Well There‘s Your Problem - Episode 122: United Airlines Flight 232

Episode Date: January 20, 2023

oh you wanna be specific and make it a runway huh Our Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/wtyppod/ Our Merch: https://www.solidaritysuperstore.com/wtypp Send us stuff! our address: Well There's Your Podcasting Company PO Box 40178 Philadelphia, PA 19106 DO NOT SEND US LETTER BOMBS thanks in advance in the commercial: Local Forecast - Elevator Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

Hello and welcome to Well There's Your Problem. It's a podcast about engineering disasters with slides. I'm Justin Rosnack. I'm the person who's talking right now. My pronouns are he and him or I go. I am Alex Gordor Kelly. I'm the person who's talking now. My pronouns are she and her. Yay, Liam. Yay, Liam. Hi. My pronouns are he and him. My name is Liam Anderson. That was a very enthusiastic introduction. God gives as hard as Tommy Akes to his bravest soldiers. Liam, I'm always sad when you have what I like to call, I'm going to fucking die disease, which has one symptom, which is Tommy Hurt. We hurt. Yes. It happened anywhere at any time, straight. Yes. Yeah, absolutely. And what we're doing here is we are raising

awareness for the victims and survivors of I'm going to fucking die disease. Truly, like the bravest people. Yes. And then then what happens afterwards is you fart a lot, which is annoying. Yeah, I'm gonna. Yeah, yeah. I'm gonna blow out this hole. Anyway, it's gonna. Yeah. And as seen here, we have a picture of the second worst thing that can happen to you after Tommy Hurt, which is yes, a massive catastrophic plane crash. Yeah, being scattered over a cornfield and runway. Yes. Which are in remarkably close proximity. I was gonna say someone's someone's just been doing their like crops right next to a commercial airport runway. You couldn't do that now because of the terrorism, you know. Yeah, you might

you might ferment those that corn into ethanol and then use it as sort of a fuel air bomb. You could be the kind of like tractor chud who like drives your tractor directly into a plane. This was not caused by chuds so far as we know. No, this was not caused by chuds. What we're seeing here is the wreckage of United Airlines flight 232. It's not supposed to look like that. Today, we're going to learn all about the most horrific things that can go wrong with a plane and how four guys managed to not kill everyone. Yeah. Yeah. Laws of physics and a shitload of mechanical failures versus four dudes and four dudes kind of win. Yes. But before we talk about that, we have to do the goddamn news. Some planes that are intact here. Yes, these are some planes

that are intact. So the FAA grounded every flight in the country on Wednesday for 90 minutes because their computer broke. Yeah, this was the notice to airman system, right? The one that tells you what shit's going on where you don't want to be there. You're not allowed to like fly into because the Air Force is testing fucking cool hypersonic drones or whatever there. And it just went offline. So because they couldn't issue you the safety instructions and no flights. No flights today. Go home. Walk. So this was something from like 8am to 9 30am Eastern Standard Time, already an Eastern Daylight Time. I believe we're in Standard Time, right? I always forget which is which. Standard Time. We're on Standard Time, right? And it's fun because we're enmeshing

this with the modern airline industry where every plane turns around in like 45 minutes, especially the low cost carriers. So this 90 minute delay screwed up every plane in the country for like 12, 14 hours afterwards. Yeah, in terms of like consequences to commercial air travel in the short term, like the computer basically did 9 11. Yes. It's cool. I mean, as we've seen, commercial air travel has a shitload of like very vulnerable bottlenecks. This is one of them. Yeah, more will come up in the course of this episode, in fact. And I don't know how you like staying staying in the air. Well, that's it. But here is one of these situations where you need the computer to work and the solution the fix is make the computer not break ever. But as we know,

yes, not always possible. Difficult to do. But for a brief period of time, every airline became Southwest Airlines. Glad editorial race to the bottom to see who can get to Orlando fastest. Yeah, I love this beautiful queue of airplanes, just like idling, just, you know, raising the global temperature a little bit. This is actually this is actually from Gander during 9 11. Same difference. I mean, none of these were idling, they were all parked. Well, this is still sort of a 9 11 bit of the computer. They did 9 11 to truly this is America's 9 11. The commercial aircraft industries 9 11. Yes. In other news. You're gay now. Obama's coming for your gas dogs. You're gay now. He's gonna he's gonna make your kitchen gay. Yeah, the consumer product

safety commission, the federal agency with the most fund twist of presence is now canceled. People are very mad at them. Why people mad at them? Because Richard Trump, a junior who's in charge of the Consumer Product Safety Commission, made some remarks about we're going to see if we can make some safety improvements with regard to indoor air quality with gas stoves, right? And you said, well, up to what including if necessary, banning them in new construction. Oh, yeah. And this is immediately been sort of cast as the new culture war issue. Right. Which is your dad is your dad going to do the thing he did last time and stock up on gas stoves, Ross? No, because he has an electric stove. Oh, the thing about electric stoves is that they're fine. But that's fine. Tell Ross

that. Mine isn't. I have a gas stove. I personally like to like cigarettes off of it to really drive your house. Yeah, this is this is the fun one is that I'm now on the wrong side of the culture war. So I'm going to probably become by the end of this. But by the end of this year, I'm going to be like a turf. I'm going to like QAnon guy pronouns. Yeah, I'm going to have to I'm going to have to my pronouns are Patriot and Jesus. Because we know that like gases natural gas is pretty bad to just be having around. I think the statistics are that like gas stoves cause some percentage of childhood asthma. I read that study earlier today. It's sort of this the statistical analysis, which I'm going to be honest, I think I think the indoor air pollution risks here are kind of overblown, especially if

you got a modern stove that doesn't have a pilot light, you know, it has more complete combustion than something from, you know, 1970. You know, and you can crack a window. I mean, woke scientists are trying to take your grill away. Yeah, I take away your ability to properly char meat. Yeah, exactly. I can understand if you're using something that's like really old, has a pilot light constantly going, probably leaking methane into your kitchen, all that sort of stuff. That's going to be that's going to be pretty bad for you. But like, I can't imagine that if you have like a really modern stove, it's it's going to be that bad, you know, worse case scenario, crack a window. So I think this is what's what you're really

going to have come out of this is not going to be a gas stove ban, but maybe some standards as to like complete combustion and gas stoves, so on and so forth. What's fun is the culture war side of this as you've identified is getting I keep talking about cat to like, which is stupid of me, but yeah, the cat to take on this right now is I'm turning all of my gas stove like burners on. Yeah, I'm leaving the on myself inadvertently. Yeah. Yeah. In order to like trigger you the libs and there's nothing you can do about it. And it's like, I'm I I've been triggered by a lot of things, but I don't think I'm triggered by that. You know, your energy that's just sort of a dumb thing to do. And like your lungs or whatever, like, I'm not even the kind of like liberalism smug

thing of being like, well, at least I got the vaccine. So when your dumb ass ends up in the hospital, then I told you so. I don't even need to do that, because I'm like, it's just your problem. It's in your house. It's just a very stupid thing to do. Stupidity, right? Yeah. Yeah. Go ahead and burn your house down, whatever, right? Please. If you want to gas yourself, then yeah, be my guest. It's doesn't inconvenience me in any way whatsoever. But you know, it's because of pronouns or whatever, right? Probably your fault. My pronouns are natural and gas. Actually, actually, you know, in my spare time, I break into people's houses and I take their gas stoves and like unhook them and replace them with a new electric stove with the induction

stove. Well, that's going to be the other thing is like, yeah. Well, yeah, that's the other thing is like you're you're you're looking at a situation where if they ban gas stoves, every landlord in the country is going to, you know, they're going to install the shittiest electric stove possible rather than like a nice induction stove or something that you're not going to actually match the performance. You know, you are getting the junkyard special that doubles as a washer. You're getting the shitty coil thing. Yeah. You're getting the stove my grandma Agnes had in the house in Boston when I was a kid when I was a kid. Yeah, I mean, it has a dial, but it only has two settings on and off. The dial is just to make it stand out at zeroes, really. Yeah,

I mean, the only problem with the induction stoves is you got to have a separate little pan so that the bottom of it actually heats your your mocha pot that you use for your coffee, or at least I use. If you don't have it, I know. Yeah, because it's cool. It's an it's a design. It's elegant. It's all right. I also have one. It's a really, yeah. I also have a tiny pan I have to use for the mocha pot. It's really annoying. Yeah, it's really annoying. The worst are the worst people in the world. Sometimes you just have to have a tiny coffee. I have two. I have one that's like the mocha pot that has like a cow print on it that you use for milk drinks. That's cute. I like that. It's adorable. You can see that I like the mocha pot.

Some days you just have to start your day off with a tiny coffee. I don't think I've ever seen you drink a coffee. I believe the only size of coffee I've ever seen you drink are jumbo and enormous. No, I sometimes I do tiny coffee now, too. Sometimes I do tiny coffee. Sometimes I do tiny coffee and a big coffee. Yeah, but this is made more difficult by my electric stove. Oh, I took the kettle with me, didn't I? Yeah. Okay. You want an electric kettle? I think I have an extra. Well, that's not how tiny coffee works. You put the water in the mocha pot. Yeah. And then you heat it from below. No, I was just asking in general. No, I because the thing about making coffee not to get James Hoffman. Actually, I'm about to say you see James Hoffman on the thing

because I really like his content. But yeah. So he's the coffee guy, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. You gotta like force like hot water through a bed of sort of like compressed coffee. And then that's what gets you the espresso. Right. It's like, it's a function of like heat pressure. Sure. Yes, it's a bunch. Oh, was that a big breath in? Was that the was that a big Alice breath in? Was that what that was? You got opinions, little lady? No, let's hear it. Let's hear it. Let's hear it. Let's hear it. Let's hear it. Let's hear it. Let's hear it. Let's hear it. I respect a poro. All right, I do. I just I don't think it's as nice of a sort of an affectation as my finicky little aluminium, Italian coffee bullshit that I got to disassemble

and like wipe clean and dry after every use. I think this might be the angriest I've ever been on the show. I I'm going to be honest, most days I just use the seven dollar Mr. Coffee drip machine, you know, and that that thing, that thing is why I say I use it. So I fucking my roommate, my roommate, my roommate bought that in like 2012, and I still have it. Yeah, that's my favorite thing is all the shit we stole from them. Yes. Although they, hey, man, they took my crock pot. So you got no, this was seeing the light. This was before that. I know it was. Yeah. So anyway, official position is yeah. Yeah. So that's the story of Obama making your kitchen gay. And that was a goddamn news, a goddamn coffee.

I like this coffee tool. Yes, interstitial coffee time. But we got to talk about the extremely low resolution logo here of the McDonnell Douglas Corporation. Is it a shark? Is it a p2 bomber? Is it a that's a that's a weird sort of like future plane and a space? Oh, the America bomber. Yes. First, you have to ask what is McDonnell Douglas? And the answer is it's a cheat code in Simcopter that gives you all the helicopters. Is it really? Yes, you type in I'm the CEO of McDonnell Douglas. Yeah, you do. And it gives you all the helicopters. Interesting. Yeah. So McDonnell Douglas was used to used to be like a aerospace corporation. It's now emerged with Boeing in like the 90s,

I want to say. But it used to be a large air and aerospace corporation and defense contractor. And it exists because of you may have heard of the Martin Aircraft Corporation made a lot of like fighters and stuff in the Second World War. Glenn Martin, who was in charge of that, had these two protégés McDonnell and Douglas, they each went off to found their own corporations. And essentially, both of their companies, the McDonnell Aircraft Corporation and the Douglas Aircraft Company had grown hugely during World War Two, like their their workforce had expanded, 10, 20, 50 fold, because they had all these military contracts, like Douglas made like transport aircraft and like, what's the name of the fucking sea planes, shit like that.

And so when World War Two ended, the US didn't need all this shit anymore. And they still had all of these employees. And the business thinking at the time was that you couldn't shrink a company, you couldn't downsize, it just didn't happen. You just had to keep all of these people on the payroll forever. And so they had to try and maintain that that wartime size in peacetime. And McDonald's, maybe the more interesting one, they're really heavily into like military stuff, they did a lot of guided missiles. They did the F4 Phantom, beautiful plane that will come up in the next episode. They also did a lot of space stuff, they did a lot of the early Mercury program, which leads me to their slogan, which is the most copium thing I've ever heard,

their slogan was the first free man in space. My grandfather worked on the Mercury program. Just like, okay, Gagarin might have beaten us to it, but have you considered? He's a commie. So yeah, exactly. He couldn't, he didn't have the freedom to vote for George Wallace, right? And so that he could not engage in free enterprise in space. Absolutely. His ship probably wasn't even made by the lowest bidder. Ridiculous. And so McDonald has all of these military and space contracts, but they're very fickle, they're kind of unpredictable. Like the US military kind of like gets into wars, it gets out of wars, it needs stuff, it doesn't need stuff, it changes its mind.

And they didn't know that Vietnam was coming over the horizon and was going to like guarantee them a shitload of income. So they're like very unstable in that sense. Douglas, the Douglas aircraft company, because they made cargo planes and like transport planes, it was a logical leap for them to get into airliners. And so they make those, they're trying to compete with Boeing, but not very successfully. And they have this new expensive design kind of in mind, we'll meet that shortly, couldn't pay for it, couldn't pay for anything really. They're like less than a year from bankruptcy. They produce airliners like jet airliners, the DC8 and the DC9, but they're way behind schedule because they don't have any money. And so McDonald comes to them

to be like, okay, well, we also have no money. Yeah, well, sort of it's McDonald has money, but like no sustainability, no consistency. Douglas has consistency, but no money. And so they merge in 1967 to create the McDonald Douglas Corporation. And this is a remarkably successful merger. Like it really is the best of both worlds. And it sort of sets the blueprint for a lot of American manufacturing in that you kind of, you wed the civilian and the military in a way that like for instance, Boeing is very successfully able to do it like Lockheed Martin successfully able to do. We have the two sides of the business and when you don't have money to like do the military stuff, the civilian side funds that and vice versa. And so within a couple of years of their

merger in in 67, all of this has turned around and they are ready to push their big new expensive dream project. Next slide, please. Beautiful tri-jet. Yeah, you love a tri-jet. You love a tri-jet. I have a soft spot for them too. They're so inelegant. But this is this is their thing. Do you guys hear that? Hear what? Can you hear what I believe to be Uptown Funk? I cannot hear Uptown Funk. I hear a little bit of Uptown Funk. A little bit? How bad is it? Do I need to shut my door is my question. I think you're fine. Yeah, you should be fine. If you're if you're like in doubt, then I guess just get off and do that. Yeah, I'll be right back. Okay. Get like a little like podcasting

studio, you know, build some sound barriers around you. He does have a he does have a podcasting studio needs to soundproof the podcasting studio. Just just like what you want to do is you want to do as I do and just fill that room entirely with like various of crap. Yes, it's like stuff you accumulate. And then that has a great sound deadening sort of prophecy. It's going to become sort of like a like a minor hoarder. Oh, well, that's already me. Yeah. No, I mean, my podcast, my podcast room is also is also a room where I store everything that doesn't fit in the rest of the apartment. Starting to think that something about podcasts is we may be not the most sort of like, mentally healthy or good at adulting people.

No. That's why that's why none of us have normal jobs, except Liam. The most the most normal member of well, as your problem incorporated. This is true. Yes. Shut up. It's weird. This plane looks kind of like out of proportion to me as I'm looking at it. It looks like too small. It looks a little bit shorter than it should be, you know, I guess that's because it is the oldie plane or it could be a horrible accident that this plane underwent and they had to cut out the middle. They've done a cut and shot on this. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. They do it really obviously on the livery. So it just says, like,

because they cut out like three rows of seats in a door. Yeah, that's where that's where it accordion din after colliding with a terminal. Remember, when you get on a commercial airline, you want to check the VIN number on the chassis at both ends to make sure that it matches. Yeah, contact a friendly member of the ground crew. Ask if you can walk around the plane before you get on. They'll probably let you do it. Like, I mean, I know they like do vetting and stuff, but in I have never met an aircraft like an airport ground crew staff member who

ever gave a single fuck about anything. And you know what, it works most of the time. So that's a good arrangement. So a video of Quanta's baggage hand was a while back, like literally not just throwing bags in like, that's the most efficient way to move the bags, one of them picking up a suitcase, overhand slamming that shit down like a wrestler. Oh, I saw that one. Yeah. It's like, no, the only reason to do that is spite. And I love that. If you don't want your plane's got to get loaded. My God. I like the people being like something no one ever seems to consider. It's like,

yo, oh, we can't have bags even more than 50 pounds, but we don't weigh the pads. It's just like, yeah, once for OSHA, dumbass. Yeah, M-Track also has a 50 pound roll. And I was confused about that to start out with, because I was like, trains are pretty heavy, baggage is not that heavy. Then I realized, oh, wait, this is for the people who have to handle the luggage so they don't get a hernia. Workplace protections. Yes. Yeah. The only way to solve this is to palletize everybody's luggage. I forgot Cornelius van der Roys. It's nice to meet you. All right, so this is Lockheed. Fuck, not Lockheed, Martin. This is McDonnell Douglas's

big new. Lockheed had the other one. Yeah, tried with the curvy engine. I'm sure Ross has mentioned it already. For some reason, I wasn't able to unmute myself for a bit, but this American paint scheme, a personal favorite of mine. That was a superior one for a long time until they went with gray instead. Dude, I was flying. Was I flying the other day? Yeah, because I flew to and from Jacksonville. I will say, I have sort of gotten over flying as absolutely miserable experience, but it sucks, dude. It's just like, you know what I mean? It's very bad. Fine. I'll just get on the plane, but I'm not going to be fucking happy about it. Yes. I tend to find the sort of like quotidian anxieties and annoyances of air travel don't

really dent me so much because I'm too terrified that I'm going to die. I'm too busy with my cave woman brain being like, why is the room moving? Why is the room moving fast? Why is it tilting upside down? We're going to slide backwards and fall out of the fucking sky. I'm going to accidentally push the button on the seat that makes the engine fall off. Why is no one else screaming? All of these things. I guess that's why I'm not mad at screaming children and stuff because I get it. You know, they're smart. You're smart. You'd be screaming too. What is this thing? Did I write this one? You wrote this one, yeah. I wrote this one. It's fine. I can commandeer it and fly it, I guess. This is...

Oh, yes. Oh, welcome aboard. Welcome to the flight there. Captain Kelly. Fly me to Cuba. No, it's not a Muslim thing. Why would you ask me that? So this is McDonnell Douglas' big new flagship project. It was originally Douglas' big new flagship project, but they didn't have the money to do it until they emerged with McDonnell. This is the DC10. Yes. And as you may notice, it has one to three engines, one placed sort of in an ungainly fashion on the tail. I would not call that ungainly. I would call that

arousic, perhaps even erotic. I would say something that are ungainly can be arousic. Oh, yeah. That's only fans coming soon. So back at 53, the FAA implemented this thing called the 60-minute rule, right? That flight paths of airliners must be constructed in such a way that at all times, the airliners are no more than 60 minutes from an airport in case of an engine failure or some similar emergency. But we had four engines. But this is why they introduced the most recent generation of extended operations, ETOPS or XOPS or whatever. You can fly across the Atlantic in a two-engine plane now,

which you never used to be able to do because they required that you have four engines, so that if two of them fail, you still have two engines. Yes. Now I only need one. Good luck to you. Yeah. It's the same difference here. If you're flying across the US, there's no reason for you to be like, you have to be 60 minutes from an airport if you've got four engines because it's more engines than you know what to do with them. One of them keeps the plane up long enough to be safely diverted somewhere, so you can just kind of fuck around with it, do whatever.

Yes. In 1964, a restriction was lifted for aircraft with more than two engines because they had another engine. It was sort of the regulation changed, so now you could have theoretically three engines and be able to do these transatlantic flights, which means all of a sudden there's this big market for these things called tri-jets. Ross, what's that ridiculous plane you like with like 14 engines? It doesn't narrow it down. There's a million engines. Yeah, that's about this. In 604 Burnin.

That's a B-36. Yeah, I was thinking B-26. I think that all flights should be required to be done in modified B-36s. That would be pretty funny. No easy as fucking shit. 230 foot wingspan, baby. Yeah, she's not a light girl, but she's got it where it counts. So for a large plane, you can save money because four engines consumes more fuel than three engines. It's heavier. More and we already requires more maintenance, all of this shit, so you want to try and downsize even your longer flights to tri-jets if you can to save money.

Yeah, so a lot of your early tri-jets are shorter range ones. They had the Hawker-Sidley Trident Boeing 727, but a large tri-jet was clearly a pretty economical option over something like a four-engine Boeing 707. Lockheed tried to enter the market first with the L-1011. That's the one with the curvy engine, but McDonnell Douglas jumped ahead of them with the DC-10, which was cheaper, but technically inferior, right? Yeah, they stole a march on them. They sold a shitload of them to American and United pretty much before Lockheed could even go and market this to anyone. Don Draper goes to see American and already they've bought 30 of these DC-10s or whatever.

Yes. So you got three engines here. There's one under each wing. There's a third one in the tail. Airlines had their choice of engines. You could get them from Pratt and Whitney, or you could get them from GE, as opposed to the L-1011, which only use Rolls-Royce engines. It's weird. Rolls-Royce. Airlines have these weird preferences about engines, which is something that we'll get into in a minute, even when they're technically almost interchangeable. They have preferential contracts. Is that contribute to it? Yeah. I mean, some of it's that's a national stuff. American carriers will want to buy GE, like British Airways has always gone Rolls-Royce, stuff like that.

Which is the actual reason. Yeah. I imagine horse trading on the side as well. I imagine parts commonality helps as well. Yeah. So they end up with these individual preferences, which is nice for aircraft manufacturers to be able to accommodate. The big problem is this market for these wide-body trijets turned out to be smaller than expected. Neither the DC-10 nor the L-1011 made too much money for their respective designers. In fact, to the point where Lockheed completely exited the airliner business entirely. Is there a reason we know why they didn't make money,

or is it like a combination of things? It's small market and too many people competing. Yeah, that makes sense. Also, it's not as much of a margin as you'd expect. I set out the case for it on like four engines consumes more fuel. It's not that much. Not enough to really make a difference. I would imagine the consumer airline market because the airlines aren't going to say, yes, I'm okay with being ripped off to a point where the Department of Defense says, please, daddy, harder.

Yeah, for sure. I mean, that's something we'll get into on the bonus episode. But yeah, it's important tomorrow after I put in 49 hours at work. That's right. It should be great. But yeah, it's sort of like a long trend towards consolidation of bigger planes that culminates in the end of the 747. That's a lot of your domestic airlines at this point. They don't really have what you would call it. They don't have the transatlantic routes. American and United, they're stuck with domestic flights. Pan Am has bought up all these big 747s. But the DC-10 proves to be more popular than the L-1011,

but quickly develops this really bad reputation for safety with stuff like the cargo door blows out and flies. An engine falls off. What are these problems, Ross? You're not describing. You're giving me solutions, buddy. You're giving me solutions. It's sort of one of those things where the failures you have might not kill anybody and certainly might not lead to a whole lot. They do kill people. That's it. But even when they don't, there's something about the phrase parts exiting or parts departing the aircraft during flight that catches your attention. It's generally not a good thing.

Now we talk about the GE CF-6 engine. Incredible guy here. Yeah, there's the guy. This is what engineering used to look like. Yeah, you used to get a coat with a name tag on it. Ross, you should get a coat with a name tag. We should all get coats with name tags on it. Oh, that'd be great.

That's all good shop coats. Corinne's learning crochet and is trying to make Ross and I custom crochet high biz. Delightful. All right. So this is what you call a high bypass turbofan. So your early jet aircraft were powered by turbojets, but that has a problem, right? Which is the turbojet has a very high exhaust velocity. So even when you're, when you're going, that's fine if you're going fast. If you're going slow military aircraft.

Right. Yes. And if you're, if you're going slow, maneuverability is a big deal. Yeah. If you're going slow, it's very fuel inefficient. Because you just send in all this air at the back, which, you know, is accelerating you from zero miles an hour to seven miles an hour and all that stuff's going out to back at 500 miles an hour. Right. You know, it's not ideal.

Do the words vent to atmosphere mean anything to you? So when you're traveling at slower speeds, you need something that can have a slower exhaustive velocity, which results in the turbofan, right? So here with this sort of giant fan on the front, there's a big, big fan in the front. Yes. So there's turbofan. You have a turbojet in the back, which is optimized not for thrust, but for spinning a shaft.

And it's relatively small. And that shaft drives the big fan. So the majority of the air that goes in the engine does not go into the jet. It goes through the fan and goes around the jet, thereby leading through a lower exhaust velocity, more efficiency, more thrust for less fuel, right? But one effect of this is that the engines need a large diameter, which means you have a large fan that operates at a very high speed, which means every fan blade is subject to very high stresses, right?

I mean, is this thing running on like a belt of some kind? No, it's just a machine shaft. Shaft. Oh, sorry. Yeah, I didn't know if it had both or one or the other. It's like a... I can do car engine. I can't do a...

I can't do a craft engine. Actually, this guy is like five to six feet tall. This is like a seven or eight foot diameter sort of fan. Uses a sort of like a piston and arm system, like a steam locomotive, you know? Oh, that was a joke. God damn it. I don't know engines. Sorry, folks.

I only know car engines. That's the thing about jet engines. It's kind of remarkable how few parts all of them have. There's a lot of intricate stuff going on there, but mostly in stuff that's in a handful of mechanically simple assemblies. It's weird as hell. Drinking, Roz. That was shape of hops to come.

Oh, nice. I've got a Costco brand sparkling water. See, I've reduced my alcohol consumption to two beers a day. That does not mean they have to be light beers, though. Oh, listen, I'm proud of you. I just had a mango lussey, so, you know. Oh, good choice. Yeah, yeah, because I had a car.

So, the ends of the fan blades on these high-bypass turbo fans, you know, they easily exceed the speed of sound, right? The centrifugal force here is like 60 tons per blade, so. Fighting the comments about whether that's real. We don't care. Exactly. So, you need a very heavy-duty piece of metal in the middle, the fan disc, to keep everything in place, right?

And a complicating factor here is, of course, all these fan blades are consumables, so you have to be able to replace them, right? You can't just weld them on there. What's that attitude? Because of all this, and because weight is important, you build all this stuff out of titanium, right? Which is this sort of notoriously difficult to work with

in very temperamental material, right? Yeah, I put in a whole sleight about that, yeah. So, this CF-66 is derived from an earlier turbo fan on the C5 Galaxy military cargo aircraft. That was the really, really big one. Give it to the Air Force first, see if it kills people there. If it doesn't, then it's good for civilians. I found out yesterday, Lockheed tried to make a civilian version of it.

The L500. Yeah, but the marketing line was... American like Maria, that's an American AN-225. Oh, yeah, the marketing for it was like, oh, yeah, you can book a ticket to Europe and bring your car and your luggage. It was what could have been. 1,000 people, right?

Yeah. Jesus. Three decks. Give me a sort of towering Inferno-style movie set on one of those, you know? One of the launch customers would have been executive jet airlines of Penn Central fame. Oh, beautiful. Anyway, yeah, so this was derived from a turbo fan on the C5 Galaxy.

Radically increased the range, fuel efficiency of airliners, and made possible many routes which were otherwise uneconomical. And it was the engine of choice for United Airlines. First, we must ask ourselves, what is United Airlines? All right, so imagine a dumpster. Now imagine that dumpster on fire. Now imagine Roz, 14 beers in, on a flight somewhere, clutching at his seat nervously and saying,

I should have taken the train. And we're about there. I listen. You don't fly United, do you? No, I do fly United. Well, you do. That's right. Yes.

Because, yeah, oh, buddy. Buddy. I wish I could have flown American because I'm a moron. Fun fact about this episode is I was writing it, but I got distracted while I was writing it and wrote Episode 99, the airmail scandal. Yeah, I remember that. You were like, hey, this is going completely like grabbed you.

Yes. That was a lot funnier. So initially there was this kind of like primitive accumulation that happened with airlines, right? Where aircraft and like aircraft parts manufacturer is namely Boeing and Pratt and Whitney. Boeing made airframes, Pratt and Whitney made engines. We're buying up these like fledgling air transport companies.

It was mostly freight. It was mostly like we will fly you a mail or whatever with some passenger stuff, but like flying passengers was miserable because it was like an open cockpit and shit like that. And as we know, having that sort of like integrated production chain, manufacturing your own planes, that's very lucrative. It's very efficient, which is it sucks if you want to preserve

some semblance of a free market, right? Like it's a monopoly. It's purely a monopoly in that sense. Actually, it's a monopsy, I believe. And so Boeing and Pratt and Whitney and all of these like fledgling air companies sort of like formed into this conglomerate UATC, the United Aircraft and Transport Corporation. And this is until the airmail scandal happened,

watch the episode, not going to explain it twice. And Congress passes the airmail act of 1934, which sort of breaks up by fear that like the idea is you cannot have an aircraft manufacturer and an airline in the same company. You have to split them off as like an antitrust measure, which is what they do. And so UATC, like the plane bit becomes Boeing, more or less,

and the airline bit becomes United Airlines, which grows steadily into this national carrier. I have one detail that was too good not to include, and this is verbatim from the Wikipedia. From 1953 to 1970, United operated six day a week, afternoon nonstop, extra fare. Men only flights between New York and Chicago, the Chicago Executive, and Los Angeles and San Francisco,

on which women and children were banned. Advertisers a club in the sky. They featured cocktails, steak, dinner, and cigar and pipe smoking permitted. Incredible. There's not a lot that I miss about masculinity, but being able to light up a cigar in the Chicago Executive. Yep.

I return. You don't need it. If you don't, I know we were talking about air quality like 10 minutes ago, but you don't need it. Shut up. All I can think of is the poor stewardess is on that flight. He says, doesn't that thing give out? That's not going to be good.

No, that's bad. That's why we give every stewardess a spear gun on newly passengers. Incidentally, one of United's claim to fame is that they claim to have invented the idea of a stewardess. OK, that's just a servant, really, in the air. That's the hard ground breaking. Yeah, but they claim to have hired the first one.

But so in 1968, United buys at launch 30 DC-10s with an option on another 30 if they like them, which they do, and they take that option. They buy 60 and all. But when they do that, it's still intended to be a domestic airplane because United's a domestic carrier. United doesn't have an overseas flight until 1983.

The reason why for this, by the way, is that for a long time routes internationally were assigned by the federal government. Ultimately, a bunch of airlines would sue the Eisenhower administration in something called the Trans-Pacific Route Case for the right to fly to Japan, fly to Australia. And what the federal government ended up doing was going,

OK, well, we're not going to allow you to just operate those freely. We'll still award them, but we'll award them to some other people. Yeah, like Pan Am wins big on that, TWA wins big on that. Both United and America can get absolutely rat-fucked on it. United really wants to fly to Japan,

and they're left with just Hawaii, which isn't that profitable. I love what that federal government is, petty. Oh, yeah, 100%. And so that means you can go to such glamorous destinations as Bakersfield or whatever on United. Dubuque. Yes, yeah.

Dubuque's nice. It's hopefully Goliath's there, man. So you can fly to Des Moines. So you can listen to Dubuque have an inclined plane, or is that Des Moines, I forget. Ah, I believe that's Des Moines. I'm not even joking because United's, one of their other big marketing things

was like they would fly to all 50 states. And we will take your dumb ass anywhere. Yes, yeah, absolutely. And so United is stuck in the US, locked in, and one of their pushes to try and economize and grow more is to deregulate the airline industry, because the airline industry is still run by a sort of like FDR New Deal kind of thing,

where the civil... FDR from beyond the grave. Pretty much, yeah. Like this sort of zombie regulator. We have to fear is declining leg room itself. Yes. That's the Civil Aviation Board, the CAB, that administers airlines.

And if you want to fly a new route, if you want to fly to, I don't know, Denver from New York, you have to go to the commercial airline board, where they will, and this is a true example, lose the file for seven years, and then turn you down because the file is now out of date. This is one of those things where, you know, someone posts like a picture on Twitter about like,

how nice and luxurious flying used to be, and then some global emoji guy replies in the comments, well, aren't you happy now that flying is so cheap that it's accessible to the masses? You wouldn't have been able to afford that flight. And I'm kind of like, I don't use planes anyway. Because they're too miserable. The Civil Aviation Board really had a premium

on that kind of return shift. So there was somebody at the time, he was concerned about people wearing suits to go on the airplane and having a lot of leg room and having a steak dinner. And Airlines fucking hated it because it was too expensive and it stopped them from doing what they wanted to do, which is pack people in cheap and then fly them like cattle. To the Buick, right.

I will say, listeners at all, for a little bit of context, Roz and I and two of our friends are going to New Orleans. The three of us are flying. I'm going to do it anyway, Alice. And Roz is not flying. So he gets there like nine hours after the rest of us do. And I look forward to the Crescent. More likely nine hours before I might just take an extra day.

Well, Dylan, get your own hotel. Don't drink a hand grenade. Oh, Roz, bad news. You and I are rooming on that trip. Sorry. Yeah, that's fine. I'll buy you your plugs. Get the travel recording things and record,

even if you do have a hand grenade. Oh, we can. Yo, live from New Orleans. Yes, yes. I regressed it already, but that's a good idea. So United's ends up winning. Like this is an early, well, not early, but this is a huge victory of lobbying.

They get the Airline Deregulation Act passed in 1978, which basically says, fuck it, do whatever you want, abolishes the CAB. It keeps the FAA and like safety rules and stuff, which is nice, but basically everything else is fucked. And you can just do whatever you want, which leads to them flying everywhere, packing people in sheep.

Number of airline passengers goes up. Labor conditions get worse. A bunch of small airlines go bankrupt and get eaten. And some of the big ones too, which is what happens to Pan Am. Pan Am each shit in 1985 gets bought out by United. And that's when they start flying internationally as like sort of as a zombie Pan Am. And somehow the trademark is passed to the Guilford Rail

system of New England, which becomes Pan Am railroad. They ate it last year, right? They ate it last year. They got completely bought out by CSX. The Chessie system cat, you know, conqueror, all of which takes us to 1989, which is. Which I think is personally Taylor Swift's best album. Now.

See, I like this livery better than the two space one. It doesn't have the bare metal, but I really like the colors. I like that this kind of looks like the Armenian flag. Yeah, this is definitely an airline. This is a good this is a good library. The United font in the weird, the weird United font, as opposed to the later font where it's in serif text. Oh, this is very remembered of the future to me.

Yeah. In a way that I quite like. Yeah. The world you are right for no longer exists. Things. I think every plane should have the big Pacific Southwest smile. Like my old seven Mazda. Yeah.

We're so happy to see you. So we're we're setting up for United Airlines Flight 232. This particular DC 10 United Abort in 1971. So they'd had it for what 18 years. Yeah. 16,997 flights, which is not unusual then or now. Well within sort of expected lifespan. Yes.

Not even really an old plane. Like 20 years old is not that weird at all. Yeah, planes last a long time, especially now. You know, there's still 727s running around mostly in like Iran, I think. But yeah, I mean, you can get really weird of that. If you like go to like non US manufacturers, like you got a fucking illusion that was made by communists. Yes.

And you can see daylight through the floor or whatever, but it's still flying. Yes. And this guy, he's gone from Denver Stapleton Airport, which is the old airport, the one that didn't have conspiracy theories. Yeah, they hadn't. It's not Lucifer yet. Exactly.

It's now a big new urbanist housing development. Incidentally, that Stapleton, who I believe was mayor of Denver, also a prominent Klansman, because just about everybody in his generation in American politics was. That sounds about right to me. Yeah. Stapleton to Philadelphia International Airport, which is not named after a Klansman by way of Chicago O'Hare, which I don't know.

Maybe. I don't know. I haven't checked. I don't know either. Yeah. Took off 209 p.m. Central Daylight Time, right? Oh, it's good. You said a date.

That's how we know it's good. Did we put down the day of this flight? Probably not. Oh, I think we did not. Did we do a research live on there? Like it's 10,000 losses. You know, every once in a while. Every once in a while.

July 19th, 1989. July 19th, 1989. Okay. Cruising altitude is 37,000 feet. It's probably about, you know, this is not a huge long flight. You're probably on the air for like four hours total, right? State time. The weather is good.

This is supposed to be an aggressively unremarkable flight. Right? Yeah. When they try to like make you feel better about your fear of flying and you're like, they do millions of flights a day. These are the bulk of the millions of flights a day they're talking about. Like this. Yes, exactly.

It's flying from like a medium-sized American city to a medium-sized American city expecting nothing. Sort of like the briefing for this one is as usual. Um, I would say, I would say Denver is the only medium-sized city on the site Tinerary. Chicago and Philly are pretty big. All right. Fine.

Whatever. Yeah, yes. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Shut up. Palace. So our flight crew, we have pilot Alfred C. Haynes.

Al Haynes. We have thousands of hours of flight time, by the way. We have co-pilot William R. Records. And we have flight also about 20,000 hours of flight time. So we have flight engineer, a position which has since been eliminated. Dudley J. Dvorak. Venture of the keyboard. Keyboard.

A better of the keyboard. Yeah, sure. Why not? 15,000 hours. Oh, it's more efficient. Let me tell you about my ortho linear. Shut the fuck up. Flight flight.

Flight engine is cool. I love your keyboard nerds, but goddamn. Sit in the third seat that's like sideways relative to the orientation. Yeah, it's a 95 Ford Ranger jump seat. Yeah. My job is to stare at gauges. Yeah, watch the gauges. See what they're doing.

You have now been replaced by like a series of synthetic voiced alarms, which have been remixed into a song with Hatsune Miku. Yes. Pull up to bring. Pull up to bring. Too low flaps. Oh, Ross, you didn't want to? Okay.

The missile knows where it is. And this is like a. This is on you, Alice. Flight crew. Very, very normal. Oh shit. Okay. Yeah.

This is the slide that I put on about metallurgy. I look forward to people telling me in the comments about everything I get wrong. This is based off of sketchy research because I didn't bother to use my university login for like metallurgy papers. So first, we must ask. Hey, Alice, real quick.

Do you have a JSTOR login? I might do. I haven't checked. Get back to me about this. Yeah, thank you. I don't have much like occasion to use it at the moment. Also, if anyone wants to DM me on Twitter with their JSTOR login, I'm here.

So first, we must ask, what is metal fatigue? So I think you get a JSTOR login if you got a Philadelphia library card. You're joking, really? Yeah, I love liberalism. That's pretty good. So I'm going to do a Sci Hub tail running off my on-rains server.

Don't quote me on that. It may not be true. I know some places give you a JSTOR login with the library card. Well, if you have a JSTOR login, please DM the podcast account because my DMs are closed because you freak won't stop sending me Thursday. Just send the entire contents of Sci Hub

to the post office box. Yes, thank you. So the fan disk of the engine, as we mentioned, is made out of titanium because titanium is very strong. However, titanium rarely occurs in the shape of jet engine fan disks in nature. Interesting. You have to forge it into that shape,

which means you have to melt it. And when you melt titanium, it reacts with air in a way that can contaminate stuff from the atmosphere, which you don't want to do. So to avoid that, you melt it in a vacuum. Actually, you melt it in two vacuums at this point. But this is not a foolproof process. Sometimes stuff just gets into the vacuum anyway.

For instance, a rogue bit of, and I pick a chemical at random, nitrogen gets out of the atmosphere. Are we talking like a white room type of deal? I mean, yeah, potentially. I mean, it's like a vacuum forge, which is weird as hell looking machine. But so your rogue particle of nitrogen or whatever gets in the titanium. And now you have a problem.

Because metallurgically, the titanium around it is not titanium. It's a titanium alloy. And there's different ways of categorizing titanium alloys. They're like alpha, beta, alpha and beta. Alpha is the one with like a hexagonal close packed structure. Beta is the one with like a body centered cubic packing. This one, when nitrogen gets into it, that's an alpha alloy. And it's a very hard, very brittle alpha.

And so when this happens, this is called a hard alpha defect. My chemistry is coming back to me and I don't like it. I haven't heard the word body centered cubic packing in a long time. And I didn't want to hear it ever again. So this area within the billet of titanium is now very brittle, right? So brittle that when you machine the titanium, typically what happens is that this alpha alloy just shatters. And it falls out and leaves a hole in the titanium.

It might be just like inside a bit. And it's impossible to notice visually. Like there are different ways to try and reduce this happening. There's different like, you can use fucking like plasma hearths and shit like that, which sounds like some fucking skyrim. To try and like melt titanium. And this is like an alive area of material science. And you can make a lot of money if you can figure out how to do this.

But it's sort of an inevitability that you machine, you forge like X number of billets of titanium. You will get some like hard alpha defects. You'll get some other defects. And so you have this billet which has a hole in it. And you can't see that visually. The way you check for that is you literally, you just do an ultrasound of the titanium.

And so Alcoa makes Alcoa, the Aluminum Corporation of America, forges this titanium billet, which is a little bit like outside of their wheelhouse, I guess. And they send it to GE or the division of GE that makes aircraft engines. And GE ultrasounds it just to make sure. Alcoa was like a first mover on a lot of weird metals, just because aluminum was kind of a weird metal for a long time. It makes sense.

So GE like ultrasound this, and it fails the ultrasound check. It like the ultrasound detects this cavity in it, which means GE has to send this back to Alcoa to be scrapped, to be melted down, re-reforged, whatever. It's wrong, do it again. Yeah, the ultrasound comes back, says it's a boy, and GE is like, okay, this goes back. But GE loses the fucking billet.

They just lose track of it. It just disappears into the wrong thing. Someone like fumbles it into the wrong pile, whatever. We don't know. Hey, when I fumbled the titanium back. Yeah, exactly. And it just, it keeps it. And GE makes it.

30 yard pass, you know. But GE, this has been tossed across a warehouse floor or whatever. And is now sort of known good. It's been tested and is falsely believed to be fine. And is machined into a fan disk, a fan disk that now has a minute hole in it. And as we said, this fan disk is like going very, very fast. It's being subjected to a lot of stress.

And it has a weak point in it, a weak point, which is now going to crack at the edges. And as the cycle of stress goes, you know, like up and down and take off landing, all this, that's repeated thousands and thousands of times, over which those cracks get wider and deeper. But this is also a known problem. Like GE accepts that it's going to miss some anyway.

So part of the scheduled maintenance of this is a guy, like a maintenance technician, has to like spray fluorescent dye onto the fan disk. And that's going to like penetrate into cracks. And later they will find that dye present in this fan disk, which means that it got into that crack. Someone was looking for it and just no one noticed or cared enough to write it up because replacing a fan disk,

hang on the ass, expensive. And also it's quite difficult to see. So this crack is busy cracking away worse and worse every time with no one any the wiser. There is no other way to detect this until, and I get to do it this time, 316 p.m. on July the 19th, 1989, when... Wham, Whammo, the boom, yes.

Various sort of like Batman animated series noises. This is the actual fan disk. This is the actual one, as they later pulled it out of a cornfield and reconstructed it. And as you may notice, it's not supposed to look like that. It's got a big crack in the middle of it. You could tell it's a good image

because of all the photocopier burn. Yeah, this is from the NTSB report, which is remarkably detailed even by their standards. It has a lot of very heavily photocopied illustrations, a number of which are in here. But yeah, so this just explodes. And what happens to the aircraft, I've kind of characterized with a painting.

This is the DC-10 devouring his own son. So you divide engine failures into like contained and uncontained engine failures. The contained engine failure is when stuff breaks and it stays within the sort of like the tube, the casing. All this stuff is an uncontrolled and uncontained engine failure. Yes, not ideal.

Yeah, the way that you would characterize this is that the engine explodes. This is the tail mounted engine, by the way. This is engine number two, which is the tail mounted one, yes. Hi, it's Justin. So this is a commercial for the podcast that you're already listening to.

People are annoyed by these, so let me get to the point. We have this thing called Patreon, right? The deal is you give us two bucks a month and we give you an extra episode once a month. Sometimes it's a little inconsistent, but you know, it's two bucks, you get what you pay for. It also gets you our full back catalog of bonus episodes so you can learn about exciting topics like guns,

pickup trucks, or pickup trucks with guns on them. The money we raise through Patreon goes to making sure that the only ad you hear on this podcast is this one. Anyway, that's something to consider if you have two bucks to spare each month. Join at patreon.com forward slash wtyppod. Do it if you want.

Or don't, it's your decision and we respect that. Back to the show. So this tail mounted engine fan disk disintegrates and of course that means it throws all those fan blades all over the place. They're mad at titanium. The plane's made of aluminum. The titanium wins.

So on the way out, some of these fan blades, they went into the tail. Now the tail has a control surface on it, which is actuated by three independent hydraulic systems, which are all very close together at one point. And so it, some debris just severs all three of them, all three systems, and they bleed out and instantly. And you just have no hydraulic pressure left.

Yeah, you have a big issue because there are three hydraulic systems. There's no fourth one. And please move all the control surfaces in the airplane, right? The flaps, the ailerons, the elevators, the rudder, that's what this one is called, the rudder, right? I'm good at planes. I'm no, I'm not being one of those sort of like Boeing guys who objects to like computerized control by being like,

it's die by wire. You should have direct control over a control surface, but I'm doing that one step further for hydraulics. And I'm like, you should be able to like mechanically crank every control surface on the aircraft. I mean, I want to say there was. Like a rescue radio, yes. There was some like statistical analysis before this occurred

that was like the chances of all three hydraulic systems going off line was one in a billion, you know, unless this happens apparently. Apparently they also like armored some of the hydraulic systems in places where they thought this was most likely to happen. And either that didn't work or like it was not happened to be here. Yeah. Yeah. So this is all the stuff that you use to turn the plane, right? Yes.

And it's sort of like attitude control. So the flight crew hears here's this explosion, right? Quickly determine this is a problem with the number two engine. Go through the procedure to shut down engine number two. Well, they're shutting it down. Co-pilot records notice that the plane was not responding to any control input. And a flight engineer noticed all the hydraulic pressure gauges are at zero. It's and the plane was slowly rolling to the right.

Yes. It's it's beginning. Don't want that. Well, it will continue for a while, which is called a Fugoid Oscillation, which is sort of the specific characteristic motion of a plane with like no positive attitude control, where it just kind of like. Yes, there it goes. I'm making a hand gesture here that none of you can see.

Oh, that's a forebear. Yes. Yeah, I'll do this with my hands. It claims it descends. It goes up and down. And one of the problems with this is that it's a feedback loop. It's like a positive thing because the more it goes up, the more it goes down. The more it goes up, the more it goes down.

And, you know. So in a sort of situation where you lose power like this, there's a backup, right? Which is the air driven generator. You can deploy this little thing off the side of the plane. It's a little propeller that pops out the side of the plane. And it powers the central electrical systems and hydraulics, right? So even if you lose every engine, you can still control the plane with no power other than stuff from the plane's own momentum.

And the will of God. Don't forget the will of God. Now, the problem here is they deployed it, but there was no hydraulic fluid. Yes, it solves the problem you don't have. Yes, it solved a different problem. Right. Because the problem is you don't have any power. You have plenty of power.

Like you have two engines that have worked. You have two engines. Yeah. Like you're getting electrical power through everything. It's just that all of the hydraulic systems have no hydraulic fluid left in them. Yes. It's like an empty tube. So there's essentially no control on the plane

save for modulating the thrust on the engines. Yeah, and this is the crazy part. This sort of works like. Yes. They're sort of able to control the aircraft using variable thrust. You want to go left, you like power up the right engine, power down the left engine a bit, stuff like this. And so we go off on this sort of magical mystery tour.

Wow, these three guys try to work out how to fly a plane. Like wrong on purpose for the first time. Yes. Yeah. I can't stress enough, by the way. This is not something you could possibly ever train anyone to do. No, there would be no reason to. You're not supposed to be able to recover from the situation.

No, you're supposed to go into a ditch basically. Yeah, it's sort of an outside scope thing where you're like your sort of instructions here in the big binder are like brace for impact. Yeah, you're your mom. Yeah, yeah, I was about to say make peace with your gods. So all right. So they started out down here.

This is this is Mapleton, Iowa or Iowa way. I understand some people call it Iowa way now, or they have for a long time. Right. Correctionville up here on the board. Yes, I heard this in the music band. Anyway, you know, they're going, they're going, they're going north. I'm not sure why they take this flight path.

Engine Flayer happens up here north of Alta. They're going to head out. They're supposed to go this way towards Chicago. We have this engine failure and now they can only turn right, which they do air traffic control. Here's about the emergency. They're like, all right, can you make it to Minneapolis? We can send you to Minneapolis.

Well, problem is they can only turn right and they have to turn left to go to Minneapolis. Just like hold it. Just just like hold it and go 360 degrees. You know, yeah, that's not happening. It's like a big loop, you know. They don't think they can make it to Minneapolis. They're going to Sioux City, Iowa. You guys ever see a Kingdom Cobb, right?

All right. So what are we going to do? Now, so pilot, pilot, flight crew is in close contact with the flight attendants and the flight attendants say, hey, there's a guy. There's a guy in the in the plane. He is the United Airlines DC 10 training check airman. His name is Dennis Fitch, right? Leslie Newsom is here.

Yeah. Good luck. We're all counting on you. So Dennis Fitch is, you know, the training check airman is like he's qualified to train people. He's also qualified to, I guess the check airman is like you are able to check that pilots are qualified. You're the one who actually qualifies the pilot and ensures they know what they're doing, right? So this guy knows check rides, where you do that.

We have to like prove that you know how to do the thing. Yeah. This is the guy who knows the most about the DC 10 that you can know, right? Yeah. Sort of like plane driving instructor. Yes. Plane flight team. Yes.

So so Haynes, Captain Haynes invited him to cockpit where this real humdinger of a situation was developing, right? Is that from the black box real humdinger of a situation? Real humdinger. Right here. Basically, like this is say, this is a conundrum. We have it. Things are bad.

And it basically is like, at one point, Fitch, the like the check airman says to Haynes, I tell you what, we'll have a beer when this is done. And Haynes is like, well, I don't drink, but I'm going to start, which is. I also, I believe this is the flight that says you're cleared to land at any runway. And he says you want to be specific in making a runway. Yes. So, you know, Fitch comes on the flight deck. He knows there's no procedure for this kind of problem.

The best he can surmise is that maybe. My dude takes off his pants so that he can just shit on the floor knowing it will not matter anyway. Yeah. One thing they do is they put the landing gear down, which might hold the nose of the plane steadier, but essentially Fitch was assigned to be the man to manipulate the thrust on the one in three engines while the rest of the flight crew was trying everything else to control the aircraft.

Right. They got United Airlines maintenance on the radio who were sort of flabbergasted that all three hydraulic systems could be offline at once. They also sort of kept pestering the crew with like, well, if you looked at page 91 on the manual. Yeah, motherfucker. There's a quote from Haynes who I like, which is he says, we were too busy to be scared. You must maintain your composure in the airplane or you will die.

You learn that from your first day flying, which really puts a spin on the fucking Chuck Yeager thing pilots do, you know? Yes. I always liked the thing I've said that I personally am very competent, but only moments of extreme crisis is the one time I'm not anxious. Yeah, there's, if you read the transcripts from the flight deck, very remarkable things happens while this is all going on. This crew is very calm.

They're very collected. Everyone's working very well together. Everyone knows that they're in a very dire situation, but you know, they're even joking with each other throughout this is all going on. Yeah. Yeah. Gallus humor has an important place in our culture. It's true.

Yes. I mean, nominally Haynes is in charge. He's taken input from everyone. People are tasked for being effectively delegated, like going back to check if the control services are working. You know, there's good communication with the flight attendants. There's like, you know, even as this plane is wildly out of control, the flight deck is this well or oiled machine.

Yeah. If you're going to have a plane totally lose control, I mean, this is the crew you want. This is the optimal crew for the job. Yeah. Part of this is because United Airlines was an early adopter of something called crew resource management. Way back in 1981, they were the first airline to do so, which is the sort of philosophy on the flight deck where instead of the captain's word being law, there was a more collaborative

process of piling the aircraft where, you know, everyone had valid input. This minimizes the risk of human error, which, you know, could cause one mistake, one boneheaded decision from one person crashing the plane to, you know, everyone's got input. Everyone can say, that seems wrong. Let's not do that. Right. So, you know, this is a remarkably like well functioning flight deck for this crisis. So, we see the sort of like long flight path of them trying to figure this out with a lot

of like right hand loops in it. Yes, this is, this is, they turn right, they turn right. How do you get to Sioux City, where you take 16 right turns? They somehow managed to do one left. Overcorrecting, you know? And then there was this 360 degree loop here, and they're on approach to Sioux Gateway Airport, which was by far the nearest airport that could possibly take a DC-10, while they're on the way, ATC is informing them, all right, you know, try for the airport, try for runway

33. If not, there's an interstate you could maybe try and land on. All right, now we're going for the runway. This is where you get the sort of like the funny but serious thing, it's like you want to be particular and make it a runway, but on the other hand, what all of this is in aid of is in large part, the thing is going to crash, maybe everybody is going to die, what you want to do is. The penalty reduction is what we're going to do.

Yeah, that's what we're going to do. The thing is going to crash, maybe everybody is going to die, what you want to do is. The penalty reduction is what we're going for, yeah. What you want to do is not dump it on top of somebody's house, right, on top of like lots of people's houses. Do the words harm reduction mean anything to you? Yeah, yeah, like the airport, you're not really making some like a landing at this point to crash whatever you do.

The idea is it's a controlled environment with a lot of like emergency services nearby and not much else that you can sort of crash into. And incidentally, they do happen to have a lot of emergency services nearby because the Iowa Air National Guard is like weirdly, unexpectedly on duty at Sioux Gateway Airport, so they have like two, three hundred trained personnel who are like they're ready with stretchers and stuff. They do not have enough firefighting equipment though because Sioux City Airport was not certified for aircraft as large as the DC-10, so they don't necessarily have all the firefighting

equipment they should have for an accident of this magnitude. This firefighting equipment, because as they're sort of going in circles dumping fuel, the airport like scrambles its fire department and they want to stage all of their appliances and stuff somewhere close so they can be on the scene quickly. So yes, which was they stored it all, they stage it all on closed runway 22. Oh, it's closed, right? It's perfect. Yes, and there's there's several more problems they're discovering as they're flying,

number one being guess what else is hydraulically operated? Oh, the landing gear, but they've already loaded that, so. No, the landing gear, you can drop an emergency, but the brakes are hydraulic. Oh, fuck. Yeah, so that's going to be that's going to be a problem. Sioux City Airport, they staged all of their fire trucks on runway 22. They're flying generally in the direction of the airport. Sioux City approach says or ATC says United 232 Heavy wins currently 360 at 11360-11.

You're cleared to land on any runway. And Haynes says, Roger, you want to make it particular and make it a runway, huh? But Haynes, he can't really turn to make it onto runway 31, but he does notice the dead ahead of him is runway 22. So he says, I'm going to make this shit a million times much, much worse. Yeah, like, okay, I can only do runway 23. So then I got to get all the fire equipment off the runway as quickly as possible. How fuss can you start a fire truck in Florida?

We're going to find out. I have a feeling there were people in the cabs of the trucks. Lower torque, lower torque, lower torque. I have a feeling these trucks are running. So despite all odds and one thing, if you look at this flight path here, how remarkably straight they were able to have it heading straight to the airport here, they were lined up for runway 22. They were going way too fast.

They actually got quite good at flying it to just off of like an hour's practice, which is really funny. Maybe they should have stayed in the air a little bit longer. You know, they're lined up with the runway. They're going too fast. They're sinking too fast. They have no brakes. Yeah.

Plans get harder to control the slow you're going though. It looks a lot better than it should. Right. Fitch is still manipulating the engines. But at the very last possible second before they made contact with the runway, the plane dipped to the right. And that's when all hell broke loose. Yeah.

Kind of comes in on its side. Yes. Like it lands a wing first and then gets sort of like thrown. It sort of, you know, yeah, it starts to skid, starts to roll over. Some witnesses say it started to tumble. It broke into pieces. The right wing impacted the runway. The plane was going about 250 miles an hour.

Maximum landing speed is 160 miles an hour on this plane. It goes right off the runway. It broke into a bunch of pieces. Some of the large pieces, like parts of the wings, left the airport grounds entirely and caught fire. You know, burned down someone's cotton field. Yeah, exactly. I mean, the whole plane was, you know, wrecked, destroyed. And, you know, it was very bad.

It was not a good situation to be in. Gouged out of the earth. It's taken here as it's sort of veered rightwards. And this is where, you know, you have the fire equipment on scene, like right there, and they go over and they start trying to extinguish the fire. But again, they don't have the sheer amount of fire retardant to, or the capability to put it on the plane fast enough to avoid a major fire developing pretty much instantaneously.

Yeah, that's why you need those cool sort of giant airport fire tenders, because you need to be able to dump a shitload of foam. Yeah, the ones that are like, they carry like a million tons of flame retardant, and then goes zero to 60 and a half second. Yeah. What if we did firefighting by top dragster? Yes. They have 20 wheels.

It's such a like a fucking like Lego play set. They're always like fluorescent yellow as well. Yeah, they're great. But so we have another NTSB diagram here of what happens to the cabin. I've titled this slide. Are you going to survive the crash landing? Or why Alice gets decision anxiety from the part of the airline ticket buying process? Will they let you pick out your seat?

Because that's what you should fly Southwest Alice, because you'll never be you'll never be aware enough to pick your own seat. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. But no, instead, like even budget airlines here, they just they give you a little diagram much like this unhelpfully to be like, hey, where are you sitting? I'm like, oh, what's time to review a bunch of these diagrams and figure out where my odds are best. So Jesus Christ, lady, I'm normal mentally. I love you so much.

So Captain Haynes and Fitch and Records and what's the flight engineer's name? Dvorak, the inventor of the kingdom. Dvorak, right. I have now exhausted the airplane's supply of liquor. Yeah, well, against I mean, OK, so they say among pilots, a good landing is one you can walk away from and a great landing is one where you can use the plane again. The flight crew has against all odds done a good landing. They all survived.

I believe Fitch got some pretty severe injuries, though. You know, without any flight controls save for engine thrust, they put this plane on the ground without killing themselves. And with the remarkable survival rate among the passengers, right? So this plane breaks into several parts. So like you can see here, these wavy lines are where it broke apart. Cockpit just departs. Cockpit departs the plane.

I don't head out right. Yes. Injection cockpit, you know. First class does pretty badly, you know, most of them are. Yeah, yeah, you know, but whatever, sort of between. It's like, well, at least you got crushed to death in a comfortable seat. That's about to say. Sort of the the middle section of the plane between like the wing exit rows and the first

the first exit up here. These folks do pretty well. Most of them live. I'm struck by the remarkable presence of no injuries. Like there's, well, like a dozen people there who just walked off the plane and were fine. And we're just like, don't see what the big problem is. Why the fuck am I not in Philadelphia? But apart from that, you know.

Oh, good. Cord. Hi, that row. You had issues because, of course, the wings caught fire. Lots of people died of smoke inhalation back here all the way to the back of the plane, where some of the people near the exit, they got out pretty easily. But you have lots of serious injuries. You have lots of people die, but over half the plane survives.

And this is crazy. There's a literal, a literal miracle. Yeah. Yeah. Also, one thing you may notice is a number of like inlet occupants. This is one of the fucked things about this is that United had been doing a program to encourage more kids to fly. It was like World Children's Day or something.

So they're like, fuck it. Let's just herd a bunch of kids onto a plane. And that was this plane. So. Hey kids, you want to go from Denver to Philadelphia? See the Liberty Bell? Yeah. You want to go to Philadelphia in 1989?

Have an experience whether the plane gets there safely or not, you know. So I believe of the 296 passengers and crew, 111 were killed in the crash. One died 31 days after the crash. The rest of the folks survived with various degrees of injury. I mean, you did you you did get injured on this plane. Right. You know, I left like 12 people.

Yes. Now, the flight crew was in the separated cabin, just lying there among the wreckage. They were all stuck in there for 35 minutes until the rescuers identified. Oh, that's the cabin right there. We should go. We should go check that out. That's not like recognizably a cockpit anymore. If you've seen sort of like bits of the fuselage after like any plane crash,

even like sort of a crash landing, it stops looking like a plane pretty quickly and starts looking like you've just like thrown a bunch of sheet metal into a blender. Um, but again, they all survived with varying degrees of injuries. Fitch got the most severe injuries out of this, but they all recovered and they went back to flying airplanes after the incident. Christ. Yeah. Yeah.

I mean, Haynes like did some like public speaking on on on like aviation safety after this, which you would, I think. Yes, absolutely. But very much of the sort of like I'm not a hero of the real heroes are the flight descendants sort of mold, which yeah, also true. Cause keeping the entire cabin like as relatively calm and safe as possible and then getting everybody to like brace even knowing that like, you know, half of them are going to die in the process.

It's not easy. And then in doing the evacuation, like flight descendants are fucking incredible genuinely. And it's one of the flight attendants was killed in this incident. I don't know who it was. I actually can't see either. Yeah, but they had eight flight descendants on board. And, uh, you know, your reward for doing all of this shit is,

I guess United runs like a sexist ad campaign about you. Yes, they assign you to the all men flight. Yeah, you're pulling fucking like a burning people out of the aircraft. And, you know, they put you on a billboard that's like, you want to fuck this woman? You know, fly to, you know, fly to Philadelphia and fuck this woman. It's like, thanks. Okay. Yeah, no, fantastic.

Appreciate that. Um, but through this, of course, we learned valuable things about crew resource management. Right. I love this. Thank you for this. You know, by all rights, this should have been a plane that went down with all hands. You know, no one should have survived this. Right.

Right. We cannot ever size enough how miraculous it was that anyone survived. There's one of those like statistics that genuinely baffles me is that like most people who are in plane crashes survive. Right. Like that's something that we've sort of clawed our way up to through shit like this. And that's genuinely insane to me because previously that was like an absolutely like a zero sum game where you either get to your destination safely or you are paced.

And now it's more like, even if the plane crashes, probably statistically going to be okay, which is a lot of a lot of plane crashes or stuff like, well, we overran the runway and we fell on a ditch, you know. Fuck it. I'm milking that shit for life. I'm around in my like plane crash survivor t-shirt. I'm doing interviews. I'm doing public speaking on like resilience and courage and what it taught me about loving

myself. I'm milking that shit for the rest of my life. No one is ever winning an argument with me ever again if my plane goes into a ditch because like you you argue with me about it right off the airframe because it was cheaper than repairing it. Yeah. You want me to do literally anything. I'm like, oh, you know, I can't because of the injuries I sustained when I was in a plane crash, which I survived.

Yes, I was in an old 767 that overran the runway, fell on a ditch. They could have repaired it, but it was the fuselage was now like two tenths of an inch out of line and they just decided to write it off. Anyway, I've been traumatized by that ever since. Oh yeah, everyone survived, but I saw one of the overhead bins open and some luggage fell out. You see this booboo? That's a hero's booboo.

Absolutely. Totally unironically. Yeah. I'm having that shit and put on my tombstone plane crash survivor. There's lots of mitigating factors here. There's really good weather. It was during the day the airport was nearby. There's very rapid response by emergency services.

There was a shift change in the nearby trauma center, so there were a lot more people on duty. There was the National Guard was there, but really got this plane on the ground without killing everyone was crew resource management, right? Because no one person could land this plane, but several people could almost do it. And a fun thing about it. I remember seeing that they tried to work this out after the fact at United and tried to work out how you could possibly do this.

And essentially their conclusion was, I don't know. You can't. Thanks, boys. Should we put something in the binder about how to do this if this happened? They're like, no, you can't do this. You can't do it there. Yeah, they ran it in flight simulators afterwards and no pilots could get a survivable landing, right?

This is, you know, I truly a loss smiled on this flight crew that day. And there have been a small number of similar incidents since UA-232 since. Only one of them, which was a DHL flight out of Baghdad that was hit by a missile in 2003, resulted in a safe landing with no control services. Imagine doing like this level of flying. And, you know, on the one hand, if you're doing it for United, it's like, I'm going to save all these kids. You're doing a DHL flight out of Baghdad in 2003.

I'm going to save all these sex butts. Yeah, I'm going to save all of these porn mags that are being sent to like marines or whatever. I'm a national hero. There's like a bunch of stolen Mesopotamian or Babylonian artifacts in the back that are going to a hobby lobby. And I'm like, why knuckling the control column? Like, I'm going to save you. And, you know, one of the things about this is since then, we've gone down

from these three-man flight crews to two-man flight crews, and the airlines have started agitating for one man on short flights. So who knows? Absolutely. Yeah. If anything, it should be higher. I want a 20-man flight crew because apart from anything else, absolutely bolsters your resilience in case the other 19 guys have heart attacks simultaneously.

And also, if one of them goes fucking Andreas Lubitz and decides that he's going to like neat to eat himself into a mountainside with everybody else, then I would rather have 19 dudes beat the shit out of him than one. So, yeah, that's about to say. You got you got 20 guys on the flight deck. You know, three of them fly the plane. The other 17 do some kind of. Hold guns to the back of their heads to make sure they keep flying the plane.

I was thinking of some kind of piloting crew. I was thinking of some kind of Pirates of Penzance thing, but operated for airplanes. This is the future of air travel, right? It's a universal basic income because, you know, we're flying the civilianized C-5 Galaxy, the flight crew of 20. Everybody's driving the cars on there. It's like, again, you have sort of like slapstick unionism where every one of those 20 guys is in a different union.

I'm in the second Flight Engineers Union. I'm in the third Flight Engineers Union. International Brotherhood of 15th Flight Engineers. Yeah, an oiler. You got a fireman for some reason. Stoker. Breakman. Yeah.

Right. Never stopped. So, yeah, would this be achievable ever again? Who knows? I mean, at this point where modern plane design has stuff like, they have hydraulic fuses in there now, so you could not have a complete hydraulic failure from one location, or at least it'd be very, very difficult. This has a bizarre effect of rehabilitating the image of the DC-10

as a much more survivable and safe plane than it was. Makes you know they seem more glamorous, too. Yes. And they changed how they forged titanium to reduce the chance of cracks. They used something I want to say is called the triple vacuum system now, which I don't know what it is. They had a whole extra vacuum. Although, I think there's also like a cold half thing or whatever that is,

where they fuck around with temperature. As I said, there's a lot of interesting weird metallurgy going into this. Yes. So, yeah, the titanium that you build this stuff out of is safer than it's ever been. Yeah, air travel is very, very safe, just very, very unpleasant. But if it's safe, then why does the room that I'm in go fast and then tilt upwards? It's not, it's not, that's not normal. As I said, it's safe, it's just unpleasant.

It is unpleasant. Well, I mean, it's tempting to say that this is like, it's some combination of like extremely good crew resource management and also dumb luck slash divine failure. Like without the second one of those, you could have extremely good crew resource management as the thing crashes into a cornfield. Like, yes. I do think there are lessons here about listening to people, though.

That's always, I guess that's the big one you get out of this one is, if you're in charge of something, you're going to do better if you listen to other people. I know that's the most generic lesson imaginable, but. So like, golden rule stuff, but on the other hand, it works for us. We practice podcast resource management and. This is true. Instead of like the early days of the podcast when you were sort of like tyrannical captain who like did everything.

I still like to think of myself as that though. That's true. Yeah. We have a slightly different life. Yeah. Yeah, for sure. More equitable division of labor, I suppose. Yes.

And fucking credit where it's due to pilots for really legitimately earning the Chuck Yeager shit. Yeah. Yes. I will not make fun of your aviators, even though you are visibly a 50 year old man. If you fly a plane, you can wear aviators. I guess that's what they're called. I guess that's what they're called.

I guess so. I guess so. All right. But what's Joe Biden's excuse? I don't. Shut up. Yeah, I don't think Joe Biden can fly a plane. Listen, Jack.

Maybe he can fly a plane. I don't know. The answer is to call me fat and challenge me to do push-ups, which honestly, I'm pretty sure you can also wear aviators if you're the president. Okay. So you got president airline pilots. My dad. Douglas MacArthur.

Your dad. Your dad. God. My dad wears regular aviators, not sunglasses aviators. Yeah, you're dead. That's not an aviator anymore. Those are dad glasses. Yeah, I guess that makes sense.

Yeah, he's just a dad. What's up, Dan? How's it going? My dad wears those, too. I wouldn't call them aviators. My dad also wears those. It's a timeless, classic fit for the dads in need of. Actually, Corinne also wears those now at this point.

They're kind of cool. I think kind of maybe. No, don't tell her that. No, they are. They are. Don't do that. I'm sorry to encourage her, but I genuinely think they look good. You could have aviators, but they're transitions lenses.

Oh, wow. I should not speak that into existence. All right. Just offensive to use the name of my community for those lenses, which look like absolute dog shit. Well, I think I think we've already mentioned all the things we learned. Yeah. Unless anyone else has anything else.

I don't think so. All right. I don't. Crew resource management. Do that. Resource management. Do crew resource. Crew resource.

It's like socialism in small groups. Some anarchists would do well to learn some crew resource management. Eat shit, bud. Oh, it's a horizontal command structure, but it's still a command structure. Shut up. The flight crew served 10 minute terms before being replaced in another all plain election. The flight crew has to step down before the new one is elected. They got to turn auto back on.

All right. Masses of boots defer to the bootmaker. Masses of flying the plane defer to the guy in the aviators with the silly accent. Yes. Yes. Well, we have a segment on this podcast called Safety Third. Shake hands for danger. Hello, Justin, Liam, Alice, and potential guest.

Go fuck yourself. Wrong. Well, in fairness, the first time we put this one up, there was a guest. Too bad. The episode was too long. I work part-time for a museum that deals with the history of the urban transport of my city. One of the things we do is guided tours of disused parts of the network, notably closed stations.

More locks, more locks. You're going to find more locks in there and chuds and sewer alligators and shit. Yes. On some of our sites, the station may be closed, but the railway is not, and trains can pass in and out of the site. But notably at one of our sites, station A. There is no second route out of the station, which means evacuating in a fire requires that we would have to walk down the railway line in the tunnel. Fire safety plan.

Do not have a fire. Yes. This means that we as tour guides have to contact the power controller and make sure the power is turned off and lay the appropriate short circuit device to ensure it cannot be turned on. That's these guys. They make contact with the rail and the third rail, thus causing a short circuit. Oh, these guys seem cool.

Yes, because in a third rail system, the rail carries the positive current, and then the third rail carries the positive current, and then the running rails carry the return current. I want to say, I don't quite know how this works, but like this is arrangement of pipes that takes on the role of Robert Shaw at the end of the taking of Pellum 123. But this guy is going to be like plus 600 volts, and this one is zero volts. So that's your difference in voltage there. I think that's how that works.

I'm not sure. So third rail scare the fuck out of me. Yeah. So this means we as tour guides have to contact blah, blah, blah. This is all fine because the site is at the end of a branch line and it's not used by trains, but which might have the power applied to the third rails. Sure. Now, recently there has been a change in the practice on site due to engineering works

further up the branch of the junction, which is station B, where it meets the main line of this metro route. As a result, we are meant to now contact the engineering supervisor at station B to confirm that they have turned the power off and laid the short circuit device themselves. We then don't touch the track at station A at all. This is, of course, way better for me as I don't want to go back on the track if I don't have to. Apart from anything else, railway track is like really gross. Yes.

If you've ever spent any time on or around it, it's filthy. It's covered in like rats and roaches and garbage. Like weird metal dust from rails and wheels. Like it's weird. It's wet. It's warlocks, obviously. It's creepy and wet. Yeah, it's creepy and wet.

However, the communication about this was nothing more than a very confusing email that contained several errors which were sent to us. This was only sent to our work emails and as we are only casual zero hours employees, most people do not read work emails and no manager checked that we actually read and understood the changes. Bearing in mind that while there are normally no trains on this branch during the engineering work, the work supervisor is permitted to allow engineering trains to run on the line. Yeah, it's no trains apart from when there are.

Yes, no trains apart from when there are trains. Well, I mean, if you didn't want there to be trains, why would you leave this perfectly good rail here? That's a good point. That's a good point. Any time is train time. As a result of this shoddy communication system, a member of staff who had not read the new briefing began assessing.

SOTE. I don't think you're in any position to complain about confusing emails that contained several errors. Accessing sites in question, not knowing about the changes to the procedures. This person then began accessing the track without actually speaking to the person who was in charge of the power and train movements. Meanwhile, the engineering supervisor had no idea if anyone was on site at station A, began ringing off duty staff to see if they knew what was going on

as they were the only people they had number for. Or numbers, excuse me. The staff member on site is lucky that someone who isn't actually trained in the procedure was there who had heard about the change and told them to stop. When this was raised. Yeah, because like otherwise you just go on to the thing and get hit by an engineering train. Yes. Or even if you don't get fucking zapped by the third rail.

Or both at the same time. Or I'm increasingly suspecting this system may even have a fourth rail. I mean, that just seems excessive. Yeah, I know, you know, there's a place that doesn't. The staff member on site is lucky that blah, blah, blah. When this was raised to management, the person raising it was told, it's not a big deal. Just a small misunderstanding, which is true.

But these small misunderstandings are how people get killed. Yeah, this is a whole boring like two thirds of the way through the slice of Swiss cheese, you know. Yeah, exactly. This is like this is like if you. Yeah, just a couple of things that got wrong there. Some guy would have been turned into a, you know, this sort of pancake. Pancake.

Or just sort of like a seared, you know, perfectly seared side of beef, depending on. Delicious. That's not that's not beef. That's a long pig. A perfectly electrically. See, and you say you can't use an electric stove for anything good, but really like seals in the juices, you know, and there's some some device back in the 60s that was marketed as an instant hotdog maker

that just ran like like 800. Remember this through a hotdog. It was just going to like arc flash your hotdog and leave like a sort of like char around the outside. Yeah, no, it's I mean electricity is fucking scary. You should like let leave the electrons alone as much as you can. Because once you start squeezing them into a small tube, they get very angry. And you know, if you turn them loose unexpectedly, then get very angry with you in a way that I

don't I don't care for at all, especially, especially DC. DC likes to spread out, you know, and it can yeah. What's the official? Well, there's your problem position on like the war of the currents, by the way. I feel like we should I would definitely have to go with AC. AC is better in almost all circumstances. I would say most metro systems would be better off with overhead wire. You know, I guess third rail works because of clearances, but there's a lot of

There's a lot of advantages to overhead wire out there. You know, I don't I don't understand why third rail is still as popular as it is, just because it seems like a more expensive system. Legacy, I suppose. I mean, there's so many substations. Yeah. And the other thing with DC that it's not good for is killing people perversely, which is one of the things that Edison tried to like set it up for.

Yes. The war of the currents was making sure that the first electric chairs would DC so that he could it could points don't be like, I see this fucking Westinghouse shit will kill you in AC. They were AC, not DC. Fuck. All right. Well, the reverse of everything I just said.

Not AC, not DC, but a secret third thing. Just a question mark, C. I was reading. I was reading a book while we're killing time waiting for Liam to come back. Well, while I'm vamping. I know, right? I was reading. I forgot to hit on mute.

I've been here for like three minutes. God damn it. All right. I'll tell that anecdote on another video. Anyway. I'm kind of curious about the end. No, I'm not going to keep you. No, no, it's something I read in a book recently that made me mad about electricity.

Someone referred to the Milwaukee Road electrification as three phase DC. And I was like, can't be three phase DC. DC doesn't have phases. Well, it's one phase. Yeah. Yeah. No, it doesn't have any phases. Because it's it's it's it's it doesn't alternate.

Yeah, that's the phase. The phase is it goes. That's the one phase. No, because the phase single phase implies you're alternating at a frequency. Oh, God damn it. Okay. Fine. Zero phases.

Yes. I don't know anything about electricity. Yes. Anyway. Keep up the good work and thank you from a non electrified listener. You're welcome. That's a that's a gas stove supporter right there. Yeah.

Our next episode will be on Chernobyl. Does anyone have any commercials before we go? No, but we do have business after this. Yes. All right, we got we got a patreon. You have an ad for it already. This is the ad for it again. Subscribe.

I have another bonus episode out soon. Yes. Recording that tomorrow. Yes, exactly. The thing will happen. Yes. The podcast continues. All right.

That was it then. Fly safe. Yes. Yep. I'm Scott Manley. Fly safe. All right. That was a podcast.

All right. And the recording. I'm ending it. I'm ending it. That's still good. If I could find it. It's he's top left. Still going.

No, I got to find the browser window. Where's the browser window?