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Thirty-Five Thousand Feet of Silence: The Rudder That Took Flight · Aviation Survival Stories

• 0:03
  Speaker 1: At 540 in the afternoon, 35,000 feet above the Bering Sea,
• 0:08
  Speaker 1: a 747 rolled 30 to 40 degrees to the left.
• 0:12
  Speaker 1: No warning, no crew input, no checklist that could fix it.
• 0:15
  Speaker 1: The aircraft was Northwest Airlines Flight 85, approximately seven hours
• 0:19
  Speaker 1: out of Detroit and bound for Tokyo. In that moment,
• 0:22
  Speaker 1: four pilots held the lives of everyone on board in
• 0:24
  Speaker 1: their hands, and not one of them had ever trained
• 0:27
  Speaker 1: for what was about to happen next. This is the
• 0:29
  Speaker 1: story of a metal crack no one could see. a
• 0:32
  Speaker 1: procedure that did not exist and the four men who
• 0:34
  Speaker 1: invented a solution from nothing while the ocean weighted 40,000
• 0:38
  Speaker 1: feet below. To understand what made that moment so extraordinary,
• 0:41
  Speaker 1: it helps to know something about the machine at the
• 0:44
  Speaker 1: center of it. The aircraft registered as November 60, 61
• 0:47
  Speaker 1: Uniform Sierra, was not just any 747, it was the
• 0:50
  Speaker 1: first one, Construction number 23719, the original prototype of the
• 0:57
  Speaker 1: 747-400 series, flight testing had begun in April of 1988,
• 1:03
  Speaker 1: when the aircraft flew under the registration November 401 Papa Whiskey.
• 1:07
  Speaker 1: Boeing engineers put it through everything the airframe could be
• 1:10
  Speaker 1: asked to endure before a single paying passenger ever stepped aboard.
• 1:14
  Speaker 1: Northwest Airlines took delivery of November 661, Uniform Sierra, on
• 1:19
  Speaker 1: December 8, 1989. By the morning of October 9, 2002,
• 1:24
  Speaker 1: that aircraft had been carrying passengers for nearly 13 years.
• 1:27
  Speaker 1: Nearly 13 years of oceanic crossings, pressurization cycles, temperature swings
• 1:32
  Speaker 1: from equatorial heat to polar cold. Nearly 13 years of
• 1:36
  Speaker 1: metal under stress. The route that day was one of
• 1:38
  Speaker 1: the longest Northwest operated. Detroit Metropolitan Airport to Tokyo Narita,
• 1:43
  Speaker 1: a great circle arc that sweeps Northwest across Canada, hugs
• 1:46
  Speaker 1: the Alaskan coast, and crosses the North Pacific. The flight
• 1:49
  Speaker 1: departed at 2.30 in the afternoon Eastern Daylight Time. By
• 1:53
  Speaker 1: the time the Bering Sea appeared beneath the clouds about
• 1:55
  Speaker 1: seven hours later, the crew was deep into the rhythm
• 1:58
  Speaker 1: that long-haul flying demands. Long-haul operations on a flight of
• 2:02
  Speaker 1: this duration require more than two pilots. Northwest Flight 85
• 2:06
  Speaker 1: carried four, two captains and two first officers, rotating in
• 2:10
  Speaker 1: pairs so each crew member progressed. It is a system
• 2:13
  Speaker 1: designed around human endurance. the understanding that no pilot can
• 2:16
  Speaker 1: sustain peak concentration across 11 hours of oceanic flying without relief.
• 2:21
  Speaker 1: Senior Captain John Hansen was the most experienced man on
• 2:24
  Speaker 1: the aircraft. First Officer Mike Fagan flew alongside him. Junior
• 2:28
  Speaker 1: Captain Frank Geib and First Officer David Smith formed the
• 2:31
  Speaker 1: relief crew. At approximately 5.40 in the afternoon, Alaska Daylight Time, G.
• 2:36
  Speaker 1: Kame and Smith were in the active seats. Hansen and
• 2:39
  Speaker 1: Fagan were in crew rest, That rotation, that ordinary procedurally
• 2:43
  Speaker 1: correct transfer of control, placed Guy at the controls at
• 2:46
  Speaker 1: precisely the moment the aircraft decided to do something none
• 2:49
  Speaker 1: of them had seen before. What no one on that
• 2:52
  Speaker 1: flight deck knew what no visual inspection could have revealed,
• 2:55
  Speaker 1: was that somewhere inside the lower rudder power control module,
• 2:59
  Speaker 1: a fatigue crack had been quietly growing. Cast metal does
• 3:02
  Speaker 1: not announce its failures. It accumulates stress across thousands of cycles, invisibly,
• 3:07
  Speaker 1: until the moment it does not. That moment was now.
• 3:10
  Speaker 1: The aircraft banked left, not gradually, not with any warning
• 3:14
  Speaker 1: from the instruments that something was building. At 5.40 in
• 3:17
  Speaker 1: the afternoon Alaska daylight time, at 35,000 feet above the
• 3:20
  Speaker 1: Bering Sea, Northwest Flight 85 rolled 30 to 40 degrees
• 3:24
  Speaker 1: to the left, and Frank Geib had not touched the controls.
• 3:28
  Speaker 1: He reached for them immediately. The aircraft did not respond
• 3:30
  Speaker 1: the way it should. Geib's first instinct was an engine.
• 3:34
  Speaker 1: On a four-engine widebody, asymmetric thrust from a failing power plant,
• 3:38
  Speaker 1: can produce exactly this kind of uncommanded roll. It was
• 3:41
  Speaker 1: a reasonable diagnosis. It was the logical one. Pilots are
• 3:44
  Speaker 1: trained to work from probabilities, and an engine failure is
• 3:47
  Speaker 1: among the most probable emergencies a 747 crew will ever face. G.I. Portet.
• 3:53
  Speaker 1: He ran the mental model. He checked. The engines were fine.
• 3:57
  Speaker 1: Every one of them was producing normal thrust. The aircraft
• 4:00
  Speaker 1: was still rolling against his inputs, still held in that
• 4:03
  Speaker 1: left bank, as if something had locked the rudder there.
• 4:05
  Speaker 1: Because something had, The end section of the lower rudder
• 4:09
  Speaker 1: power control module, the piece that houses the yaw damper actuator,
• 4:13
  Speaker 1: had broken away from its cast metal housing. The actuator,
• 4:16
  Speaker 1: now unhoused, was driving the lower rudder surface to its
• 4:19
  Speaker 1: full left limit, and it was not going to stop.
• 4:22
  Speaker 1: There is a difference between a malfunctioning component and a
• 4:24
  Speaker 1: fractured one. A malfunction can be overridden, reset, isolated. A
• 4:29
  Speaker 1: fracture is permanent. The lower rudder was at full hardover
• 4:32
  Speaker 1: to the left, locked there by physics, and no switch
• 4:35
  Speaker 1: position on any panel in that cockpit was going to
• 4:38
  Speaker 1: change it. Guy breached for the checklist. There was no
• 4:41
  Speaker 1: checklist for this, that is not a figure of speech.
• 4:44
  Speaker 1: The manuals carried by Northwest Flight 85, the thick meticulously
• 4:47
  Speaker 1: organized binders that cover thousands of possible failure modes, did
• 4:51
  Speaker 1: not contain a procedure for a fatigue fracture of the
• 4:54
  Speaker 1: rudder power control module housing. Boeing had not written one.
• 4:57
  Speaker 1: The failure mode had not been anticipated. The crack that
• 5:00
  Speaker 1: caused it was not something any inspector walking around the
• 5:03
  Speaker 1: aircraft with their eyes could have seen. It required ultrasonic inspection.
• 5:07
  Speaker 1: No one had known to look. Geib declared the emergency
• 5:10
  Speaker 1: and reached for the radio. Here is where the geography
• 5:13
  Speaker 1: became its own problem. The Bering Sea sits at the
• 5:16
  Speaker 1: edge of reliable radio coverage. Northwest Flight 85 was in
• 5:19
  Speaker 1: a communications dead zone. The kind of remote airspace where
• 5:23
  Speaker 1: the normal assumption that someone is listening cannot be taken
• 5:25
  Speaker 1: for granted. Geib transmitted. He received nothing back. The aircraft
• 5:30
  Speaker 1: continued to hold its left bank, fighting every correction, burning
• 5:33
  Speaker 1: through the crew's options, one by one. It was another
• 5:36
  Speaker 1: Northwest aircraft that saved the radio problem. Flight 19, operating nearby,
• 5:41
  Speaker 1: picked up the transmission and relayed the emergency to air
• 5:44
  Speaker 1: traffic control. That relay established the chain that would eventually
• 5:48
  Speaker 1: bring ground support into the picture. But the radio working
• 5:51
  Speaker 1: again did not solve the problem at the center of everything.
• 5:54
  Speaker 1: The aircraft still could not be flown normally and no one,
• 5:57
  Speaker 1: not on the flight deck, not on the ground, had
• 6:00
  Speaker 1: a procedure for what was happening. Northwest personnel in Minneapolis-Saint
• 6:03
  Speaker 1: Paul joined a conference call. The people on the other
• 6:06
  Speaker 1: end were experienced. They had access to documentation. They listened
• 6:10
  Speaker 1: to what the crew described. They could not identify a solution.
• 6:13
  Speaker 1: In crew rest, John Hansen felt something change. The exact
• 6:16
  Speaker 1: nature of what a sleeping pilot feels when the aircraft
• 6:19
  Speaker 1: beneath him shifts is difficult to quantify. But Hansen knew
• 6:23
  Speaker 1: he was the senior captain on the flight. and nearly
• 6:25
  Speaker 1: 13 years in aviation teaches the body things that wakefulness cannot.
• 6:30
  Speaker 1: He came forward, what he found on the flight deck
• 6:32
  Speaker 1: was an aircraft being held in an uncomfortable configuration by
• 6:36
  Speaker 1: two pilots working hard to keep it there a declared
• 6:38
  Speaker 1: emergency with no checklist attached to it, and a conference
• 6:42
  Speaker 1: call with the airline that had produced nothing actionable. Fagan
• 6:45
  Speaker 1: came forward with him. Hansen looked at the situation and
• 6:48
  Speaker 1: understood something that would take investigators months to fully document.
• 6:52
  Speaker 1: The lower rudder was gone, not malfunctioning, gone structurally separated,
• 6:56
  Speaker 1: irrecoverably locked. The upper rudder still responded. The ailerons still responded.
• 7:02
  Speaker 1: The engines still responded. And if you held the upper
• 7:04
  Speaker 1: rudder full right, combined full right aileron, and adjusted the
• 7:08
  Speaker 1: thrust asymmetrically across four engines, you could theoretically counteract the
• 7:12
  Speaker 1: force being exerted by the locked lower surface and steer
• 7:14
  Speaker 1: the aircraft. Theoretically, this was not a technique from any checklist.
• 7:19
  Speaker 1: It was not a maneuver any of the four pilots
• 7:21
  Speaker 1: had trained for in a simulator. It was engineering intuition
• 7:24
  Speaker 1: applied at 35,000 feet over open ocean, with a conference
• 7:27
  Speaker 1: call full of experts who had already run out of answers.
• 7:30
  Speaker 1: Hansen took the controls with Fagan alongside him. They flew
• 7:34
  Speaker 1: the aircraft by hand. The nearest suitable airport was Ted
• 7:37
  Speaker 1: Stevens Anchorage International. To reach it, they had to maintain
• 7:40
  Speaker 1: directional control across hundreds of miles of overwater flight. Descend
• 7:44
  Speaker 1: from cruise altitude without the standard control authority a 747
• 7:47
  Speaker 1: commander expects. configure for landing with a rudder that would
• 7:52
  Speaker 1: fight every approach input, and then, this is the part
• 7:55
  Speaker 1: that Hansen himself described plainly, not be certain they could
• 7:58
  Speaker 1: keep the aircraft on the runway. He said that out loud,
• 8:01
  Speaker 1: not to the passengers, to the flight attendants. Hansen walked
• 8:05
  Speaker 1: back through the cabin and briefed the senior flight attendant.
• 8:07
  Speaker 1: He used the words red emergency. He told them there
• 8:10
  Speaker 1: was a solid chance the aircraft would need to be
• 8:12
  Speaker 1: evacuated on the runway, he asked them to prepare, then
• 8:15
  Speaker 1: he returned to the flight deck and continued flying, The
• 8:18
  Speaker 1: passengers did not know what the crew knew. The cabin
• 8:21
  Speaker 1: stayed quiet in the way cabins do when the seatbelt
• 8:23
  Speaker 1: sign is on, and the flight has stopped feeling routine.
• 8:26
  Speaker 1: Outside the windows, the Bering Sea gave way to the
• 8:29
  Speaker 1: Alaskan coast. The aircraft descended. Hansen and Fagan held their
• 8:33
  Speaker 1: improvised configuration. Upper rudder full right, aileron full right. Asymmetric thrust,
• 8:38
  Speaker 1: mile after mile, as if the four of them had
• 8:40
  Speaker 1: always known how to fly this way. They had not.
• 8:44
  Speaker 1: They were inventing it. Picture the lower rudder of a 747.
• 8:48
  Speaker 1: in normal operation. It moves in small precise increments, fractions
• 8:52
  Speaker 1: of a degree at a time responding to your damper
• 8:54
  Speaker 1: inputs that the pilots never consciously command. The system is
• 8:58
  Speaker 1: designed to make long-haul flight smooth and stable. It operates quietly, automatically, invisibly.
• 9:04
  Speaker 1: Most passengers who have crossed an ocean on a 747
• 9:07
  Speaker 1: have never thought about it once. Now picture the housing
• 9:09
  Speaker 1: that holds the actuator in place. It is cast metal
• 9:12
  Speaker 1: not a moving part. not a component subject to wear
• 9:15
  Speaker 1: in the way a bearing or a valve wears. It
• 9:18
  Speaker 1: is the structure, it is the thing that is supposed
• 9:20
  Speaker 1: to be permanent, but cast metal fatigues. Every pressurization cycle
• 9:25
  Speaker 1: flexes the airframe. Every thermal cycle, the heat of a
• 9:27
  Speaker 1: tropical ramp, the cold of polar cruise altitude, expands and
• 9:31
  Speaker 1: contracts the metal microscopically. Across nearly 13 years and thousands
• 9:35
  Speaker 1: of flights, a crack had been growing inside that housing,
• 9:38
  Speaker 1: not on its surface, where a maintenance technician's flashlight might
• 9:41
  Speaker 1: catch it. Deep inside the material, propagating through the cast
• 9:45
  Speaker 1: structure with each cycle, invisible to any inspection method then required.
• 9:49
  Speaker 1: When the housing fractured on October 9, 2002, the end
• 9:52
  Speaker 1: section broke away completely. The yaw damper actuator, no longer constrained,
• 9:57
  Speaker 1: drove the lower rudder to its full travel limit and
• 10:00
  Speaker 1: held it there. The system designed to make the aircraft
• 10:02
  Speaker 1: stable had become the mechanism of its instability, and because
• 10:06
  Speaker 1: the failure was structural rather than electronic or hydraulic, no reset,
• 10:09
  Speaker 1: no circuit breaker, no isolation procedure could undo it. Here
• 10:13
  Speaker 1: is what the investigation would eventually confirm, and what makes
• 10:16
  Speaker 1: this event worth sitting with. The failure mode was not
• 10:18
  Speaker 1: unknown in a general sense. Fatigue in cast metal components
• 10:22
  Speaker 1: is a recognized phenomenon. But the specific failure, the housing
• 10:26
  Speaker 1: fracturing as a structural element, rather than an internal component failing,
• 10:30
  Speaker 1: had not been anticipated for this part. No one had
• 10:33
  Speaker 1: written an ultrasonic inspection requirement for it. No one had
• 10:36
  Speaker 1: written a procedure for the result of it. The aircraft
• 10:38
  Speaker 1: that had carried passengers across oceans for nearly 13 years
• 10:42
  Speaker 1: was flying with a crack that no one was looking
• 10:44
  Speaker 1: for inside a component no one was watching, And the
• 10:47
  Speaker 1: first sign of it was a 30 to 40 degree, uncommanded,
• 10:50
  Speaker 1: rollover the most remote airspace on the route. The question
• 10:53
  Speaker 1: the National Transportation Safety Board would need to answer was
• 10:56
  Speaker 1: not whether the crew had done something wrong. The evidence
• 10:59
  Speaker 1: made that answer clear before the investigation formally began. The
• 11:03
  Speaker 1: question was structural and systemic. How does a cast metal
• 11:06
  Speaker 1: housing accumulator fatigue crack to fracture point without any required
• 11:09
  Speaker 1: inspection catching it? And what does the rest of the
• 11:12
  Speaker 1: fleet look like right now? Walk back through what the
• 11:14
  Speaker 1: crew faced with that answer in mind. There was no
• 11:17
  Speaker 1: checklist because no one had modeled this failure. There was
• 11:20
  Speaker 1: no conference call solution because no one had solved this
• 11:23
  Speaker 1: failure before. The improvised technique Hansen and Fagan developed upper rudder, aileron,
• 11:28
  Speaker 1: asymmetric thrust, worked not because it was trained but because
• 11:32
  Speaker 1: they understood the aerodynamics well enough to construct a solution
• 11:35
  Speaker 1: from first principles. in real time, at altitude, with passengers aboard.
• 11:40
  Speaker 1: That is not what the manual calls for. The manual
• 11:42
  Speaker 1: did not exist. What the NTSB ultimately documented was not
• 11:46
  Speaker 1: a story about a crew making errors. It was a
• 11:49
  Speaker 1: story about a system encountering a gap it had not
• 11:51
  Speaker 1: prepared for, and four pilots filling that gap with something
• 11:54
  Speaker 1: that cannot be written in a checklist. The accumulated judgment
• 11:57
  Speaker 1: of people who knew their aircraft well enough to improvise
• 12:00
  Speaker 1: when every prepared answer had run out, the NTSB published
• 12:04
  Speaker 1: its findings and the regulatory machinery moved, On July 24, 2003,
• 12:09
  Speaker 1: about nine months after the Bering Sea, Boeing issued Alert
• 12:12
  Speaker 1: Service Bulletin 74727-27-A23-97. The directive was specific. Inspect the lower
• 12:20
  Speaker 1: rudder power control module manifold using ultrasonic methods, the only
• 12:24
  Speaker 1: technique capable of finding a fatigue crack hidden inside cast metal.
• 12:27
  Speaker 1: Visual inspection, the kind that had been performed on November
• 12:30
  Speaker 1: 16 C1 uniform Sierra across nearly 13 years of commercial service,
• 12:35
  Speaker 1: could not have found it. no one had required anything more.
• 12:38
  Speaker 1: The Federal Aviation Administration followed. Airworthiness Directive 2003-23-01 took effect
• 12:45
  Speaker 1: on December 18, 2003, mandating the inspection across the affected fleet.
• 12:51
  Speaker 1: Three years later, a superseding directive, 2006-18-17, tightened the requirement further.
• 12:55
  Speaker 1: Effective October 13, 2006. By 2008, a proposed replacement had
• 12:57
  Speaker 1: been published. signaling that the industry considered the original fix
• 13:06
  Speaker 1: a bridge, not a destination. The GATT the crew had
• 13:09
  Speaker 1: fallen into on October 9, 2002, was being closed, slowly, methodically,
• 13:14
  Speaker 1: through the language of service bulletins and federal directives, but
• 13:18
  Speaker 1: it was being closed because they had survived to report it.
• 13:21
  Speaker 1: In January 2004, the Airline Pilots Association presented the crew
• 13:25
  Speaker 1: with its Superior Airmanship Award. The citation covered what the
• 13:29
  Speaker 1: NTSB report had already documented in careful technical language, an
• 13:33
  Speaker 1: uncommanded hardover with no applicable checklist, a communications dead zone.
• 13:37
  Speaker 1: a conference call that produced no answer, and a crew
• 13:40
  Speaker 1: that constructed a solution from aerodynamic first principles and held
• 13:44
  Speaker 1: it for hours. There is something worth sitting with in
• 13:46
  Speaker 1: that award. The ELIPA Superior Airmanship Award does not go
• 13:49
  Speaker 1: to crews for following procedures. It goes to crews for
• 13:52
  Speaker 1: performing correctly when procedures do not exist. That distinction matters
• 13:56
  Speaker 1: more than it might seem. An aviation system built on
• 13:59
  Speaker 1: checklists and standardization had produced four pilots skilled enough to
• 14:03
  Speaker 1: function when the checklist ended. The training had prepared them
• 14:05
  Speaker 1: for the space beyond the training. Captain John Hansen and
• 14:08
  Speaker 1: First Officer Mike Fagan flew November 16-01 61-uniform Sierra by
• 14:13
  Speaker 1: hand across the North Pacific. Junior Captain Frank Guy managed
• 14:16
  Speaker 1: the radios, declared the emergency, and coordinated with Anchorage Approach Control,
• 14:21
  Speaker 1: under conditions no simulator had ever modeled for this specific failure.
• 14:25
  Speaker 1: First Officer David Smith called back from rest, joined them
• 14:28
  Speaker 1: in the cockpit. Together they landed the aircraft, every person
• 14:31
  Speaker 1: aboard walked off the plane. The investigation had not found
• 14:34
  Speaker 1: a villain. It had found a fracture, a fatigue crack
• 14:36
  Speaker 1: in a cast metal housing, propagating invisibly through years of
• 14:40
  Speaker 1: pressurization cycles and flight loads, until the day it gave
• 14:43
  Speaker 1: way over the most remote stretch of the route. The
• 14:45
  Speaker 1: system had a gap. The gap had a cost that,
• 14:48
  Speaker 1: on this occasion, was paid entirely in fear and professionalism
• 14:51
  Speaker 1: rather than in lives. November 661 Uniform Sierra returned to
• 14:55
  Speaker 1: commercial service after the incident. It kept flying for Northwest
• 14:59
  Speaker 1: then for Delta after the 2008 merger, accumulating more cycles,
• 15:03
  Speaker 1: more crossings, more passengers who boarded without knowing what the
• 15:06
  Speaker 1: aircraft had already survived. On September 8, 2015, it made
• 15:10
  Speaker 1: its final revenue flight. The route was Honolulu to Atlanta,
• 15:14
  Speaker 1: a last Pacific crossing of a different kind, a long
• 15:17
  Speaker 1: descent toward the mainland and the end of a working life.
• 15:20
  Speaker 1: The aircraft that had begun as a prototype in April
• 15:22
  Speaker 1: 1988 that had entered Northwest service on December 8, 1989,
• 15:27
  Speaker 1: that had rolled 30 to 40 degrees over the Bering Sea,
• 15:30
  Speaker 1: with no checklist and no warning. Touched down in Atlanta
• 15:33
  Speaker 1: for the last time, on April 30, 2016, November 16
• 15:38
  Speaker 1: 61-uniform Sierra was transferred to the Delta Flight Museum. On
• 15:42
  Speaker 1: March 28, 2017, the museum opened its 747 experience exhibit.
• 15:47
  Speaker 1: The aircraft stands in Atlanta now preserved, the first 747.
• 15:51
  Speaker 1: 400 prototype, the plane that survived a failure, No one
• 15:55
  Speaker 1: had written a procedure for, available for visitors to walk through.
• 15:59
  Speaker 1: Most of them will not know the story of October 9th, 2002.
• 16:03
  Speaker 1: The exhibit does not require them to. The aircraft simply
• 16:05
  Speaker 1: stands there, a piece of engineering that outlasted the crisis
• 16:09
  Speaker 1: it was never designed to survive. There is a final
• 16:11
  Speaker 1: detail that belongs here. The incident over the Bering Sea
• 16:14
  Speaker 1: did not initially receive media attention. The passengers landed, the
• 16:18
  Speaker 1: aircraft was inspected, and the investigation began. all without the
• 16:22
  Speaker 1: kind of public reckoning that follows a visible catastrophe. The
• 16:26
  Speaker 1: regulatory response happened in the structured, unglamorous language of airworthiness directives.
• 16:31
  Speaker 1: The crew received their award in January 2004 at an
• 16:34
  Speaker 1: industry ceremony most people outside aviation never heard about. What
• 16:38
  Speaker 1: happened at 35,000 feet above the Bering Sea on that
• 16:42
  Speaker 1: Wednesday afternoon was witnessed in real time by perhaps 200 people,
• 16:46
  Speaker 1: the crew and the passengers who felt the aircraft roll
• 16:49
  Speaker 1: without knowing why. The rest of the world learned nothing
• 16:52
  Speaker 1: about it, and yet the service bulletins that followed the directives,
• 16:55
  Speaker 1: the ultrasonic inspection requirements, those traveled forward into the maintenance
• 16:59
  Speaker 1: records of every aircraft they touched, preventing failures that will
• 17:02
  Speaker 1: never appear in any accident report because they never happened.
• 17:05
  Speaker 1: That is what safety looks like when it works, not
• 17:07
  Speaker 1: a headline, a crack that was found before it fractured,
• 17:10
  Speaker 1: a procedure written for a failure that a crew in
• 17:12
  Speaker 1: 2002 survived long enough to report. John Hansen, Mike Fagan,
• 17:17
  Speaker 1: Frank Geib, and David Smith gave the system what it
• 17:20
  Speaker 1: needed to fix itself. They did not have to. The
• 17:22
  Speaker 1: margin was close enough that they might not have. The
• 17:25
  Speaker 1: aircraft stands in Atlanta. The directives are in the maintenance records.
• 17:28
  Speaker 1: The crack that started it is in the NTSB file.
• 17:31
  Speaker 1: Documented in the language of fatigue fracture and cast metal housing,
• 17:35
  Speaker 1: a small invisible failure that four pilots and an entire
• 17:38
  Speaker 1: regulatory apparatus converted, in the end, into something that will
• 17:42
  Speaker 1: never happen the same way again. This show is made
• 17:44
  Speaker 1: by Oba Media.