Original subtitles

♪

NARRATOR: US fighters scramble to intercept a fast-moving jet.

WESLEY: Everybody knew that there was a major problem.

COL. OLSON: Stand by. I can't quite see.

NARRATOR: But this is not a combat mission.

COL. OLSON: Our job is to try to figure out

what's wrong with that airplane.

NARRATOR: It's a midair emergency.

WESLEY: 4-7-Bravo-Alpha, Jacksonville.

Please acknowledge.

NARRATOR: A private Learjet is hundreds of miles off course.

COL. OLSON: There's some reason why that crew is not communicating

with air traffic control, and we need to find that out.

BOB: Can he see anything in the cockpit?

BOB: The aircraft was flying toward a large metropolitan area.

BOB: Get me someone from Learjet.

I need to know how long this plane can stay in the air.

JIM: If it went down in those areas,

there'd be mass casualties.

MAN: Mayday, mayday.

♪

NARRATOR: It's 8:30 am at Orlando International Airport.

FO. BELLEGARRIGUE: Nav lights? CPT. KLING: On.

FO. BELLEGARRIGUE: Radios?

NARRATOR: The pilots of a private Learjet

run through their pre-flight checks.

CPT. KLING: Are set.

NARRATOR: They're preparing for some high-profile passengers.

FO. BELLEGARRIGUE: And we're ready for taxi.

CPT. KLING: Just in time. Here's the man himself. Good morning.

NARRATOR: Pro golfer Payne Stewart is on his way to Dallas

with some close business associates.

PAYNE: Sure, the target area's wide,

but you miss, the bunker's gonna eat you alive.

MIKE: Payne Stewart is one of the most colorful characters

in the game of golf.

NARRATOR: At 42, Stewart is in the middle of a comeback year.

He's just won the US Open,

one of the most important dates on the tour,

but he's almost as famous for his trademark wardrobe

as he is for his golfing.

MIKE: Payne Stewart was loud, he was outgoing,

he was engaging.

His dad always wore really colorful blazers

and he always told Payne, you know, you want to stand out.

So Payne said I'm gonna wear knickers, plus fours

and a flat cap,

so even people who didn't follow golf knew who he was

by how he dressed.

PAYNE: Let me show you my idea for that bunker.

NARRATOR: Payne Stewart hopes his future in golf

will go beyond playing the game.

He has big plans for building a new course

at the Dallas university

where he honed his skills as an amateur.

MIKE: There were three other people with him in the plane

in addition to the pilots.

He had Van Ardan, who was his agent,

along with Robert Fraley, also his agent,

and Bruce Borland, who was a member of

the Jack Nicklaus design group.

PAYNE: This hole is gonna be tough. It's over 500 yards.

NARRATOR: Stewart flies regularly on the Learjet,

a plane that takes its name from the man who designed it.

JIM: Bill Lear was working on a fighter jet design

for the Swiss,

and when they decided not to build that airplane,

he took that design and brought it back to the US

and built the Learjet.

WESLEY: 4-7-Bravo-Alpha, you are cleared for takeoff.

CPT. KLING: You ready? Okay. Here we go. And takeoff thrust.

NARRATOR: Captain Michael Kling is well qualified

to fly this high performance machine.

He's a former Air Force pilot and flight instructor.

JIM: A lot of pilots came out of the Air Force

and started flying Learjets

because it reminded them and gave them that performance

that they were used to.

It was like the Ferrari or the Porsche of business jets.

FO. BELLEGARRIGUE: V-one.

NARRATOR: First Officer Stephanie Bellegarrigue

has less than 100 hours in the Lear.

She's keen to log more flight time.

FO. BELLEGARRIGUE: Rotate.

NARRATOR: At 9:19 am, the Learjet lifts off.

FO. BELLEGARRIGUE: Good morning, Jacksonville.

This is Learjet 4-7-Bravo-Alpha climbing to flight level 2-6-0.

NARRATOR: The crew contacts Jacksonville air traffic control.

WESLEY: Good morning 4-7-Bravo-Alpha.

Climb and maintain flight level three-niner-zero.

NARRATOR: Wesley Kutch was one of the controllers

on duty that day.

WESLEY: The crew of the Learjet was extremely professional,

cheerful, nothing out of the ordinary at all.

A typical hello, how are you, verify your altitude,

course, et cetera.

FO. BELLEGARRIGUE: Learjet 4-7-Bravo-Alpha,

roger that, Jacksonville.

Climb and maintain flight level three-niner-zero.

NARRATOR: The controller clears the jet to keep climbing

all the way to 39,000 feet.

JIM: The Learjet generally flies higher

than the commercial airliners.

NARRATOR: By flying at high altitudes where the air is thin,

the Lear saves on fuel.

JIM: Well, you get a better economy,

so you're getting from point A to point B, costing you less.

NARRATOR: The flight plan calls for the plane to fly northwest

towards Cross City, Florida,

then turn west and fly direct to Dallas.

Fourteen minutes after takeoff,

the Learjet has traveled 80 miles.

It's time to pass control of the plane

to a new air traffic controller.

WESLEY: Air traffic control

is a series of what we call hand-offs,

and that means that it's time for him

to cross to somebody else's sector.

WESLEY: 4-7-Bravo-Alpha, contact Jack Center at 135.65.

NARRATOR: The pilots need to change

to a different radio frequency to talk to the next controller.

WESLEY: 4-7-Bravo-Alpha, please acknowledge.

NARRATOR: There's no answer.

WESLEY: There's nothing really unusual

about missing a frequency change.

It's early, just after takeoff.

I assume they're trying to get everything buttoned up

and taken care of.

It really wasn't that alarming.

WESLEY: 4-7-Bravo-Alpha, contact Jack Center on 135.65.

WESLEY: In the back of your mind, all controllers know,

I didn't get an acknowledgment for that frequency change,

so you give it a moment.

You go on about your business

and then you come back to the aircraft. You try it again.

WESLEY: 4-7-Bravo-Alpha, this is Jack Center.

SUPERVISOR: What's up?

WESLEY: It's that Learjet. It's not answering.

SUPERVISOR: Maybe he's off frequency.

WESLEY: There's a plethora of reasons

where an aircraft can miss a call.

SUPERVISOR: Let's see if it levels off when it's supposed to.

NARRATOR: The Learjet has nearly reached

its approved cruising altitude of 39,000 feet.

WESLEY: They're still climbing.

SUPERVISOR: Let me see their flight plan.

WESLEY: When they climbed through 39,000 feet,

everybody knew that there was a major, major problem.

SUPERVISOR: They've got a turn coming at Cross City.

WESLEY: Let's hope they make that turn.

I'm gonna try again on the other frequency.

4-7-Bravo-Alpha, Jacksonville. Please acknowledge.

NARRATOR: At the same time, pilots of other planes in the area

also try to contact the Learjet.

PILOT: 4-7-Bravo-Alpha, come in.

BOB: It's kind of a band of brothers thing, uh, among pilots

that if something is beginning to go wrong

perhaps you can step in safely and remedy a situation.

If the Lear's radios were failing but not failed,

then perhaps a relay could be set up

to communicate with the aircraft from the ground.

WESLEY: Any pilot, any pilot,

do you have contact with the Learjet?

PILOT: Negative. Nothing from the Learjet.

NARRATOR: It's been 20 minutes

since Payne Stewart's plane left Orlando.

Controllers watch nervously as it approaches Cross City.

It's a critical moment.

They know that any second now the Learjet

is supposed to turn west towards Dallas.

WESLEY: The tension level was so high,

you could hear a pin drop.

WESLEY: Damn it.

WESLEY: It's not making a course correction.

There was something terribly wrong.

♪

WESLEY: This is Jacksonville Center.

I'm declaring an emergency.

WESLEY: We're all kind of in shock and disbelief

at this aircraft.

BOB: Benzon here.

NARRATOR: Experts at the National Transportation Safety Board

are notified of the escalating emergency.

BOB: Get me a map.

BOB: Once the air traffic control system realized

that the aircraft had gone rogue, so to speak,

the next step is to try to figure out why.

It's either being hijacked or it's malfunctioned.

The crew has been incapacitated somehow.

BOB: This is where they are now.

NARRATOR: Controllers scramble F-16 fighters

to track down the wayward Learjet.

COL. OLSON: Is the crew incapacitated?

Is there something wrong with the aircraft?

There's some reason why that crew is not communicating

with air traffic control,

so our job is to go up and find out why.

♪

NARRATOR: The situation is growing more urgent.

The runaway plane has been out of contact

for more than an hour,

and it's about to fly over the densely populated area

around Memphis.

BOB: Get me someone from Learjet.

I need to know how long this plane can stay in the air.

BOB: The aircraft was flying toward a large metropolitan area.

The question became, well,

if it went out of control or ran out of gas over Memphis,

what would happen?

NARRATOR: Learjet investigator Jim Tidball

is immediately recruited to the team.

JIM: Where is it right now?

NARRATOR: His first task is to determine

how far the plane can get with the amount of fuel on board.

JIM: I need performance data on the 35 ASAP.

JIM: When the airplane didn't make its turn,

it continued on towards Memphis,

and after Memphis it was headed toward St. Louis,

and after St. Louis again towards Minneapolis.

Those are all major metropolitan areas.

If it went down in those areas, there'd be mass casualties.

NARRATOR: A small private jet on a routine flight

has turned into a national emergency.

LOU WATERS: We have a developing story, as you may have heard.

There is a civilian Learjet...

NARRATOR: News of a rogue Learjet flying

hundreds of miles off course has captivated the nation.

BOB: Turn that up, would you?

NEWS ANCHOR: The air force is simply saying...

NARRATOR: NTSB investigators keep a close eye

on the media coverage.

BOB: We began assembling our launch team

and monitoring the situation on television,

like a lot of folks in the United States.

NEWS ANCHOR: It did take a full load of fuel on with it.

BOB: So it became a kind of a weird situation for us.

♪

NARRATOR: There's some good news.

The plane has cleared Memphis air space.

WESLEY: At least it didn't hit the city.

NARRATOR: But the crisis is far from over.

Controllers still have no idea why the plane

is not responding,

and there are more urban centers in the Learjet's path.

If it doesn't change course soon,

the fighter jets may be forced to take drastic measures.

JIM: If the decision came out that they were

to take the airplane out

instead of allowing it to go towards a metropolitan area,

that decision would have to come from the White House.

WHITE HOUSE PRESS CONFERENCE: The FAA began tracking

an aircraft in distress.

The president was made aware of this situation this morning

in a meeting with his economic advisors.

♪

JIM: Okay. I think I got something.

NARRATOR: Jim Tidball has come up with a rough calculation

of where the plane will run out of fuel.

JIM: ATC kept giving the team real-time data

as to where the airplane was, the heading that it was flying,

et cetera, so we always knew where the airplane was,

and, calculating the fuel burn at those altitudes,

we could figure how far it was gonna go.

JIM: My best guess is South Dakota, possibly North Dakota.

I can't say more than that.

♪

BOB: Let's hope he's right.

With any luck they won't hit anything.

BOB: That's the scary part of the whole equation here.

Is it gonna hit a house? Is it gonna go down in a town?

Big Midwest, but anything could be possible.

In the air, the F-16 pilots have caught up

with the rogue plane.

COL. OLSON: Stand by. I can't quite see.

COL. OLSON: Once we made the intercept, our job is to figure out

what's going on with the airplane.

We'll visually look at the airplane.

COL. OLSON: No damage.

COL. OLSON: There was no panels missing.

There was no gas leaking, for instance.

There was no other, any other fluids leaking.

There was no obvious exterior damage.

NARRATOR: The fighter pilots are desperate for some way

to communicate with the Learjet's crew,

so they attempt a risky aerial maneuver.

COL. OLSON: Alright, I'm gonna try and wake them up.

COL. OLSON: Maybe, you know, by flying through their jet wash

or the turbulence that's caused by the lead fighter

in this case, it would get some reaction out of them.

♪

You're hoping you get some movement.

NARRATOR: But it's no use. The Lear does not respond.

BOB: Can he see anything in the cockpit?

COL. OLSON: Stand by. I'm gonna go take a closer look.

NARRATOR: But Colonel Olson isn't giving up.

Even though his F-16 is designed to fly at much higher speeds,

he wrestles it closer to get a better look.

COL. OLSON: Flying an F-16 at low air speeds can be difficult,

especially at high altitudes.

It was very strange sitting next to them

wondering what's going on inside the aircraft.

NARRATOR: The windows of the aircraft provide an ominous clue.

COL. OLSON: No movement, and the window's covered in frost.

JIM: When the report came back that the windshield

seemed to be iced over on the inside

and that the cabin windows were all dark,

that gave us cause for concern.

COL. OLSON: If the people are conscious, they'd be trying to

scrape away that condensation so they could see.

So if you see no attempt to get rid of that condensation,

your mind goes, what's the condition

of the crew and the passengers that are on board that aircraft?

NARRATOR: The grim reality of the situation sets in.

BOB: The frosted-over windscreen

and the darkened cockpit and cabin indicated

that the crew is probably no longer with us.

NARRATOR: The Learjet is now a ghost plane.

BOB: Can we narrow down the crash site any more?

NARRATOR: With no hope for the passengers and crew,

the only focus now is on where the plane will come down.

BOB: As NTSB investigators, we're very interested in

where the aircraft would crash obviously,

because we had to get there as soon as we could.

NARRATOR: But all they can do is wait and watch.

MIKE: To hear the news of Payne likely being on that plane

was very shocking. It didn't seem real.

He was just winning the US Open

and grabbing Phil Mickelson's face and hoisting a trophy up.

NARRATOR: After nearly four hours in the air,

the Learjet is approaching Aberdeen, South Dakota.

BOB: Got it. It could go down any time.

NARRATOR: According to calculations,

the jet is almost out of fuel.

At 10 minutes past 12:00, it happens.

COL. OLSON: One of the engines just flamed out,

and it started turning.

I said something like, "Look out, the aircraft is turning."

We don't know where this aircraft is gonna go,

but it's starting to move.

NARRATOR: The Learjet carrying Payne Stewart and five other people

is falling from the sky.

COL. OLSON: They're going down. They're going down.

BOB: Where's it gonna hit?

NARRATOR: The F-16 attempts to follow.

But the plane disappears into the clouds.

It drops below the radar.

COL. OLSON: Center, I've got a crash site.

♪

WESLEY: We all felt like

we were pretty much just kicked in the guts,

couldn't do anything, so it was a pretty bad day.

NARRATOR: Payne Stewart's Learjet

has slammed into a hay field in South Dakota.

There are no survivors.

COL. OLSON: You have human beings on that aircraft. They have a life.

They have a family. They have a connection. They have a story.

You're part of the end of their story unfortunately,

so when you look back on it, it's a very, very sad deal.

♪

JIM: It's over.

JIM: I think there was a sense of relief

when the airplane actually did go down in a rural area

that it did not impact a major metropolitan area.

NEWS ANCHOR: This is where the plane went down

after its 1,500-mile four-hour flight

halfway across the nation.

On board, golfer Payne Stewart, two-time US Open champ.

MIKE: The guys get to know each other really well.

It is a tight-knit community with the media,

with the players, with the families,

and for someone from that family to be taken away

in such tragic fashion was really saddening.

NARRATOR: In Brown County, South Dakota,

the crash has shaken local residents.

WITNESS: And after a few flips and flops and everything

it went straight down,

and it took probably 12 seconds to hit the ground.

♪

NARRATOR: For crash investigators, the first step

is to survey the impact area and lay out a search grid.

INVESTIGATOR: Nice and slow. We don't want to miss a thing.

JIM: The grid-type search was a way to proceed

so we knew where we had been, what we had covered,

and then we could move on to the next grid section.

To us it was very important so we knew where we could walk,

where we couldn't walk.

NARRATOR: The 500-mile an hour impact hasn't just smashed

the wreckage, it's driven most of it into the ground.

JIM: The aircraft at the accident site

was completely destroyed and in pieces,

and there were a lot of very small pieces.

BOB: My first impression was

we're gonna have a little trouble gathering evidence here.

♪

NARRATOR: At the Learjet crash site,

investigators dig through layers of earth.

They search every inch of soil for wreckage.

BOB: It almost became an archaeological dig,

kind of unlayering the thing as we went down through the earth.

JIM: A good investigator can't make decisions

based on initial information.

You have to have all the data

before you can do an adequate job.

NARRATOR: As key pieces are recovered,

investigators map out the position of the plane.

They want to find the tail and, with it,

the cockpit voice recorder.

JIM: As we were looking through the debris in the crater,

we started finding pieces that were close

to the cockpit voice recorder.

We knew we were looking in the right area.

We felt confident that we'd find the CVR.

NARRATOR: Meanwhile, Bob Benzon

of the National Transportation Safety Board

is piecing together what they know so far.

BOB: Okay. Let's see what we got.

NARRATOR: The lengthy pursuit of the flight has given him

an unusual head start on the case.

BOB: For an investigator to realize

that an accident's going to occur before it happened

is very unusual.

It's a strange feeling, a sad feeling

to know an accident's going to occur

and you pack your bags early for once instead of later.

♪

BOB: The engines were okay.

BOB: The F-16 folks were gathering data,

like both engines were running.

They could see two contrails.

It had some electrical power

because navigation and rotating beacon lights were going on.

BOB: The electrical was working. So what else do we know?

NARRATOR: The F-16 pilots also noticed

some unusual fluctuations in the Learjet's altitude

before it crashed.

COL. OLSON: Stand by. I'm gonna take a closer look.

NARRATOR: The Learjet was bobbing up and down

in a steady rhythm known as porpoising.

BOB: That probably was because the autopilot

was set in a climb mode,

and the aircraft was attempting to climb

as high as it possibly could,

but aerodynamically there's a limit to that,

and so it would get up to its very maximum ceiling

and then go down and try to go back up and go down again.

NARRATOR: No pilot would deliberately fly a plane this way.

BOB: I think they were unconscious or worse

when the jets got the visual.

NARRATOR: There's another lead Benzon urgently wants to pursue.

♪

COL. OLSON: No movement, and the window's covered in frost.

BOB: The F-16 folks told us that there was a large area of frost

in fact covering 90 percent more of the front windscreens

of the aircraft on the inside.

That obviously indicates that at some point

things got very, very cold inside,

so it wasn't an answer to all our questions,

but it led us quickly to think

that there may have been a pressurization problem on board.

♪

NARRATOR: Investigators may be a step closer

to finding answers.

They've recovered the cockpit voice recorder...

INVESTIGATOR: Good work.

NARRATOR: ...the only recording device on board.

JIM: The CVR was pretty smashed when we recovered it,

and there was concern that we'd get nothing off of it.

♪

BOB: I only hope we hear something that tells us what went wrong.

JIM: It was sent back immediately to the NTSB lab,

and they did a fantastic job of piecing this thing together

and getting data out of the CVR.

BOB: Okay. Let's hear it.

NARRATOR: The recording captures sounds

during the last 30 minutes of flight.

As they listen, investigators make a disturbing discovery.

No one on board is talking at all.

JIM: It was eerie because the airplane is flying

and there is no voice whatsoever.

But there are other sounds and, if they can be identified,

they could provide vital clues.

BOB: Turn that up, please.

BOB: We can hear warnings in the cockpit, buzzers,

things like that,

so even though no voices are heard,

there is valuable stuff on those.

BOB: That's the cabin altitude warning.

We are definitely looking at a loss of pressure accident.

NARRATOR: The recording confirms Benzon's hunch.

The plane suffered some sort of decompression failure.

The higher the altitude, the lower the air pressure gets.

FO. BELLEGARRIGUE: Good morning, Jacksonville.

This is Learjet 4-7-Bravo-Alpha climbing to flight level 2-6-0.

NARRATOR: Above 10,000 feet, the air outside is so thin

that the cabin air must be pressurized so that

pilots and passengers can get enough oxygen to breathe.

Pressurization prevents

the life-threatening condition called hypoxia.

Dr. Mitchell Garber is an expert

on just how quickly hypoxia can incapacitate a pilot.

DR. GARBER: You've got maybe four or five seconds' worth

of actual oxygen in your brain

and then another 12 to 15 seconds in your circulation.

Once all that is gone,

things are going to go very horribly awry for you

very, very quickly.

NARRATOR: The evidence paints a chilling picture.

BOB: The cabin altitude warning horn

was blaring for the entire 30 minutes

minus a few seconds at the end.

♪

NARRATOR: The mystery now is,

why did Payne Stewart's Learjet lose vital cabin pressure,

and why didn't the emergency alarm prevent the catastrophe?

♪

INVESTIGATOR: Not much to go on.

NARRATOR: The search of the crash site

turns up very little of the pressurization system,

just a couple of damaged valves.

BOB: The positive thing to do is work with what you have.

You go to war with what you have,

not with what you wish you had.

NARRATOR: The flow control valve regulates how much air is drawn

from the engines into the cabin.

A problem with this valve could cause a depressurization.

BOB: Even though components are heavily damaged,

it's part of our training and our job

to try as hard as we can

to determine what the component was doing prior to the crash.

BOB: Well, let's see what this can tell us.

NARRATOR: Benzon examines the valve

under a high-powered microscope.

He makes an important discovery: small scratches in the metal.

BOB: At impact, parts hit parts,

and internal components hit internal components,

and those cause witness marks.

You could almost consider it to be a snapshot

of what would happen at impact.

BOB: Bingo.

BOB: The witness marks indicated quite definitely

that the valve was closed during the horrendous impact

of the aircraft and the ground.

NARRATOR: With the flow control valve closed,

there would have been no air flow to maintain cabin pressure.

CPT. KLING: We've got a cabin altitude warning.

BOB: The discovery that the flow control valve was closed

was a big deal for us.

Now we were getting close to why the accident occurred.

NARRATOR: Setting the valve correctly

is a routine part of every takeoff.

BOB: Either the thing broke

or the crew took off without setting it.

INVESTIGATOR: Let's see what these turn up.

NARRATOR: To check for mechanical failure,

investigators need more pieces from the mechanism

that opens and closes the valves.

They step up search efforts at the crash site.

BOB: We bought and rented metal detectors,

and people were out there on their hands and knees

sifting through dirt with screens

to try to find these components.

NARRATOR: Investigators fill crates with recovered parts.

BOB: Any more wreckage from the pressurization system?

NARRATOR: But the valve mechanism is never recovered.

JIM: When we find a clue

and we can't follow it all the way to the end,

it gets very frustrating for investigators.

We know we've got a piece of the evidence,

but not all the evidence.

♪

BOB: Play it from the top.

I want to hear something she said before takeoff.

NARRATOR: Benzon turns to air traffic control recordings

that captured all radio calls with the Learjet's crew.

FO. BELLEGARRIGUE: Orlando tower, 4-7-Bravo-Alpha.

Requesting taxi.

NARRATOR: He hopes the recordings can tell him

when the Learjet began to decompress.

The air used to pressurize the plane comes from the engines,

so it can feel a bit hot.

That's why some pilots wait until the last minute

before opening the airflow valve.

FO. BELLEGARRIGUE: V-one.

NARRATOR: Did they forget to do this?

FO. BELLEGARRIGUE: Rotate.

WESLEY: Good morning 4-7-Bravo-Alpha.

Climb and maintain flight level three-niner-zero.

♪

NARRATOR: If they did forget to open

the crucial valve at takeoff,

they would have been affected by a lack of oxygen

as soon as they climbed past 10,000 feet.

DR. GARBER: The progression of hypoxia symptoms

is probably most pronounced in the mental arena,

in our ability to think, our ability to make determinations.

It's one of the reasons it's so critical.

NARRATOR: Benzon listens carefully to the voices.

He wants to compare how the pilots sound on the ground

with how they sound at higher altitudes

where there's less oxygen.

BOB: It was important for us to try to figure out

at what altitude, what point in the flight really,

something began to go wrong.

BOB: So far, so good.

Play me something from later,

after they climb past 10,000 feet.

NARRATOR: Changes in their voices

could reveal when the pressure failed.

DR. GARBER: You may get slurred speech

as you do with intoxication.

You may get slower speech as you do with intoxication.

FO. BELLEGARRIGUE: Good morning Jacksonville.

This is 4-7-Bravo-Alpha climbing to flight level 2-6-0.

BOB: She sounds the same to me.

So everything's fine up to that last radio call.

BOB: Transmissions from the first officer were clear,

so we knew at that altitude things were going fine.

FO. BELLEGARRIGUE: Radios... CPT. KLING: Are set.

NARRATOR: The timing tells Benzon

that the crew set the valve correctly at takeoff.

FO. BELLEGARRIGUE: Cabin air switch.

CPT. KLING: Normal.

BOB: Something happened between the last radio call here

and when they lost radio contact here.

BOB: We had good transmissions from the flight crew,

clear, without oxygen masks on at an altitude of 28,000 feet,

and four minutes later as the aircraft

was passing through 36,000 feet,

air traffic control could not contact them.

So that led us to believe

that something pretty darned important happened

between those two altitudes in that four-minute window.

♪

NARRATOR: Something must have happened to close the cabin air valve,

but it's impossible to say

whether it was human error or mechanical failure.

BOB: Because of the chaotic nature of airplane accidents,

you don't have a lot of clues sometimes,

but that doesn't mean that we stop investigating.

♪

CPT. KLING: Cabin altitude warning.

NARRATOR: There's another baffling mystery.

The Learjet is equipped with emergency oxygen masks.

CPT. KLING: Masks on. FO. BELLEGARRIGUE: Masks on.

NARRATOR: No matter what caused the loss of pressure,

the oxygen masks should have given the crew

enough air to breathe until they could land the plane.

BOB: If a crew happened to get an altitude warning,

gosh, the first thing any flight crew should do

would be to don an oxygen mask.

CPT. KLING: I can't breathe. Can you breathe?

FO. BELLEGARRIGUE: A little bit.

NARRATOR: Could the emergency oxygen system

have somehow failed?

♪

Benzon scours the Learjet's maintenance records.

BOB: Looks like everything was working fine.

NARRATOR: He discovers that on several previous flights

the Learjet's crew used the masks without any problems.

BOB: We did determine that the oxygen was on board

and the crew could have used it.

So now the question became,

why didn't they use supplemental oxygen?

BOB: Time to take a new approach.

Set us to climb, please.

NARRATOR: Investigators need to learn more

about what happened on board the Learjet

after the crew's last radio call.

They hope a simulation of the flight will help.

BOB: There goes the cabin altitude warning. Start the clock.

DR. GARBER: You've got maybe 15 seconds to do something

once you become in a environment

that's almost eliminated with oxygen.

BOB: Emergency checklist. Got it.

NARRATOR: Benzon scans the same type of checklist binder

used by the Learjet pilots.

What he's about to discover could finally unravel

the mystery and reveal why Payne Stewart's Learjet

tumbled from the skies over South Dakota.

DR. GARBER: I think all of us sort of had in our heads

the checklist will have

once you hear the altitude warning horn

or any other indication of a decompression event,

that you're gonna put your oxygen mask on

as the first and immediate action item.

NARRATOR: The simulated loss of cabin pressure

leads Benzon to an astounding discovery:

The first item on the emergency checklist

is not "Put on oxygen masks."

BOB: "At 10,000 plus or minus 500 feet,

cabin altitude control pressure to the outflow valve

is trapped."

BOB: Some of the wording at first glance was quite confusing,

and I imagine it would be very confusing

if you were under a distressed situation

and trying to figure out exactly what the checklist meant.

BOB: "This deactivates the automatic mode

and stops cabin altitude from rising higher

if the failure is in the automatic control system."

I can't believe we still haven't put our oxygen masks on.

BOB: We were surprised, because it implied pretty strongly

that you need to trouble-shoot a pressurization problem,

and if you can't fix it, then you don your oxygen masks,

and that's counterintuitive to us. That was backwards, in fact.

The first step should have been don oxygen masks.

BOB: Okay. Shut it down. I think I know what happened.

♪

NARRATOR: Investigators now have a theory

about what went wrong on board the Learjet.

BOB: Everything is fine till about 24,000 feet.

Then something causes the plane to lose pressure.

CPT. KLING: We've got a cabin altitude warning.

FO. BELLEGARRIGUE: Emergency checklist. Uh.

BOB: They reach for their checklist and start to troubleshoot.

CPT. KLING: What does the checklist say?

FO. BELLEGARRIGUE: "At 10,000 plus or minus 500 feet,

cabin altitude control pressure to the outflow valve

is trapped."

BOB: They picked up a checklist, read it, were confused by it,

and the oxygen masks were sitting there unused.

CPT. KLING: Could it be the bleed air?

FO. BELLEGARRIGUE: "This deactivates the automatic mode

and stops cabin altitude from rising higher

if the failure is in the automatic control system."

CPT. KLING: Uh, what failure?

NARRATOR: Hypoxia sets in with devastating speed.

After 15 seconds, the crew would be confused and disoriented.

CPT. KLING: Uh, read that again.

FO. BELLEGARRIGUE: Uh, okay. Uh...

DR. GARBER: A lot of it depends on how rapid

the onset of hypoxia is,

and a lot of it depends on the individual,

but things that we tend to see fairly commonly

and probably the most important one

is the difficulty in thinking.

FO. BELLEGARRIGUE: "At 10,000... the control pressure..."

DR. GARBER: Thought patterns becoming more confused

and less deliberate.

You actually start to lose consciousness.

And if you don't get oxygen delivered back to you,

eventually you're going to die from oxygen starvation.

BOB: But before they can solve the problem,

the crew loses consciousness.

BOB: The Lear checklist in a sense, a very real sense,

could lead a crew astray.

BOB: Without those masks on, they wouldn't stand a chance.

♪

DR. GARBER: Instead of a loud warning horn,

maybe a statement from the airplane that says

"Put on your oxygen mask" would be more effective,

rather than having people

who are having to try and figure out what the sound is

having to deal with the sound itself

and then having to try and figure out

what they're supposed to do about it.

♪

NARRATOR: In the aftermath of the Learjet tragedy,

Payne Stewart's family and friends,

along with golf fans across the nation,

come together in mourning.

PRESIDENT CLINTON: I am profoundly sorry

for the loss of Payne Stewart,

who has had such a remarkable career and impact on his sport.

TIGER WOODS: I knew Payne as a carefree guy

who was nice to everybody and was very open-hearted.

MIKE: Payne wouldn't have wanted a lot of mourning

over his death, however it happened. He was an upbeat guy.

He was a happy guy who just loved living life,

being with his family, having a good time,

and he wouldn't want people mourning.

He wanted people celebrating his life

and being there for his family.

♪

FO. BELLEGARRIGUE: V-one. Rotate.

NARRATOR: Investigators are never able

to determine conclusively what caused the plane

to lose pressure.

BOB: The decompression could have been caused

by a leaky seal on a door,

a small leak about the size of a pencil

in the side of the aircraft,

a malfunction within the system. So we don't know.

But whatever the reason,

the crew would likely have recovered

if they'd put their masks on.

DR. GARBER: The NTSB in its report ultimately concluded

that had they received oxygen in a timely manner,

it's likely that we would not be talking about

this particular accident today.

CPT. KLING: We've got a cabin altitude warning.

FO. BELLEGARRIGUE: Emergency checklist.

NARRATOR: Following the investigation,

the NTSB recommends important changes to aviation checklists.

BOB: We asked very strongly that that checklist

that we suspected got the crew in trouble, the checklist

be changed to make it clearer and more useful in an emergency.

NARRATOR: The FAA is quick to respond.

"Put on oxygen masks" is now the first item on the checklist,

not just for Learjets, but for every similar plane in the sky.

BOB: We were pleased with the results.

The checklist was changed.

Again, not only for the Lear,

but the FAA insisted that other aircraft, other business jets

recheck their checklists to make sure they made sense.

JIM: I think the most important takeaway for me

is to understand your emergency checklists.

There are emergency checklists for a reason,