Mayday series starts on TV1 Tonight
The Mayday series starts on TV1 (NZ) tonight, January 14th at 20.35 Hrs
The programs are as listed below
The first episode Racing the Storm profiles American Airlines Flight 1420, which lands in Little Rock, Arkansas at the height of thunderstorm season. The MD80 ploughs off a wet runway, down an embankment and breaks apart, killing 11 people. Mayday delves into the time pressures and misjudgment that lead to this accident.
Subsequent Mayday flights are:
Unlocking Disaster an investigation of the 1989 United Airlines incident in Hawaii. Just out of Honolulu the cargo door of Flight 811 opens at an altitude of 33,000 feet, ripping a huge hole in the 747 taking out five rows of seats –and nine passengers – with it. Mayday investigates how delays in fixing known design faults can have tragic consequences.
Flying Blind As Aeroperu Flight 603 takes off from Lima at night its airspeed and altitude indicators jam. The flight crew is flying blind and heading for disaster. The Air Traffic Control tower is getting false readings from the plane’s jammed computer. The 757 crashes into the Pacific, killing all 70 on board. Mayday traces the cause of the computer malfunction and charts its tragic consequences.
Flying on Empty – An Air Transat Airbus runs out of fuel over the Atlantic and has to glide to a power-free landing. Mayday explores the causes that contributed to this near catastrophe and shows how the crew managed to glide to a safe landing.
Cutting Corners – Shortly after Air Alaska Flight 261 takes off from Puerta Vallarta the stabilizer – which controls the angle of the plane in flight – malfunctions. The pilots struggle to control the nose-diving plane but it rolls and dives into the ocean. The eighty-eight passengers and crew on board die. Mayday tells the story of how maintenance errors can lead to fatal crashes.
Fire on Board – The pilot of Swissair Flight 111 smells smoke in the cockpit less than an hour after take-off. It’s a race against time to dump fuel and land. Minutes later fire and complete electrical failure cause the MD11 to crash into the Atlantic killing all 229 passengers and crew on board. Mayday searches for the cause of the fire and asks why it spread so destructively so quickly.