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Air Crash Investigation

Pilot and co-pilot looking worried
  • Posted at 11:04am
  • 12 September 2007
  • by RhodriMarsden-RT
  • 1 comment

Until I got a Sky dish, National Geographic meant glossy magazines featuring beautiful photographs of the Alpine tundra or exotic sub-Saharan wildlife. Now, however, it's synonymous with programmes that look at the many and various ways we can meet a violent death.

Their current schedule includes such relaxing documentaries as Landslides Investigated, World's Most Dangerous Drug, Seconds from Disaster, and When Routine Appendectomies Go Bad. OK, so I made the last one up. But the icing on the cake is the new series of Air Crash Investigation.

As you might imagine, the trailers for the show aren't designed to reassure us about aviation safety: "Was it the weather? Was it faulty equipment? Or was it an act of war?" I sat down to watch the programme with a certain amount of trepidation in any case, because I really hate flying. I can't bear it.

And although I'm more sensible than I used to be, I'm still the kind of person who will grab the knee of the passenger sitting next to me if a luggage rack springs open, or even if someone drops a complimentary lemon-scented cleansing towelette.

By the time the opening credits had finished rolling – computer graphics of planes being bisected by lightning bolts and pilots pointlessly screaming "Mayday" – I already had clammy palms. The subsequent calm reconstructions of air stewards going about their usual preflight routines didn't help to calm me down – this was an episode of Air Crash Investigation, after all, not an instalment of Applauding Perfect Landings.

I remember once flying with Air Portugal, and to keep us composed during severe turbulence we were shown a film of babies learning to swim. But no amount of footage of toddlers at play would have helped to reassure the passengers of Helios Flight 522 from Cyprus to Athens, whose traumatic journey on 14 August 2005 was detailed in this programme.

It's a grim tale: an incorrectly set switch on the panel of a Boeing 737 led to a lack of oxygen on board the aircraft and, because the two pilots – a German and a Cypriot – misinterpreted the warning signals, they didn't realise they had to don their masks.

As a result, the pilots quickly passed out, followed shortly afterwards by the passengers. And, after three hours circling Athens on autopilot, the plane eventually crashed on a remote hillside with no survivors.

Programmes such as these are usually at pains to stress how safe it is to fly and that such stories are extremely rare. Air Crash Investigation, however, doesn't bother mollycoddling us with such trivial details, and so it leaves me with far more concerns than I had before it started.

Passengers’ oxygen masks, for example, only function for between 12 and 15 minutes! Who knew? Also, it seems that pilots can become confused by their mass of panels and switches, and don't even appear to have a manual stashed in the glove compartment. And, worryingly, air-traffic controllers can easily misunderstand the guttural English accents of German pilots.

In short, the programme – perhaps predictably – left me feeling stressed and anxious. And National Geographic didn't even see fit to follow it with some soothing footage of babies learning to swim.

Air Crash Investigation is on at various times on National Geographic (Sky 526, Virgin 230).

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  • Posted on 24 March 2009
  • at 12:48am
  • by clav

what, all new air crash, you only have 3 new ones that you have repeated every day for the last 3 bloody weeks, get real eh

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