An exceptional amalgamation of recreation, expert witnesses, limpid prose, and superlative graphics makes this episode the equal of any others in this superior series. I'm only giving it a 7 because documentaries are rarely masterpieces and because I enjoy giving low grades. That may make me sound like a sadist, and I am, but I'm not the worst. When the famous economist Thorstein Veblen was teaching at the University of Missouri he never gave a grade higher than C -- and he mumbled when he lectured.
An MD-11 Fed Ex flight bounces around during a landing at Newark and flips over. No one dies. Twelve years later, a supposedly up-dated Fed Ex MD-11 attempts a landing at Tokyo's Narita Airport on a gusty day, bounces three times, flips over and burns furiously, killing both pilots. The experts at the Japanese equivalent of the National Transportation Safety Board try to figure out why. After the initial violence, it turns into a detective story. You like Sherlock Holmes? You might like this.
The "cause", the Golden Nugget, of the crash of course doesn't exist. Instead, as always, investigators uncover multiple contributing factors -- pilot fatigue, lack of recent training, misperceptions induced by the very structure of the airframe, and so on. The pilots made the final fatal error because they thought they were on the ground, whereas they had just bounced sixteen feet into the air.
Well, corrective measures have been implemented but accidents will continue to happen because sometimes, however rarely, the bad variables will line up just right. Right now, you're sitting in a room full of air molecules. Each molecule is jiggling this way and that. Some day all the molecules will happen to move in the same direction at the same time. It will feel singular.
An MD-11 Fed Ex flight bounces around during a landing at Newark and flips over. No one dies. Twelve years later, a supposedly up-dated Fed Ex MD-11 attempts a landing at Tokyo's Narita Airport on a gusty day, bounces three times, flips over and burns furiously, killing both pilots. The experts at the Japanese equivalent of the National Transportation Safety Board try to figure out why. After the initial violence, it turns into a detective story. You like Sherlock Holmes? You might like this.
The "cause", the Golden Nugget, of the crash of course doesn't exist. Instead, as always, investigators uncover multiple contributing factors -- pilot fatigue, lack of recent training, misperceptions induced by the very structure of the airframe, and so on. The pilots made the final fatal error because they thought they were on the ground, whereas they had just bounced sixteen feet into the air.
Well, corrective measures have been implemented but accidents will continue to happen because sometimes, however rarely, the bad variables will line up just right. Right now, you're sitting in a room full of air molecules. Each molecule is jiggling this way and that. Some day all the molecules will happen to move in the same direction at the same time. It will feel singular.
