Original subtitles

Military families in Kentucky

prepare to welcome home loved ones from overseas.

The plan was to have a reception for them

and then those soldiers would be reunited

with their families and friends.

At the same time, at a small Canadian airport...

There was wreckage all over the place.

There was massive destruction.

Nobody could have survived this.

256 people are dead.

It's one of the worst aviation accidents of all time.

Any time a crash of this sort would occur,

immediate suspicions would be raised.

Answers will be hard to come by.

It does not advance safety

to get the wrong cause of an accident.

...as two radically different scenarios

for the crash emerge.

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!

Arrow Air flight 1285 is nearing the end

of a 6,000-mile journey from Egypt to the United States.

The dc-8 is on its way to fort Campbell, Kentucky,

via Germany and Newfoundland.

On board are eight crewmembers and 248 passengers.

Most of them are U.S. Soldiers

with the famed 101st airborne division, the screaming eagles.

That division fought through World War II,

through d-day and the battle of Normandy,

dropped in behind the German lines.

It's really marked its place in history.

I think everybody who serves in that division

has a special loyalty and a special feeling

about the division and being part of it.

They had been in the Sinai for five and a half months,

so I'm sure they were anxious to get back

to friends and family and to enjoy the holidays.

To bring the soldiers home,

the military has hired the charter carrier Arrow Air.

It was not unusual to do that back in the '70s and '80s,

where the government would contract

with the civilian airlines

to transport troops in and out of the country.

At 5:30 in the morning,

the Douglas dc-8 lands at gander international airport

on the eastern edge of Newfoundland, Canada.

They had to refuel in gander

before they could complete the flight

into Fort Campbell, Kentucky.

Okay, guys, I'd like to be refueled,

checked, and wheels up in 90 minutes.

Roger that.

Captain John Griffin has been an Arrow Air pilot

for four years.

He's also a flight instructor for the airline.

First officer John Connelly will be at the controls

when flight 1285 leaves gander.

Mike fowler, the flight engineer,

monitors the aircraft's mechanical systems.

Okay, you want to give her the once-over?

While the pilots run through

a series of pre-flight checklists,

the flight engineer steps out to inspect the plane's exterior.

He'll look for any damage to the fuselage or engines,

and check for buildups of ice on the plane.

The soldiers wait inside the airport.

Some shop for souvenirs at the gift shop.

Anything?

Okay, roger that.

All right, 15,538 gallons,

or 101,000 pounds.

Passengers and cargo unchanged.

Weight's confirmed.

Okay.

We're good to go.

That puts us here.

Rotation is 144 knots.

Yeah, that looks good.

On the airspeed indicator is a marker, or bug.

It reminds the crew of the exact speed they must hit

in order to get the plane off the ground.

Bugs set on the right.

Copy that.

With the refueling and pre-flight checks complete,

the 248 soldiers get back on board.

I think it was probably a very joyous mood,

because when they landed in Gander,

I know some of them went in and used the telephones

to call Fort Campbell and call their families

and say they were in Gander, and they'd be home in a few hours.

Gander tower, big a 950,

we've completed refueling and pre-flight checks.

Requesting taxi to runway 31.

Big a 950, wind's at 290 at four knots.

Takeoff now runway 22.

A last minute change puts Arrow Air

on a different runway than originally planned.

9,900 feet, takeoff to the south, we're good.

Copy that, Gander. Runway 22.

Big a 950, you are cleared for takeoff.

Merry Christmas.

Roger that, Gander tower.

Merry Christmas to you, too.

The dc-8 accelerates to takeoff speed.

80 knots.

Check.

V-1.

Rotate.

Arrow Air 1285 lifts off from Gander airport

at 6:46 a.m.

But just seconds later...

Ah, she's flying like a pig.

Positive rate?

Negative.

I'm sure for the last few seconds

those soldiers knew that there was a serious problem in hand.

Watch your altitude! Pull up.

Come on, airspeed!

Airspeed!

Watch the trees!

Yes, arrow 1285 is down, just off runway 22,

estimate 2,000 to 4,000 feet.

At the small airport in Gander, Newfoundland,

emergency crews race to the crash site.

It's a field of wreckage, bodies and personal effects.

Thousands of gallons of jet fuel are feeding a massive blaze.

It didn't look like aircraft.

It was just probably a 30-foot-high burning mass

of metal and fuel and everything.

Hey, any survivors?

Canadian air force captain Tom Badcock

is one of the first on the scene.

As an Air Force officer, of course,

I had been to numerous crashes,

but this was nothing like I had ever seen in my life before.

And to see the devastation

and to see my, basically, comrades

lying on the ground in pieces was...

Words couldn't, can't describe it.

Many of them had bought t-shirts

saying "I survived Gander, Newfoundland".

We found that particularly emotional.

After hours of searching

through the charred wreckage,

everyone's worst fears are realized.

The crash has claimed the lives of all 256 people on board.

The search for the cause of the disaster is already under way,

but it will lead to controversy and ultimately to the demise

of the Canadian aviation safety board.

For the U.S. Military,

the crash of flight 1285 in Gander, Newfoundland,

is a historic loss.

If you take a look at the history

of the 101st airborne division air assault,

even in World War II,

that division never lost so many people

in such a short period of time

as they did on December the 12th in 1985 in Gander.

The Canadian military sets up a security perimeter

around the crash site.

We controlled all access to and from the site.

The RCMP asked me if I would identify an object

which they thought to be strange.

I've never seen a casing like this before.

And he said, "does this have any

kind of a chemical or nuclear connotation?".

And I said, "no, I have no idea what it is".

The find raises suspicions

about what was on the flight.

It certainly is possible

that Arrow Air could have been carrying things

either that it shouldn't have been carrying

or that weren't on any kind of cargo manifest.

David Mcnair is an investigator

with the Canadian aviation safety board.

There were aircraft parts everywhere,

and you immediately became aware that it was gonna be hard

to find things that you needed to find.

Mcnair is joined by colleague Peter Boag.

They arrive hours after the crash

to a scene of complete devastation.

The sights and smells, it's always unpleasant,

but you just have to.

You have to do it. It's part of your job.

The terrible scale of the crash

quickly makes headlines around the world.

It will have a tremendous impact on this division.

This is not only a sad day for the 101st airborne,

but a sad day for the nation.

Most of the young men and women we mourn

were returning to spend the holidays with their families.

You do not grieve alone.

We grieve as a nation together

as together we say goodbye to those who died

in the service of their country.

There is just no way that I can express to you

how tragic that was with the loss of so many people

in that one plane crash.

The Americans were really suffering

in terms of military losses

just two years prior to the crash of the Arrow Air flight.

The United States had lost a large number of soldiers

in a suicide truck bombing in Beirut.

So the losses, in a sense, were mounting,

and although the numbers these days

might not strike us as extraordinary,

they certainly were extraordinary at the time.

It wasn't just some assortment of soldiers...

A large number of them

from one of the leading American military units

in the American army.

You know, all of this raised, if you like, the symbolic stakes

quite apart from the casualty toll

of the loss of life that occurred.

Investigators immediately interview

the Gander ground crew

and get some intriguing information.

Morning.

Did you see the flight engineer inspect the aircraft?

But they did not deice the wings before taking off?

Yeah, we picked up a little bit of ice coming in.

We're good to go.

Okay. Thank you.

Well, we were concerned about icing,

because the refueler witness indicated

that they had picked up some ice on the approach.

They turn to meteorological reports

for the early hours of December 12th.

In early morning it was very, very icy,

and it had been severe freezing rain.

They flew in during the time that the forecast was for icing.

Mcnair and Boag wonder

if the crew of flight 1285

may have made a serious error by not deicing.

They check to see what other planes flying out of Gander

did that morning.

There were two other takeoffs this morning.

One deiced, one didn't.

And we noted that one Boeing 737 that departed

that picked up quite a bit of ice on his departure,

and that was an indicator to us

that the probability of ice accretion or ice gathering

on the aircraft was quite high.

But the other aircraft,

a British aerospace VC10,

had been on the ground for 50 minutes and did not deice.

It got off the ground safely.

And they took off within two hours of each other.

Ice cannot have been the only factor in this crash.

Big a 950, wind's 290 at four knots.

Takeoff now runway 22.

In search of other factors,

they consider the last minute runway change.

Copy that, Gander. Runway 22.

Not the runway they were expecting.

But they quickly conclude

that the alternate runway could not have had any bearing

on this crash.

Runway 22 is the longest runway at Gander,

so, in fact, it gave them the best margin for performance.

Investigators examine and document the crash site,

trying to determine the trajectory of the plane

as it went down.

This was a very heavily wooded area,

and as it got closer to the ground,

it started clipping the trees.

And we're gonna need pictures of the treetops as well,

and we're gonna need aerial shots.

But what they need most of all

is the information from the plane's two black boxes.

They could hold the key

to understanding what doomed flight 1285.

But as soon as they're recovered,

Mcnair sees a potential problem.

We were disappointed to see it was such an old recorder,

an old foil recorder,

as they really just don't give enough information

to the investigators.

Well, send them off to Ottawa, and we'll see what we've got.

The older design of the FDR engraves data

on a slow-moving roll of stainless steel foil.

Though the foil is fire resistant,

it can record only four flight parameters,

such as airspeed and altitude.

The newer digital flight recorders

can record hundreds of parameters.

All they can do is send the black boxes to

the national research council's flight recorder playback center

and hope for the best.

Then, with the investigation only hours old,

it takes a drastic turn.

An overseas U.S. Consulate receives word

from someone claiming responsibility for the crash.

The caller says it was the work of Islamic Jihad,

a branch of Hezbollah.

If you had to think about any one terrorist group

operating in the middle east at this time

which had an intent as well as a capacity

to target American military personnel, that was Hezbollah.

The call opens the possibility

that a terrorist bomb brought down flight 1285.

Tensions were really high in the world at that time.

When an aircraft fully loaded with American soldiers

crashes...

There's always questions that come up.

Mcnair sends portions of the wreckage

to a royal Canadian mounted police forensics lab

to be tested for bomb residue.

The team searches for evidence that flight 1285 exploded

before it hit the ground.

They look for any fallen debris

between the runway and the point of impact.

If the aircraft exploded before it hit the trees,

one would expect something would come off the aircraft,

and we would have found it.

We didn't find anything, nothing at all.

So we knew with confidence that the aircraft hit the trees,

the first impact, intact.

It's a similar story

when the test results from the RCMP come back .

They find no trace of bomb residue.

And both U.S. And Canadian officials suggest

Islamic Jihad's claim of responsibility could be false.

One of the things that obviously benefits

terrorist organizations is to spread the claim

for operational responsibility very, very broadly

to kind of boost the reputation of their organization,

again, to instill greater fear.

So it's difficult to separate fact from fiction.

With terrorism looking less likely,

investigators continue to focus on

the performance of the aircraft.

35 feet, six inches.

Four and a half degree declination.

The airplane had struck some trees

about half a mile from the end of the runway,

and we could see a distinct pattern in the trees.

Using photographs from the crash site,

investigators plot the height of 378 trees

to determine the dc-8's exact position as it went down.

The airplane was right wing low

with a nose high attitude relative to the trees.

Through photogrammetry, we determined that, in fact,

the aircraft was way above the stall angle of the aircraft,

so the aircraft was clearly stalled

in a high rate of descent.

The plane's radical nose-up position prevented it

from getting the lift needed to keep it in the air.

Investigators can't explain why the plane was flying

at such an extreme angle.

One clue about what the pilots were doing

comes from a piece of cockpit wreckage,

the airspeed indicator.

Look here.

It shows that the crew set a takeoff speed

of 144 knots

and that the plane reached an airspeed of at least 165 knots.

Bugs set on the right.

Copy that.

Investigators hope that

a much more detailed picture of the pilots' last moments

will emerge from the cockpit voice recorder.

But they're in for a disappointment.

It doesn't sound like it recorded anything

from the cockpit.

The cockpit recorder wasn't functioning properly.

It didn't record any of the crew's conversations.

With the absence of cockpit voice recorder,

we don't know exactly what the crew was doing

or what they were facing.

Their hopes now rest with the flight data recorder.

Even this rudimentary recorder would have caught

some indication to show what speeds they rotated at.

What warning lights, if any, were they seeing?

What was their reaction?

All these things are extremely valuable.

But it turns out to be only marginally more useful

than the cockpit voice recorder.

The recorder for the Arrow Air accident

was extremely limited.

We were able to determine, first of all, speed,

a little bit of altitude and heading of the aircraft.

There was no indication on there of engine power, bank angle,

pitch angle.

The flight data recorder tells investigators

that Arrow Air 1285 began its takeoff roll

and increased to a speed of 167 knots.

Liftoff occurred 51 seconds from the start of the roll.

Two seconds later, the speed began to decrease.

Come on, airspeed!

Airspeed!

The speed dropped off very quickly,

and so we knew that the aircraft was below normal flying speed.

We got that much from the recorder.

It tells us almost nothing.

But a closer look at the flight data

does reveal a potentially valuable clue.

The distance needed to get to takeoff speed

was longer than the pilots had planned for.

We looked at the acceleration distances,

and it took a little bit longer than we...than expected.

4,300 feet, 100 knots.

6,300 feet, 144 knots.

They should be lifting off now.

Investigators discover that liftoff occurred

some four seconds later,

or more than 1,000 feet further than it should have.

8,000 feet, 167 knots.

An extra 1,000 feet to get off the ground.

Why'd it take them so long?

V-1.

Rotate.

They used the full power,

and we would expect them to rotate a little earlier,

take off a little earlier.

The longer than normal takeoff

supports the original theory

that ice on the wings played a role in the crash.

But investigators know that can't be the whole story.

Icing itself is not necessarily

the only thing that happened.

Accidents don't just usually have one item.

They have several items.

Determined to find out what else,

besides ice on the wings, contributed to the crash,

the CASB turns its attention to the plane's flaps.

For the dc-8, the optimal flap setting for takeoff

is 18 degrees.

Looks like the flaps were extended.

With detailed work, we could say with some reasonable certainty

of where the flaps were,

which we believe were in the normal takeoff position.

They wonder if ice,

combined with malfunctioning engines,

caused the plane to stall.

The engines are sent to the CASB in Ottawa for a full inspection.

Each engine was recovered on site,

and immediately you could tell

that there was rotational damage on all the engines.

Wood debris is found deep inside

all four of the turbines.

A lot of tree debris

means the engine was running when it hit the trees.

Evidence shows the dc-8

was properly configured for takeoff

and that there was nothing wrong with the engines.

So why was flight 1285 slow to get off the ground?

Investigators focus in on the weight of the aircraft.

It's 101,000 pounds for fuel,

passengers and cargo unchanged.

They had predicted that each passenger and baggage

would weigh 170 pounds.

That average weight, 170 pounds,

matches the estimated weight for male passengers

set out in the Arrow Air guidelines.

As a pilot, having flown many military people around,

this didn't seem to ring true,

so we immediately looked at that aspect of the investigation.

Good morning.

I have a rec form for some personnel files.

Following his hunch,

Mcnair soon makes a crucial discovery.

Regular commercial flights has a mixture of folks.

It has men, women, children,

so then the average doesn't work out as much.

But this was no ordinary commercial flight.

All 256 passengers were adults, almost all of them large men.

We actually looked at the medical records

of the passengers, in terms of getting their actual weight

during their last medical.

In my own case, I normally weigh 175,

but when I've got all my gear on,

or I'm bringing it on board an aircraft,

I'm bringing on board 200 pounds or more.

We estimated that the more realistic weight

would have been 220 pounds per passenger.

That includes the passenger, everything they were carrying,

and the equipment they had.

With the new estimates,

he calculates the weight of the passengers

at more than 54,000 pounds.

That's 12,000 pounds heavier

than the weight recorded on the load sheet.

It's not even close.

But this plane had been flying with that weight

all night,

taking off from Cairo, then from Cologne without any problems.

The ice picked up in Gander may have made the difference.

You can take off at a heavier than normal weight,

and if there are no other factors at play,

you can get away with it.

If you have something else, like ice,

you have a serious problem.

Investigators now strongly suspect

that it was a combination of ice and extra weight

that prevented the dc-8 from staying in the air.

Okay. This has to be it.

Ice and weight.

We had a lot of scientific basis

to say that the aircraft should have flown but did not.

Why didn't it fly? And we had two powerful reasons.

One was weight.

The other was even probably more powerful,

is a small amount of ice contamination on the aircraft.

But they can only theorize.

No one in Gander saw ice on the wings.

It's impossible to know how much there was.

That's one problem.

Mcnair and Boag must now confront another.

Some of their own colleagues on the CASB

are raising doubts about the findings.

One of those with questions

is board member and aviation expert Les Filotas.

Well, as soon as I started looking

at the draft report, I skimmed some of it

and went to the part that was my technical specialty,

the flight data recorder part,

and as soon as I looked at it,

I said, "there's something really wrong here".

Filotas immediately wonders

how the aircraft could lose thrust

and crash so quickly after takeoff.

I did rough calculations,

and it just showed that to get that kind of deceleration,

you'd have to lose not one, two, or three engines, but all four,

and that was just a startling thing to see right away.

Watch your altitude. Pull up.

Come on, airspeed!

Airspeed!

They said the aircraft was,

I believe the exact phrase was "destroyed by a fuel-fed fire".

The early reports, everybody who was around there

mentioned the massive explosion and the mushroom cloud.

See this thing

coming, come across the front

of the truck, and it was like

a flame on the bottom, eh.

Two truckers on the highway

were almost under the flight path

when the Arrow Air aircraft passed over,

and they both said they saw fire on the right-hand side.

U.S. Army officials deny

there was any unreported or classified cargo

on board Arrow Air 1285.

But Filotas has reason to doubt that claim.

When the troops' equipment was loaded on board,

there were some of these big boxes.

What could have been on there? And we couldn't get any answer.

There was no cargo manifest,

and it was another contentious question that was never settled.

Not much attention clearly was paid to security procedures.

And, you know, this was a different time, admittedly,

but still, I think, the lack of security

at Cairo, at the airport

as the soldiers came on board the Arrow Air flight

for their return journey,

I think anybody would have to regard it as shocking,

even for their time.

And it's the kind of thing that

would never be allowed to happen today.

Filotas joins those speculating

that Arrow Air flight 1285 was the victim of a terrorist plot.

Was it Hezbollah?

Did it have any kind of European connections?

And the big question always in the back

of American governmental and security authorities' minds is

is there a...is there a cold war dimension to this?

Are the soviets involved?

The testimony you're about to give will be the truth,

the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help you god?

I do.

Please be seated.

Some now wonder if Arrow Air 1285

was at the center of the biggest global scandal of the time...

The U.S. Plot to illicitly provide Iran with arms

in exchange for American hostages.

Arrow Air was indeed one of the airlines

that assisted a covert operation

that was being mounted at the time

out of the Reagan White House by a famous individual

by the name of colonel Ollie North,

and the Iran contra business was very tangled

and a very peculiar covert operation.

It was not a thin, tiny layer of ice on the wings.

Filotas points to photographic evidence

to prove his case.

My colleague made a trip out to Gander

and went to the RCMP photo lab there,

where they had literally thousands

that they took on the crash site.

Many photos that seemed to indicate

that there was some kind of an explosion on board.

It's just like if you took a piece of aluminum foil

and poked your finger in it.

It would curl out from the inside to the outside

and would be obvious from which side

you put your finger through.

Filotas becomes even more suspicious

when he learns that an independent investigator

hired by Arrow Air

had explored the possibility of an onboard explosion.

He carefully looked at everything

and found that on the number three engine,

that's the inboard engine on the right-hand side,

some of the inlet guide veins, three of them, consecutive ones,

had sort of a dent in the leading edge,

and one of them had some red paint on it.

That investigator concluded that

there could have been a midair explosion...

...and that the damage and the paint markings inside the engine

could have been caused by debris exploding outward

from the main fuselage.

Another key piece of information for Filotas

comes from the postmortem examination

of some of the 256 victims.

Autopsies indicate that there were extremely high levels

of carbon monoxide in their blood.

So if they have combustion products

in their lungs,

natural inference is that they must have breathed in

some combustion products before the crash.

From all this evidence,

Filotas and his colleagues paint their own picture of the crash.

What the hell was that?

Smoke.

Smoke in the cockpit. Smoke.

But the lead investigators, Mcnair and Boag,

maintain that the sabotage theories

are nothing more than a sensationalist distraction.

We had no indication that terrorism was a player,

but we did have a lot of indication

that there was an aircraft performance problem

and there were icing problems.

Mcnair and Boag decide

the only way to end all the speculation

is to scientifically prove their theory

that ice combined with extra weight

is what brought down flight 1285.

Okay, you want to give her the once-over?

Before the mid 1980s,

little was known about the aerodynamic impact

of very thin ice accumulation.

The flight engineer who inspected the aircraft

was likely only looking for large buildups of ice

that would make the plane significantly heavier,

not thin coatings on top of the wings.

As part of the investigation,

we did a lot of research on the effects of ice on aircraft.

Aerodynamic tests carried out in a wind tunnel

reveal that even a small amount of ice contamination

can significantly reduce wing lift.

Just a small amount, say the size of some sandpaper,

if that's the type of surface you have,

it can seriously degrade a large aircraft.

That was a surprise to me.

The team carries out further tests

in a flight simulator.

We basically had to reprogram the simulator

to degrade the performance to simulate ice.

V-1.

Rotate.

Every attempt to fly the simulator

with the exact same parameters as flight 1285

ends the same way, with a stall and a crash.

Okay, let's run it again with 10,000 less pounds.

From the simulator trials, we realized with icing on board,

what degraded the lift characteristics of the aircraft,

it was difficult to fly a normal profile,

and you could easily lose control of the aircraft.

Ah, she's flying like a pig.

Positive rate?

Negative.

Full power.

The pilots would have been able to see

that their plane wasn't climbing fast enough.

Watch your altitude. Pull up.

Come on, airspeed!

Airspeed!

Watch the trees!

First officer Connelly pulled the nose back,

trying to get the plane in the air.

What he didn't realize was he was sealing their fate.

The dc-8 was already on the verge of a stall.

Pulling the nose up only made things worse.

The aircraft's weight had been underestimated...

Its lift compromised by ice on the wings.

A fatal combination.

If you take one of the factors out,

if you take the ice out and have the same weight,

maybe you don't have the accident.

If you take out the heavy weight and still have the icing,

maybe you won't have the accident,

but if you have them combined together, you have the accident.

As for the suspicious paint markings

found inside the engine,

Mcnair determines they came from a front-end loader

used to clear debris at the crash site.

As well, the extreme intensity of the fire

could have caused the abnormally high level of carbon monoxide

in the victims' blood.

Even the truckers' accounts of pre-impact flames

can be explained.

If you have an airplane flying at high angle of attack

where it's in a stalled regime, typically, or often,

you will have flame coming from the engine

because of compressor stall.

As for the terrorists' capability

to pull off such a complex, brazen attack,

there is significant doubt.

Could they have done it in terms of intent?

Yes.

In terms of actually pulling that operation off

in the circumstances?

You know, that seems to be low probability,

but just at the edges of the margins of the possible.

There was a lot of controversy

which we just basically had to deal with,

in terms of keeping on with our job,

because investigation is not an emotional issue,

it's a scientific issue.

So we basically had to stick with science.

We didn't see any evidence of any other kind of explosion.

We only saw the evidence of an explosion caused by impact

and the aircraft breaking up.

Mcnair believes his conclusion

carries an urgent warning for the entire airline industry.

A lot of people have a hard time believing

that a little, tiny bit of ice on a large wing

will have a big effect, but it does.

After nearly three years

of painstaking research and investigation,

the Canadian aviation safety board

is ready to release its report.

But what is supposed to provide answers

instead ignites a storm of controversy.

The ice theory is flat-out wrong.

CASB investigators believe

they have a convincing report

that explains the complex cause of the crash of flight 1285.

I was hoping that, as all investigators do,

when the final report came out,

that in fact the safety message would be out there

and would be accepted.

But four of the nine members of the board

disagree with the report's conclusion.

This investigation appears to involve a cover-up.

It's impossible that ice would have been a factor.

Crash investigators are, you know,

they're always under pressure to come up with an answer

sooner than they would like,

and sometimes depending on the intensity of that pressure

can perhaps create crash investigations

which are less than satisfactory.

The dissenters take the unprecedented step

of releasing their own minority report,

citing an onboard explosion as the cause.

We had extremely difficult time

in putting out our dissenting report.

We were given a very restricted time,

and then there was an attempt to suppress it.

I was asked the question outright,

"well, what do you want to do?

Do you want to try to save your job,

or do you want to get the truth about this accident?".

My answer was, "well, I want to save my job

by getting at the truth".

It was quite unusual to have a dissenting report

written with photographs.

I don't see merit in it.

I totally don't understand why it was issued

in the first place.

Why would you come up with this?

What's the scientific basis for it?

There is no science.

Okay, look.

Paint transfer means nothing.

The crew blood samples means nothing.

The petalling is meaningless.

Therefore, you have no evidence of terrorism.

This proves nothing.

In this particular case, of course,

what we had was an extraordinary outcome,

where you have a majority and a minority report

which are deeply divergent

and which raise very different kinds of pictures

about what the outcome of this crash would be.

I think it's very tough for families and friends

not to have final closure on something.

There was really no definitive answer

to what caused that crash.

If I was a family member, I'd have questions, too.

But on march 10, 1989,

while the controversy continues to swirl,

there's tragic evidence that Mcnair and Boag's message

has not been heard.

In Dryden, Ontario, in wintry conditions,

the crew of a Fokker F-28 elects not to deice.

Just seconds after takeoff,

the plane cannot achieve sufficient lift

to stay airborne.

The accident was almost identical to Arrow Air 1285.

The airplane hit the tree canopy intact,

and after that, it exploded

because of the fact it hit the ground

with a lot of fuel on board.

The crash kills 24 of the 69 people on board.

It was pretty clear from Dryden

that icing or snow may have been a factor in this as well.

If only the 'investigators' warning

had been heard,

the tragedy in Dryden may never have happened.

The fact that there was a lot of controversy

around this investigation was very unfortunate,

because basically, it took away from the safety message.

Aircraft like the dc-8 are very vulnerable

to icing contamination.

That message was lost because of the controversy

and the bomb theory.

But those who held firm to the bomb theory

stand by their actions.

It does not advance safety

to get the wrong cause of an accident.

The real safety message is that you have to get at the truth,

and the truth, truth and the facts of this accident

were never finally established.

The controversy over this investigation

spelled the end of the Canadian aviation safety board.

It was scrapped and later replaced

with a new, better-regulated agency.

We learned a lesson.

It cost a lot of people their lives,

and that lesson didn't get passed on to other people,

and other people lost their lives.

That's the sad part, for me.

I know, in my own case,

if I really didn't know all the answers,

and I had lost someone in that terrible crash,

I wouldn't be satisfied.

It's tough when you don't know,

and you've lost someone that's near and dear to you.

I think we all want to know.