Original subtitles

A 747 plummets towards the Pacific Ocean.

People just popped up like popcorn.

Engines 1, 2, and 3 have all crashed.

This airplane is totally out of control.

It is going to crash.

In two minutes, China Airlines flight 006 dropped

six miles to the clouds.

Airspeed 270, 280, 290.

The plane begins to tear itself apart

as it spirals toward the sea.

And I close my eye.

I thought I was gone.

Altitude, 15,000 feet, 12,000 feet, 10,000 feet.

Emergency. Emergency.

Ladies and gentlemen, we are starting our approach.

We lost both engines.

Mayday. Mayday.

Brace for impact!

It's going to crash!

February 19, 1985.

a China Airlines flight cruises

across the Pacific to Los Angeles.

At 39,000 feet, it's racing towards the dawn.

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

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

as it sails above the ocean on autopilot.

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

so they're rested for the landing.

But Captain Min-Yuan Ho is restless.

Oh. Good morning, gentlemen.

Even though he's not officially on duty yet,

Captain Ho returns to the cockpit.

Thought I'd keep you company.

The captain isn't the only one up.

Best friends Seksan Caniyo and Alex Noel

have something to celebrate.

I feel like I'm in first class.

It's Seksan's 30th birthday.

Thank you.

I had the longest birthday because I

just gained my 12 hours back.

And we've been drinking champagne, celebrating

41,000 feet in the air.

Not too many people get to do that.

Bill Peacock is in first class.

He's traveled all over the world

for the American government.

There was nothing special.

It was a routine commercial flight.

I had a very nice first class seat-- sat there

and read some books, went to sleep.

By now, the plane is nearing

the coast of California.

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen.

We will shortly be serving your breakfast.

For those of you who wish to adjust your watches,

the local time in Los Angeles is now 7:00 AM.

Sleep well?

Very well, sir. Thank you.

Good morning, captain.

After their five-hour break,

the flight crew is reunited in the cockpit.

Soon after, the plane runs into some stiff winds.

Ladies and gentlemen, this is your captain speaking.

We're experiencing some light air turbulence.

Please fasten your seatbelts.

The autopilot is set to keep the plane

flying at 290 miles an hour.

But with the wind blowing hard, it's increasingly difficult

to maintain the speed.

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

Engine 4 is giving us weak thrust.

There's a problem with one of the engines.

The flight engineer throttles up the engine,

but it doesn't respond.

We're losing speed.

Back in economy, Seksan Caniyo

has also noticed something.

You noticed the light in that wing isn't flashing anymore.

So what?

In the cockpit, the strange situation

suddenly gets much worse.

Engine 4 flamed out.

The fourth engine stops working completely.

Take a look at engine out procedures.

Work out a three engine cruise altitude.

The problem with the fourth engine

isn't a complete surprise.

At the pre-flight briefing, Captain Ho

was told that a repair crew had worked on engine four

before the flight.

Perhaps the engine still wasn't working properly.

We had a snag advisor on engine 4 before we took off.

-Yes, sir. -Maybe that's it.

Without the fourth engine,

the plane continues to slow down.

Airspeed, 240.

Call Oakland Center and request a lower altitude.

Oakland Center.

Dynasty 006, requesting new altitude.

Dynasty 006, stand by.

Reignite engine 4.

Yes, captain.

At this altitude, there isn't much oxygen.

So the chances of a successful relight are slim.

No response, captain.

As the crew tries to restart their engine,

their plane slowly begins to roll to the right.

Dynasty 006,

you're cleared to flight 240.

We're banking right, captain. Airspeed, 230.

As the plane continues

to turn and slow down, it's in danger of stalling.

Altitude hold off. Nose down.

Hoping to increase his speed,

Captain Ho tries pushing the plane's nose down.

Nothing the crew does seems to help.

Their jet is banking more and more steeply.

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

Airspeed, 220. We're banking right, captain.

I'm disengaging autopilot.

For the first time, Captain Ho takes

manual control of the plane.

Seatbelts.

He struggles with the controls.

But the plane has veered into thick clouds,

and he can't see the horizon as he

tries to keep his jet level.

I've lost ADI.

The ADIs have malfunctioned.

It's going out of limits!

Just minutes after their fourth engine stops

working, the China Airlines flight

suddenly stalls and begins falling from the sky.

People just popped up like popcorn, hitting the cabin.

And all the tray was flying--

hot tea, pots, noodles, and all the luggage in the compartment

were hitting people.

You could hear rivets popping.

It sounded like bullets were hitting the outside

of the aircraft, which, you know,

we're out in the middle of the ocean,

nobody's shooting at us.

At that time, we didn't know we're going to live or die.

China Airlines flight 006

is out of control and hurtling towards the ocean.

You can see the stewardesses,

all these people who didn't have their belt on,

they were flying.

Dynasty 006. Oakland Center. How do you hear me?

The crew is stunned, blindsided by their jet's

bizarre behavior.

Engines 1, 2, and 3 have lost power!

No response, captain.

Dynasty 006. Oakland Center. How do you hear me?

Airspeed 270, 280.

290.

Dynasty 006. Oakland Center. How do you hear me?

Struggling against the plane's wild motion,

the flight engineer tries again to restart his fourth engine.

Ignition, negative.

The G-Forces are so powerful that the flight

engineer is pinned to the control pedestal.

Dynasty 006. Oakland Center. Do you copy?

You need to see this.

In Oakland, air traffic control spots

the plane's sudden descent.

In a matter of seconds, the plane

falls almost 10,000 feet.

Altitude 370, 360, 350.

In the cabin, the G-Forces are punishing.

And I close my eyes. I thought I was gone.

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

The plane is about to exceed its maximum speed.

Approaching BMO.

Tumbling madly through the clouds,

the 747 finally starts to pull out of its nosedive.

As the plane writes itself, the G-Forces changed direction.

The passengers are pressed to the floor,

feeling five times their normal weight.

I remember looking over at this dignified

older Chinese gentleman who is sitting

across the aisle from me.

And his face was being contorted

like this, like he was lying on his side

in a wax museum in a fire.

I mean, his face was just all contorted.

As the crew struggles to regain

control of the plane, it begins to slow down.

Air speed 180 knots and falling.

As their speed continues to fall,

the flight engineer reaches desperately

for the engine throttles.

Air speed 18 knots and falling.

But the engines don't respond.

No response.

The engines are flamed out.

After tumbling 10,000 feet in 30 seconds,

the jumbo jet plunges again into another freefall.

And the second time when it went down,

this time it's plunge.

I mean, it went down.

The change is swift.

Once again, the passengers feel pulled

towards the nose of the plane.

You know, this airplane

is totally out of control.

It is going to crash.

Altitude 250.

Airspeed 290.

As the plane spins toward the ocean,

the airspeed increases rapidly.

Dynasty 006.

With the crew struggling to control

the plane, six separate calls from air traffic control

go unanswered.

The stress of the dive tears the landing

gear doors off the plane.

In less than a minute,

the plane drops 3.5 miles.

Hold on!

Let's link arms.

He said, I love you, man.

I told him, I love you, man.

And we said goodbye to our wife.

And he said something about his belongings.

He gave all his belongings to his wife.

And that's when we just start pushing

our chair back together.

Altitude 15,000 feet.

With no visible horizon line,

Captain Ho doesn't know which way is up.

With SPNO--

Without a reference,

he can't stop the plane from spinning.

Emergency. Emergency.

After blindly plunging thousands of feet,

the plane finally breaks free from the clouds.

And when this thing was falling down,

it looked like you have a magnifying glass

and you went like that.

And all of a sudden, the white water

break becoming closer and closer, faster and faster.

It's, like incredible, and we thought we were going to die.

Altitude 1,200 feet.

As he struggles for control,

Captain Ho has only 30 seconds before his crippled plane

smashes into the ocean.

I can see the horizon.

Altitude 10,000 feet.

For the first time since beginning

his harrowing descent, the captain

can now use the horizon line as a reference

in leveling the plane.

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

passengers pay the price.

Their bodies are forced into their seats,

battered by another dramatic change in direction.

You know, the G-Force was so strong.

And I weigh at 200 pounds.

So my weight was almost 1,200 pounds.

It's a race against time,

and the plane starts to win.

ADI's coming back.

As the plane finally begins to level,

the altitude indicators return to normal.

ADI is coming in.

More importantly, as mysteriously

as the incident began, three of the plane's engines

regain power.

Engines 1, 2, and 3 are coming back.

Engine 4, still negative.

-Reignite engine 4. -Yes, Captain.

Once again, the flight engineer tries

to reignite the fourth engine.

- But this time... - Engine 4, reigniting.

For the first time in minutes,

the plane is flying under control.

They saved the airplane.

They pulled the airplane out of this acrobatic maneuver

at an altitude of 9,500 feet.

They popped out of the clouds at 11,000 feet,

and they had the airplane in stable level flight

by 9,500 feet.

That was a masterpiece of flying.

Ladies and gentlemen, this is the captain speaking.

Is anyone hurt?

Do we have a doctor on board?

There's a gentleman

sitting behind me all splatter with blood

from hitting the compartment.

So we kept flying.

And next thing I knew that the whole plane

was quiet, real quiet.

Nobody talked very much,

and the talk were whispering, because we don't know--

we still don't know we're going to live or die.

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

A new controller, Brian Campbell,

has taken over control of flight 006.

Dynasty 006. Oakland Center. Do you hear me?

Can you fly the plane?

006, we are flameout. We are... emergency.

We are 9-er thousand.

Roger. Roger.

We have radar contact.

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

Roger. Roger.

Less than 10 minutes after the start

of their problems, everything seems normal again.

Request radar vector to return to course.

There really is nothing I can do to assist.

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

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

I'm giving him a destination.

It appeared to me that he was well

in control of his aircraft.

Dynasty 006. Oakland center.

Are you declaring an emergency?

Do you want to divert to San Francisco?

Negative, Oakland Center.

Condition normal now.

We will continue to Los Angeles.

Air traffic control clears the plane

to climb to 35,000 feet.

You are now cleared to climb to 350.

But a new problem soon arises.

Roger Oakland Center.

Captain, our landing gear is down and locked.

Can you bring them up?

Negative.

The hydraulic fluid in system one is empty.

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

Hydraulic fluid, which controls the gear

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

Oakland Center. Dynasty 006.

Request new clearance to maintain flight level 270.

Dynasty 006. Oakland Center. Do you have injuries?

Stand by, Oakland Center.

Sir, are you OK?

My head.

One passenger has suffered serious injuries,

and two dozen others have cuts and bruises.

Oakland Center. Dynasty 006.

We have at least two injuries on board.

Dynasty 006. Oakland Center. Are you declaring an emergency?

Do you want to divert to San Francisco?

Stand by, Oakland Center.

Oakland Center. Dynasty 006. We're declaring an emergency.

We request a direct route to San Francisco.

Well, they cleared all the other airplanes out

of the way, they gave them clear runway so nobody

was waiting, nobody-- he didn't have to wait for anybody else.

He went straight in for a landing.

Dynasty 006. Oakland center. You are now cleared.

You are free to descend at pilot's discretion.

Captain Ho not only has

injuries on board, the plane itself

has been severely damaged.

His rear elevators, which help control

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

Without them, landing his jet safely

will be extremely difficult.

The problem is it's a very big airplane,

and it responds very, very slowly.

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

You might hit the ocean.

What you need is a very cool head.

Captain Ho must now land using varying

amounts of engine thrust.

It's a controlled fall towards the runway.

As we came in, we flew

over the house in Atherton where I had lived,

where my kids had been born.

And I looked down, and said, boy, this is fitting.

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

because it's been so badly torqued and ruptured,

you know, at least I got to see that.

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

I mean, it was just perfect touchdown.

Yes!

Ladies and gentlemen, this is Captain Ho speaking.

Wishing you a safe journey.

I hope you enjoyed our uneventful flight.

Thank you for flying China Airlines.

We hope you fly with us again.

On the ground, the full extent of the damage

to the plane can be seen.

I saw this enormous piece of extremely complicated

machinery that is much larger than most buildings

sitting there on the tarmac with bits ripped off it.

Parts of the entire airplane, at the end,

were ripped off as though a tornado had come through

or a crane had been in and ripped pieces out of it.

It was a very sobering experience.

It's clear why the crew had such a hard time

landing the plane--

enormous chunks of the tail are missing, either torn off

by the stress of the dive or crushed when the landing

gear doors broke loose.

If the damage had been much more severe,

the crew wouldn't have been able to regain

control of their jet.

Two dozen passengers have minor injuries,

only one requires hospitalization

but is soon released.

A near disaster was avoided.

But what had gone wrong in the first place?

The National Transportation Safety

Board arrives that very day and launches their investigation.

The cockpit voice recorder is sent to Washington,

but it's designed to tape over itself every 30 minutes.

None of what happened in the cockpit

during the terrifying plunge from the sky remains.

Without a cockpit voice recorder,

we had to reconstruct what the crew said

and how they interpreted things,

and what was going on in the cockpit to the best

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

A record of the plane's instrument activity

during the flight has been captured

by the flight data recorder.

But again, the team runs into a problem--

the flight data recorder experienced unprecedented

stress during the dive.

There were electrical interruptions, too, which

caused gaps in the recording.

Investigators begin with what they do have.

Passengers and crew report that just before the failure

of the jet's fourth engine, the plane flew

through unexpected turbulence.

Had this caused the engine to fail?

Satellite weather maps reveal that there was indeed

heavy air turbulence over the Pacific,

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

The jet's four engines are tested and studied.

Even after the horrific dive through the sky,

they're found to be in working order.

However, given the previous history

of problems with engine four, it

receives particular scrutiny.

They had an anomaly with one of the engines.

They believed that the engine had flamed out

or that there was something seriously

wrong with the engine.

The wear on a small throttle valve trimmer

is measured.

It's worn down by only 4/1000 of an inch,

but that's enough to restrict the fuel flow to the engine 4.

Engine 4 is giving us weak thrust.

Investigators determined

that at 39,000 feet, engine 4 did indeed deliver

weaker than normal thrust.

It's known as a hung engine.

The aircraft logbook reveals that engine 4

had been written up on two previous occasions

just the week before.

The NTSB decides to dig deeper into the history

of maintenance on engine 4.

We had a snag advisor on engine 4 before we took off.

Yes, sir.

Maybe that's it.

But after weeks of investigation,

the NTSB concludes that the engine

didn't need to be replaced.

All the repairs were done according to the book.

A faulty engine was not the cause of the accident.

And even with the loss of one engine,

the plane shouldn't have been in immediate danger.

Engine 4 flamed out.

A 747 is designed to fly on only three engines.

The loss of thrust on a four engine airplane

is a minor event.

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

but the airplane is easily re-trimmed,

and the airplane will fly on three

engines with no difficulty.

We're banking right, captain.

Airspeed 230.

There are standard procedures

to follow in the case of an engine failure,

but the crew of the China Airlines flight

hadn't followed them.

They tried to reignite the engine immediately

instead of descending.

Reignite engine 4.

Yes, captain.

They attempted to restart much too high.

You are supposed to attempt to restart

an engine only below 30,000 feet, they were at 41,000.

But it's a little curious to me is why they didn't use

the normal relight procedure.

They were starting to try to relight the engine at altitude

and that would likely not relight.

No response, captain.

It's a mistake.

But it shouldn't have led to the plane

spiraling out of control.

So how had a manageable problem turned into a near disaster?

I've lost ADI.

The ADIs have malfunctioned.

It's going out of limits!

To get more information

on what was happening in the cockpit, investigators

interview the flight crew.

I heard the captain report the ADI was lost.

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

The crew tells investigators

that their ADIs, which measure how level the plane is,

weren't working.

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

And looking at their indicators,

can't possibly be right.

And therefore, they must have failed.

The attitude indicator had indicated a position

so implausible that it looked like it

had to be a failed instrument.

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

But in fact, when the ADIs are studied by the NTSB,

they're all found to be perfectly normal.

When we started banking right,

engine 4 was already flamed out.

We started to descend faster, and engines

1, 2, and 3 also failed.

Engines 1, 2, and 3 have lost power.

NTSB investigators are even more confused

when the crew tells them that all of their engines

had failed.

No response, captain.

With the exception of engine 4,

the flight data recorder indicates

that the other three engines were

working the entire flight.

Ignition, negative.

If the engines had all failed,

there would have been a host of other problems

such as cabin depressurization, but that didn't happen.

Engines 1, 2, and 3 are coming back.

Finally, when we decided that lower in altitude, 1, 2, and 3

came back, and we were able to reignite engine number 4.

Engine 4, reignited.

At the end of the dive,

the crew had the plane under full power.

It was a remarkable recovery.

But to investigators, it's a puzzle.

The story the crew is telling doesn't

match up with the evidence they've uncovered.

After months of investigation, the NTSB team slowly

pieces together a re-enactment of the plane's near

catastrophe over the Pacific.

It includes information from the reconstructed flight

recorder, personal interviews, and the air

traffic control transcript.

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

apart from a problem with a small valve,

there was nothing wrong with the 747

before it plunged from the sky.

In fact, it was the crew that made

a series of fateful decisions that almost crashed the plane.

Just after 10:00 Pacific Time, engine 4 on the China Air

flight starts to lose thrust.

Engine 4 is giving us weak thrust.

The flight engineer struggles to fix the problem.

But investigators discover that he

doesn't take one of the most basic steps he should have--

he leaves the engine's bleed air valve on.

When an engine isn't working properly,

the valve is supposed to be closed so the engine can use

all available air to restart.

It's a little puzzling that the flight engineer

didn't shut off bleed air.

And the most-- in my mind, the most likely reason for it

is that he didn't expect to be told to restart

the engine at 41,000 feet.

And so when the captain instructed

him to try some restarts, he just kind of wasn't

ready with his checklist.

He wasn't-- he was doing something out of order,

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

to shut down the bleed air.

The end result is that the engine,

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

Unwittingly, the flight engineer

has started a ticking clock.

Engine 4 is slowly losing its ability to stay lit.

We're losing speed.

With more engine power

on the left wing than the right,

the China Airlines flight begins turning.

In order to keep it from turning to the right,

the proper thing to do would have

been to step on the rudder.

That would have produced a twisting force, so to speak,

that would have overcome the imbalance of the engines.

But instead of adjusting the rudder himself,

Captain Ho continues to let the autopilot fly the jet.

The autopilot is designed not to move the rudder.

The autopilot can adjust the ailerons and spoilers

in the plane's wings, but these flaps

aren't strong enough to overcome

the imbalance that the plane is experiencing.

Without the help of the rudder, the plane's turn

becomes steeper and steeper.

Now, it's possible that he'd forgotten that the autopilot

didn't use the rudder.

He may have been assuming all along that the autopilot was

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

which it wasn't.

Engine 4 flamed out.

Investigators discover

that after losing power to his fourth engine,

Captain Ho continues to leave the autopilot on.

He doesn't take complete control of the plane.

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

Airspeed 240.

He didn't use the rudder

to compensate for the lack of thrust

on the right outboard engine.

The airplane started to lose speed,

and one thing led to another.

And in the end, it was really that little error

of airmanship--

the failure to step on that left rudder pedal--

that triggered everything else.

Reignite engine 4.

Yes, captain.

Rather than taking control of flying the plane,

Captain Ho's attention seems to be focused on his engine

problem, something that his flight engineer

could handle on his own.

No response, captain.

It's really critical that attention be

paid to flying the airplane.

But it's happened over and over again in aviation

that the crew gets focused on a problem with a system,

in this case, an engine.

But it could have been a light bulb,

it could have been any other malfunction.

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

then they're not prepared for what's

happening to the airplane.

The plane enters a critical moment--

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

The NTSB believes that the captain was concentrating

on his airspeed indicator but seemingly

fails to notice the instrument directly beside it,

his attitude indicator.

This instrument would have warned

him that his plane was starting to roll

alarmingly to the right.

They concentrated on one part of the phenomenon

and lost the full picture.

And as they lost the full picture,

they lost, apparently, a very important part

of any instrument flying, which is the scan.

You look at all of the primary instruments one

after the other.

And whatever is going on, you look at them all constantly.

During the plane's nosedive,

it flies through thick clouds.

With no visual horizon as a reference,

the flight crew must trust their instruments

to level the plane.

I've lost ADI.

Instead, what investigators believe

happened, is that the crew became spatially disoriented,

they decided that their instruments were failing.

They simply didn't believe what they were seeing,

and they thought they had lost their attitude instruments.

They hadn't lost their altitude instruments,

the airplane was, in fact, embarking

on an aerobatic maneuver.

As the plane begins tumbling toward the ocean,

another critical lapse in judgment occurs.

The stand by ADI was also going out of limits.

I tried to restart.

During interviews, the flight engineer

told the NTSB that all three of the plane's working

engines failed.

We started to descend faster, and engines

1, 2, and 3 also failed.

But the flight data recorder shows that, in fact,

they were still working.

In the heat of the crisis, the engineer

had made an enormous mistake.

Engines 1, 2, and 3 has lost power.

The investigation reveals

that as the plane fell, the thrust in each engine

was indeed reduced dramatically.

But the cause wasn't engine trouble,

the engine throttles had been lowered

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

It was something the engineer missed

in the chaos of the dive.

You can understand

why the flight engineer might have been

confused about this situation.

If he had not seen the captain pull the the power to idle

on the engines, he would reasonably

assume that the fact that they went to idle

was a problem rather than intentional.

Investigators also believe that they know why

the engines didn't give the crew

more power when the engineer tried to throttle them up.

The cold temperatures at 29,000 feet

would stop them from responding quickly.

No response, captain.

But in the heat of the moment,

the engineer could have taken their slow response

as another indication that they failed.

The NTSB discovers that, indeed,

gauges in the generator panel behind the engineer

show that the three engines were still firing.

Ignition, negative.

But the gravitational force became so powerful,

the engineer couldn't look back.

After months of painstaking recreation,

the NTSB investigators believe they understand

what happened inside the cockpit

of China Airlines flight 006.

But what they don't understand is why.

The crew's medical records are examined.

Was there something wrong with the captain

that might explain the bizarre behavior?

Nothing turns up.

You know, it wasn't just the Three Stooges who won a trip

on a 747 or something, it was a trained

crew, highly experienced, thousands of hours.

How could an experienced crew make

so many fundamental mistakes?

The NTSB team decides to examine all the factors

affecting human behavior, including

a new field of research.

For the first time, as far as I know,

in a report, the circadian rhythms, the bio rhythms,

the day and night functioning of the body,

was seriously taken into account

as a possible explanation of why an extremely experienced

Boeing 747 captain didn't notice things that

to other pilots might have seemed obvious,

such as the fact that his airplane was busy flipping

on his back when he was attempting to deal

with an engine problem.

Although Captain Ho had the required 15 hours

off duty before flying that day,

the NTSB investigators take a closer

look at the captain's schedule before the night

of the flight.

I do not think I was fatigued.

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

This accident occurred at what

would be about 2:00 AM, local time,

and that's pretty significant.

Most people are asleep around 2:00 AM.

So this incident occurred at a point in his,

what it would call, circadian rhythms,

his body clock where he would be at his deepest sleep.

I remember also that he had gone back into--

there was a crew rest area on 747,

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

But another thing I remember from his interview

was he said, you never really sleep well on the airplane.

A captain never sleep well during a flight.

I worked for many years for this airline,

but I never have this problem before.

During six flights in the previous six days,

Captain Ho had covered a total of 18 time zones.

Thought I'd keep you company.

The NTSB research suggests

that desynchronosis or jet lag may have been a cause.

And I think all these factors certainly

would have contributed to his being

performing at less than his full potential at the time.

Engine 4 flamed out.

Investigators also take a closer look

at the very machinery that is supposed to make

long distance flying easier.

Take a look at the engine out procedures.

Work out a three engine cruise altitude.

Yes, captain.

We have people in the front of airplanes because we

believe that in circumstances which nobody has foreseen,

the human being in the front of the airplane

can react creatively, can solve a problem

that nobody has thought about before in real time.

And automation can't solve problems

that nobody has thought about before in real time

in quite the same way.

The NTSB concludes that possibly

fatigue from air travel and bored

by the monotony of his tasks--

We're banking right, captain.

I'm disengaging autopilot.

--the captain relied on his autopilot for too long.

When he should have taken direct control,

he hesitated trusting his systems.

That is obviously a failure.

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

Pilot error.

As a result of the China Airlines near mishap

and other incidents around the same time,

aircraft manufacturers began to rethink the design

of their automated systems.

The idea of the automation is that it's going to help

the human do the human's job.

It's going to help the human take the airplane

from the gate to the gate at the other end,

and it's going to help along the way.

Boeing makes use of this particular incident

to say we still want the crew to have full authority so

that they can move the controls, as far as it's

physically possible to move them,

and to manage the airplane, even if it may bend

the airplane, as it is better to do that than to restrict

the pilot's authority and then have him

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

is in charge.

Whatever mistakes the flight crew made that day,

they did succeed in their ultimate task.

They flew the airplane well.

They did an excellent job with the approach afterward.

They were careful with the airplane.

They knew the airplane had been damaged.

They didn't know the severity of it.

They were gentle with the maneuvering, and yet,

tested enough to make sure that they wouldn't get

themselves in further trouble as they

made the approach to landing.

The one big thing they did right,

and one only ever needs to do one big thing

is they saved the airplane.

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

When something happens to your airplane,

you need to save the airplane,

and you need to save the passengers,

and that's what they did.

The pilot saved our lives.

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

And perhaps there was one other hero that day,

the Boeing 747 itself.

It was put through maneuvers and stresses that far

outweighed its known limits.

And yet despite it all, the aircraft

survived and landed safely.