Season 5 Episode List

[Chris]

Season 5

1. Air India: Explosive Evidence (Explosive Evidence)
   - Air India Flight 182 flying over the coast of Ireland exploded in mid-air killing all 329 on board. Investigators discovered that a bomb from Sikh militant group Babbar Khalsa caused the aircraft to disintegrate.
   
   
2. Behind Closed Doors
   - A brand new McDonnell Douglas DC-10 just a few months old operating American Airlines Flight 96 from Detroit, Michigan to Buffalo, New York suffers an explosive decompression after a cargo door burst. The pilots forced at emergency landing at Windsor, Ontario. However, the fault with the door is not repaired and two years later, Turkish Airlines Flight 981 suffers a similar blowout during a flight from Paris to London. This time, the DC-10's hydraulic system was damaged and the aircraft smashed into a forest in Senlis, killing all 346 on board, thus making it the deadliest aviation disaster at that time.
   
   
3. Southern Storm
   - Southern Airways Flight 242 in a flight from Huntsville, Alabama to Atlanta, Georgia got caught up in a severe thunderstorm and got hit by hailstones which were the size of baseballs. The McDonnell DC-9-31 jet, registered N1335U lost both engines and was too far away from Atlanta or any other airport and was forced to make an emergency landing on a highway in New Hope, Paulding County, Georgia. However, before it stopped, the jet collided with a gas station and exploded, killing 70 people (including 8 on the ground).
   
   
4. Dead Weight
   - A small commuter aircraft, Air Midwest Express Flight 5481 plummets into a hangar of Charlotte/Douglas International Airport seconds after take-off from there on a flight to Greenville.
   
   
5. Invisible Killer (Slammed To The Ground)
   - Delta Air Lines Flight 191 crashed while on approach to the Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport, killing 8 of 11 crew members and 128 of the 152 passengers on board and one person on the ground: a total of 137 deaths. This accident is one of the few commercial air crashes in which the meteorological phenomenon known as microburst-induced wind shear was a direct contributing factor.
   
   
6. Gimli Glider (Deadly Glide) (Miracle Flight)
   - A Boeing 767-233 jet, Air Canada Flight 143, ran completely out of fuel at 41,000 feet (12,000m) altitude, about halfway through its flight from Montreal to Edmonton. The crew was able to glide the aircraft safely to an emergency landing at Gimli Industrial Park Airport, a former airbase at Gimli, Manitoba. The cause of the fuel starvation was an imperial to metric measurement conversion error when the plane was fueled, which was aggravated by out of commission gas gauges.
   
   
7. Fanning the Flames (Cargo Conspiracy) (Mystery Fire)
   - South African Airways Flight 295 starts filling with smoke. A fire has erupted in the rear main level cargo area; the pilots cannot land as the aircraft is over the Indian Ocean. The passengers choke on the fire's toxic fumes partly due to improper use of the recirculate air flow setting. The pilots successfully open the doors in flight, a rarely used and risky maneuver, to clear the smoke from the aircraft, however it still crashes. The fire was found to have burned extremely hot and this can't be explained from the cargo that was on the plane.
   
   
8. Fatal Distraction (Who's at the Controls?)
   - An explosion is heard and seen in the vicinity of Miami International Airport. Eastern Airlines Flight 401 was scheduled to land at that same moment. Actually, the L-1011 has crashed in the Everglades because the landing gear light did not turn on and the pilots got distracted while their plane was descending silently. 101 people died.
   
   
9. Mixed Signals (The Plane That Wouldn't Talk)
   - Birgenair Flight 301 was a scheduled Puerto Plata-Gander-Berlin-Frankfurt flight. But something goes terribly wrong. At 80 knots (150 km/h) on takeoff, the captain finds that his air speed indicator (ASI) is not working properly, though the co-pilot's ASI is OK. As the plane is climbing to 4,700 feet (1,400 m), the captain's ASI indicates 350 knots, which triggered an autopilot reaction, increasing the pitch-up attitude and reducing power to lower the plane's airspeed. Investigations showing that the plane was actually traveling at 220 knots. Both pilots become confused when the co-pilot's ASI reads 200 knots (decreasing) while getting a rudder ratio and Mach airspeed advisory warnings and a stick-shaker warning. Both pilots believed that both ASIs were malfunctioning. The autopilot, which received the captain's faulty ASI readings, is disconnected by the pilots, and they give full thrust. It isn't enough. At 11:47 PM, the Ground Proximity Warning System gives an aural warning, and eight seconds later the jet crashes into the Caribbean Sea. All 13 crew members and 176 passengers died.
   
   
10. Phantom Strike (Death Over The Amazon) (Radio Silence)
    - A GOL Boeing 737 and an ExcelAire Embraer Legacy business jet collided in mid-air over the Amazon killing 154 people. The passenger jet crashes and the Legacy is badly damaged, but it manages to land. Its the deadliest plane crash in Brazil's aviation before the crash of TAM Flight 3054.