It's Mexico City at rush hour. The airport is extremely busy and the airplanes are lined up behind one another like lights on a Christmas tree. One of them is a twin-engined Lear jet carrying nine people, including Mexico's equivalent of the vice president and a senior official of the anti-drug effort.
The Lear suddenly flips over, turns in the opposite direction, and smashes into the traffic of downtown Mexico City. Mexican authorities ask for help from Washington and it's discovered that the cause of the accident was wake turbulence. The light Lear jet was a little too close to the Boeing heavy that was ahead of it and was caught up in the horizontal tornado left behind the Boeing.
Left up to me -- left up to many of us, I suppose -- that would have been the end of it. But the astonishing thing about this program is that it illustrates the lengths to which investigators will go to discover what might be called the secondary or proximate cause.
Okay, the calm weather left a wake turbulence that was stronger and lasted longer than unusual. And the pilots of the Lear couldn't pull out of the dive because of the low altitude during their approach. But why did THAT all happen? The Lear pilots didn't use a long, steady descent, despite advice from the Air Traffic Controller; they used a step-down approach. They flew level while tending to their heading, then dropped down to slow their speed while tending to the altimeter. It turns out both pilots were frauds. They didn't know how to operate the airplane in normal flight, let alone during a crisis. The paperwork was extremely careless and resulted in two flight schools being suspended.
It' a fascinating series, with even the technical material being made clear.
The Lear suddenly flips over, turns in the opposite direction, and smashes into the traffic of downtown Mexico City. Mexican authorities ask for help from Washington and it's discovered that the cause of the accident was wake turbulence. The light Lear jet was a little too close to the Boeing heavy that was ahead of it and was caught up in the horizontal tornado left behind the Boeing.
Left up to me -- left up to many of us, I suppose -- that would have been the end of it. But the astonishing thing about this program is that it illustrates the lengths to which investigators will go to discover what might be called the secondary or proximate cause.
Okay, the calm weather left a wake turbulence that was stronger and lasted longer than unusual. And the pilots of the Lear couldn't pull out of the dive because of the low altitude during their approach. But why did THAT all happen? The Lear pilots didn't use a long, steady descent, despite advice from the Air Traffic Controller; they used a step-down approach. They flew level while tending to their heading, then dropped down to slow their speed while tending to the altimeter. It turns out both pilots were frauds. They didn't know how to operate the airplane in normal flight, let alone during a crisis. The paperwork was extremely careless and resulted in two flight schools being suspended.
It' a fascinating series, with even the technical material being made clear.
