airline.

As a direct result of the crash of flight 8509,

Korean Air has been completely transformed.

Since 1999 the airline has not had a single crash or fatality.

It has become one of the most highly regarded airlines

in the world.