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Glider Over Georgia: When Both Engines Failed Midflight · Aviation Survival Stories

• 0:03
  Speaker 1: At 17 minutes past three in the afternoon on April 4th, 1977,
• 0:09
  Speaker 1: a commercial jet with 85 people aboard touched down on
• 0:12
  Speaker 1: a two-lane highway in rural Georgia. Both engines had been
• 0:16
  Speaker 1: dead for several minutes. The pilots were flying a glider
• 0:19
  Speaker 1: that weighed more than 40 tons, and that road was
• 0:21
  Speaker 1: the best option they had left. The community below them
• 0:24
  Speaker 1: was called New Hope. There is something brutal in that name,
• 0:28
  Speaker 1: given what happened next. 72 people did not survive the day.
• 0:32
  Speaker 1: And the investigation that followed would expose a chain of
• 0:35
  Speaker 1: failures so specific, so interlocking, that no single broken link
• 0:39
  Speaker 1: is enough to explain the wreckage. Every piece of this
• 0:41
  Speaker 1: story was ordinary on its own. Together, they became the
• 0:45
  Speaker 1: worst aviation disaster in the history of the state of Georgia.
• 0:48
  Speaker 1: There are two things about Southern Airways Flight 242 that
• 0:51
  Speaker 1: should stop you cold before you hear another word. First,
• 0:54
  Speaker 1: this was the first documented case in commercial aviation history
• 0:58
  Speaker 1: of a jet losing both engines simultaneously in flight. No
• 1:01
  Speaker 1: training procedures existed for it, the pilots had no manual
• 1:05
  Speaker 1: to follow because no one had written one yet. Second,
• 1:08
  Speaker 1: 24 people walked away from that highway. Two of them
• 1:11
  Speaker 1: were flight attendants, who prepared their passengers for a crash landing,
• 1:15
  Speaker 1: without receiving a single instruction from the cockpit. This is
• 1:18
  Speaker 1: the story of what happened in the 47 minutes between
• 1:21
  Speaker 1: takeoff and impact, and why the answers the investigation produced
• 1:25
  Speaker 1: were not as simple as anyone wanted them to be.
• 1:27
  Speaker 1: Captain William W. McKenzie was 54 years old and had
• 1:31
  Speaker 1: spent the better part of three decades in the air.
• 1:33
  Speaker 1: His logbook showed 19,380 total flight hours. On the DC-9 specifically,
• 1:39
  Speaker 1: he had accumulated 3,205 hours. He was not a man
• 1:43
  Speaker 1: who startled easily. He was not a man who made
• 1:46
  Speaker 1: careless decisions in the air. First officer Lyman W. Keel Jr.
• 1:50
  Speaker 1: was 34. He had 3,878 total flight hours, with 235
• 1:55
  Speaker 1: on the DC-9. He was building his career, accumulating experience,
• 2:00
  Speaker 1: working routes through the American South on a regional carrier
• 2:03
  Speaker 1: that connected smaller cities to the larger hubs. Southern Airways
• 2:06
  Speaker 1: Flight 242 that Monday was a short regional hop. The
• 2:10
  Speaker 1: route ran from Muscle Shoals, Alabama to Huntsville, Alabama, then
• 2:14
  Speaker 1: on to Hartsfield, Atlanta. These were not exotic destinations. This
• 2:18
  Speaker 1: was the kind of flight that regional crews flew multiple
• 2:21
  Speaker 1: times a week, connecting ordinary people to ordinary places for
• 2:24
  Speaker 1: ordinary reasons. The 81 passengers boarding that afternoon had ordinary
• 2:29
  Speaker 1: reasons too. Some were business travelers, some were heading home.
• 2:32
  Speaker 1: Annette Snell, a rhythm and blues singer, was among them.
• 2:36
  Speaker 1: In Paulding County, Georgia, families were going about their Monday.
• 2:39
  Speaker 1: Kathy Griffin Carter was home with her son Jeffrey Richard Carter.
• 2:43
  Speaker 1: Faye Robinson Griffin was nearby with her son Larry Allen Griffin.
• 2:47
  Speaker 1: Edna Griffin-Gamer was with her children John and Courtney. Seven
• 2:50
  Speaker 1: of the nine people who would die on the ground
• 2:52
  Speaker 1: that afternoon were members of connected families who had lived
• 2:55
  Speaker 1: in that community for years. None of them had any
• 2:57
  Speaker 1: reason to think about the sky. The pre-flight weather briefing
• 3:00
  Speaker 1: that morning had acknowledged storms in the region, but McKenzie
• 3:04
  Speaker 1: and his first officer had already flown that same corridor
• 3:07
  Speaker 1: earlier in the day, and the weather had been manageable.
• 3:09
  Speaker 1: The storms were there, but they had gaps. The crew
• 3:12
  Speaker 1: had navigated them before. They understood the sky between Huntsville
• 3:16
  Speaker 1: and Atlanta the way experienced pilots understand familiar territory, not casually,
• 3:21
  Speaker 1: but with the specific confidence that comes from having done
• 3:24
  Speaker 1: something many times and having it go right. What no
• 3:27
  Speaker 1: one told them before that second flight was that the
• 3:29
  Speaker 1: storm system had reorganized. The cells had consolidated into a
• 3:33
  Speaker 1: squall line, a wall of weather rather than a scattered
• 3:36
  Speaker 1: field with gaps to fly through. The dispatch system had
• 3:39
  Speaker 1: the updated information. That update was never transmitted to the crew.
• 3:43
  Speaker 1: McKenzie and Keel took off from Huntsville, carrying a mental
• 3:46
  Speaker 1: picture of a sky that no longer existed. The DC-931,
• 3:49
  Speaker 1: registration N135 uniform, climbed normally. The route south toward Atlanta
• 3:54
  Speaker 1: was familiar. The radar aboard the aircraft showed what appeared
• 3:57
  Speaker 1: to be an opening between storm cells near the VOAR
• 4:00
  Speaker 1: beacon at Rome, Georgia. The crew descended from 17,000 feet
• 4:04
  Speaker 1: toward 14,000, reading their instruments, looking for the path through.
• 4:08
  Speaker 1: That gap on the radar was not a gap at all,
• 4:10
  Speaker 1: it was the core of the storm. The radar was
• 4:13
  Speaker 1: showing them the worst possible place to fly, and making
• 4:16
  Speaker 1: it look like the safest. What was waiting inside that
• 4:18
  Speaker 1: apparent opening was not clear air, it was what investigators
• 4:21
  Speaker 1: would later describe as an extreme concentration of water and hails.
• 4:25
  Speaker 1: the kind of precipitation that a jet engine's intake is
• 4:28
  Speaker 1: not designed to survive. The crew did not know that yet.
• 4:31
  Speaker 1: They were following their instruments, trusting their training, looking for
• 4:34
  Speaker 1: the break in the weather that the radar told them
• 4:36
  Speaker 1: was right in front of them. They flew straight into it.
• 4:39
  Speaker 1: The hail hit the windshield first, not rain, not turbulence.
• 4:43
  Speaker 1: Hail traveling horizontally at the speed of the storm, and
• 4:46
  Speaker 1: it struck the DC-9's forward glass with enough force to
• 4:49
  Speaker 1: crack it. Inside the cockpit, William McKenzie and Lyman Kill
• 4:52
  Speaker 1: felt the aircraft shudder. The radar had shown a gap.
• 4:56
  Speaker 1: There was no gap. They were already inside the worst
• 4:59
  Speaker 1: of it. What happened next took less than 90 seconds
• 5:02
  Speaker 1: to become irreversible. The JT-8D engines on the DC-9 are
• 5:06
  Speaker 1: capable machines. They are designed to handle rain, moderate icing,
• 5:10
  Speaker 1: the ordinary punishment of commercial flight. What they are not
• 5:13
  Speaker 1: designed to handle is the volume of water and hail
• 5:16
  Speaker 1: that poured into their intakes in those seconds over northwest Georgia.
• 5:19
  Speaker 1: The engines did not fail gradually. They flamed out. Both
• 5:23
  Speaker 1: of them. nearly simultaneously. The DC-930-1 became a glider at 14,000 feet.
• 5:29
  Speaker 1: There is a moment in any crisis when the options
• 5:31
  Speaker 1: that still exist are fewer than the options that have
• 5:34
  Speaker 1: already closed. For flight 242, that moment arrived the instant
• 5:38
  Speaker 1: the second engine went silent. McKenzie and Keel had no thrust,
• 5:41
  Speaker 1: degraded instruments, and a sky full of weather between them
• 5:44
  Speaker 1: and the ground. What they did next would be debated
• 5:47
  Speaker 1: for decades. The cockpit voice recorder captured the first 15
• 5:50
  Speaker 1: seconds of the emergency clearly. then a short electrical interruption,
• 5:54
  Speaker 1: then the voices resumed, clipped and focused, then a second blackout.
• 5:58
  Speaker 1: This one lasted nearly two minutes. Two minutes of silence
• 6:01
  Speaker 1: on the recorder. Whatever decisions were made in that gap,
• 6:04
  Speaker 1: about altitude, about heading, about which runway or road or
• 6:08
  Speaker 1: open field might be reachable, Those decisions cannot be fully reconstructed.
• 6:12
  Speaker 1: The recorder came back online, and the crew was already
• 6:15
  Speaker 1: deep into the problem, already past the first calculations, already
• 6:18
  Speaker 1: working a scenario that had no manual, no checklist, no
• 6:22
  Speaker 1: training protocol, because there was none. No commercial jet had
• 6:25
  Speaker 1: ever lost both engines simultaneously before this flight. The procedure
• 6:30
  Speaker 1: for surviving it did not exist in written form, McKenzie
• 6:33
  Speaker 1: and Keel were writing it in real time. Air traffic
• 6:35
  Speaker 1: control offered Dobbins Air Force Base, roughly 20 miles to
• 6:38
  Speaker 1: the east. The crew turned toward it, then turned away.
• 6:42
  Speaker 1: The weather between them and Dobbins was too thick, the
• 6:44
  Speaker 1: visibility too uncertain, the electrical situation too unstable to trust
• 6:48
  Speaker 1: the instruments that would guide them in. Cartersville Airport was
• 6:52
  Speaker 1: behind them, out of reach. A third airport, Cornelius Moore,
• 6:55
  Speaker 1: lay about 20 and a half miles back along their track.
• 6:58
  Speaker 1: It was never mentioned, not because anyone decided against it.
• 7:02
  Speaker 1: It simply fell outside the coverage area of the ATC
• 7:05
  Speaker 1: facility handling the flight. It did not appear on their screens.
• 7:09
  Speaker 1: It was not a secret. It was not a conspiracy.
• 7:12
  Speaker 1: It was a gap in the system, the same kind
• 7:14
  Speaker 1: of gap the radar had shown them over Rome. The
• 7:17
  Speaker 1: crew was now trading altitude for distance, running the numbers
• 7:20
  Speaker 1: on what was left. McKenzie looked down through the broken
• 7:22
  Speaker 1: weather and found Georgia State Route 92 spur, a two-lane
• 7:27
  Speaker 1: road cutting through Pording County, northwest of Atlanta, near a
• 7:30
  Speaker 1: community called New Hope. It was straight. It was relatively clear.
• 7:34
  Speaker 1: It was there. He chose it. Here is what the
• 7:36
  Speaker 1: NTSB found when investigators reached the site. The DC-9 had
• 7:40
  Speaker 1: touched down on the highway. The approach was controlled. Given
• 7:43
  Speaker 1: what the crew had available, no thrust partial instruments, a
• 7:47
  Speaker 1: fractured windshield, weather still pressing on all sides, the touchdown
• 7:50
  Speaker 1: itself was by every technical measure, a landing, not a crash,
• 7:54
  Speaker 1: a landing. Then the left wing struck a gas station
• 7:57
  Speaker 1: at the edge of the road. The aircraft rotated left,
• 8:00
  Speaker 1: hard and fast. and entered a wooded area at the
• 8:02
  Speaker 1: side of the road. The fuselage broke apart. The cockpit
• 8:05
  Speaker 1: separated from the rest of the aircraft. It came to
• 8:08
  Speaker 1: rest inverted, nose down, in the trees. Both McKenzie and
• 8:11
  Speaker 1: Keel were still strapped into their seats. The impact forces
• 8:14
  Speaker 1: that separated the cockpit from the aircraft were the forces
• 8:17
  Speaker 1: that killed them. Massive trauma. They never left their chairs.
• 8:20
  Speaker 1: Behind the cockpit, the story split. The forward section of
• 8:23
  Speaker 1: the fuselage was destroyed in the impact. The rear section
• 8:26
  Speaker 1: survived long enough for fire to find it. The fire
• 8:29
  Speaker 1: moved forward from the wings, consuming the middle of the
• 8:32
  Speaker 1: aircraft while the back remained intact for a few critical minutes.
• 8:35
  Speaker 1: Those minutes were the difference between 22 survivors and none.
• 8:39
  Speaker 1: At the very back of the cabin, flight attendant Sandy
• 8:42
  Speaker 1: Ward had already done something extraordinary. When the engines flamed out,
• 8:46
  Speaker 1: there had been no announcement from the cockpit. Nothing. The
• 8:50
  Speaker 1: interphone between crew and cabin had gone silent along with
• 8:53
  Speaker 1: everything else. Ward and her colleague Catherine Cooper had no
• 8:56
  Speaker 1: information and no instructions. What they had was a cabin
• 8:59
  Speaker 1: full of passengers and a window. Ward looked through the glass,
• 9:03
  Speaker 1: saw the ground rising, saw trees, and made a decision
• 9:06
  Speaker 1: without authorization from anyone. She began moving through the cabin
• 9:10
  Speaker 1: shouting the brace command herself, pressing passengers into position, not asking,
• 9:15
  Speaker 1: not waiting, just doing the one thing the training said
• 9:17
  Speaker 1: to do when the ground is coming up and no
• 9:19
  Speaker 1: one is talking. Cooper did the same at the front.
• 9:22
  Speaker 1: The NTSB report noted, without qualification, that the actions of
• 9:26
  Speaker 1: both flight attendants contributed directly to the number of survivors.
• 9:29
  Speaker 1: Their training worked, their nerve held, and they acted entirely
• 9:33
  Speaker 1: on their own judgment, in a situation no one had
• 9:36
  Speaker 1: briefed them on. because there was no one left to
• 9:38
  Speaker 1: brief them. When the board's investigators finished their analysis, the
• 9:41
  Speaker 1: majority finding pointed outward and upward toward the systems surrounding
• 9:46
  Speaker 1: the flight rather than the crew inside it. Picture the
• 9:49
  Speaker 1: dispatch office that morning. Someone there had the updated weather information.
• 9:53
  Speaker 1: The squall line had formed. The cells had reorganized into
• 9:56
  Speaker 1: a wall. That information existed in the system. The crew
• 9:59
  Speaker 1: of Flight 240 242 never received it. They departed Huntsville
• 10:02
  Speaker 1: with a mental model of scattered storms and navigable gaps,
• 10:05
  Speaker 1: because that was the last picture anyone gave them. Picture
• 10:08
  Speaker 1: the radar image in the cockpit, the bright return that
• 10:11
  Speaker 1: showed a corridor of lighter color between two heavier cells.
• 10:14
  Speaker 1: That lighter corridor was an artifact of the radar's own physics.
• 10:18
  Speaker 1: Heavy precipitation at the edges of a storm absorbs and
• 10:22
  Speaker 1: scatters the signal dense water and hail at the core
• 10:25
  Speaker 1: can appear attenuated, lighter on the screen. The crew saw
• 10:28
  Speaker 1: what the instrument showed them. The instrument was not lying, exactly.
• 10:32
  Speaker 1: It was showing them everything it could see. It simply
• 10:34
  Speaker 1: could not show them the thing that would kill them,
• 10:36
  Speaker 1: because the thing that would kill them was invisible to it.
• 10:39
  Speaker 1: Both failures, the dispatch failure and the radar limitation, were
• 10:42
  Speaker 1: system failures. Neither required anyone to have acted in bad faith.
• 10:46
  Speaker 1: Three of the four NTSB board members signed the majority
• 10:49
  Speaker 1: report finding on those terms. The probable cause was the
• 10:52
  Speaker 1: dual-engine flamer caused by massive water and hail ingestion, aggravated
• 10:56
  Speaker 1: by the failure to transmit updated meteorological information, and by
• 11:00
  Speaker 1: the known limitations of airborne weather radar. But the fourth member,
• 11:03
  Speaker 1: Francis McAdams, dissented. McAdams did not dispute the system failures.
• 11:07
  Speaker 1: He acknowledged them. What he argued was that the majority
• 11:10
  Speaker 1: finding drew the frame too wide, and in doing so,
• 11:13
  Speaker 1: shifted weight away from the one decision that put the
• 11:16
  Speaker 1: aircraft in that position. The crew had seen weather. The
• 11:19
  Speaker 1: crew had a radar that showed them a gap. The
• 11:21
  Speaker 1: crew chose to descend into that gap rather than turn
• 11:24
  Speaker 1: away from it. McAdams argued that the captain's decision to
• 11:26
  Speaker 1: penetrate the storm rather than avoid it deserved to stand
• 11:29
  Speaker 1: at the center of the probable cause, not at the
• 11:32
  Speaker 1: edge of it. The majority disagreed. Three votes to one.
• 11:35
  Speaker 1: There is no clean answer here. There never was. McKenzie
• 11:39
  Speaker 1: had flown that corridor earlier the same day and come
• 11:41
  Speaker 1: through without catastrophe. The radar showed him what it always
• 11:45
  Speaker 1: showed him. The briefing he received told him what it
• 11:48
  Speaker 1: always told him. He was not flying recklessly. He was
• 11:51
  Speaker 1: flying the same way he had flown thousands of hours before,
• 11:54
  Speaker 1: with the same tools, trusting the same information, making the
• 11:57
  Speaker 1: same kind of judgment call that experienced pilots make every day.
• 12:01
  Speaker 1: The difference was that on this day and this storm
• 12:03
  Speaker 1: at this moment, Every system that should have told him
• 12:06
  Speaker 1: to turn back had already failed to tell him anything
• 12:08
  Speaker 1: at all, and Flight 242 was the first commercial jet
• 12:12
  Speaker 1: in history to lose both engines at once. There was
• 12:15
  Speaker 1: no training for it, there was no procedure, there was
• 12:18
  Speaker 1: no scenario in any simulator that had ever asked a crew,
• 12:22
  Speaker 1: both engines gone, what do you do now? McKenzie and
• 12:25
  Speaker 1: Keel found a road, that was the answer they wrote.
• 12:28
  Speaker 1: 72 people died, 24 survived. And the question of whether
• 12:32
  Speaker 1: any other answer was possible, whether a different radar, a
• 12:35
  Speaker 1: transmitted weather update, a mentioned airport, two more miles of altitude,
• 12:39
  Speaker 1: that question does not have a resolution. It has a memorial,
• 12:43
  Speaker 1: dedicated on the 44th anniversary of the crash, in a
• 12:46
  Speaker 1: community still called New Hope. The NTSB investigation into Southern
• 12:50
  Speaker 1: Airways Flight 242 produced one of the most consequential safety
• 12:54
  Speaker 1: reports in American aviation history. Not because it found a villain.
• 12:58
  Speaker 1: Because it found a gap and the gap was everywhere.
• 13:00
  Speaker 1: The probable cause, as the majority of the board determined,
• 13:03
  Speaker 1: was the total loss of thrust in both engines following
• 13:06
  Speaker 1: massive ingestion of water and hail, compounded by the movement
• 13:10
  Speaker 1: of the thrust levers. Contributing to that loss were three
• 13:13
  Speaker 1: separate system failures operating in concert, the dispatch system that
• 13:16
  Speaker 1: never transmitted the updated weather information, the captain's reliance on
• 13:20
  Speaker 1: airborne radar that could not see what it claimed to show,
• 13:23
  Speaker 1: and the limitations of the FAA's air traffic control infrastructure
• 13:26
  Speaker 1: in that corridor. No criminal charges were filed. No individual
• 13:30
  Speaker 1: was found liable in a court of law. The investigation
• 13:33
  Speaker 1: closed without a single name attached to a single act
• 13:36
  Speaker 1: of deliberate wrongdoing. What it found instead was a chain.
• 13:39
  Speaker 1: Each link looked ordinary. Each link had been used safely before.
• 13:43
  Speaker 1: But on April 4th, 1977, they connected in exactly the
• 13:47
  Speaker 1: wrong sequence, in exactly the wrong weather, at exactly the
• 13:50
  Speaker 1: wrong altitude. The changes that followed were not ordinary. Airborne
• 13:54
  Speaker 1: weather radar standards were revised. Dispatch protocols for updating crews
• 13:58
  Speaker 1: on developing convective systems were tightened. Training programs began to account,
• 14:03
  Speaker 1: for the first time, for the scenario of dual-engine failure
• 14:06
  Speaker 1: in a commercial jet. Before Flight 242, that scenario had
• 14:10
  Speaker 1: no place in any simulator. After it, the question was
• 14:13
  Speaker 1: no longer hypothetical. Sandy Pearl Ward, the flight attendant who
• 14:16
  Speaker 1: had stood at the back of the aircraft as fire
• 14:18
  Speaker 1: moved toward her, wrote a memoir titled Am I Alive?
• 14:22
  Speaker 1: She retired from Northwest Airlines in 1994. Katherine Lemoine Cooper,
• 14:26
  Speaker 1: who had unstrapped herself from an inverted seat and crawled
• 14:29
  Speaker 1: through a broken fuselage, lived until June 12, 20. Both
• 14:33
  Speaker 1: women had called out brace when they saw trees filling
• 14:35
  Speaker 1: the windows. Both had done it without any instruction from
• 14:38
  Speaker 1: the cockpit, without any communication from the crew, because the
• 14:42
  Speaker 1: crew had nothing left to give them. The NTSB noted
• 14:45
  Speaker 1: formally that the actions of both flight attendants contributed to
• 14:48
  Speaker 1: the survival count. 22 passengers walked away from that road
• 14:52
  Speaker 1: in Paulding County. The investigators believed those two women were
• 14:56
  Speaker 1: part of the reason. Nine people on the ground did
• 14:58
  Speaker 1: not survive. Seven of them were members of interconnected families,
• 15:02
  Speaker 1: the Griffins, the Gammels, the Carters, who lived near the
• 15:04
  Speaker 1: stretch of Georgia State Route 92 Spur, where the aircraft
• 15:07
  Speaker 1: came down. They had been home, that was all. They
• 15:10
  Speaker 1: had simply been home on a Monday afternoon, when a
• 15:13
  Speaker 1: jet with no engine power selected their road as the
• 15:15
  Speaker 1: only available runway. Burleigh May Bell Cranton, and Ernest L.
• 15:19
  Speaker 1: Pruitt died alongside them. Their names are on the memorial.
• 15:22
  Speaker 1: That memorial was announced in 2015. Funding was completed in
• 15:26
  Speaker 1: March of 2019. On April 4, 2021, the 44th anniversary
• 15:32
  Speaker 1: of the crash, approximately 100 people gathered in New Hope,
• 15:36
  Speaker 1: traveling from four states to dedicate it. Survivors, family members
• 15:40
  Speaker 1: of the dead, people who had been children in that community,
• 15:43
  Speaker 1: and remembered the day the sky fell onto their road.
• 15:46
  Speaker 1: Flight 242 remains the deadliest aviation disaster in Georgia history.
• 15:51
  Speaker 1: That record has stood for more than four decades. There
• 15:53
  Speaker 1: is something that does not resolve cleanly about this story,
• 15:56
  Speaker 1: not because the facts are unclear. The facts are documented
• 16:00
  Speaker 1: in precise detail. The altitude the radar returned. the two-minute
• 16:03
  Speaker 1: gap in the cockpit voice recorder, the engines that ingested
• 16:06
  Speaker 1: a storm and went silent. The facts do not leave
• 16:09
  Speaker 1: much room for ambiguity. What does not resolve is the
• 16:12
  Speaker 1: space between what the systems showed and what was actually there.
• 16:15
  Speaker 1: Captain William McKenzie had 19,380 hours of flight time. He
• 16:20
  Speaker 1: had flown that same corridor earlier that same day. The
• 16:23
  Speaker 1: gap in the radar image looked passable because radar, in 1977,
• 16:27
  Speaker 1: could not tell you it was lying. The weather update
• 16:30
  Speaker 1: that might have changed his calculation was sitting in a
• 16:32
  Speaker 1: dispatch office, untransmitted. He was not warned. He was not reckless.
• 16:36
  Speaker 1: He was operating at the edge of what his instruments
• 16:38
  Speaker 1: and his briefings and his training had ever prepared him
• 16:41
  Speaker 1: to see. And at that edge, there was nothing. The
• 16:43
  Speaker 1: NTSB descent, written by Francis H. McAdams argued that the
• 16:47
  Speaker 1: captain's decision to enter the storm deserved more weight in
• 16:50
  Speaker 1: the probable cause. Three of the four board members disagreed.
• 16:54
  Speaker 1: The debate was real. The vote was 3-1. That tension,
• 16:57
  Speaker 1: between system failure and human judgment, between the information a
• 17:01
  Speaker 1: pilot receives and the decision he makes with it, did
• 17:03
  Speaker 1: not end with the investigation. It became the architecture of
• 17:06
  Speaker 1: every major aviation safety reform that followed. Every revised radar standard.
• 17:11
  Speaker 1: Every updated dispatch protocol. Every simulator scenario that now includes
• 17:15
  Speaker 1: both engines silent at 14,000 feet. McKenzie and Keel found
• 17:20
  Speaker 1: a road, they put the aircraft down on it. 72
• 17:23
  Speaker 1: people died, and 24 walked away from a wreck that
• 17:26
  Speaker 1: should have killed everyone aboard. Whether that outcome represents failure
• 17:30
  Speaker 1: or the outer edge of what two pilots could accomplish
• 17:33
  Speaker 1: with nothing left, that judgment belongs to the record not
• 17:36
  Speaker 1: to a verdict. What the record does say is simpler.
• 17:39
  Speaker 1: Annette Snell was on that flight, so were the Griffins
• 17:42
  Speaker 1: and the Gammels and the Carters, who never boarded any
• 17:45
  Speaker 1: aircraft at all. So were 22 people who survived because
• 17:48
  Speaker 1: two flight attendants shouted a single word when the trees
• 17:51
  Speaker 1: appeared in the windows. Brace. The memorial in New Hope
• 17:55
  Speaker 1: stands at the site where the road became a runway
• 17:57
  Speaker 1: and the runway was not enough. It does not assign blame.
• 18:00
  Speaker 1: It holds the names. And in a community that has
• 18:03
  Speaker 1: carried this weight for nearly 50 years, that may be
• 18:05
  Speaker 1: the only honest thing left to build. This show is
• 18:08
  Speaker 1: made by Obermedia.