Show Notes
Of all disasters that can befall a plane, probably none is more terrifying than a sudden, near vertical dive at full speed into the ground. In today’s episode, will look at some of the reasons that this kind of accident can occur. The context, of course, is the crash last Friday, January 31, 2025, by a Learjet 55 less than a minute after takeoff from North Philadelphia airport.In the weeks ahead, accident investigators from the National Transport Safety Board will interview witnesses, collect and examine the wreckage, study maintenance records, and, if it is available, review data from the plane’s flight data recorder to understand what caused the crash and issue safety recommendations to prevent similar tragedies from recurring. As they assemble the evidence, investigators will be thinking about similar accidents that have happened in the past, looking for patterns to guide them in their search for the causal factors.In today’s episode we’ll run through a far-from-exhaustive list of some possibly relevant antecedents to Friday’s crash. Get full access to Finding MH370 at www.deepdivemh370.com/subscribe
More from Finding MH370
A newly recovered drifter buoy from Mauritius shows for the first time how barnacles like the ones found on MH370's flaperon grow during more than two years at sea. The new data suggests a new methodology for determining how long the debris floated in the sea -- and whether it's plausible that the plane really did crash land in the remote ocean.
The ocean is vast -- but the range of possible places that MH370 could be is limited, constrained by evidence and the plane's performance. Today's experiment lets us define that area, and thereby determine just how much effort it would take to solve the case once and for all.
The ocean is huge, but the range of places that MH370 could be is tightly constrained, and recent searches have made it even smaller. Today we discuss where the noose has tightened down to, and where Ocean Infinity will look.
If you want to find an airliner on the seabed, you could do worse than to talk to someone who's already done. I interview underwater search expert Tony Romeo about how he used a high-tech submersible to locate a long-missing Pan Am airliner in the sea off Puerto Rico, and why he thinks he can do the same for MH370.
A Pan Am airliner lay on the seabed near Puerto Rico for more than 70 years until Russ Matthews and his team located it. He tells us how they did it.