Endless Thread - No No No No Yes

Episode Date: January 12, 2018

In the first episode of Endless Thread, we bring you two stories of two incredible near-misses.

Support for endless thread comes from MathWorks, creator of MATLAB and Simulink Software, to design and develop engineered systems, accelerating the pace of discovery in engineering and science. Learn more at Mathworks.com. Support for WBUR comes from Is Business Broken, a podcast from the Mayrotra Institute at Boston University that explores questions like, why is innovation in healthcare so hard? Is ESG just greenwashing? of course, is business broken? Listen, wherever you get your podcasts. Produced by the I-Lab at WBUR, Boston. Amory Siebertson, I want to talk to you about your truly rated G-wholesomeness for a minute. It is super disappointing, I got to say. I'm so sorry to disappoint. But like, unless I'm totally misjudging you, you're not really exploring the anxiety-inducing corners of the internet. That's fair. I don't go online to be stressed out. Okay. So you are not like me a regular visitor to Reddit's no, no, no, no, yes community, which is not really a scary corner of the

internet, but it does make you kind of go, oh, yikes. I am not, but I know you well enough by now to know that it's one of your favorites. Oh, it's definitely a favorite, and you know what that means. What? It means we are definitely going to watch some short videos right now, some gifts. Most of what goes on at Reddits, no, no, no, no yes, is give some videos of things that look really, really bad until they don't. You ready? I'm ready. Wait, is there audio in these videos? No.

Damn it, Ben. I know. It's a podcast. We're making a podcast. But it's going to be worth it. We'll just describe what we see. You ready? Sure. Here we go. Okay, so that's a guy at a massive pool party jumping off a roof, flipping, and just barely not smashing his head on the edge of the pool and perfectly landing in. inside it. Okay. You ready? I'm going to do another one. I love this one so much. Okay, there's a

boat. This is a classic, no, no, no, no, no, yes. Was that a dog on a surfboard? It's two dogs on surfboards shredding the gnar. Okay. They collide. Somehow both dogs end up triumphantly riding the same surfboard. Crowd cheers. Why do I love these so much? I mean, these are things that you could see happening to yourself. Yeah. But instead, you're watching them happen to someone else. And you have all of the suspense and the anxiety of this really bad thing happening. But then it turns out okay.

Yeah, you know how it ends before you start watching. And in a way, that makes it better. It's about the spoiler. I'm Ben Brock Johnson. You are listening to Endless Thread, a show featuring stories found in the vast ecosystem of online communities called Reddit. I'm here with my producer. Are you, Sir Amory, we are your guides, your friends, lend us your ears because we are finding all kinds of stories. We are going to listen to Redditors tell their stories.

We are going to wade into the comments. It's going to be great and weird and fun. And hopefully, if we pay attention, we might even learn a thing or two. One does not simply walk into our show without saying how it's made. We're coming to you from WBUR, Boston's NPR station, and we're making this show with a little help from our friends at Reddard. Today's episode, Amory, you ready? Ready. No?

No. No? Yes. Okay, so we are about to hear two stories that capture this idea. Stories about things that looked really bad until they maybe didn't. We've got a big one for you about a flight unlike any other. But first, here's a story that could happen to anyone, like this guy, Sid. Excited to be here.

Sid is a Redditor. And he actually has a photo of the moment. His story turned into a kind of no, no, no, no, yes story. He says the image haunts him. But without knowing Sid's story, you would not be haunted by this picture. It's like some trees, some rocks, some terrain. It's pretty mundane overall. But I think about how that was almost the last photo that I ever took.

When this photo is taken, Sid is in the high Sierra of Northern California, Inyo National Forest, Lake Sabrina. He's with like five friends. They all split up. He wanders off to take some photos with the nice camera he brought with him. He's walking across this rock to take a picture of a creek, but the rock's covered in black ice. As my finger goes down on the shutter button,

I slowly start slipping. I grasp at the rock, slide into the water, and then I'm washed down the creek as it joins other tributaries and becomes a larger river going down the mountainside. It's below freezing out, and the water is absolutely ice cold. I feel myself getting washed over these waterfalls and I'm getting scraped against sharp rocks.

I can't really see my surroundings very well because my glasses actually got washed away, maybe a foot, two feet. Everything beyond that is just a hazy fugue. I'm just imagining at any moment I'm going to feel something break or I'm going to get knocked out and that's going to be the last thing that I ever feel.

Eventually, I get a handhold. I just cling on to it for dear life. The thing that I've managed to grasp onto in the middle of this river was actually a large boulder, improbably situated about four feet from the precipice of an enormous, truly unsurvivable, multi-hundred-foot waterfall, action movie style.

The sound of the water is deafening. It's up to his torso. He's pretty sure he's going to die. Turns out, even though he was alone, one of Sid's friends, Will, did see him wash by in the middle of the creek. Will climbs down and finds Sid. He screams at me, and I scream back,

and he's sort of cautiously peering over looking at this waterfall, and he just frankly says, oh yeah, if you go over that, you're definitely dead. Will heads off to find the rest of the group, but there's not much time, because being soaked through in this weather, we're talking hypothermia. Eventually Will finds the rest of the group and they scramble down to the top of the waterfall. Ultimately, they manage to craft a strange sort of rope harness thing.

They throw it out to me. Once I'm satisfied that, all right, this is pretty much as good of a chance as I'm going to get. We have the moment of truth. Sid can't see. He's holding onto a single strap. The water is moving fast and if he slips, he's gone. but they manage after a struggle to pull him onto land. We just all laid there for a moment, like, holy crap.

They get Sid back to the car. They cover him in blankets, and everyone heads back down the mountain. So the yes part of this no, no, no, no yes, other than Sid's surviving, his camera made it too. It was a Nikon D650. That thing was my baby. I actually have it with me in the studio today. Amory.

Ben. That's a pretty good no, no, no, no, no, yes example. But this next one kicks it up a notch. It deals with one of, I think, your favorite subjects? Oh, no. Can we admit on the podcast that you maybe have a slight fear of flying? I think you just did. Perfect.

You must have been so excited to find this bonkers airplane story posted by a Reddit user last year. I bet you had no anxiety about this whatsoever. Yeah, and consider that your trigger warning for this next story. Yeah, heads up. This story involves an accident in the air. It starts at 18,000 feet on British Airways Flight 5390. The day is June 10th. The year is 1990.

The itinerary is supposed to be a flight from Birmingham, which is sort of smack dab in the middle of England, to this coastal city called Malaga, in Spain, near the strait of Gibraltar. There are 81 passengers on board. Pretty soon after the plane takes off, something happens. There would have been a very, very loud bang. Very loud bang. It was an explosive decompression. The incident was described from a bunch of different perspectives

in the following days and weeks and years. But we're going to start with the perspective of Tony Hampson. He's currently a pilot for the British airline EasyJet, but at the time of the incident, he was an engineer for British Airways. And this whole no, no, no, no yes story happened because of another engineer Tony worked with at the time at the Birmingham airport. Let's rewind. Here's my best rewind sound effect. Part of the job of an engineer, maybe the most important part, is looking at a plane before takeoff to prevent accidents from happening.

An engineer does this by identifying defects and performing repairs. So this particular plane in question, it's called a B. DAC 111. And before takeoff, this particular engineer in question notices that the bolts on the windscreen, which is British for windshield, look worn out. They look ready for replacements. He went off to the stores looking in different racks to just visually identify the bolts compared to the old ones. Yeah, you've got to bring your old bolts with you when you're getting the new bolts. I know how that goes. Right. Okay. So, well, here comes another slice of the Swiss cheese. Okay, Amory, I need your help for a second because Tony mentions

this Swiss cheese concept a couple of times? Yeah, so it's actually a real model of accident analysis and management. So think of it as a way for people in certain industries to understand exactly how accidents happen so that you can prevent future accidents. And it works like this. So if you had a bunch of slices of Swiss cheese and you stack them all up or put them all together, it's pretty unlikely that you would have a spot where all of the holes in those slices would line up. Each one of those holes represents a mistake or a human failure of some

sort. And hopefully those mistakes get covered up or protected in some other part of the process by another slice of cheese. The way that we look at it in aviation is that it takes a whole sequence of events to produce an incident and one day the holes will line up and on that day that's when the incident will happen. So the engineer removes the bolts in the plane's windshield, heads to the store where you get the parts, and then get this. This engineer had been prescribed glasses to wear for close-up work. Are you reading or stuff at arm's length? Here we go. Okay.

Yeah, okay. So he was starting to see the picture. Yeah. Yeah. So he wasn't wearing glasses when he examined the bolts, but felt he had a good feel for them. But having the bolts feel right might not be the best safety standard? The problem with the bolts is they were just slightly undersized in diameter, very, very slightly under size. size and diameter, but enough to make a difference.

And then the engineer puts the wrong-sized bolts on the plane's windshield between three and five a.m. Aviation circles, that's known as a WACL, a WOCL, a window of circadian low. So at that time of the morning, people's performance are impaired, whether you're a pilot, an engineer, taxi driver, radio presenter. So that was the first big factor. Wow, that's so interesting that you think about circadian rhythms in this industry and and how it impacts the way that all of these things play out.

Yeah, absolutely. And it's a big factor in the aviation industry, particularly in the pilots world. But not in the engineer's world. And that is why we have an engineer, San's glasses, fitting the wrong bolts into an airplane's windshield inside the Wackle, when humans perform the worst, which, fast forward to mid-flight now is how we get to our loud bang.

That sound is the plane's windshield blowing off. Along with the bang, then there would have been an instant mist inside the cabin. So everyone immediately, presumably knew something was pretty wrong. Yeah, absolutely. The other big clue would have been for the stewards standing in the forward galley just outside the flight deck when the flight deck door blew in. It just went straight across the controls and the throttles inside the cockpit.

So not only have we now lost the windshield and a door, we've lost something else. that is pretty mission critical to this plane not crashing. The flight captain, Tim Lancaster. So at the time the window goes, the captain is blown out to the window, but fortunately for him still has his latch straps in place, his legs are tangled into the lap straps. Yep, if you are now picturing the pilot sticking halfway out of the nose of the airplane while it's flying at 18,000 feet,

and he's being held halfway inside the plane only by his seatbelt, which randomly caught onto his ankles, you pretty much get the picture. Another thing this plane is losing right now, though, altitude. The plane goes into a dive. Reason? Answer from Tony. You know, Mr. Nonchalant. Because as the captain was thrown forwards and out of the window,

his legs were against the control column. If you apply any force to a control column, it will disconnect the autopilot. And that's what happened in this case. It disconnected the autopilot. And I'm guessing the pressure of his legs against the column turned a climb for the aircraft into a dive. How far did it dive?

I believe the report said that it dived initially about 2,000 feet or so. But just to add some numbers to that when the captain went out to the windscreen, the aircraft was doing 300 knots. So that would have been around 330 miles an hour. Thank you for doing that because I'm bad with knots. That's 1.1. That's okay. The speed increased to 320 knots, so we're looking 350 miles an hour while it was in the descent.

Not exactly cruising anymore, but it is. is time for the scheduled beverage service, or at least a message from our sponsor, back in a minute. At Radio Lab, we love nothing more than nerding out about science, neuroscience, chemistry. But, but we do also like to get into other kinds of stories, stories about policing, or politics, country music, hockey, sex, of bugs. Regardless of whether we're looking at science or not science, we bring a rigorous curiosity to get you the answers. hopefully make you see the world anew. Radio Lab, adventures on the edge of what we think we know. Wherever you get your podcasts. There is something powerful about the sound of the human voice. Beautifully produced audio has the unique power to connect and inspire. Tell your organization's story

with a custom podcast from City Space Productions, the creative studio from WBUR's business partnerships team. Become a thought leader. Recruit new talent. Reach new audiences. Whatever your goal, can help. Discover how the magic is made at WBUR.org.org slash creative studio. Okay, so status check here. Flight 5390 has gone from normal to nosedive, and the captain is still hanging out of the window in frigid temperatures. The co-pilot's name is Alistair Atchison, and Alistair and the rest of the crew have jumped into action. Back to engineer Tony Hampson. Once the flight deck door came in and the co-pilot took control of the air, The steward who was standing immediately behind the door, literally dived into the cockpit to grab the captain's legs.

At that point, he didn't know that they were tangled into his lap straps and was holding on to him to stop him going further out the cockpit. That steward was Nigel Ogden. It was like something from a disaster movie, and I still find it hard to believe that I was at the center of it all. Nigel told this story to the Sydney Morning Herald back in 2005. He has since passed away, so our colleague Robin Lepard. Lubbock is the voice you are hearing. You'll hear him reference two of the other stewards on board, Simon Rogers and John Heward. Everything was being sucked out of the aircraft. Even an oxygen bottle that had been bolted down went flying and nearly knocked my head off. I was holding on for grim

death, but I could feel myself being sucked out too. John rushed in behind me and saw me disappearing, so he grabbed my trouser belt to stop me slipping further, then wrap the captain's shoulder strap around me. Luckily, Alistair, the co-pilot, was still wearing his safety harness from takeoff, otherwise he would have gone too. I was still holding Tim, but my arms were getting weaker, and then he slipped. I thought I was going to lose him, but he ended up bent in a U-shape around the windows. His face was banging against the window, with blood coming out of his nose and the side of his head.

His arms were flailing. Most terrifyingly, his eyes were wide open. I'll never forget that sight as long as I live. I couldn't hold on anymore, so Simon strapped himself into the third pilot's seat and hooked Tim's feet over the back of the captain's seat and held on to his ankles. One of the others said, we're going to have to let him go.

I said, I'll never do that. If we'd let go of his body, it might have got jammed in a wing or the engines. By now, Alistair was talking to air traffic control, who were talking him through landing at Southampton Airport. All the manuals and charts had blown away. Over the intercom, he told the passengers we'd lost the windscreen. Some of them could see Tim out of the window, but the cabin was silent as the grave. We walked up and down, preparing the passengers for an emergency landing. People gasped as they saw the blood on my face.

The plane was very shuddery, very rocky. I remember one man at the very back with a little baby on his knee saying to me, we're going to die. And I said, no, we're not lying through my teeth. Nigel's lie turned out to be true. No lives were lost on Flight 5390, thanks in large part to co-pilot Alistair Acheson. I asked the former engineer Tony Hampson, who remember is now a pilot, just how hard it might be to land a plane with a person sticking out of the cockpit.

Well, I must say I've never done it, so I can't comment on that directly. I would imagine it would be fairly distracting. If that isn't a perfect specimen of dry British wit right there, I don't know what is. When it landed at Southampton and then the emergency services arrived at the aircraft almost instantly to recover Tim, who everybody assumed was dead, he started to show signs of life. In fact, he came round pretty quickly. while he was still hanging out to the window. And the first words he uttered to the, I think it was to the ambulance guy was,

where am I? And the ambulance guy said, say, you're at Southampton Airport. And this is absolutely true. Tim's humor through all that. The next thing he said is, where is my wallet? That's factual. Why did he care about his wallet? Does he need to buy himself a beer?

I don't know. But it's a standing joke amongst pilots and the cabin crew for eternity that all the pilots think about is the next meal and how much money they're earning. Wow. This all brings us back to Tony's former colleague, Bolt's Guy. What happened to the engineer after this? The engineer in question.

He did return to work for British Airways, but I understand his position in the company changed, and he went into a planning role, an office-based job. A desk job. Maybe for the best. As for Captain Tim Lancaster, he came away from the ordeal with frostbite, fractures to his arm and wrist, and a broken thumb. Not bad for someone who is hanging out of an airplane for almost 20 minutes going hundreds of

miles an hour at below freezing temperatures. And perhaps even more remarkable, he was back in the cockpit just five months later. Pilot Tim Lancaster is retired now. Amory, we were so close to getting him to talk to us. So close. We reached out to everyone we could find with a connection to Flight 5390. People who claimed to have been on the plane but didn't return our messages. Alistair Atchison, the co-pilot who landed the plane, who said he doesn't want to, quote,

reopen the closed hangar door. And of course, Tim. I'm sorry, we can't take your call at the moment. Who didn't answer? Hello, my name is Ben Johnson, and I'm looking for Tim, Lancaster. But we didn't give up. Hey, this is a message for Tim.

Tim, my name is Amory. producer in Boston, Massachusetts. Tim, I called you yesterday, and we'd really love to speak with you. I've left one message in the past before. I'm working. And then one morning, we woke up to this voicemail. Obviously, I'm thinking about them. I did send you quite a long SMS message, I think you call them, or text message.

We call them about a little proposition I had. Give me an email, please. The proposition was interesting. Not unreasonable, but interesting. Yeah. So Tim in an email told them. basically that he did not want to tell us the whole story, but that maybe if you, quote, cross my palm with silver, which sounds British or maybe Game of Thrones speak for...

Or Lord of the Rings speak? Yeah. For paying him that he would sit down and spend the better part of a day talking to us. But, of course, as public radio journalists... We don't have that kind of scratch. Yeah. More specifically, we don't pay our sources. Right.

So no go on Tim, unfortunately. We did ask Tony Hampson, the former British Airways engineer, what he thought of Tim and Alistair, basically turning us down. Quintessentially English. Is that what it is? I'm sure that's part of it. I don't know if it's the pilot community, whether it's English, a combination of two. But I mean, like, is this story in some ways like a thing that people don't want to talk about?

I knew one of the stewards quite well. and he was certainly very reluctant to talk about it. It clearly had a very, very big impact on him. I saw him very briefly about a year or so after the incident, and we spoke briefly about it, but I could tell he was still affected. Could something like the events of British Airways Flight 539 happen again? Yes and no. Tony tells us that most modern aircrafts have windshields fitted from the inside of the aircraft,

not from the outside, like the BAC 111, which means should a windshield become loose again, it would fall into the plane, not blow away. Also, a bunch of recommendations came out of the accident report from the Civil Aviation Authority. That's the UK's version of the Federal Aviation Authority here in the U.S. Tony Hampson says some of those recommendations have been implemented, some haven't. And Tony tells us that to this day, at least in the UK, an aircraft's windshield is not what they call a vital point for inspection. Vital points are parts of the plane that should definitely be inspected because if something goes wrong with any of them, the plane is in trouble. So even though a pilot almost blew out of one, windshields are not considered a vital point.

Are you mad about that? Aviation is a very unique industry in that everything we learn in aviation is done retrospectively. But quite often things, after an event like this, would change. Do you think they changed enough? We can never guess what's going to happen next. We can never guess what is going to happen next. And that is why no, no, no, no, yes, exists. Because the flight you think is for sure going to crash sometimes doesn't.

And the slip into that high Sierra mountain river you think will end in death over a waterfall, ends in a rescue effort in a boring photo. Granted, there's also a Reddit community called yes, yes, yes, yes, no. So take care. And the next time your flight is delayed and you are losing your mind, take one of Tony's favorite sayings to heart. It's better to be late in this world

and early in the next. Even though this episode was inspired by the community, no, no, no, no. Yes, Amory, you found the amazing story of Flight 5390 in the Today I Learned community, which is also a great source for fascinating historical facts and stories. One of my favorites.

Oh, and Sid, aka Glass Fractals, on Reddit. If you want to see the photo, he took right before almost dying by waterfall, you can find that and more at WBUR.org.org slash endless thread. By the way, next week we are going to go on a deep dive into one Reddeter's pretty amazing life story. I just slept on the train until I needed to go to the first thing that I had to do. And that also starts interfering with work because you don't want to be the dude with a turtle in your pocket who like ruined your coat because he used to shit all over it and like going to work in a rumpled suit

because you have no place to put it. And, like, that was when I actually started to feel homeless. You can check that out next week. Endless Thread is a production of WBUR, Boston's NPR station, in partnership with Reddit. The idea for the show is conceived by Jessica Alpert, who, when we ask if she likes the episode we've put together, she always says...

No, no, no, no. Yes! Iris Adler is our executive producer and human proof that we are... Totally not robots. Mix and sound design by John Parati and Paul Vikas, who liked to make the show sound interesting as far. Lisa Kramer is our web guru who always looks at our web copy,

and even if she hates it, she recognizes... There was an attempt. Michael Pope is our advisor at Reddit, and whenever we have our weekly meeting with him, we can all agree. It was... Oddly satisfying. Find us on Twitter at Endless underscore Thread. If you want to reach out to us about a story

or give feedback on the show, you can find us on Reddit. Our profile name is Endless underscore Thread. We are also online at WBUR.org.org slash endless thread. You can subscribe to the show on your podcast app of choice, and if you like the show, write us a review. It helps other people find us. Today, you learned the show is produced by Amory Severson.

Our awesome theme music is by the band Squelcher. I'm senior producer and host, Ben Brock Johnson. I'll let myself out.