Please forgive my rudeness, but your TV show - and most others like it are bent on drama and trauma- not facts. Despite your inquiry, nothing of what you are told here is likely to make it into your program. If I'm wrong, my sincere apologies, but yet to see a TV program, even NG or BBC, that gets it right. Even when the details are explain to you, in the most simple terms, your kind still opt for the the High Dramatic effect. I won't help you do do that!

No Fly Zone,

Im shocked your saying that seeing as your from the states. The yanks love trauma exaggeration and drama.

They even dramatise paint drying on a wall. Reliable sources have confirmed that the chemicals used in the paint have also been used in WMD in IIIIIIIraq :E

Nah, you're just being overly harsh. Captainincas says those shows are the best CRM tool since a cup of Starbucks with a blueberry scone.:p

For obvious reasons I could not quote in Pprune the whole accident report chapter and verse. Otherwise I could have mentioned the fact the report stated the crew did try for windmill relight as soon as the engines were literally drowned in water. However they were still in extremely heavy rain while stuck in the thunderstorm and the Boeing investigation made the point that it is a waste of time trying to windmill relight while still in the conditions that caused the dual flameout in the first place.

Then when the load on the battery took place as an APU start was attempted, the already defective battery gave up the ghost completely. Thus no electrical power and no sparks to get the engines going. In short the crew were up sh#t creek without a paddle.

Thanks for all your comments. We're really proud of the fact so many aviation industry insiders follow our show and think highly of it. That said, we know our show is not perfect. We try our best to get the details right – from the research to the props and sets our Art Department builds. But the fact is, we are limited to what we can do due budgetary constraints and regulations with the actor's union, etc. We have a skeleton cockpit, which we try to build as accurately as possible for each of the planes we feature and only one cabin, which we only have limited ability to manipulate to customize for each flight.

With only 44-minutes for each episode, it's always a challenge to boil down the essence of an accident, the investigation, and safety lessons into a cohesive story.

Long story short, we appreciate you watching. We work hard at this show. And we take great pride in the fact we have this platform to spread the important safety lessons that come out of these tragedies.

To the one person who questioned the facts on our show, every word that's spoken on our show is independently fact-checked and annotated. I came to this forum because I've gotten great help here in the past. This time, I simply looking for some quick input, which thank you – I got yesterday and appreciate very much.

We've got a lot of interesting episodes coming up for Season 14 – some well known, others not. To all you steely-eyed aces, keep on keeping it safe!

Sonya,

I worked for BM at the time of the accident, and was actually made aware of the accident 1hr after it happened by Sim engineers when I emerged from the Orion/Britannia B737 Sim at EMA during my 737 Conversion course.

I knew both crew members personally, so have taken perhaps even more interest than the average Joe in the accident/investigation.

This accident has been done to death in CRM courses in every airline (and there have been a few) I have passed through.

Difficult to know what new ground/insight you can offer on this one.

A few minor/oft ignored points you may find interesting. The action of disengaging the autothrottle (at that time if I remember correctly the 1st item in the recall items for severe engine damage/fire on the 737-400) had the effect of smoothing the damaged engines operation (as the PMC was no longer fluctuating the fuel flow to try & compensate for the damaged engines inefficiency ) If I remember correctly Boeing subsequently reversed the order in the checklist (as I no longer fly the "Classic" I don't know which order it is done in now)

The vibration was so severe, that reading the vibration maters (particularly from the RHS where they were partly "masked" if on full deflection) robbed the crew of a vital parameter (which they later stated they wouldn't have placed much faith in , as the gauges were somewhat junk in the DC9 which was the Capt's previous type) The levels of vibration probably rendered the value of the other engine instrumentation to "useless", as testified by another crew in one of the 2 similar failures which succeeded this one & precluded the grounding of the type. There were no "warning lights" associated with this failure regime, an omission corrected in the instrumentation of the subsequent 737NG.

The fact that the incident happened more or less directly over EMA conspired against them, as they had no need to demand power from the damaged engine until a very late stage of the approach , an extended routing to some other airport would have shown up the deficiency in the remaining engine much sooner & "may" have given them time to relight the one they had shut down.

Boeing/CFM were allowed to certify the new variant of the CFM56 by ground testing only, even if it was in fact substantially different to previous versions , because it was a"variant" rather than a new engine. The deficiencies inherent in the design (vibration at high altitude) were therefore not identified.

The accident showed up many technical deficiencies in many other inspected aircraft concerning their wiring of fire extinguishing/detection systems (cross wiring etc) as there was at one stage a suspicion (later disproved) that the wrong fire warning may have activated. . . nonetheless it was a slap in the face for Boeings Q.C.

Saddest fact of all, is that, for the sake of a couple of hundred metres of flat undershoot (or a different runway ) they would probably have gotten away with collapsed gear/some back injuries. How they managed to land on a busy motorway without hurting anyone in a vehicle is a miracle.

We should always remember that Kevin & Dave were both affable average ability line-pilots, and despite the very public/personal comments made by BM management & the engineering biased chief investigator, this COULD have (in reality) quite probably happened to a large percentage of us.

To pilots and enthusiasts, probably not much - but the audience is somewhat broader.

Possibly. As I recall, another issue was the frequency of radio transmissions. The Captain was in fact interrupted during an attempt to review the symptoms and re-assess the situation.

Interesting that you should say that - one of the books I read covering the subject advanced the opinion that the Captain had a reputation as "something of a martinet". Said book has proven inaccurate in several ways since, and I'd be interested to check the veracity of the claim (via PM if preferred).

Air Crash Investigation.
The TV drama that found an innocent engineer guilty of causing the Helios crash, grossly prejudicing his chance of a fair trial.
Stick to fiction. It's what you're best at!

Rubbish. The episode concerned made it clear that the switch should have been checked by the crew during pre-flight and was not. Additionally, the ground engineer who performed the test specifically requested the crew to check the switch was set to "AUTO", a request that was apparently ignored.

To which engineer are you referring?

Thank you
 

I, along with a team of pilots, engineers, ATCs, have been translating your series, Air Crash Investigation into Chinese for years. Though,, some of your Chinese audiences are raising concerns about the effects may be off the real scenarios, there is no doubt that Mayday is one of the best aviation-related TV show in the history. As for myself, for those who are newbies with aviation, the first show I would recommend to them is Mayday, and it never let anyone down.

Thanks again for your team's hard-working and professional attitude. Your job is really fascinating.

That Air New Zealand cabin is totally wrong in Deadly Test. We never had the koru on the walls like that, they were usually just plain. Could you also spill the beans on some other episodes? The pilots here all love the show