Well There‘s Your Problem - Episode 181: Swissair Flight 111

Episode Date: July 3, 2025

turns out there is actually a "plane falls out of the sky" button on your infotainment system, it just takes a while to work check out maya's new podcast https://x.com/qotmpod?s=21 and maya's internet webzone: https://mayawalkwith.me/ LINK TO BUY A VAN FOR LIAM’S COWORKER https://helphopelive.org/campaign/24216/ Our Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/wtyppod/ Send us stuff! our address: Well There's Your Podcasting Company PO Box 26929 Philadelphia, PA 19134 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/

Three, two, one, mark. OK, look at that. I work out one day and all of a sudden my palms don't hurt from clapping anymore. All right. All right. We're going now. Are you OK? Am I OK? Are you OK? I'm seeing a beautiful vision of the 1990s. I'm sorry you're not OK. What's going on?

Oh, no, I'm fine. I was I was just saying that as a rhetorical gesture. I see. I see. Yes. I was worried. That's how you have to be, because you're my best pal. No, the big issue right now is that I've cleaned up enough of my office that I can lean my

chair back, but it leans back farther. That's the worst thing that you've ever invented, yeah, because like, you- Ross and I have the same chair, so I- he's on the video, but I am, so let me demonstrate something for you. Oh, fuck! Oh, fuck! ALICE I'm willing to get competitive about this, or indeed anything, let's fucking go. JUSTIN Hold on, hold on, we gotta...

ALICE Oh, fuck! Oh, fuck! JUSTIN Ah, shit. Goddamn. Okay. ALICE Oh, shit! Okay, okay, right, we're good. We're good, we're good.

JUSTIN No, these things really need a limiter on. This is stunt post-casting. There's probably a way to do that, anyway. Oh god, oh fuck, I crushed my balls. This is, after, this long it took us, this long to pivot to video, but the pivot to video is a little like, four minute thing ahead of the episode that is just us reclining our chairs too far. Oh my god. I missed this.

Yeah, yeah, me too. Here we are. Um, alright, let's just, this is another man reclining his chair, but that one probably doesn't. His doesn't recline very far. Before we get into the news, I have an announcement to make. First to praise the glorious hogs, then berate them for not doing enough. So you glorious hogs raised about $4,000 for my co-worker's grandson.

He has muscular dystrophy, he needs a wheelchair van. We're up to $4,666, hail Satan. But we need more money. Hail Satan, four times. And you're gonna give us more money. So I'll put that in the video description. Perfect, yeah. Okay, let's get into this reclining mail. Are these cost Port-A-Pro headphones?

You have been watching too much Dank Pods, I think. To be able to recognize that off the dome. I'm interested in what's going on with the tie. I want this tie. It's a shame that this man is going to explode and die. It's very whimsical. You know, the 90s were a whimsical tie sort of time. Yeah, the fourth, the third gen Taurus with the little cute little ass.

What I'm saying is I want to fuck the Ford Taurus. You have been watching too much Tankbots. Hello, and welcome to... LIAM Hey, Roz. JUSTIN Well, there's your problem. It's a podcast about engineering disasters with slides. I'm Justin Roz. I'm the person who's talking right now. My pronouns are he and him.

Okay, go. ALICE It's the podcast where we plug two podcasts before our own. I'm November Kelly. I'm the person who's talking right now. My pronouns are she and her. Yay Liam. LIAM Yay Liam, hi. I'm Liam McAnderson. My pronouns are he, him, his. I'm doing Kelly. I'm the person who's talking right now. My pronouns are she and her. Yay, Liam. Yay, Liam. Hi I'm Liam McAnderson. My pronouns are he him his I'm doing that now. Oh god damn it. You outwoke me

You you come into my own home and outwoke me. You come into my house on the day of my daughter's wedding And I hope that your first child will be a non-binary child Hey, man, give me 30 seconds and I'll get up to speed with any pronouns. I did an uncomfortably close to Bernie Sanders Luca Brazi there. I'm not thrilled about how that came out. 99% of the pronouns are used by 1% of Americans. Both of me, Bernie Sanders, we're going to redistribute the pronouns. Go to www.BernieSanders.com. I am no longer asking for your pronouns. We have a guest.

Hello. My name is Maya Ventura. My pronouns are it, it, and she, her, which is four, so I've now taken that crown. I run a newsletter, it's called Laser Chronicles, some of you read it, most of you probably know me from the last time I was on here. ALICE Yeah, welcome back. I mean, pretty close to consecutive guests. ALICE Yes, Maya, Maya. You have a podcast to plug too, bud.

I do, yes. I was gonna do that at the end, and I forgot, so thank you. I figured you would. I also host Queens of the Monsters, which is a podcast about kaiju films. How neat. Ooh. Which has been dormant for a year and is going to hopefully be back up before this episode comes out, but if not it will be immediately afterwards, so.

Looking forward to that. ALICE So, what we see on the screen in front of us, is a man. A man who is relaxing in a luxurious seat on an airliner. ALICE This is like peak 90s Euro vibe. Look at the arm holding the not iPad in front of him. That's so overbuilt, like now that would be a flimsy little flex thing, but that's built in there like a throttle quadrant. It's like...

JUSTIN Yeah, that thing folds into the armrest, that thing is like, y'know, it's made out of metal, like a man- a person had to make that, as opposed to an iPad, which I assume just sort of, y'know. ALICE Well, a child had to make that. JUSTIN Yeah, someone thought about it and it came into being through, like, AI or something. I don't know. ALICE Before all of the label was externalized and abstracted from you.

JUSTIN Yeah, exactly, exactly. This was made by, you know, a horrible man in an Airbus factory. ALICE It's true. This was made by a horrible Frenchman. It's like, uh, AMG doing the one man one engine, but it's just one, one angry, striking French worker. Mmhm. One shitty little tablet thing.

He's got a tiny little bottle of champagne. He's drinking that champagne out of a... Okay. So today, today we're gonna talk about when entertainment systems go wrong. Swissair Flight 111. Hang on, we've committed to videos, so let me do this real quick. Flight entertainment gone naughty? Gone wild?

No, no. I'm not fond of that. Also, also you're not in the thing, because we just have the video before the slideshow starts, because we're not getting devs, devs cut in our own video at this point. That would be a- SEAN Yeah, it's stuck like this, there's nothing I can do about it. ALICE Okay, okay.

The expression, it's a source of pain. It's an expression of pain. SEAN We have to get a full streaming setup, right? Where everything goes on. I have to get another monitor. We have to get- SEAN You have two? What? ALICE No, I have to get another monitor, we have to get- You have two? What?

No, I have to get another one. It's just, everything about this podcast somehow always becomes more work, and yet we never release it any more consistently. Nope. Nope, and we never will, fuck you. No, unlikely, unlikely. And then I have to get, y'know, we have to get four extra inputs, one for Liam, one for Nova, one for me, one for the guest, one for ActiMate Windows.

ALICE I mean, at this point, we just buy some kind of hyper yacht, and we fly us all out to International Waters. ALICE We could probably expense a hyper yacht, we have a good account. ALICE Yeah, to record this in person, y'know. I say International Waters because obviously I'm not going to the this in person, you know, I say International Waters because obviously I'm not going to the US anytime soon, because they will find the JD Vance memes in my phone and send me to El Salvador.

Oh right, yeah, I forgot they were doing that, we didn't put that in the goddamn news, because first we have to do the goddamn news. Recursive. That was a tremendous... Hold on, let me get that. There we go. Um, Zoran Mamdami, along with Brad Lander, DID THE RRR NOT TO NOT TO SUSPENDERS DANCE TO ANDREW QUAMO AND KILLED HIM.

Andrew Cuomo has died. He has been killed. Andrew Cuomo has been killed. And in the words of Brad Lander, good fucking riddance. Thank god. Yeah. But who is gonna- no, I don't wanna do it. I'm gonna- I have died.

LIAM Who is going to bring home the ziti? ALICE So, I get to talk about this, uh, bless my stupid puppy life, I get to talk about this on three separate podcasts, one of which is entirely mayor focused. We've talked about this on Trash Future, we talked about all the political implications of that, we're gonna talk about the Meir-al implications, mostly for this one I'm just soaking up the vibes, because the vibes were immaculate. JUSTIN The vibes were really good, everyone loves Zoran, Zoran's so good. Everything about him is positive. This man has never had a negative vibe in his life.

ALICE No. No. He's amazing. And, like, the thing I was saying on TF as well is that, like, there are people like this everywhere. Right? Like, I don't wanna do hero worship in the sense of, like, I don't wanna do great man theory to New York City, right? Like, I'm gonna start a cult of port personality around this guy, I think that's a good idea. By the standards of politicians, yeah, he's unusually charismatic and like, everything like that. He's very good at what he did, I don't think he put a foot wrong in the campaign. But...

I think he should become Stalin. I agree. I agree completely. I think, uh, governor, senator, president, after we change a couple of amendments, but like, and listen, I'll be proud to fight and die for him in American Civil War, too. ALICE We could make him an Ayatoa. ALICE I don't know if that... Anyway.

LIAM That's not gonna resonate with the Midwest voters, man. ALICE The thing I was gonna say is, you know somebody like this, or you know someone who knows someone like this, and what this is is a success of organizing, right, of having, particularly DSA NYC, being able to create a candidate and support a candidate like this, because a few years ago he was doing, like, leafleting and stuff, right? Yes. And that's hard work on his part, but that's hard work on everybody's part.

And I'm certain he would tell you the same thing. Right? And I think we're allowed to have some hesitation about electoralism. I'm sure in office he's gonna do some things by nature of being in office that are gonna be bad. But it's strategic, right? And you're allowed to be happy about this. You can live out. You have permission to live out. And the worst people in the world are real mad about it, which is not how you worked

on it. That's the important part in all this, I would say. Certainly as far as I've experienced. Andrew Cuomo successfully sent back to the suburbs, for one. Yeah, this is true. Even those of us who are fuckin' technocratic nerds who have concerns about free buses, pretty happy about this result. ALICE You just don't like him because he's a bus guy and you're a train guy, and those two houses are like indignity, you know? JUSTIN Shut up.

ALL LAUGHING. ALICE But yeah, so, um, he's now gotta, like, because the other thing about this is it's been structured in such a way that he's having to fight his way through increasing levels of creeps. Because now he's gotta beat Eric Adams, and like, whatever kind of insane third party write-in candidate that Bill Ackman tries to organize. LIAM Oh Oh yeah. JUSTIN And there's a GOP candidate as well. ALICE Isn't it Slewa again?

Like, Slewa. Yeah. ALICE They did not, they didn't have a primary, they just nominated him by acclimations. JUSTIN Incr-ah. ALICE It's like St. Peter, yeah. JUSTIN Yeah, this is like centrist infighting, I can't believe these centrists like so fucking disorganized. You got it. You got to be good. You got to be smug. If anybody says any shit about Zoran, you got to like, get completely like peaceful and beatific in your expression and you got to hit them with a vote blue no matter who. Yes, that's true. Exactly. The thing about

the centrist infighting is that my understanding from what I have heard from people who worked in New York, I used to be an organizer, I should probably clarify. From what I've heard in New York, this is basically what happened to Andrew Cuomo, because Democratic voters sort of told establishment officials, people in power, party officials, whatever, that they didn't like any of the candidates like towards the end of last year. So they were like, okay, we're going to give you Andrew Cuomo. And then they gave them Andrew Cuomo and this is where we are now. This is, it's amazing. Cause like all the other candidates just, you know, everyone united and was like,

okay, okay, whoever you vote for, just don't vote for Andrew Cuomo. This was like a non, like just a don't vote for Andrew Cuomo election. And everyone was pretty chummy, which is pretty funny, which is apparently something you can do with rank choice voting. I don't know, we gotta expand this system. Don't ever let it happen again. ALICE Please, please let us have it in Philly, I'm so tired of Sherrell Parker.

ALICE As far as the Cuomo campaign as well, if you think about it this way, he came out with two messages, right? Message number one, I know it's against the odds, but all thirteen women are lying. And number two, I stand with Israel. Exactly. Exactly, right? And the thing is, like, Eric Adams and whoever else is gonna be able to, like, go into fucking

Zoran's old tweets where he's like, defund the police or whatever, and you have that argument now. But he didn't have to have it previously, because the argument that he was having instead is, actually I'm not a member of the Al Qasem Brigades and that's an insane and racist thing to say about me. And it was so obvious to everybody, and it just completely backfired, and I think you have to look at this, apart from anything else, is this like, seismic shift in terms of like, Israel and Palestine in the American like, electoral calculus. SEAN What of the more interesting things was the

day after the election, when all the New York conservatives tried to tie him to 9-11 in order to do racism. But like, the America forgot. It was like, the efforts... They did find his passport in the rubble. Do it... the problem with politicians, right, sometimes you look at them and you're like, you've never done anything interesting in your life. You've advanced too early, too fast, and too high, and you're just like, yeah, if he was doing 9-11 at the age of 10, you know, it's like, what hope is there for the rest of us, you know? 9-11

child, mayor of New York City, at a year younger than me, and it's like, I'm having a midlife crisis, probably. SEAN Yeah, I wish I had done 9-11 at 10. ALICE You were 10 when 9-11 happened. I was eight. I was eight. I was eight. I was eight. I was eight. I was eight. I was eight.

I was eight. I was eight. I was eight. I was eight. I was eight. I was eight. I was eight. I was eight.

I was eight. I was eight. I was eight. I was eight. I was eight. I was eight. I was eight. I was eight. I was eight. I was eight11 is the problem. I have a constitutional right to do 9-11.

Why am I being detained? I know my rights, I know my rights! Day one, not even of the Zuran administration, but the Zuran nomination, and you're like, getting a bit ahead of it, like, I have the right to do 9-11. It's not even day one, the RCV thing is like next week. God damn it! It's like day negative six, the RCV thing is like next week. God damn it. It's like day negative six. You don't know.

But like, the interesting thing is that of course the New York Conservatives pulled out 9-11, but like, the average conservative everywhere else, including the executive branch, is a Jews did 9-11 guy these days. Yeah. So that didn't work out too good. So I mean- That's gone poorly. days. So that didn't work out too good. ALICE It's also, um, like, they're also trying to suggest that he's gonna do Sharia lore in New York City?

SEAN That one... JUSTIN Yeah, let's go! ALICE Better than the NYPD, probably. Like, I haven't checked, but... if we can do, like, the woke Sharia, if we can institute that, then let's fuckin' go. Y'know? Yeah, I would support woke sharia at this point, why not. Fuck it. Just roll the dice on it.

Everyone has to have... everyone has to dye their hair, everyone's gonna have to get a septum piercing. You actually, listen, you are allowed not to have neopronouns, but you just have to pay a tax for it. It's a small thing, it's like a formality, you know. Yeah, so I'm really happy. There is of course, always the scope. If you have the right to do 9-11, I as a leftist always have the right to piss and moan about anything and ruin anybody's

day. And so, there is a theoretical way where you're like, uh, this is electoralism, it's a distraction, it's not gonna do anything, it's taking people away from burning down the Walmarts or whatever. And if he socializes the Walmarts then there won't be even any point in burning down the Walmarts. So that's a good point. That's horrible. Yeah. So I guess you could do that, but the thing is, if you're doing that, you are, um, sort

of more radical than the Communist Party of India brackets Marxist, which congratulated him today on having been nominated. So I only subscribe to Communist Party of India, brackets Maoist. Good enough. I believe there are several of those last time I checked, or at least several. More all the time. More all the time. It's like a ton of decay, you know?

Yeah. Yeah, so I'm obviously very happy to hear that every New Yorker who wears glasses is gonna be killed, and an army of halal-cart guys is gonna be armed and deput, an army of halal cart guys is gonna be sort of armed and deputized to enforce the woke chariot. They're gonna be state run grocery stores, and you're gonna have to go there, and you're gonna have to purchase deli meats. It's gonna be like a reasonable amount of money. Yeah.

They're gonna make you do that, like in Communist Cuba. They're gonna nationalize Boar's Head. Not bad. I mean, considering all the listeria, that's probably not a bad idea. Yeah. People are gonna have to smuggle in Dietz and Wattson deli meats. This is the first time that I've felt good about things politically, anything politically, for a minute. And I know it's

like different because I live in a different country, I'm thousands of miles away, it doesn't affect me directly, but I'm happy for my friends in New York, I'm happy for my friends in America because like, if it is possible to learn any lessons from this, I have total faith that the Democratic Party will fail to do that, right, but if they do, if they surprise me, then the rewards are great, right, because if they do, if they surprise me, then the rewards are great, right, because people like it when you believe in things, and they like the policies. And if you just advocate on that basis, then you do very well. I know it's completely foreign to everything the Democratic party wants to do, anywhere,

but learn the fucking lesson, guys. JUSTIN Maybe this finally collapses the Democratic party. Inshallah. ALICE That blood machine, uh, blood machine never break, right? It's like, do you want abundance, the thing that is very well thought of by a bunch of columnists and fails all the time, or do you want this? Right?

Um, so... I think the abundance guy's like Zoran. Yeah, he doesn't like him back though, which is really... It's like, why won't you follow me back? It's like, they're trying to get on sharper? Matic Laisius doesn't like him, and he's like, as far as I can tell, the head abundance guy these days. The abundance pope.

Yeah, Matic Laisius turned himself into the abundance guy when I think that... the actual abundance guys seem to be a little nicer, but Matic Laisius is now the face of the movement. He's the worst guy imaginable. Yeah, they had a weird fuckin' conference in DC, like a couple months ago, and it was genuinely the most surreal thing I've ever seen. Including all the times I've worked in politics. Yeah, so, good things are possible. Electrolysm is back on the menu. Wolf Hell. It's all good. And I dunno how that translates to a British context, other than... fuck, maybe

during the Green Party. I dunno. Yeah. Speaking of, good things being possible. Uh, that's... Are we... wow, okay. We bombed Iran, and it didn't do shit. That's true.

Where are you articulating the good thing here? Is the good thing that Iran appears to have weathered being bombed by the US Air Force? SEAN We've knocked a door in, apparently. JUSTIN Yeah, we like, you know, sort of, again, there was a sound in the bunker- SEAN Vandalized a poster of some kind? JUSTIN There was a sound in the bunker that sounded like the upstairs neighbor's cat jumping off a table.

ALICE All it cost was like two trillion dollars and like 18 hours of flying time for a hundred aircraft. JUSTIN Yeah, I was about to say, there was like a hundred and something million dollar operation. ALICE I love people being like, well, how come if we bombed Iran, the B-2 took thirty-six hours to do it, but I can take a flight from... and it's just like... It's because of Flat Earth! They were just like, no, they got it confused with the B52.

Well the problem in this case, the reason why there's possibly been not much damage is because of the opposite of Flat Earth, which is Pointy Earth. Ah yes, the mountain. Yeah, because of the mountain. Formed around, raised in a cave, nukes and fuckin' is all I crave. ALICE Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I mean, I think it's... because we're doing this podcast, obviously, the goddamn news has never been more overtaken by events, like fucking World War Three almost started

while we were out there for a minute. LIAM We had to wait another couple months before doing an oops all news. ALICE Yeah, yeah, but we sort of like, ended up with Israel trying to start a war with Iran and drag the US into it, and then Trump agreeing to, like, bomb the side of a mountain, and then getting really mad at everyone involved. Which is- SEAN I DID A GOOD JOB! ALICE Yeah.

First time you got a president dropping the word fuck on a live broadcast, which was cool. That was pretty fun. No, Biden already did it when he was VP. I guess he was VP, not president. Oh yeah, you're right. This is a big fucking deal. Big fucking deal, yeah. I will say, there's a lot of people who are like, the thing about him saying that he wants

peace after bombing is obviously illogical and just a diversion, but like, no, Donald Trump is very much this stupid. Yeah, he is. Thank you for your attention to this matter. Yes. But yeah, so, I mean... We're all gonna throw a few bombs at each other and we're gonna shut up afterwards, right?

This is like a stupid fight you had when you were drunk after a night at the bar. Yesss, that was pretty dumb. Should have done that. ALICE After having done this, and after having been sort of bombed a little bit in return, Israel were like, okay, well that was cool, now we're going back to the genocide in Gaza. Yeah, this is true, yeah. SEAN Yeah, they literally said that.

I guess the nuke wasn't that big a deal, huh? Apparently not, no. And I mean, I hold out hope for Trump getting frustrated and petty and doing a kind of, like, Zelensky-style humiliation to Netanyahu, but I... That would be cool, but I'm not holding my breath. That would be pretty cool, yeah. JD Vance hitting him with the, have you even said thank you once? Like...

SEAN I do like the idea, but I've read... JUSTIN They throw his dirty laundry at him. Like the literal dirty laundry he brings each time. SEAN Take your iPad and get the fuck out! ALICE Yeah, I don't know, this struck me as like, an extremely funny thing when it was happening, when it was like, oh, we bombed Iran. It was like, okay, the first five minutes you looked at it and you're like, oh, this

is horrifying. Then you realize what they bombed, and it's like, oh, they tried to bomb the thing that's inside a mountain. Yeah. Jesus. The non-mountain bombing is bad, but at least now it seems to have kind of, like, come to an end for the moment. Nothing new to say about Israel being a kind of, like, dangerously genocidal, war-mongering

state, right, which is a threat to, at this point, global security. And the sole check on that is a real estate developer from Queens getting mad at them. So that's cool. ALICE I will say the Islamic Republic of Iran and the most patient people on earth, I think at this point they have earned an award for that, certainly. Because this is of course now the second time that they've been bombed, and the first time they just kind of sent the drones and did nothing else. And then this time they, the largest, the most warmongering country in the world bombed

them, so they just kinda sent the drones and not much else. ALICE Well, they're still trying to figure out how to kill SpongeBob. SEAN That's true. That's a good point, I didn't think of that. ALICE When they bombed that one US base, Trump said one of the funniest things he's ever said, which is just, by way of arranging this, they're like, they called ahead, right? To be like, hey, can we bomb your base?

Yeah, is like, what okay? Hey, when's a good time, you can bomb, when can we drop a bomb? And Trump's like, oh, you know, about, you know, 1pm, what's up with you, and, you know, he's like twirling the cord of the phone around his face. Ask him, ask him, ask him, ask him, ask him, ask him, ask him, ask him, ask him, ask him, ask him, ask him, ask him, ask him, ask him, ask him, ask him, ask him, ask him, ask him, ask him, ask him, ask him, ask him, ask him, ask him, ask him, ask him, ask him, ask him, ask him, ask him, ask him, ask him, ask him, ask him, ask him, ask him, ask him, ask him, ask him, ask him, ask him, ask him, ask him, ask him, ask him, ask him, ask him, ask him, ask to quarter the phone around his family. Asking the eye of the world, like, so how's... Doing anything, Lin? It's really funny when the, like, remaining kind of command of the, like, Iranian armed forces are, just like, all of their colleagues are getting, like, effortlessly murdered with

their families, and they're like, you know what, we're gonna have to escalate this a bit. And I move to the next chapter of this book by this guy, Baudrillard, and we're gonna like, we're really gonna sort this out. And I call the Americans and ask if I can bomb their base. And we do conceivably have better negotiations standpoints with Iran right now than we do Israel. Yeah, that's true. standpoints with Iran right now than we do with Israel. ALICE Oh, yeah. By far.

The joke I always tell about this is, I came up with this when it was the Soleimani assassination, and it's still true. That like, being a kind of Iranian decision maker is like, you've trained for years to become a kind of chess grandmaster, and you're up against a guy who keeps eating your pieces. Right? Yeah. No, that seems perfectly reasonable. I will say, whatever this happened, I was watching the social network and it took about five minutes before I put my phone down and kept watching the movie. So that was, you

know, that whenever this is the closest we can come to a major global conflict. I would say it's interesting but the fact that one's party, which is Israel, wants to make a major global conflict and can't do it. So, you know, that's very amusing to me. I don't want to say nothing ever happens, but like Iran, they're very patient people and they might want to make nothing ever happen. I feel like you've kind of guaranteed an Iranian nuclear weapon on a long enough timeline. Well we did that as soon as we scrapped the JCPOA. That's true, that is true. Yep, so, you know, that's nothing really new there.

Yeah. Yeah, you know, I mean, at this point, you know, the biggest threat right now is the Israelis getting really mad at nothing, and doing the Samson option. Mm, cool. Yeah. Yeah. JUSTIN Yeah, you know. Which, I don't know, they'll probably do that at some point. You know?

ALICE I hope not. JUSTIN They put out all these videos of like, oh, Iran is gonna nuke Paris. And then they nuke Paris. ALICE Yeah. Honestly, honestly get along with it, maybe it'll kill some of the rats. I've already seen the Mona Lisa, just get rid of Paris, it's fine. The size of that postage stamp. It was bigger than I thought, because I had been told by everyone that it was smaller

than I would think it would be, and that it was bigger than I thought it would be, because I had like internalized that so much. That's a good manager expectations, right there. That's a good skill. Yeah, yeah. It's the only time I've ever done it successfully. I've been to the Freer Gallery, I know how small paintings can be, they can be really small. SEAN I remember, I was at the V&A with my dad, and

they have those gigantic royal portraits that are like 12 feet tall, and my dad grabbed a curator and was like, why is it so big? ALICE I don't want Israel to nuke Paris, cause my ex lives there and I'm fond of my ex, can we negotiate on this, can we nuke somewhere that I'm probably never gonna go, like Stockholm? Oh, they can't nuke Stockholm, what about snus? Oh, sure, Leon must be destroyed. Frankfurt! Do we know anyone in Frankfurt?

This is a global podcast. There's an old Russian joke, right, which came up again in the context of the Ukraine War, where the Russian generals are like, okay, well, we got to bomb the West, where do we bomb? We're gonna bomb Paris. And it's like, no, my wife likes to go shopping there. Okay, we're gonna bomb London. You can't bomb London, my kid goes to school there. Okay, well, we're gonna bomb, fuck, I don't know, like Geneva. Oh, my money's there. And they argue about this for like an hour and eventually they're like, alright, fine. We bomb Voronezh.

Which is in Russia. Because it's the one place that none of them care about. Right? Yeah. We're gonna... Folks, folks, we're gonna bomb Moline, Davenport... I wanna go to Davenport. What are the other...

Just new Tel Aviv and get it over with. I mean, they could always take the funniest option and nuke Moscow. And just like, AHHHHH! Total agents of chaos. Yeah, let's see what happens. Is Israel bored of not getting the attention nukes Kiev and Moscow simultaneously? JUSTIN Simultaneously, yeah. LIAM That's true, they could do that. ALICE Alright, fear that, dickheads!

JUSTIN Pyongyang as well. ALICE The one option, the one country on earth deterrence doesn't work against. Aside from Poland. JUSTIN Oh, yes, obviously. It's cause they have solidarity. That's right. Yeah.

That's true. And Pope, well, they don't have a pope anymore. They're still dining out on the one pope. America has a pope. You know, America's a pope's nation. That's true, we're the pope. If you went to Villanova, it doesn't count. I mean, I can't make fun of the White Sox anymore, because I feel slightly bad. Like, I'm making more points against me to get into heaven, in case the Catholics are

correct. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, well, what can you say but, Ghost Sox. That was... And also with you. Yeah. And with your spirit. Fuck!

Yeah, I changed it on you. That was, to goddamn noose. We talk about in-flight entertainment. Oh shit, yeah. Uh, stairs straight ahead. Yeah, raw docket. Why is I saw the TV glow on it? That's actually my picture.

God, watching I saw the TV glow at the beginning of like an 18 hour flight, you get your egg cracked you're like, oh fuck, I'm in the hell zone. And you've got another like 16 hours of flying. Oh boy. And you're flying out somewhere so you can't even get home to start transitioning. You're just like, mmm. Well the good news is, this is my picture, and I took it on a flight to Seattle, so I mean, it's a relatively good place to end up at the end of that. Oh yeah, they just meet you off the plane, you know?

Yes. Yes. You know what, uh, you know what, uh, film I watch on the airplane? Is it Airplane? Yes. It's a good film to watch on an airplane. It's a good film to watch on a trans- air plane. It's a pretty good film to watch on an airplane. For all the times you've been flying. It's a pretty good film to watch on an airplane.

So I have an audiobook that I only listen to while I'm flying, and I refused to listen to it at any other time, so I've had to listen to this in like two hour sprints over the past like, four years. Almost halfway through, baby! My version of rawdogging is, I sort of semi- raw dog, I wrap it up, right, but not very effectively. I take my- Like a paper towel.

Yeah, gross. I take my noise cancelling headphones and I just listen to music, but I'm looking at my phone to see what the music that I'm listening to is all the time. That's the real autism locking in, and I'm doing that for like five, six hours. SEAN What happens to me is, I get a beer, and I sit down, and when there's some mild turbulence I'm absolutely terrified. SEAN Yeah, you are. With you it's my version of hell. ALICE Like a cat that's been splashed with water,

you're just like, digging into the seat rest. SEAN Yeah, this is true, yeah. ALICE He does do that. SEAN I flew in a very small aircraft in a whiteout this back in February, so I no longer feel any fear on larger aircraft, which is an experience I do. I recommend for everybody and also do not recommend for anybody. I got to turn my air conditioning down because it's 200 million fucking degrees in Philly and I have three desktops running in here.

It's also 2 million degrees here and I've had to close mine in the other room because it's too loud so I'm suffering but that's fine. You should all move to Glasgow, the climate proof city. I was in London for a week doing the Trashfuture live show and it was the hottest venue I've ever done. It was like fucking 50 billion degrees in there because it was like a concrete basement. And we got a bunch of, Gwen, my wife, took a bunch of promotional photos of us, and every single one of us is like mostly sweat. And then I got back to Glasgow and it's like, oh, it's pleasantly cool. Meanwhile, you look

at the weather app on your phone and it's like, the place that you just left is currently on fire. Yes. I will say... It was 101 two days ago here. Goddamn. Yes. The first time we broke 113 years apparently. Uh, is...

I was gonna say something but now I forget what it was. Well, it was about the weather. It's just been insufferable. Oh right, yeah. We've had Canadian wildfire smoke and the heat at the same time, it's been real nice. ALICE Can you hear my fan? SEAN No. ALICE No.

SEAN Excellent. Alright, I'm human again. ALICE Not humid again, which is actually the problem. SEAN No, I am. I am. SEAN So, stinky after this one. ALICE So time was, I'm pulling us back on topic here, time was... SEAN Fuck you! ALICE If you were, I gotta do it, if you were

kind of on a plane, and you're like, I'm bored, I don't know what to do, you wander down to the parlour, or whatever, the dedicated dining room, you go to the smoking room, you take part in Agatha Christie murder mystery, cause you're on a flying boat, or whatever the fuck, and okay, it takes eight hours, cause it's flying at like five miles an hour, but like... JUSTIN You're on Hindenburg, you know, and you go and, um, you know, you, uh, yeah, you go to the restaurant, uh, and you, um, then you go to the smoking room, which has 35 doors between you and the outside world. ALICE Flicking a cigarette butt off the end, off

the, like, out of the Hindenburg must feel so good. Could you imagine the Marlboro limited plane? Oh, yes. Oh, shit. I've got the Marlboro unlimited was like the greatest concept to me is like the worst thing, the worst experience for any human to go through. And I would have killed somebody to get to experience. Oh yeah, me too. Even as somebody who hasn't smoked in five years. Anyway, it's fine any human to go through and I would've killed somebody to get to experience it. ALICE Oh yeah, me too. SEAN Even as somebody who hasn't smoked in five years. Anyway. ALICE It's fine, you make those five years back in about ten minutes. SEAN Oh, that's a good point, yeah. That's true.

Catching up for lost time. ALICE Yeah. But so eventually, like, maybe you wanna do something else besides go and murder one of your fellow passengers, right? SEAN Maybe. ALICE Yeah. SEAN It's very rare that I don't wanna murder. ALICE You're gonna have to lead a bit. SEAN Like... Maybe. Yeah. It's very rare that they don't want to murder.

You wrote all this, you're gonna have to lead a bit. Yeah, sorry, sorry. The top left here, this is what they call the first example of in-flight entertainment, it's called the world's first aircraft cinema, it says there. Oh my god. This, in case you haven't noticed, is just a regular film projector that they are loading into what looks like a Ford dry motor to me. Oh, that's gonna shake so much.

It is. Crank it manual, like the propellers have a belt. Of the world with Imperial Airways LTD! Yes, this was a British innovation. Except I think it started- You're well known for saying it's a British innovation. We gave you, I saw the TV glow on a seatback TV. Like, yes.

That's true. Except I think they were actually the second to do it. And this banner is a lie, but I can't remember what the first one was. I looked it up in my research and did not write it down. Back in the day, you could just lie. You could just do that. Yes. This was the first one to have a picture taken for it, which means that basically it might as well be the first one in terms of documentation. Yeah. So, and also notably, this was 1925, so of course film was made of nitrate at this point, and if you know anything about nitrate, film has a tendency to spontaneously combust. I have a message for Germany.

And this was not a problem, but like, it is an interesting concept to load these spontaneously flammable material aboard the very small aircraft. In any case, I don't think we killed anybody with that. Everybody's smoking. Yes. Everybody's throwing their lit cigarette ends towards the back of the plane. It's a DC-3, it's basically invincible. That's true.

I mean, it's a tri-motor, which is close enough, but this was a point in time whenever planes were sometimes made of wood, and if they got too wet the wings would- Says Wade, we were at the war with the mosquito! If they got too wet the wings would come unglued, and that would kill people a few times. Oh, the wings fall off button. Yeah, the wings fall off rain. In the middle here, this is an ad from Transworld Airlines, an airline that I have made jokes about for the past 10 years I've been trans.

This is sort of a later but more common concept of in-flight entertainment, which is still just film projector. But like by the 1950s, film projectors had gotten like normal enough that they had done a they had started there was like a specialized industry for this for in-flight entertainment specifically is that what this is on the bottom left is that a project that yeah that's a later one um this is this one yeah that's a later one this is just this is the original one which would have just been a film projector not really that far off from the same technology on the older one um they the Since of course films have gained the technology of sound in the intervening 25 years, 30 years, they had developed in-flight audio, which was done

by pneumatic tubes at this point in time, and a system I don't really understand. ALICE That's crazy. SID That's like getting the pneumatic tube canister through to your seat, and you open it up and it just plays a noise. SEAN Yeah, I don't really understand that. ALICE That's wild. SEAN That is more fun than a static card with tight dialogue on it.

ALICE Well, because originally if you're screening a silent movie in a plane, you gotta get the projector in there and then you've gotta get the pianist as well. SEAN Oh, that's true, yeah. ALICE Oh, yeah, that's a good point. SEAN Yeah. SEAN Well, of course, notably planes were so loud in the first one that the pianist had to play very loudly. Well, that's all. Yes. Oh, yeah, that was also happened.

You have upright piano. Yes. Just drag it out. What kind of what kind of airplane or airport specialty vehicle do you need to load the upright piano? No, I think it's I think it's like an integral structural part of the airplane. You know, you're doing like a banked turn. And the piano's going from side to side. Once the rain starts, the piano's the only thing keeping the wing on.

It's a load bearing piano. Um, yeah, the pneumatic tube thing. That's this load bearing piano you shouldn't detune. The pneumatic tube thing is weird and I don't understand it. As far as I can tell, Delta had them until like 2006 on some planes, which is even more confusing, because Delta flies absolutely ancient aircraft until the wings essentially fall off, and they still do that. It's because they don't put the piano on there.

And they don't know, and they don't know that, okay, in certain kinds of turbulence, the only thing you can do is play Claire de Lune. That's the only thing that keeps the wing on. Banging out nearer, my god, to thee on the DC-3. It's gonna make the same goddamn joke. Fuck. It's not formulaic, it's a callback. The bottom left is not one of the projectors, sort of, that would feature in the middle, except that's a simulated screenshot, but like, this is a slightly later one. This is a

projector that is essentially made of three cathode ray tubes that do, each do red, green, and blue. If you know how a rear projection TV from like the 1980s or 90s works, it's basically the same concept. They were not very, they were not great, but they could run for infinite amounts of time and didn't really require maintenance. So they were... It looks very space age, and I guess this is one of those things that, like, airplane food or whatever, that just kind of gets stagnates for a while, just plateaus, and... SEAN What's the deal with that? ALICE Yeah, it becomes fodder for stand-up comedians,

because it's just a fact of life of flying that everyone has to accept, as you're all looking at the movie that they screen on, like, you have no choice in this. SEAN Yes. ALICE You can either, like, get the headphones or the little pneumatic tubes or whatever, or not, so you can either, like, watch this, watch Cary Grant muted, or watch Cary Grant with sound, but you have to watch him. SEAN Yes. JUSTIN I think it'd be funny if you were in airline and you're like, we're gonna do some, like, really, really

out there films, like, Fox Today's in-flight film is, uh, come and see! ALICE I hate flying Alitalia, they made me watch Salo 120 days in Sodom. SEAN Can do Letterboxd to charter aircraft for weird film screenings? ALICE Do not give them that idea, they will do it. They have the marketing budget to do whatever kind of silly bullshit they hear someone with aircraft for weird film screenings. Do not give them that idea, they will do it. They have the budget to do whatever kind of silly bullshit they hear someone with enough followers

say on the internet. They will do that. Thank God I have less than a thousand followers still. So the one at the bottom left, this is what they had sort of after the film projector, but it's the same basic sort of concept. You're just projecting a film from a central source. They were mostly done from tapes at this point, not like VHS tapes, but like video eight tapes, which I'm sure like five of you are going to know what I'm talking about. It's a little contact piece. Audience of trans women going, yuck!

That's a fair point. Also audience of like Techmoan viewers. I know there's a fair overlap there. Including me, yeah. Yeah, I know you're there because you're in the fucking Patreon credits every time I watch it. Jesus Christ, am I? I guess so, yeah, that makes sense. I should become a Patreon of that guy, I like him. I love Tecmoan. He's good at his work. But that's...

Video 8 was just sort of the small tape format, not super relevant here. This sort of projector was common in airlines, but also a bunch of other places, you'll notice this picture is actually mounted in like a classroom or something. But it's the exact same thing, it's just three cathode ray tubes that get really hot and put a lot of voltage through them, and they project an image. And it looks bad, but you can project an image with reliability, and that's what they need. At least you can't set this one on fire with a cigarette, though. Yes. If you've ever watched Die Hard 2, they should turn on The Simpsons with one of these.

On the right is sort of where we are now, this is the seatback in Flight Entertainment, these have been around for probably 20 years or so. This is a picture that I took, this was also on Delta Airlines, coincidentally, they have moved past pneumatic tubes and have gone towards. Wow. The 21st century. Yes. This is just sort of how most people would recognize, would recognize in-flight entertainment as the big screen that you can touch and you can watch movies. Nowadays it's for free. It used to be that you had to pay for them.

But nowadays the sort of airlines that would make you pay for them just don't give you anything at all, which is very funny. I remember when, in the back of the seat, there was a weird bulky telephone. Yes. Yes. First time, first time I ever flew, my parents yelled at me for even getting close to trying to touch the damn thing. You were out of $5,000 dues for touching the Skyphone. Yes. $5,000 was a lot more in 1999.

And also this was like 2005, so at that point they were gluing over some of them, but some of them the glue panels had fallen off and the foam was still there, because US Airways was a bad airline. I always wonder, and I don't know if there's an answer to this, about how curated the seat back video is, can I watch flight on a plane? Is that allowed? Am I allowed to see Denzel Washington doing coke before flying the plane? Right?

They're pretty heavily trimmed. Every film that I have seen, except for TV Glo, funnily enough, has been trimmed or censored in some way. I watched the first Austin Powers film on a flight, like a couple years ago, and there were actually scenes where they had cropped down the picture to censor something, and did not have enough resolution, so it was just very blurry compared to the scenes before it and the scene after it. ALICE Yeah, that's actually accurate.

Yeah, that's actually accurate. Yeah. We've got a clumsily drawn, like, turtleneck over Heather Graham. I watched the French dispatch on the plane. That would be... I would do that, that would be... And it had, you know, there is a scene with nudity, and it was just there, it was fine. I have not... Maybe it's only on flights to Europe where they don't have morals.

Yeah, you're scrolling past sallow. Yeah, exactly. But like... That's too tame for me. Yeah. I mean, I also... My question was sort of like, not so much about sex and violence, but like... What they have on there, yeah.

Do they kind of avoid, do they block out the ones that are gonna set people off into fits of hysterics because they include wings falling off a plane? Can I watch alive on a plane? You know? It's a good question. You can actually look at the... I'm looking at the flights that Delta has right now and it all looks rather basic stuff. Oh, they got Jurassic Park on here.

ALICE You do gotta kind of keep people calm, right? And like, okay, you're not gonna get that much exhilaration out of a tiny, sort of iPad-sized screen, but like, you don't wanna hit anyone's phobia of flying. And I've always wondered about that. Like, how... ZACH Not something I know the answer to, but now I also want to know the answer to. ALICE It's actually all, uh, mentor pilot, uh, air crash videos.

I'm like popping open all of my aviation disaster specific YouTube channels. They're putting this podcast on the plane. I'm like, what, what, yeah, I'll tie in with Delta, yeah. Yeah, we could be the last fuckin' bit- you ever see that? Hold on, I'm talking with what, why, yeah, out to high end with Delta, yeah. SEAN Yeah, we can be the last fuckin' bit! You ever see the- ALICE Hold on, I'm talking with United, actually. Yeah. Yeah.

ALICE Getting us to do the safety briefing. SEAN Oh hell yeah. SEAN Oh hell yeah. ALICE Oh, I'm heard saying it's R, okay. You ever see the dash cam videos we show up on sometimes, where people are listening to us? ALICE Yeah! And then crash their cars.

I'm sorry about your car, it's very funny when that happens. SEAN This is a new one, I've never heard this, this is the funniest thing I've heard all day. ALICE Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm not sorry about your car. Our cars. ALICE Doing the safety briefing, and it's like, in the very unlikely event of an emergency and you're told to issue an embrace position, you're gonna wanna get your neck over something so that it snaps as quickly as possible, and you're just not- SEAN That's true. ALICE You're not present for like, whatever happens next, you know?

SEAN I'm going off camera and off mic, because I gotta eat, so carry on. That done like three people do that, and they're the only people who died because it was a perfectly fine land. Yeah, and I am sued for five hundred trillion dollars. Don't do that. I do the last scene of Flight, but it's like, I was on my phone. I'm on my phone now. Like, I was posting.

Yeah, I was gonna say, most airlines don't tell you to do the brace position, but most airlines don't really tell you anything of interest, because nobody pays attention these days. Mm, that's true, yeah. They try to make it like a fun little thing. It's dangerously plausible that we could do one. Somebody's... I think Delta started making them like a fun little thing and I just became a trend that nobody cares about because

Nobody watches the safe Safety brief went viral Yes, this has happened. They have talked about this fucking insane United the United International safety brief is like, you know a fun jaunt through Europe with American in Paris playing in the background and and then, like, you know, the safety seems secondary. Yeah. ALICE Yeah, that's about... that's how most of them

are. That's the... ALICE Yeah. I always like the British Airways one. I usually fly British Airways when I can, if I get a choice, which you basically don't now. Just because there's something about the corporate affect to British Airways, which has been made so deliberately soulless because all they had was like Imperial nostalgia,

and now they don't want to do that. So it's just kind of generic airline brackets British, which means, you know, the flight stands by like gray flannel and stuff. But the affect of the safety brief is is very much like, it's like a therapist, right, when you are being floridly insane, just trying to like, gently and calmly reassure you that you're not gonna die on the plane. And I value that, I need that. I need the kind of banal Britishness of like, well, you know, you're probably not gonna crash into water, but if you do, there's some things that you can do, and just think about those, you know? But you're probably not gonna crash into water, but if you do, there's some things that you can do, and just think about those, you know? But you're probably not gonna need to.

JUSTIN I like United, because I have the confidence that if someone is an asshole, they will break his legs and drag him off the plane. SEAN That's a great- that is a completely reasonable point. As far as I'm aware, they have, like, the strongest union culture of any of the major legacy airlines. So I assume these are somehow related to each other. Oh my god, they get the biggest fucking thugs out there to take off an asshole. Italian American Airlines. United go fuck yourself. Yeah, the average safety briefing now on Delta they do they will actually right now they

talk about their corporate history because it's their 100th anniversary this year, which is not relevant and stupid. Or you fly a low cost airline with no screens or on regional and so the you just have the flight attendants give you the most straight laced thing of your life, which they do not want to do and nobody is paying attention to. Yeah. Particularly God, I flew Frontier to Philly for the live show. And that was the most that was the most unattentive and like vaguely. I don't want to say uncivilized, but like, I don't know.

That crowd was that crowd was questionable. Anyways, so I keep talking about Delta is the only airline I fly to because I fly to Seattle. 52 minutes in, we're on slide one. Let's go. OK. Next slide. The good news. So the good news is the videotape thing on the right. I already talked about on accident.

This was by the time the 90s came around, videotape was a lot more common. So you could start doing the whole individual in seats entertainment system. The one on the left here, this is what Swiss Air had before, the one we're going to talk about in a minute. ALICE This is the coolest thing I've ever seen in my life. I need to control more things in my life with controls like this. I mean, if it was more like, is the word skeuomorphic? If it had more clicky clacky buttons and panels and stuff then I'd be more in favour of it, but this is really good still. Yes.

Yeah, this is why people still like blackberries. Mm. Yeah, I mean, I kind of agree with that at this point, so. I get the point. This is, so basically these just act as sort of a control hub for a video tape player that can also seek left and right. It's complex to explain in a way that doesn't actually matter. But by the time the early 90s come around, somebody had decided to come up with the interactive

in flight entertainment system. And the first company to do this, if you click the next slide was Was actually Nintendo of all companies. Oh my god Okay, so they they sort of they were sort of the first major company to explore this They they developed what they called the Nintendo Gateway system, which is very hard to find documentation about so Some of this is like off some of this is best guesswork This is this this is like similar to the phone. They charged you $5,000 if you touched actually yes, this is the yeah Yeah, so this was the sort of first I quote unquote interactive setup that was really installed

It was installed on Northwest Airlines and a bunch of Japanese Airlines and like Air Canada and British Airways. I think Northwest Airlines and a bunch of Japanese Airlines and Air Canada and British Airways, I think. It was fancy because you could pay to play Super Nintendo and eventually Game Boy games. Which, y'know, they also introduced this system in hotels, and one other scenario that I suddenly can't think of, but uh- You had to work so hard to be like a gamer back in the day. Oh yeah. Oh yeah. Oh yeah.

Well, this wasn't even the first in-flight video game system, but the first one is so stupidly con... The first one was also on a 1925 British plane, but it's like, you line up in the aisle and play Quoites, and technically that counts. Yeah, you know, you see the system installed in a hotel and like you have to pay extra to play Leisure Suit Larry. Hell yeah. You get like three hours of entertainment out of that game, that's worth paying five bucks for. I mean, not 1990, it wasn't. Oh yeah, no. last time I played the first Leisure Suit Larry I cheated

the whole way through so that's just how it goes. So yeah this was sort of the first basic like interactive one it's kind of sort of the basic roadmap for what we have nowadays the more common systems that we have nowadays. I don't know when these were retired I really don't know anything about how they worked or how much they cost. I know how much it cost in hotels because that was like five dollars an hour to play Super Nintendo or N64 games, which is somewhat ridiculous, but never mind. Minimum wage You're gonna find like some youtuber flying to like an island off the coast of Chile or something

In a plane that still has one of these in it and he's taken that flight solely in order to find this. Like, yeah. Oh, annoyingly, this sounds like something I would do, so I can't actually say anything negative about that. Oh no, it's really cool. Like, I'm a big fan, as a guy who just goes to, like, different bits of Central America looking for old planes that are still flying, so. Yeah, no, I wish I had the money to do this, or else I...

Fortunately I can't, and unfortunately I can't go to Iran for old planes anymore, because we blew up some of them the other day. Aww, that was a bad decision. If Israel touches a single F-14, tie me to the fucking ICBM and fire it at Tel Aviv. They blew up one, and they said that it was one that was like, quote unquote, minutes from takeoff, but it was obviously one that they were just using for spare parts. Yeah Yeah, I guess yeah, I guess we got the 747 SP out there too not anymore They just have they just have the 200 which I think Israel also blew up one of those god fucking damn it

We not anything nice in the world. Not only right not only do you start a war, it's not just Israel, it's like the US, it's Russia as well, it's like not only do you start a war, but you also destroy a bunch of really interesting aircraft. I am still mad about that Antonov, I will be mad about that until the day I die. Yeah, I'm mad about that too. I think everybody, I think most people are, it's pretty reasonable, yeah. I mean, they still want to rebuild it, they still want to rebuild it out of the other one that was like half done, but they gotta find want to rebuild it. They still want to rebuild it out of the other one that was like half done Yeah, they gotta find money for it. They're gonna have to I mean that that was a very important aircraft globally for moving big stuff

like global logistical choke points like for real So that was sort of the first stab at an interactive in-flight entertainment system The second more relevant one today if you go to the next slide we're actually going to get into the stuff that's relevant to this specific flame. What are we doing on time so far? An hour? An hour? Yeah. Starting a story now.

So in the year 1994, Yuri Yitkis, a Soviet-born engineer who had immigrated to Las Vegas, Nevada... Oh, first mistake. ...started a company called Interactive Flight Technologies, Incorporated. a soviet-born engineer who had immigrated to Las Vegas, Nevada. Oh, first mistake. Started a company called Interactive Flight Technologies, Incorporated. The company's vision was to develop a state-of-the-art interactive in-flight entertainment system, close quote. They could integrate and sell to any airlines that wanted such a thing on any aircraft, any long-haul aircraft, I should say. As I've written here, the company's other vision was presumably to enrich the family because as far as I could tell, the company

started with five employees, all of which in the immediate family of the first guy we mentioned. The nepotism, the nepotism angle and the small business owner angle will come back in quite a few times. So keep in mind. You can't even get into the in-flight entertainment system business if you're not an itkiss. I have seen this exact map. This map is so familiar. This is when they invented that relief map that you have spent hours bored out of your mind looking at.

Yeah. Yeah. Are we there yet? No. Are we there yet? No. It's like, damn, I know what our ground airspeed is. That's useful information to

me. Like, ooh, we can watch L.A. Confidential! JUSTIN It's because I'm monitoring the situation. ALICE That is the benefit of the big map, is you do get to be like... I have no input over what the pilot's doing, but I'm monitoring, I'm supervising, I'm pretty sure that... JUSTIN I'm monitoring the situation, if something goes wrong in the cockpit, I've done an ocular pat down, I can go up there and resolve any problem that may occur.

Actually, something I didn't mention that's relevant to that. In the 70s, American Airlines and a couple others started putting cameras in the cockpit that they would broadcast to the cabin for passengers to look at. Whoa. And they did that until American Airlines 191 happened and an engine fell off and they all watched themselves fly into the ground at high speed. Nice. And then they stopped doing that. Oh, oh, but if I were there monitoring the situation,

I wouldn't have gone down like that. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Oh, that's that's that's Oh, that's the McDonald Douglas slash Boeing seal of quality there, to be fair. Oh, Stuartus, I've played Microsoft flights. I'm gonna remind you that you can buy from the store, which is gonna be in the links, a McDonald Douglas, we'll kill you, t-shirt. I saw someone wearing one to the Trashfuture live show, it looked good as hell. I saw someone wearing one at the Phillyfuture live show, it looked good as hell. SEAN I saw someone wearing one at the Philly live

show and I went up and introduced myself like, hey. ALICE Sorry, go ahead. SEAN And they didn't recognize who I was instantly, which is quite funny, but completely understandable. ALICE There was somebody wearing a meat deck shirt at the London show. SEAN Yeah, someone bought one! ALICE Yeah, finally.

SEAN Yeah, amazingly. SEAN I gotta get one of them. So we bought one! ALICE Yeah, finally. JUSTIN Yeah, amazingly. ALICE I gotta get one of them. JUSTIN People purchase our merchandise. ALICE People order our merch, or poom. JUSTIN Poom. ALICE People order our merchandise. SEAN So, by 1995, Interactive Flight Technologies,

IFT, they developed the first generation system, as far as I can tell, they sold this to one airline, which was Alitalia. ALICE They really wanted to show you Silo. They were obsessed about it. SEAN It was fucked up, to be honest. JUSTIN It's not for everyone, it is a cinematic masterpiece, I understand. ALICE Yeah, yeah. Alitalia doesn't exist anymore, so I can call them absolute freaks on the internet without libeling anyone. JUSTIN Oh yeah, I keep forgetting about that.

SEAN Oh, it's just a bunch of like spaghetti westerns on there. ALICE Oh yeah. We're all gonna sit there and watch Ducky Sucker. For sixteen hours. SEAN I do miss Alitalia. Beautiful livery, beautiful livery when applied to rally cars as well. SEAN Oh yeah, absolutely. JUSTIN Yeah. Also it was a livery that hadn't been when applied to rally cars as well. Oh yeah, absolutely. Yeah.

Also it was a livery that hadn't been changed in 40 years, which totally is the secret to not having a good livery these days. Yep. Yep. Yep. Put it on the Lancia Stratos and yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Um, so after they bought it for the one plane, which was the McDonnell Douglas MD-11, which is the relevant plane type for this entire episode, but for here specifically, uh, they bought it in time explicitly as a test and that they would expand it to other planes in their fleet if they decided it worked good enough. Al Itali did not buy it for any more aircraft based on the documentation I have seen. Just like we tested it, we found it to be shit. Yes. It wasn't good enough. I couldn't see the orgy as clearly as I wanted to. By 1995, IFT had relocated to Phoenix, Arizona.

What if it's the opposite? What if Alitalia was screening Salo not because they're absolute freaks but because they're absolute cinema nerds and they were screening like, I don't know, 8 and a half or La Ventura or something. And they're like, well this fucking sucks, I'm not moved to crying, I'm not moved to tears by the beauty of this artistic achievement at all. I can hardly see the fucking thing. I'm switching over to the map instead of this.

This is an insult to Italian cinema. JUSTIN Yeah, exactly. I... I missed when there was a big screen at the front of the plane. You know, obviously what they need to do is constantly fly at a lower pitch so you have cinema seating, so you can see the big screen at the front of the plane. Just one big vomit comet. I mean, one thing that I was gonna say about British Airways earlier is that I kind of

miss airline nationalism, in the sense that, like, you know, when you're a little kid and you went to the airport and you were like, oh my god, there's people from all over the world, there's planes from all over the world, everywhere has a culture and they're all wonderful, you know, and you're like, that's, that's the Alitalia plane, I don't know why everybody's crying, but like, that's the Alitalia plane, it's like white, green and red, it looks beautiful, it's emblematic, right? And then you fly a different airline and you're like, oh fuck, I'm experiencing the culture of Tajikistan, because they're giving me Tajik food.

And now they kind of don't really do that. You get the same food and you get the same movies, just off of a Netflix thing, and it's like, I want to take Air France and I want them to start showing me Goddard movies. You know? JUSTIN You go on British Airways and there's no movies, there's just a selection of Adrian Childs articles. ALICE Yeah.

What it is, is it's Love Island. JUSTIN Wow, yeah. SEAN My wife is currently watching Love Island, which makes me want to throw up in my mouth. ALICE Absolutely. You're welcome to our cultural exports. JUSTIN Great British baking show. ALICE Yeah. JUSTIN We're going to have a food edition.

SEAN We never really... the judges on Great British Baking are so pervert. ALICE Uh, they're all gross. What you gotta watch is the Great Australian Bake Off, which is now gonna be hosted by a friend of the show, Tom Walker. JUSTIN Oh, hell yeah. SEAN Oh, shit. You gotta watch is the great Australian bake off, which is now going to be hosted by a friend of the show, Tom Walker. Oh, hell yeah. Yeah, he's got a he's got a, you know, drive a car 900 miles an hour into there. I'm gonna have to put that as the second entry on cooking shows I actually want to watch.

Yes. I had to live there with Iron Chef, which will be there until the end of time. This is a lesson, a salutary lesson for all of us. If you drive yourself insane for long enough on the internet, eventually you will land a like lucrative job. Oh my god. I'm so poor and I don't have the lucrative insane internet job yet. Once. So once IFT started designing the second generation of the system, which they did after relocating to Phoenix, they started building it around a standard Intel based computer that ran Microsoft Windows NT server, which did kind of vastly expand the capabilities that they could do because they were installing a whole Intel based computer under

every seat in the aircraft. Oh, sick. Yeah, now the main problem with running like standard computer silicon in an embedded application like that is that of course computers tend to get quite warm. Yes. You're doing the Liam's room kind of temperature gradients. I'm dying out here. Yeah, actually, actually also doing the my living room temperature gradient right now, to be fair.

Look, if you have to run the heating in winter, you don't own enough computers. That's right, baby. Yeah. Oh, you'll never betray me, will you, 3080 exhaust. And the fan noise blends right into the engine noise. This is true. I read, Kurt told me, she's like, I actually find the server hum really soothing. And I was like, yeah, I bet you do. We all float down here, baby.

As as far as I have read, I think that the thing about the server fans blending in with the engine noise was actually a part of their calculus. So amazing. Yeah. So that bleed air just goes straight through as the once through cooling. So all of these machines ran very hot and it was something that IFT knew about. But Determined was not actually that detrimental to operation because it didn't affect the main server, which was a much less compact unit that was integrated into the internal wiring harnesses of the aircraft.

Yeah, we took out one of the toilets to put in like a filing cabinet sized server, and that's what Paul's hope floats. Well, every airliner basically has one of these, it's just under the cockpit. If you've never seen a picture of one, it's very interesting. It's just a bunch of avionics gear that looks like server gear, in like regular ass racks, it's crazy shit. At least on modern planes, obviously. We've built a lot of computers into these things nowadays.

JUSTIN I usually put this shit in a 727 and it's like, just a closet with servers asrily thrown in there. The toilet's still there, the sink is still there. ALICE Oh, god damn it. Jesus Christ. I will, to be clear, I have a 3D printer right here if you need hard drive adapters I will gladly... They are seated in trays, they're just not secured into those trays.

I'm so mad at you. It's press fit, it's fine. It's but by accident. The holes on the trays don't marry up with the screw holes on the hard drives. Yes they do. No they don't marry up with the screw holes on the hard drives. Yes they do. No they don't. I'm doing fucking steam logic puzzles here to try and to try and match them up and they don't match up. Listen when I get I'm gonna get evicted in like three months time I'm gonna have to move house

and I'm gonna have to pick up this computer and move it again right so like I don't know there's a decent chance this ends with the podcast buying a new computer. Yeah, don't worry, throw another credit card, we got it. I understand both sides of this, because I have a 3D printer that can do hard drive packets, but also next to me is a laptop that the hard drive is literally floating around inside of, so I get both sides of this argument. Granted, this is 20 years old, so a bit of a different scenario. What if we secured it in some kind of jelly situation, like an aspic? This is... some embedded hardware actually does this.

Not like, aspic. Alright, it's just floating around in honey. Like a D&D slime. It's just a D&D slime, you know, it's just in there. So they decided that the seat units running hot wasn't a problem, because of course they didn't get hot enough to cause a problem, at least as far as they could tell, and it didn't affect the main server. So it's only under every seat.

Yes. Yeah. So they finished developing this and made it deployable and they called it What was it the in flight and entertainment network since this was the second generation the whole system was called if en-2 You really rolls off the tongue. Yes, what you're looking at right now is a picture of the configuration They gave to Swiss air You'll notice the films thing and they have the nice touchscreens where you can select between different languages on a film. You can watch LA confidential and French, which would make it an interesting, even more interesting film.

Prolo Tomasi. Yeah, no, I have some thoughts about Swiss that I'll get into later. Sure. Makes makes sense for the multi language thing, I guess, because otherwise you would have riots, you know. You gotta have French and German at least on that. None of these films are in Romance. Yeah, this is bullshit. Swiss Federal Council, please bankrupt Swiss Air- oh wait.

Oh, that was a good one. I'm still mad about that. I'll be mad about that for a long time. We'll get into what the fuck is a Swiss International Airlines. I'll kill you. So the so IFT would eventually get lucky and would sign a memorandum of understanding with the National Flag Carrier of Switzerland Swiss air Yes, May 1st 1996 outlining a deal to install the system on 16 McDonnell Douglas MD 11s and five Boeing 747s And would involve a bizarre that cost revenue and cost sharing model that I did not really understand Involving IFT paying to maintain the system on some planes and paying for some others. Not really that relevant, it was just fucking weird. Average airline financing for anything.

Yeah, that's about right actually. IFEN2 notably had a killer feature that the original system did not have. That being, go to the next slide please. Gambling. Gambling. Gambling. Gambling. IFT designed a system that had three games, Kino, Slots, and something called Risco, a

game that I can't actually find any details of. It's presumably not the board game, which is based off of Risk, which we would be fun to gamble on. No, that'd be pretty fun. I think they should do like- Oh, I'd love to gamble on Risk. Yeah, that'd be pretty good. I mean, if you made that skill-based, you know, I mean, so much of gambling. Gambling just isn't what it used to be anymore, you know, these days. Oh, that's true. Yeah.

You just start gambling on board games. Can we do, like, professional board games? No gambling on Lotto-Doge. Yeah. The IFT themselves would run the gambling services, the financial side of things would be handled by the Swiss lottery Which makes this a multinational partnership? I think You would swipe your credit card and you would be allowed to spend up to $200 and went up to

$3,500 which hell yeah, it seems That's a no-brainer, baby What happens if I spend up to $200 before I win? $3,500 that is a good question. I assume the answer is fuck you. Yeah. Yeah. That's actually money.

Yeah. Excuse me. Excuse me, stewardess. I didn't win my $3,500. There's something wrong with the system. So yeah, the gambling system or the sorry, the Federal Aviation Administration approved IFTs overseeing the gambling operation, which as far as I can tell legally made them in the same class as a casino.

Which is interesting. ALICE They're based out of Vegas, right? SEAN No, they're based out of Phoenix at this point. Which is an even worse place to be. ALICE Phoenix casinos? SEAN Yes. So all the gambling was paid out by the Swiss National Lottery but all the infrastructure was running out of Phoenix.

Very strange setup. But they advertise gambling as the revenue driver, especially for those in business first class. ALICE Yeah, I mean, first class fires absolutely have that kind of money to burn, and are stupid, so... JUSTIN Yes. That's the shit that, like like high rollers like is slot machines They don't like the things where you know, they're sitting at a table and doing like I want like

Yeah, yeah, no, no, no, that's what real James Bond would go straight for the slot machine and just pulling the lever. Yeah There is you can't play slots on this it's what's going on in the bottom right there but it appears to be a bizarre nontical themed slots with fish. Swissair had actually agreed to install it on all three of the classes first business and coach but you know the gambling was like they can fleece first in business class travelers something fierce here. Okay, so the part about it being installed in three classes is relevant for the next They can fleece first in business class travelers. Something fierce here. Okay, so the part about it being installed in three classes is relevant for the next slide,

which, next slide please. Thank you. Ooh, diagram. Yes, the system was actually initially originally designed for the first of business class cabins and was designed to run on the same power distribution unit as the cabin, which is normal for how in-flight entertainment systems work for presumably obvious reasons.

You know, it's in the cabin. Yeah. This meant that it would be powered by the electrical system called the cabin bus. All caps. Yes. Just writing down what it says in the official reports and in the cockpit. I don't really know why it's all caps. Because it's important.

Yes. When you read it, you have to shout it. Cabin bus. Cabin bus. You do it with an air of wonder. The cabin bus. Yeah. Cabin bus. If it would also you would have a matching cabin bus breaker

that would be labeled as such in cockpit, and pulling said breaker would, in an emergency, kill all power to everything in the cabin minus essential systems. This was obviously considered essential, and was on a fair amount of emergency checklists from both Swiss Air and McDonnell Douglas themselves, including the one for quote, smoke from unknown origin, close quote. Oh, dollar man. You smoke in the toilet. I want my smoke on the airplane to be him, from the cigarette, right? Yeah, exactly.

ALICE And somebody who shuts off all the gambling, and's like, god fucking damn it. SEAN Yes. As- SEAN Stewart, where's my $3,500? SEAN As Swissair had requested that they install it on every seat on the aircraft, IFT found that the cabin power distribution would not have enough power to drive the entertainment system. The decision to install it in the coach cabin called for an entire second equipment rack in the forward main cabin. Basically the big server unit,

they were going to put two of them in there at the same time. That's what the diagram shows. You can see the first rack there towards the forward of the aircraft and the second rack there towards sort of center of the aircraft. Oh, I see. This is all from investigative reports afterwards. All this just to facilitate slot machines? Yeah, that's essentially the case. Yeah. And rescue. Yeah.

Recyclo. Recyclo, excuse me. I think. The decision was made to wire directly into the second of the aircraft's two AC electrical distribution systems, meaning it was isolated from any and all cabin safety measures, although it could theoretically still safely be shut down in an emergency as long as the essential AC bus remained online. Oh, okay.

So you just wire it in anywhere, basically? Yes. Great. Yeah, it looks good. Guys, just splice it in there, it's anywhere, basically. Yes. Great. Yeah, it looks good. Just place it in there. It's fine. It's good. Going down the checklist and it's like, what is it? What do you mean shut down half the slot machine?

Yeah, it's circuit breaker controls the right engine and the gambling. Oh, that's a tricky wiring. The Federal Aviation Administration, who was overseeing this because IFT was an American company and McDonnell Douglas was an American company, despite Swiss Air being a European carrier, would approve installing the system like this in one single aircraft, meaning that they were legally allowed to install it on other MD-11s as long as they were configured identically and the systems were installed identically to one another. This was mainly as a testing feature, although as far as I'm aware they just kind of ran with it.

ALICE Yeah, looks good. Looks good to me. ALICE It's better to ask for forgiveness than permission. ALICE Right until we go... ALICE They don't like that saying at the FAA, I understand. The FAA would also approve this despite the decision to use a different less flame-retardant mylar material compared to the rest of the aircraft's wiring systems. It's a long USB cord, it's fine. Yes.

I don't have USB yet, this is like fucking SCSI or some shit. So 1997, USB existed, it was just the slowest, the absolute slowest. Yeah. Yep. And Windows didn't support it yet. But that is Jesus. So Windows still doesn't really support it. It's firewire. That actually didn't exist yet.

Firewire 800. Yeah, that's our fucking deal with this. Good rule, actually. I have so so many firewire cables right next to me. Despite using what essentially amounts to two separate systems, they decided to wire both of them into AC-Bus 2, despite the fact that they could've wired one of them into the cabin bus as originally planned, which would've been more complex, but would've been easier to shut it down. Oh, okay, so now you can't shut down slot machines.

In essence, yeah. They all say slot machines. Dead man switch, but only down slot machines. In essence, yeah. In essence, yeah. Failsafe slot machines. Dead man switchman only for slot machines. Wings falling off. Engines falling off. Stabilizers gone. Slot machines still going.

Operational. It's like the Titania bathtub, but they're Titania slot machines. This is a flight data recorder and slot machine day out box. Yeah. The pilot has, like, a lever in the cockpit to increase or decrease the odds on the slot machines. I'm sorry that your loved one was killed, however we recovered the cockpit data recorder and we found that, um, they were screaming a lot but they are entitled to about $100 worth of credit card refunds from slots.

Yeah, actually, you know, the payout goes directly to the pilot, so there were chips flying around the cabin. The pneumatic tube full of chips. Yeah. So they went ahead with installing this on all the aircraft they had originally agreed to. The first unit was installed in an MD-11 in January 1997 with the plan to be to install the system in one to two planes per month up through February 1998. Depending on maintenance schedules,

they weren't going to bother unless it was in the hangar for something else, obviously. Swiss Air, the Swiss lottery and the IFT were contractually obligated to service the system until December 31 2003. Swissair after introducing the system to public fanfare in January 1997 with a ton of press photos, some of which I've already used several times would consider it a success. Although for reasons I can't really figure out they would disable in coach cabin by April 1997. Meaning the entire power distribution issue was entirely moot. And they could have switched back. We're not making any money off these people, but we got to keep the sort of like wiring architecture to do it.

Just in case. Yep. Yes. Which you know, I can see the justification for not rewiring the plane. If not for everything that's about to happen. Next slide. This is another one of them press photos I just talked about. if not for everything that's about to happen. Next slide. This is another one of them press photos I just talked about

because I just need to talk about the system for a minute. Swiss Air would get a... Oh, I could get the info. You could. Oh, and Chance. Chance. That's the game. I like I really like Air, just Air Show.

That's my favorite. That's the map. I know it's a map, Moira. So they have to have Chance, but where's Community Chest? Oh, it's in your ass, Roz. My favorite. What? It's in your ass. It's in your butt. OK.

I have a fun aside about that, since I we were on tour. What did you do to my ass? An ass side, if you will. I was I was talking to Jay. We were setting up for filling for the Fillmore. And he's like, Oh, do you have this cable? I think it's probably in your and I'm about to say I think it's probably in your butt. And Jake cuts me off because I've been making this joke six nights in a row. It goes, I swear to God, if you say it's in my ass, I'll fuck you up. I've never seen a man like break composure like this. It was just like, shut the fuck up. And I was like, never seen a man break composure like this, or like, I think it was just like, shut

the fuck up, and I was like, oh, he's broken composure, I've done it, the joke is so annoying. ALICE You're declaring victory at that moment, yeah. ALICE I wanna go to... what do you think, uh, they got behind the paid film, uh, paywall? SEAN I was gonna ask, yeah, what's one of the free films here? ALICE Sala again. SEAN I didn't notice this when I was putting it together,, what's one of the free films here? Mm, solo again. I didn't notice this when I was putting it together.

I have to wonder what the free films were and if it was just the safety video. You have to pay for it with a MasterCard as well. Also, train arriving at the station. What else? Maybe some Buster Keaton. That's not a bad deal. I'd watch some Buster Keaton. That'd actually be pretty good.

You know, it's probably behind the paywall, actually. They didn't even have the term paywall yet, that's how primitive they were. Back then you had to put MasterCard logo on there. To let them know, no. No Visa, no American Express. Only MasterCard. Sometimes I wonder if I've fallen off and then I remember that American Express, only MasterCard. Sometimes I wonder if I've fallen off and then I feel, then I remember that American Express exists and I feel a lot better.

That's a good point there, yeah. They don't even deliver stuff anymore. What the fuck? American unhurried. Yeah. So American Express and Western Union, two of the biggest crash outs of, I was going to say our time, but that's a much different time. American Express and Western Union, two of the biggest crash outs of, I was going to say our time, but that's a much different time.

Look, Western Union is still going somehow. I don't know what people use it for. Remittances, genuinely. I was going to say they use it for money transfer. They used to use it for money transfer to get scammed, but now they just use cryptocurrency. Yeah, no, no, Western Union is like propping up the economy of a bunch of like poorer countries Yeah, this is actually true Money Gramm is as well for the same reason. Yeah

So sorry hang on where was I that's right I had one drink I shouldn't be this out of it So Swiss Air got a fair bit of positive industry press Passengers liked it a lot. Although the features would not be as thrilling as expected. In March of 1997, Swiss Air told the Securities and Exchange Commission that a total of 50 people had gambled up to the $200 limit. ALICE 50 Swiss whales. JUSTIN Those high rollers, as I said. They love the slots.

They don't want that kind of in-person interaction where they can like, you know, intimidate their fellow high rollers at like a, you know, a poker table or like a blackjack table. No, they just want to pull the lever. I mean, I'm not turning down $10,000. Like, that's not bad. It was $2,600, I believe. No, that's not bad. It was two thousand six hundred dollars. No, all those people won thirty five hundred dollars. That's the shit.

You know what they say, the passenger always wins. By the middle of 1997, Alitalia would take a second stab at it because they were really committed to to the they were really committed to showing this one film They install it in five MD-11s as a second test They would also sign some sort of agreement with Debener from the UK and Qantas from Australia. I don't think either one of those happened As far as I can tell think both IFT and Debonair ran out of money before they could even really try. ALICE I haven't even heard of Debonair, so, like...

SEAN Oh, it's Devin's... ALICE Yeah, Devin's. SEAN That's true, yeah. ALICE Devin's airline. SEAN Devin's airline, yeah! ALICE Debenair. Yeah, Debenair. SEAN Debenair.

SEAN They were... Oh, they flew out of London Luton. So that's... ALICE Oh, that's weird, yeah, okay. I think EasyJet started doing that, so not as weird as it sounds, but yeah. I mean, it's, I mean, for 1996, oh, they existed for four years, okay, that's nice. Well done. For 1996, that would be revolutionary, because of course, every low-cost carrier hadn't realized

that people will pay to get screwed in every fashion, like we have nowadays. That would be revolutionary because of course, every low cost carrier hadn't realized that people will pay to get screwed in every fashion like we have nowadays. Had the spirit in the frontier airlines of Europe here. Anyway, Swissair themselves would have some financial difficulties, not the bigger ones later. Yeah, I was going to say. Yeah. I mean, yes, but not yet.

So combining that with some technical difficulties, the system had only been installed on five on six planes by 1998 At some points in the later half in 1997 Swiss Air had complained That the individual systems under the seats were getting so hot that the hard drives are dying. Oh Computer yeah No, well, there's just a bunch of loose hard drives under every... Right? You know, when someone like stows their bag underneath the seat in front of them and like fucks up all the hard drives.

Hate to say it. IFT blamed the company that supplied the hard drives, I can't find out who that is, but if you know some of the companies that were making hard drives at the time... It's IBM. It's IBM. Pretty short list, yeah. I could, in fact, believe that IBM was making drives that exploded like that, but I would also be tempted to blame both sides here.

Uh, and this is like, you know, this is before we had solid state drives, so, you know, it's like a platter, you know, and it's like a fuckin' disc that just explodes. ALICE After those two problems, Swiss Air didn't have any other major issues. Yeah, that was really it, up until... if you'll go to the next slide. SEAN This is gorgeous. This is the bit where I get to talk about Swiss Air. So like, I'm sort of in- I'm adjacent to this one, right? So like, this may set off a spasm of people trying to investigate me for like, like, I'm sort of in, I'm adjacent to this one, right, so like, this may set off

a spasm of people trying to investigate me for podcast nepotism. My dad lived in Switzerland for a long time when I was growing up, and so basically, because my parents were divorced and they had shared custody, I would fly out regularly, I would commute as a kid on a Swiss airplane between London and Geneva. This is the least relatable story I have ever told. But, but- ALICE It sounds nice, though. ALICE It was really nice, like, I was flying on my

own, which meant that if you're a kid doing that- ALICE On a company minor! ALICE The stewardesses make a huge fuss of you, you're allowed to go into the cockpit, because they didn't know that kids could do 9-11 yet, because Zoran Mandani hadn't been elected yet. Or Braz, yeah. I'm allowed to. It's not even illegal.

So like, every time I got off one of these planes, I would have a little set of pilot's wings and a little tiny model of the plane, and a little gift bag, and a 1% more thing, a 1% more wire in my brain between older women being nice to me and me feeling a bunch of strange feelings. So... SEAN Did the pilot ever ask you about a drudgy prison? ALICE Gradiating movies. Weirdly, weirdly, I never got sexually harassed as a kid on a Swiss Air flight, but I did get sexually harassed as a kid the first time I went to Utah, so, just derive from that

what you were. SEAN I mean, that does track. ALICE Yeah, yeah, yeah. But so, yeah, I used to fly on these all the time. At a time contemporaneous was when we're talking about. I remember these planes, I feel very fondly towards them. I think the livery is beautiful. And again, it was a time of like, strong brand identity that was based around, I don't know, I didn't know what the fuck Swissness was despite spending half my time there, but I was like, Switzerland

is when a lot of extremely beautiful women are very solicitous and very nice to you. And I kind of still believe that today. SEAN See, Nava, you ever hang around a gymnasium? ALL LAUGH See, Nava, now I'm actually jealous, because I was born in a time, and did not fly for the first time until well after 9-11, so of course the cockpit was a foreign land, where people were not allowed to be. Also, I phrased that wrong, I was not born after 9-11, Jesus Christ. Not giving myself enough credit here.

It's crazy, people who are born after 9-11 are adults now, it's crazy. Yeah, presumably some of them. They will never know that it used to be you could just go to the airport terminal and hang around and watch the airplanes. Yeah, we used to be a proper country. You could do that in Seattle, but you still have to go through TSA, which why would you do that? I think you could do that in Philly now, too.

But you also still have to go to TSA. You used to be able to do it in Pittsburgh, and then they started ruining the terminal by building a new one. Oh, right. Yeah. No, they're getting rid of the good postmodern terminal and replacing with some bullshit. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, listen, there are seats behind me that are from the Pittsburgh airport terminal.

I am I am very mad about what they are doing to my airport. And anyways, the thing about it, I am very mad about what they are doing to my airport. Anyways, the thing about airline nationalism is also weird because we didn't, we never had a flag carrier in the US. We just had like Pan Am. We just had like Pan Am as a sign of global dominance. But like, I think at the time in like the mid century, the sign of American dominance was the fact that we built the planes which we don't do anymore

Yeah, now we don't do that anymore. Yep Pan Am got subsumed into of all things CSX Shick and shit Express. Yeah They there's actually there's a there's a weird travel agency that paid Iceland air to put a pan am livery on one of their planes So they can charter it as like a retro future type thing. Which is fucking crazy. It's like $100,000 a ticket for a global itinerary. The people yearn for the brands. They want the old brand identities back.

They want the brands. They do, except they did a very bad thing. I want Swiss Air back you sons of bitches. Right? Demand the brands demand brand the the travel agency that's running this also did it on the cheap so it's not a real version of the pan am livery and it's also on a 757 which they're going to take on around the world which is a fascinating choice that is interesting yeah I. I want, I want Swiss air back. I want to return with a V.

I want to be too young to experience gender dysphoria yet and have a bunch of very beautiful women. Be nice to me. That's true. I'm, I'm jealous of the cockpit thing, but I, I understand the yearning for the older women that part I get. Yeah. Anyways, on the topic here. The aircraft we are looking at right now is in a McDonnell Douglas MD-11, built in 1991. It is registered HB-IWF. It is a name, I believe that's pronounced Vod, I don't know. It's Vod. Vod.

Vod. Vod. Vod. Vod. Vod. Vod. Vod. Vod. Vod. ALICE So Vaux is the Canton immediately north of Geneva. It's where Lausanne is, it's where Montreux is, it's very very pretty. It's like the whole kind of north shore of like Geneva. SEAN Yeah, I meant... ALICE Where smoke on the water occurred.

ALICE It is where smoke on the water occurred. It's also got a cool flag, if you're into Swiss Canton or flags, and why shouldn't you be? SEAN Yeah, and we're all here for vexology. I meant to look up how that was pronounced before I came here today and then I didn't, so it shows what I know. It's all good. Canton Vaux. The IFEN-2 system was built into this aircraft between the 21st of August and the 9th of

September 1997. There were some part problems that wouldn't actually get done until February of 1998. Vaux would be assigned to fly Swissair flight 111 between John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York and Geneva Airport in Geneva. On September 2nd, 1998. No, boy. Swissair 111 was sometimes called the UN Express due to its route, and the fact that it took off after the workday ended in New York.

Yeah, people don't necessarily know this about Geneva, but it's kind of a company town for the UN and NGOs more generally, and so if you spend a lot of time in Geneva, and as an English speaker, you're mostly around UN people, Red Cross people, etc. etc. etc. and their kids. And it's weird, it's a weird vibe, it's a weird little company town, but it's cool. It makes sense. All the bulk of the UN bureaucracy is in Geneva, New York is just where the important stuff, the stuff that all the support functions are supporting is in New York.

Yes. It's where they won't be able to send Netanyahu now that we have Zoran. Now we have Zoran. That's right. That will be a very interesting turn of events, whatever it undoubtedly happens. Anyway. Anyways, on September 2nd, 1998, Swiss Air 111 would take off from John F. Kennedy International Airport at 8.18 Eastern Daylight Time. 28 minutes late. 28 minutes after it's scheduled departure time. Had to replace a bunch of hard drives because people were gambling too much.

It's probably about fair, yeah. Yeah, all the like two people in first class. Who were pulling the lever, because that's the highest class form of gambling. Yeah, that's right. With the UN credit card, presumably. Yeah. You're gambling UN money.

That's gotta feel good as hell. Yeah. In command of the aircraft was... Alright, put it all on a Hutus. Let's go. In command of the aircraft was Captain... I don't know how that's pronounced, I'm gonna go with Urs Zimmerman? Yep.

It's URS? Okay, good enough. A 49 year old Swiss Air Force veteran whose birthday was September 3rd. Being a Swiss Air Force veteran is really funny to me, because it's like, yeah, cool, you flew, I presume, fast jets over a country that a fast jet crosses in about ten minutes. So, the coolest thing I ever saw was in Switzerland. A great country. We were staying, a family was staying in, um, we were staying in like a rented chalet.

Nice. God, I wish that were me. Uh, chalet. You know, down the road is, uh, down the road is, uh, a, uh, whatchamacallit, a sort of hotel there, where I had one of the best bolognaises I've had in my life, like a spaghetti bolognese, right. But they had a back deck, and the other side of the back deck was a cliff. And the cliff went down, you know, several thousand feet. This was, uh, what, this was in the village of Haaflu, which is just near Meiringen, which is, like, I forget what the canton is. And you could, y'know, when I was there, you could look over the

side of the railing, you could see the Swiss Air Force doing maneuvers below you. ALICE. Down, it's cool. JUSTIN. You were looking down on the plains. ALICE. Like the man's loop. Yeah, yeah, yeah. JUSTIN. Yeah. You were looking down on the planet. ALICE Yeah, yeah, yeah. Myrungen is in Bern, by the way. Just if you're curious. JUSTIN No, it's not, is that, oh, is the whole thing

a canton of Bern? ALICE So, there's two cantons, there's, like, Bernstadt and, fuck another one. Just like, Bern, like, Canton, right? So it's to the city and the thing. Oh, I see, I see. I was thinking of, uh, shit. Cause it took a long time to get the burn from there.

Not that long of a time, because the trains are very good. Um. Wait, no, I'm fucking, I'm stupid. I'm confusing Basel and Burton. Um, yeah, it is in Burton. Alright, gotcha. Okay. What was the other thing about that trip that was relevant? I forget. Shit. Oh, that, not, it is in Bern. Alright, gotcha. Okay, what was the other thing about that trip that was relevant?

I forget. Shit. Oh, that's not- I mean, I can keep throwing Swiss facts in, I had the freshest, nicest glass of milk in my life that I've ever had in a hotel in Lausanne. Very, very, very positive experiences in Switzerland, yeah. I think this is really funny for the arc of this podcast to be glazing Switzerland. Like, not that we don't deserve it, but like... It's quite ideologically interesting, yes.

Yes. It's like, eh, you know, we can all just move there and be neutral. Politics are over. The only problem is, we'd all have to get together in a big town meeting and Nova wouldn't be able to vote. ALICE AND LUCAS LAUGH ALICE AND LUCAS LAUGH It's fine, I'm not using it, it's fine. ALICE AND LUCAS LAUGH But yeah, so the Swiss Air Force, really

cool, they used to fly Bf 109s, which are the only Bf 109s you're allowed to acceptably think are cool, because they're not Nazis. They're just neutral. They used to fly FAA teens as well. And the only other thing I know about the Swiss Air Force is that in terms of like air defense and air interception, they keep office hours, which I think is one of the funniest things because it's such a small country. They will like intercept aircraft over Switzerland Monday to Friday, 9 to 5. Out with that is France and Germany's problem. ALICE Yeah, that makes sense. This conversation's very funny to me, it's never been anywhere

particularly near the European continent. ALICE You should, it's good, they got good milks. SEAN I got two very conflicting arguments there, in both ears. ALICE Nice milk, nice cheese. Nazis. Nazis. Good chocolate as well. Music box. Yeah, good chocolate.

Watches are pretty good. Yeah, we can all. Trains are pretty good. Oh, Switzerland live show, but just at a watch shop. I would be thrilled to do a Switzerland live show. I would also go to the watch live show, even though every watch I wear is a Casio right now. We're gonna do it on the bridge in Luzern.

Yeah. Oh yeah. Yeah. No, they gotta, we have to do it at the Transport Museum, but we need to meet Swiss Gareth Dennis first. Oh, I love that. We gotta, well, we do it in Montreux, you know, like, as soon as the Jazz Festival clears out we do it in Montreux on the lakefront and then just make sure the venue catches

fire. Yeah, we shouldn't tell them that first. No, no, no. It'll be a surprise. Second in command on board this aircraft was First Officer Stefan Loewe, I believe, this time I actually went and looked it up during that last diversion. And I might still be wrong, but that's what Google Translate told me so I can play him then.

He was a 36 year old with relatively low hours in commercial aviation, but was also a Swiss Air Force veteran. ALICE These two guys have both flown F-A-18s in circles over the same Alp together. Yes. Yes. They can only turn left. Also on board the flight were 11 flight attendants and one purser, bringing the total crew to 14 alongside 215 passengers, meaning we had a total of 229 people on board this aircraft.

This was not a full flight, it was about 72% of revenue passenger seats occupied. ALICE Imagine being able to sit and gamble on not a full flight, and you can still smoke. ALICE The dream. ALICE The dream. ALICE You're going from New York to Geneva, it's, yeah, no, fantastic. ALICE Unfortunately you're probably not going to Geneva, as we're going to get into.

ALICE No, you're going into it, yeah. JUSTIN You're not going to space today. Yes. I mean, there's going to be a lot of smoke involved. It's just not coming from the cigarette that you're holding in first place. In any case, in any case, about 15 minutes after takeoff, the aircraft would experience a radio blackout for 14 minutes. This was just kind of determined to be a crew air that did not represent any sort of functional

issues with the aircraft. They had just tuned the radio wrong, but it was mentioned in the official report, so I felt like I had to put it here. It's like, it would be like the inside. They got the old fashioned tuner with like the, you know, the physical thing that went back and forth. Hold on, I think I can get limbaugh. My dad and your dad just agreeing and disagreeing but howling at each other over the Swiss Air yeah, that's funny. Well if my dad and your dad were to pilot in the first officer.

Oh yeah, I just think, you guys ever seen a fist fight on a plane? At 10 10 p.m. Atlantic Daylight Time. Uh oh, I've been there. So 58 minutes after takeoff, while flying over the south coast of Nova Scotia, Captain Zimmerman detects the distinct smell of smoke. But a visual inspection did not confirm the presence of smoke. Cockpit crew initially dismissed it as normal smoke from the air conditioning system being configured incorrectly, which happens sometimes on these older MT-11s, and the smell went

away after a brief moment. ALICE I mean, there's a lot of weird bad smells you can get on planes. SEAN Yeah, cause like, all the air that's coming in you're getting from the bleed air system, so it goes through the engine. And this is like, just one of those things that happens on airplanes sometimes, you know, it inhales a bunch of air, uh, that happens to have smoke in it. But you know, the other thing which is interesting about this one is this is back before, you know, the cockpit door had to be locked. Yes.

You know, back then you could just walk in. It was also before cockpit crews were banned from smoking, up there notably, so. I don't, not that that was a factor, but it's probably something worth considering in terms of the smell, the idle smell of smoke someplace. Alright, you should probably be allowed to smoke, sometimes it's a really stressful situation. Yeah, or death or something. It's like, I just saw the movie Flight, and the thesis of the movie Flight is that drinking

makes you a bad pilot, but cocaine kind of cancels it out. Yeah, that's it. Yeah, speedball. Yeah. No, speedball's not. Exactly, you know. But I believe that China only banned smoking for the cockpit crews in 2017. Amazing.

But they have way better cigarettes there, like the packaging's way cooler. That's also true. I imagine like the Chinese cigarettes are probably good for you Yeah, they probably have that now We smoke we smoke in the Chung haas aboard the board the the Colmec built aircraft So they actually hadn't they actually hadn't built any of those in 2017 so never mind 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 catalogue 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 dot com forward slash W.T.Y.P. Pod. Do it if you want or don't. It's your decision and we respect that. Back to the show. If you'll go to the next slide, please, there's a few pictures on this one. Oh these are the two most swiss-looking men I've ever seen in my life. These guys have done some stuff, yeah. These images conjure up like Fondue and Rushdie to me, like these are, yeah, sure. This is actually the only reason I included the fixtures, because they look to be the

most European men alive. On the left... Sorry. We covered the bleakness in our own ways here. This guy, this guy could be, like, a really good cop in an 80s movie. Oh yeah, yeah, well they both could, is the thing. Actually though, yeah. Buddy cop in an 80s movie. Oh yeah. Yeah. Well, they both could, is the thing. Actually though, yeah.

Buddy cop movie. You know? Yeah, now we need to get these folks on film. I mean, they're dead, but we really need to get them on film. He's got... if you got rid of the mustache, he's got like a Phil Collins thing going on on most of his... That's true, yeah. They don't make guys who are bald this way anymore.

Oh yeah. Yeah. For which I'm desperately glad, but like... Everyone's gotten ashamed of them. He's got the Dracula flow, it's crazy! Yeah, actually I was going to point out the Widow Speaker there, that's impressive. The guy whose hair we're making, the dead guy whose hair we're making fun of on the left, that's Captain Zimmerman, the writer's first officer, Lo. I don't know if it's right to say that we're doing it on the left, just hair we're making fun of on the left, that's Captain Zimmerman, the rightist first officer low.

ALICE I don't know if it's right to say that we're doing it on the left, just because we're a leftist podcast doesn't mean there's got like a class character to it. SEAN Look, pilots are in unions, they're workers. ALICE That's true. SEAN Yeah, that's true. Four minutes later, at 1014pm, smoke sm smoke smell comes back and this time actual visual smoke that color comes alongside it captain Zimmerman declares a pan pan situation which indicates extreme urgency but not necessarily an emergency

which is not the sort of thing you typically do whenever the smoke in the cockpit but never mind he also requests that the plane be vectored to return to quote a convenient place which is what the transcript says, immediately deciding that Boston was the best option, Boston being 270 miles away. Not really sure what the thought process was there. Alright, the plane goes pretty fast, it's probably fine. Yeah. I don't know.

Well, Moncton Center, that would be Moncton in Canada. Don't go there. Never fucking go there. Why that town? Yeah. Ruin our lives. It's like New Jersey, but somehow hotter and much worse. It was 101 degrees there. It was 101 when we were in Moncton, yeah.

Horrible. Moncton responds by saying that they can vector them to Boston, but they can also do it to Halifax, which is 76 miles away, as opposed to 270. The Swiss Air crew responds with the quote, we prefer Halifax from our position, which is interesting passive language, I'm not really sure what caused that. ALICE Well, a bunch of smoke inhalation. SEAN Well, yes, because at this point they also pull up on the big oxygen masks they have for the cockpit The captain had to think for a moment and he's like, okay

I need to go somewhere where I can slide over the hood of a police cruiser. Yeah Austin made a lot of sense, but then he realized no Halifax is probably also using Ford Crown Victoria's probably also using Ford Crown Victorious at this point. So that's a good point. Yeah. Yeah. 1019, the Halifax controller starts lining them up for the for the runway there, tells them that they are 35 miles from the runway, which is just a couple of minutes of flying time, give or take, which is, you know, this is the good this is the good place. You want to be two minutes from the runway if your plane is actively

smoking at you from an unknown source. The plane being on fire was very very bad, because there's not much you can do. ALICE Yes. Generally true. This is the big through line through any time you look at a plane that's been on fire, that does tend to happen. ALICE The killed Stan Rogers? ALICE Oh, god. SEAN Yes.

ALICE We'll get to that. That's an episode. SEAN I was going to mention that as my example, but interestingly, that didn't really catch fire super hard till they were on the ground. So they opened the door and all the oxygen made everything explode. Anyway, the Swiss air crew responds by saying they're too high, which is kind of reasonable. Halifax responds by vectoring them via a longer approach to give them a few more minutes to actually get the plane closer to the ground.

At 1021? As, uh, if some folks are not, like, super familiar with the dynamics of an airliner, it is difficult to go down fast sometimes. Yes. Unless you want to really, uh, unless you want to kill everybody. Like... Yeah, yeah, it's pretty bad if you're approaching the runway and you're going 400 miles an hour. That's bad.

You want to stress that situation. The brakes don't work good. The brakes are good. They're not that good. 1021 through two. Yeah, two minutes later, Halifax asked them the amount of fuel and the number of souls they have on board the aircraft. minutes later Halifax asked them the amount of fuel and the number of souls they have on board the aircraft. They always use the term souls in aircraft accident reports, I've never quite understood it, just bizarre. ALICE I just assumed it to be a convenient way of including everybody who's on board.

SEAN Yeah, I mean, I don't want to say it sounds weirdly religious, but it sounds a little bit weirdly religious. ALICE It is weirdly religious. I think it's probably a nautical holdover as much as anything. Oh, that's a good point there, yeah. It's also like, if you need something that encompasses crew, passengers, and miscellaneous. Yeah. It's a good point.

It's a good point. It's gonna be difficult if you're carrying a lot of philosophical zombies there. Oh, that's not gonna make weight, that's a shame. SEAN Say your number of souls, well, like, observed? Or... ALICE Yeah. ALICE Alright, we have to have a debate about this now. SEAN Also, of course, people that sold their souls with a Swiss national lottery at one point or another could be some sort of problem there.

JUSTIN Yeah, that's a good point. Gotta check some people off the list. They spent their $200. Wait a second, we have some people who work at the World Intellectual Property Organization on here. Stuart is! Swiss Air Crew responds to that with the realization that, oh, we probably have a little bit too much fuel to guarantee a safe landing, and asked to be taken out over a body of water

to dump the fuel. At 10.22, one minute later, they turn to the south, now flying away from the airport, but still within 45 minutes of the runway. I don't want a Monday morning quarterback on my Monday morning quarterbacking podcast, but the kind of decision making here, and the kind of forward thinking or lack thereof, it feels... this feels lurching from one thing to the next, you know? Which I understand they are busy and also presumably terrified. But... It's been six minutes. Yeah.

It has been a total of six minutes, yes. The short duration of this is pretty fucking difficult for me to cope with when I had to put this slideshow together. At the same time he was having, at the same time Captain was having this conversation, First Officer was working through the checklist for smoke slash fumes of unknown origin. Pictured here on the right is a different smoke checklist from the Swiss Air Emergency Checklist. This is for air conditioning smoke. It is basically of the same thing. As a matter of fact, this is the first thing you're supposed

to do if there's smoke of unknown origin. You'll notice down at the bottom, it says refer to emergency procedure, smoke slash fumes of unknown origin if smoke is not of air conditioning origin. This checklist is relatively important. Excuse me, because of course- Yeah, you'd hope so. Yes. This is, I believe something like 90% of piloting is working through checklists and that includes in this situation. And indeed, as a result of reading through the checklist, sometime between 1022 and 1024 crew cut power to the cabin bus in accordance

with checklist, which would ideally have cut off continued flow of electricity to a fire in the cabin systems. However, of course, as previously mentioned, the in-flight entertainment system was not wired into that system, so power continued flowing to it. ALICE. Cut off everything except the slot machines. Yeah, no, the gambling must continue. SEAN. Why don't they build the whole plane out of the slot machines?

ALICE. So you're seeing the lights go off, the emergency lights come on, and you're still able to watch LA Confidential. It hasn't even paused. That's a concern. Well, another thing that the bus cut off, however, were the recirculating fans in the upper cabin ceiling. It's got the air supply to the cabin, it's effectively isolated from the other parts of the aircraft wiring systems. As of course, the at this point unknown fire was at the very forward cabin. You can see a progression map of it at the bottom left there, which is rather low res,

but hopefully you'll get the picture. This effectively gave it a grand total of one place to go, which is forward and directly into the cockpit ceiling. Oh good. Not ideal, not ideal. Yes. I would say that probably is not good. At 1024. So where are went, what are we here?

We are basically at like less than a minute after they turned off the electricity to the cabin. While still en route to dump fuel, Swiss aircrew told the Halifax controller, quote, at this time we must fly manually, indicating that autopilot systems had already been damaged enough that they disconnected and they had to control the airplane entirely by hand. Seventeen seconds later, they finally choose to declare an emergency, and about fifteen... Hold on. Twenty seconds after that, they declare an emergency for the second time.

Not really sure why they did it twice, but to be fair, I guess that's better than not doing it at all, which was what they had done previously. I'd just really like to underline per my previous scream for help. This was the last radio transmission that received from the aircraft directly. 35 seconds later 10, 25 and 40 seconds the aircraft's flight data recorder stops recording because of course the fire was now destroying that part of things. One second after that, the cockpit voice recorder also stops recording, and therefore, everything that happens after this is some flavor of conjecture, because there's literally nothing

to go off of except for various forensic conclusions. ALICE Oh, no throw about that. That's... Mm. JUSTIN Nah, nah. This has gone poorly. Yes. 24 seconds later, at 10-26-04, the transponder stops transmitting entirely, meaning that nobody can see any data from the aircraft, with the exception of the primary radar at Halifax, which can see it because it's radar and not because it's transmitting anything.

Notably, they can't see the aircraft's speed or the aircraft's altitude at this point. Somewhere in the next three minutes, the fire has gotten bad enough that it is now visible in the cockpit and presumably the forward cabin. We don't know that for sure. Night man. Yes. Captain Zimmerman gets up out of a seat to fight the fire himself. The details of what happened here are pretty impossible to determine, but they

heard, but considering they found what they did of him nowhere near his seat. Oh, that seems like a relatively safe bet. They also found them pretty close, and I believe the term used at one point was fused to some of Swissair's MD-11 flight manuals. The basic conclusion, I think forensic scientists have come to, is that Zimmerman got up to fight the fire and he used the manual to do so. ALICE I mean, as a kind of, like, um, video game logic, use manual on problem, it's more literal, but like, maybe this is a naive question, and not that it would have done anything, which is probably why there isn't, but you'd think there would be like a fire extinguisher

in the cockpit, right? ZACH I mean, I think my understanding is that there is, but I'm guessing it was on the part of the cockpit that was currently on fire. Oh, and it's- That is a problem. You gotta extinguish the fire on the fire extinguisher in order to use the fire extinguisher to extinguish the rest of the fire.

Yeah, most aircraft have a sort of a little handheld extinguisher, I believe it's close to the door. Yeah. I don't really know, obviously it varies varies from aircraft to aircraft I think some of the newer ones will mount it under the seat which is a smarter place for it to be but either way obviously this doesn't really work based on now he's going out to just sort of bat it yeah it's a paper I mean you know it's a valiant effort but insufficient yeah based based on what and based on what investigators have been able to piece together.

So that's what we're operating on at this point. Captain was likely either incapacitated or already dead or already dead whenever the aircraft crash. Even the first officer is the sole living living person in the cockpit to control the plane. Your plane is burning down around you and your boss has also just been burned to death immediately behind you. What a terrible day at the office, yeah. Yeah, probably continuing to burn to death. Again, this is happening very quickly. He's already dead, Roz.

Maybe, I don't know. We're close to the plane in our own ways here. Somewhere around 1030, which would basically... Attempting to stop, drop, and roll, but there's not a lot of space in there. Yeah Somewhere around 1030 so about a minute There's somewhere between a minute and two minutes after he after the captain gets up to fight the fire and then immediately dies First officer low shuts down the second engine, which is the one in the tail This almost certainly has no effect on the aircraft's liability and there's obviously's obviously no reason, no way for us to know why he did that.

He wouldn't really have done anything. Yeah, he's hit buds at this point. At this point in time, for the last one minute and eighteen seconds of flight, we have no idea what really happened. So all there is is a couple of different theories. Most of them revolve around the fact that the first officer was flying the plane by himself at night with no instruments with a cockpit full of smoke and fire and a large oxygen mask in front of him and therefore while it was possibly still somewhat controllable to an extent

we don't we don't know we're never going to know it's not really reasonable for any sort of normal human to control it under that many different circumstances going on at one point in time. Is the MD-11, does it still have direct cables from the controls to the control services? Or is it? This was the fly-by-wire era that MD- 11 was designed in the late 80s. I don't know the answer to that off the top of my head. But all we can say is that Douglas living up to the slogan once again. Yeah, yes. That's all good folks will kill you. Yeah, yeah,

I don't know off the top of my head. But in any case, it does in any case, if that were the case, then it wouldn't have mattered because of course, flight control cables would have been very burned through. But in any situation didn't really matter. Because even if the first officer was not, was not struggling to see or incapacitated. Yeah, I mean, he had all that to deal with if it could get the controls didn't work. Or if he shut the engine down, doesn't really matter one way or another, we're moving towards sort of the same general and to end point here. Yes. At 10 31 at 18 seconds, so exactly 17 minutes in total,

after the crew first transmitted the Pan Pan call, and asked to fly 300 miles to Boston, the aircraft hit the ocean nose down at a speed of about 345 miles per hour. Ooh. Exerting a force of 350 Gs across the aircraft, and its contents, meaning it has turned to dust, killing all 229 people on board, not including people that had already died before

impact, which was probably at least one, but given that the fire was also above the gamut it could have been more than that, we don't really know. ALICE You always hope to, y'know, that everybody gets like, peacefully-ish incapacitated by smoke inhalation, rather than being terrified and burning to death and then plunging directly into the ocean. Yeah. Of course. But notably, of course, even if they had done that, they still would've seen the smoke and

fire, so peacefully is still probably not quite what they're at yet. Yeah. Peacefully-ish. Relatively. Yeah, I always joke about, you know, you have the button on your seat rest that makes the engine fall off, or that makes the plane crash Yeah, and on this flight someone did that. Yeah happened. Yeah So that that is that is the end of this aircraft

229 people are now dead somewhere in there somewhere in the water near Halifax Directly into the Titanic. The only reason we know when it crashed was because it set off a seismometer nearby. Jesus. Oh god. Yeah. Cause, you know, at this point all they had really was the primary radar that didn't really show any details.

So if the entire plane had disappeared from the radar, I assume they would have assumed it crashed, but like, they wouldn't have had any way of knowing if it was just more things failing. In any case, that's the end of this plane, and the end of these two guys, and the end of a bunch of other people as well. And the end of whoever won their $3,500. Awesome. Now with the water log too, on top of everything else. Yes, that's true. As Beth said, yeah. And he was water log too on top of everything else. Yes, that's true.

As I say, yeah. And he was one day away from his birthday as well. Yes, from turning 50 specifically. Wow. Yeah. I feel a little bad for him. Particularly because he, you know, notably did not die in the crash directly. He died before that.

It puts him in sort of a really strange position. Yeah. Well, I understand 50 is when you start getting reactionary politics, right? So, I don't know. The age keeps increasing every year, though, so I don't know. SEAN Next slide. Now that we're done talking about the act of flight, here is what that same plane from two slides ago looks like at this point in time.

ALICE It's always crazy to me how much, how well all the structural bits are able to hold up to the stuff that like, liquidifies every person on board. ZAC Yeah, metal's a very strong material. ALICE Yeah, it's a metal. Big fan of metal. ZAC Yes. ALICE Yeah, metal's pretty good.

ZAC Yeah. Hence the problem with the wood planes we talked about quite a bit earlier. That was we figured that we figured that out pretty early on, but it still took about 20 years of commercial flight for us to get that far. If they had a piano on this plane, though, the structural piano, of course. Yeah. Well, actually, they had a they had two Picasso paintings on board it, which obviously did not survive this.

Oh, so there was some form of art. It was not piano, some form of culture, I should say. The search and rescue operation, which the Royal Canadian Armed Forces called Operation Persistence... Just kind of pick something that sounds vaguely positive, you know? Operation Midnight Hammer. We're gonna find someone alive. Or, no. Never mind. Yes. My understanding is that- I think you call it Operation Persistence if you're expecting not to find very much for

a long time. Yeah. Because you're persistent. Yeah. Yeah. Uh, they've... well, seeing as they actually... there was no way for anybody to know it crashed on the official side, because of course, they had no idea what was going on with the radar, all they had, notably, was a couple of guys local who called 911, I believe is calling

into the Moncton police to be like, hey, I think I just saw a bunch of Swiss guys get turned into soup. Yeah, I mean, that's roughly what happened for them to realize that they had lost it, I believe. The seismometer thing I mentioned, but they didn't realize that till later. It's just that how we know what time it was. Pretty much immediately once they got there, they would find a field of wreckage and would start to call off most of the rescue part of the search and rescue operations about three hours after it started

about 3.30 a.m. Atlantic time. Once the operation began or switched to salvage, it was mostly guided by underwater sonar and diving operations, initially mostly using American navy ships and sailors from the US's grapple, based out of Philadelphia. ALICE & SEAN Weird name. SEAN They would find the flight data recorder on September 6th, and the cockpit voice recorder on September 11th. 1998, to be clear.

Next slide. ALICE Oh, this is cool. The fucking, like, NTSB Kintsugi frame. SEAN Yeah. Oh, this is the Canadian one. JUSTIN Do they have multiple of these, or do they just have one that they keep reusing? SEAN You gotta have a different one for each aircraft, surely. ALICE Oh, that's a good point. SEAN Oh, yeah, that's true.

SEAN The one for TWA 800 they had in, that's a good point. Yeah, that's true. The one for TWA-800 they had in a hangar until like last year, I think. Wow. Actually, when was that? I remember there being a big deal about it, because people make a big deal out of the one plane crash. Can't find it quickly enough. In any case.

Something disturbing about the velvet rope in front of it. That's a good point, yeah. Well, notably that's a CTV reporter, he's got the C about the velvet rope in front of it. Yes, that's a good point, yeah. Well notably that's a CTV reporter, he's got the CTV hat on standing in front of there, so they probably didn't want them getting too close to the horribly mangled pieces of metal. Yeah, that's a good point, yeah. As authorities recovered more of the aircraft, they gradually reconstructed just the forward section of the aircraft, from the cockpit back to just the first class cabin.

This is the entirety of what they managed to recover and successfully piece together. Wow. You'll notice it's not super complete. They did retrieve, what was it, 98% of aircraft debris by December 1999. So notably in the intervening year I had been born, which is cool. Investigators in the press would find a specific concern focus on by the first week of October 1998, less than a month into the investigation. Next slide. Okay, we're gonna do some real like crash detective shit here.

Okay. Ideal. The the the TSB the transportation safety board, that's the Canadian one I remember now, find one very peculiar part of the aircraft's wiring harnesses, that being multiple segments of wire that had damaged insulation. All these segments of wire were components leading to the power supply of the in-flight entertainment system. Several segments of wire here had become so damaged that the copper was fully exposed, obviously before it had been crushed for 350G. Anyway, in fact, it had gotten hot enough that the copper core had actually started to melt, which you can in fact see the picture of here.

JUSTIN Oh yeah, this is very melted looking. SID Yeah, that's not good. JUSTIN It's wild to be able to pull these cables out of the ocean and identify them by function as well. SID Yeah, I mean, that's what these investigatory boards are made to do, but I guess I never really thought about that. That's pretty fucked up. That's their job. You know, they, they, they have this and then, you know, as long as they don't accidentally pick up a piece of the transatlantic cable, presumably could have happened here and then completely cut off America and Europe,

leading to World War III. Of course. The generally accepted explanation for this that the TSB would come up with, which was not verifiable for obviously a number of reasons regarding the fact that the plane had exploded basically, was that the in-flight entertainment network system drew so much power that the wires, which were too thin for that level of power draw,

would actually have the insulation melt off of it in certain places leaving the bare metal entirely exposed the electrified copper core of the wires then came in contact with the mylar blankets that were insulating the entire system beneath it of course this was an essential part of the aircraft's insulation system entirely but the fact that you had electric electrified wire touching it is not great and it means that it tends to arc. Everything's better chemicals. And some of it's less flammable than others.

But it turns out it's old dead trees, even when it's not wood. That's true, yeah. Now, mylar is made of wood. That's a good point there. Mylar is a material with a high enough ignition point that it's generally considered somewhat fireproof Everything's made of wood. Yeah. That's a good point there, yeah. Mylar is a material with a high enough ignition point that it's generally considered somewhat fireproof to an extent, but the conclusion that the TSB came to was that the arc happened enough times and was hot enough that it probably damaged the mylar, either ignited it, or the

insulation blanket that it was covering, which is of course much more flammable. Oh, you set fire to your fireproofing. You don't want to do that. That's the opposite of what it's supposed to do. That's not good. Why didn't they use asbestos? That's a great point. Should it, listen, I know a lot of people have some problems with the Trump administration

saying asbestos is okay in certain applications now. Uh huh. But, sometimes- I can't argue with that. It's, it's not made of wood. It's one of the few things we have that's not made of wood. It's made of rocks. It's made of rocks.

It's rocks, yeah. You could build a whole airplane out of rocks that would- If we made the whole airplane out of asbestos? Can you imagine it has like, you know, you walk in the airplane and like the floor is... You do get turbo mesothelioma though. No, the floor is like the 9x9 tile that your grandma's kitchen has. Nice. So basically what of course happens whenever you have an arcing wire that is hot enough

to melt a mylar covering is that of course you get a fire that sparks and burns very, very, very hot. Oh, good. So in a part of the aircraft that is filled with active electrical wiring of many gauges and many thermal insulation material, this would also mean a fire that would spread extremely fast, particularly given whether or not it was fueled by active electrical current, which of course would have increased the heat. At a point, it doesn't really matter too much.

Fire is its own thing. But one thing that you can do to keep it to spread, to keep it from spreading to particularly sensitive systems above the cockpit is to not turn off the recirculating fans that cut off airflow from that part of the aircraft to the cockpit. Which is an essential step on the checklist. Yes. Uh huh. Great.

The MD-11 in particular was designed to use a circuit breaker system that it would not trip whenever it detected arcing and would trip based on a calculation of time of current correlation that I don't really understand. But it meant that the aircraft would think that everything was perfectly fine and nothing out of the ordinary was going on throughout any of this because it was presumably, as far as we can tell, arcing for quite a lot longer than just the one flight. So, yeah. So you could have flown on this exact plane and had this be arcing against the fireproofing the whole time.

And you just get unlucky that it happens like six minutes into this one. You know? Yeah, it's about, yeah. The flight from Geneva the previous day, I imagine, I imagine this was... I imagine it went perfectly fine. Going back in my head about when I took flights where. The next slide, that's all I have for that one. The diagrams there are rather... are an interesting demonstration of wire, but really the part

with the melted copper was sort of the most important thing there, because like, that doesn't really happen unless things get much hotter than they ever then anybody would ever reasonably consider. Ideally you don't have metal melting on the plane. Yes. The Transportation Safety Board of Canada would release the preliminary report on the crash of Swiss Air Flight 111 on August 30th, 2000. The report concluded everything we discussed on the last slide but that the primary fault for the accident lined with the Mylar material being considered too flammable, albeit still within standard. The quote that I put here is, aircraft certification standards for material flammability were inadequate and that they allowed the use of materials that could be ignited and sustain or propagate

fire. Consequently, flammable material propagated a fire that started above the ceiling on the right side of the cockpit. The fire spread and intensified rapidly to the extent that the degraded aircraft systems and etc. etc. To some extent, this is a football kick, more so rather kicking the football. My phrasing was a bit weird there. It was really the only conclusion they could come to beyond any reasonable doubt because they could not really conclude given the forensic evidence that they had ie the remains of the aircraft they couldn't really conclude if it was directly the fault of the in-flight entertainment system but like the main source of the damage was the wiring going to the in-flight entertainment system that everybody has had previously complained ran too hot

good enough yeah this is one of those ones where they got off on a technicality yeah yes well you know it could have been something else. It was probably this could have been something else. Yes. And and also between also another conclusion was that the transport, the sorry, not the conclusion the TSB reached was that the crew didn't have any way of knowing how severe the fire was whenever they shut down the fans. So they couldn't really be blamed for doing that, even though it was what killed the aircraft as far as

we know. ALICE It was on the checklist. You're supposed to follow the checklist. I get that. JUSTIN Yeah, so, the checklist, that's like, the pilots seem to have done everything that could be reasonably expected of them. ALICE Yeah, this was including trying to fight a fire with a three ring binder. Like, yes.

Yes. Yeah, this is... the crew very much worked by the book here, except the problem was the book itself. Literally. Yes. And again, literally. The release of the preliminary report led to a coalition of involved parties, namely Swiss Air, Delta Airlines, who had code-shared Swissair on the flight, and were also an American company,

so it's easier to get damages out of them. And Boeing, who had bought McDonnell Douglas, to offer families of the victims an undisclosed settlement. ALICE You are Boeing to receive an undisclosed settlement. SEAN Actually, you're not. They would have- ALICE You are not Boeing to receive an undisclosed settlement.

SEAN The families involved voted to reject taking that settlement entirely. Good for them. Instead opting to sue all of those companies and also DuPont who made the Mylar and Interactive Flight Technology. Remember the name from earlier? Back now. Totaling $19.8 billion in sought damages. The US judge would rule against punitive damages in 2002, but various dealings meant that they still received some compensation. The numbers

aren't really clear there. It doesn't really matter too much. It's just a good way to bring IFT back into the picture. Because in the real world, the press immediately started asking questions about what the wiring was hooked up to, which was of course the in-flight entertainment system. There we go. Which Swiss Air had advertised very heavily in town. Yeah. Yes, and presumably lost huge amounts of money on it because they lost $3,300 each time. That's true, yes. Swiss Air would go out of their way to turn it off on aisle aircraft by October 29,

Swissair would go out of their way to turn it off on all aircraft by October 29th, 1998 and promise they would remove it as soon as the maintenance schedule allowed for it. And of course, everybody else who had contracted IFT immediately canceled any and all contracts they had with them for, you know, reasonable guy, guy working for Alitalia, just going through and with his bare hands ripping terminals out of the seat. It was later reported by USA Today actually that the IFVN2 system had been certified by a subcontractor named Santa Barbara Aerospace, who the FAA determined had not properly audited or tested the system and their approval of it was technically invalid to begin with. Oh good. One quoted certification engineer whose name is here,

the last name that I can't really pronounce with his first name is Edward. Edward Milonov, I can't know. Yeah, Milonov. Yeah, no, no. Yeah, that sounds like that's what they come to the podcast for. Hell, yeah. We're all here. And between us, we can all pronounce one Polish last name.

Shouldn't you be able to do this? No. I mean, my wife's Polish and doesn't know how to pronounce her own last name. So like, I understand. He said, or he's also said to USA Today that I have to come to him with the request that he certify the original system in 1994 as quickly as possible because they were rapidly running out of operating capital. Oh good. Okay. Yeah, just we need you to say this is safe because we are running out of money. He did. Notably he did not sign off on this, which presumably this is for good, presumably for good reason. I mean, the first system wasn't what failed, but to be fair, they only got seven solid on one play and then took it out immediately

afterwards. So just like immediately catches fire. Yeah. Homer Simpson's bowl of cereal. So by, by any, uh, any reasonable conclusion, uh, by any reasonable assertion, assertion, don't know where I pulled that word from or Any reasonable assertion, uh, IFT was the primary party at fault here. As did everybody else, who was not bound by legal investigatory restrictions. So this is very good for them. JUSTIN Ah, this is, uh, I would not like to be in this situation if I was IFT.

ALICE Yes. Now, what, now. I would like to, now, if we go to the next slide, we're going to do a sort of where are they now here with these dead... ALICE Oh god damn it. They break my fucking heart, why don't you. SEAN Yes. By March 2001, Swiss Air was losing one million francs per day and was nearing bankruptcy.

ALICE Listen, is it a bad business decision to kill a bunch of your own passengers, and is it a bad business decision to be heavily overleveraged and everything, and is it a bad business decision to allegedly maybe have a bunch of embezzlement? Yes. Right. But are those good enough? JUSTIN I've spent the Swiss franc...

I've spent the Swiss franc before, and it's not very much money compared to a dollar. ALICE That's also true. That's also true. That's also true. But is that a good enough reason to take away a beautiful whole corporate language from the world and replace it with something that looks like a budget hotel chain? Could I sustain losing one million Swiss francs per day? No. But an airline, that should be fine. Basically what an airline does is sustain vast amounts of financial losses.

Anyway, I miss this stuff, I still have a little shoulder bag, cabin luggage thing with the old Swiss Air brand on it, and I'm gonna keep it for as long as I possibly can, until it falls apart. They should've switched currency to something that was even cheaper. Like I don't know, Turkish lira or something. Yeah, if you measure it in Zloty, it's not so bad. Yeah, it's not bad at all, yeah. Rubles...

What do they have in India? Rupees. Rupees. But then you have to do like, crores and locks, that's like, more difficult. Mm. Yeah. Yeah. Well, the various financial difficulties of Swiss Air here, uh, some of them- The main tragedy here, to be clear.

There was a lot of them that came, that were sort of rooted in stuff that happened before this crash, but it didn't really do them any favors. For a couple reasons, number one is that of course crashing a plane tends to cost money. Yeah, no repeat customers, yeah. Yeah. Also of course, people don't really want to fly on you that much, particularly if it looks, even if it looks at first like it might have been your cruise fault or whatever, or your airline's fault, and even if it wasn't.

And like, to be clear, it was kind of their fault here. So you know, not really great for business. Pretty certain I was still getting packed onto and off of these things. So like, well, I mean, that's that's reasonably fine. I mean, they they, I mean, where they operated for like three years after four years after that accident happened. So it's clearly not not it was a more terminal decline that was probably already going to happen at the time, but didn't really help. I see you presumably in smaller planes that didn't have the entertainment system.

That's also true. They only had it in the MD-11s and like some of the some of the 7-4s and they took it out all of them anyways. Now of course Swissair was losing a million francs per day in March 2001. Travel market would get much worse in September 2001 for very simple reasons. Oh Roz. Yeah. Yes. No I didn't do that. for very simple reasons. Oh, Roz. Mm. Mm. Yes.

No, I didn't do that. That was some foreigners. Roz. And one ten year old, apparently. If you believe Andrew Cuomo. On October 5th, Swiss air effectively collapsed. Swiss government would promise a loan to keep operations running in the short term, which they later increased to cover the entire winter operating season, at which point all

aircraft and operations would be transported to Swiss Regional Airline Crossair, which was renamed Swiss International Airlines. This last Swiss Air flight flew on April 1st, 2002. April fools. Swiss International Airlines is still the flag carrier of Switzerland. Yeah, they try and fucking trick you by being just like, Swiss. Not the same. Fuck you. Well, my understanding is they wanted to keep the Swiss Air brand, but there was a bizarre sort of copyright and legal restriction from them doing so.

Yeah, I think like the federal government owned it or something, I don't remember how it works out, but yeah. Yeah, it's very very... I mean, there's obviously a sort of brand image thing, consideration there, but also there was a legal side of it was very strange and confusing. In any case, they would retire the MD-11s by 2005. Because of course they weren't great airplanes, we talked about this last time I was on the podcast.

Interactive flight technologies, under the weight of scrutiny from the global press and investigatory authorities alike, would simply bail from the situation and declare bankruptcy in 1999. The CEO of the company, Mikhail Itkis, the son of the first CEO we talked about way earlier, would go on to change his name to Mike Snow in 2004 and start a new company. JUSTIN Like the DJ? JUSTIN Yeah, like the guy who made the... yeah, the songs, yeah. ALICE Yeah, I get a little bit Genghis Khan. JUSTIN Don't want you to get it on with anyone but me, yeah.

ALICE Banger! I mean, fantastic video. JUSTIN It's a very good one, yeah. That is a music video about killing James Bond. That is true. That is true. Oh shit, that's a good point there, yeah. Mm.

Mm-hmm. In 2004 he would start a new company called Interstate Cargo, which manufactured cargo trailers, established in association with, at the time, the current governor of Arkansas, if you click the next slide... Oh. That would be Mike Huckabee. Mike Huckabee, the funny Republican. Yeah, I remember that. The guy who looks like a sort of like slightly melted Kevin Spacey.

Yeah. Yes. Yes. The guy who accidentally tipped the hand about like Operation Midnight Hammer by tweeting a kind of prayers up tweet 40 minutes early. That sounds about right. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, a lot of them was bound to do it. This is true, yes. Current US ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee. Oh, I forgot, yeah, I keep forgetting about that. All right, yeah, yeah. Thing about the Trump administration part two is, like, the biggest piece of shit you've ever heard of is just, like, in a federal government job, and you don't know about this, and you'll find out

about it, and you'll take some psychic damage, and you'll be like, what the f- It's not enough. I need Chris Christie to be appointed to something. Where can Trump exile him to? Governor, like, a fucking ambassador to like, the South Sandwich Islands or something. Yeah, no, he's ambassador to the island that's only like penguins. And he's enforcing the tariffs. The trailer company, Interstate Cargo, does still exist. Mike Snow is still CEO of it, as LinkedIn doesn't list any employers prior to the year 2000,

which is interesting. I didn't do it. Yeah. I would like to close, and I would like to to close this by pointing out that he still has a Twitter account. If you'll go to the next slide I've included some of the people that he follows on that. Incredible. Okay, great. So this is, of course, the CEO of a trailer manufacturer who previously built an in-flight entertainment system that killed 229 people.

ALICE And he loves the Babylon Bee. SEAN He does. ALICE Yeah. And Cantor. Doge. Dogecoin. I like the logical kind of progression of thought there. JD Vance and of course Scott Adams, who is responsible for a similarly heinous crime

in the form of the comic strip Dilbert. That's true, that's a good point there. Jesus Christ. The modern Republican party really is just a drain for all of these guys to fucking sink into, isn't it? Yes. It's like, hey, come hang out with the Republican party, we got Cat Turd, we got the guy who killed a bunch of Swiss people. JUSTIN Maybe that's why, that's why Chris Christie

hasn't been, you know, taken into the machine, because he has too much integrity. I mean, I know for a fact that one time he took a phone call in a quiet car on M-Track, but then realized his mistake and left. Which is something Joe Biden didn't do. call in a quiet car on M-Track, but then realized his mistake and left. Which is something Joe Biden didn't do. Yeah, I was gonna say, actually, this is a relatively high bar. So that was the end of this story, I just wanted to include this last slide as a nice demonstration of...

Yeah, a better life awaits you as a right-wing chud. You can get away with anything. JUSTIN I was about to say, maybe we should pivot to be a right wing, I don't know. ALICE I think some of us would find it harder than others. It would be very difficult. JUSTIN Although you say that, you say that, I don't know, I could run the detranscript where you just go like, I'm detransitioning because of the... I was tricked into it by doctors who forced me into it, and then you just go like, I'm DETRANSITIONING because of the... I was tricked into it by

doctors who forced me into it, and then you just don't detransition? JUSTIN What if you, like, do a false backstory, and you say you're detransitioning into a woman? ALICE Yeah, that's interesting. That's interesting. I could buy that. Yeah. I was a vulnerable little girl who was forced onto testosterone through the sick machinations of the National Health Service, and now I'm rediscovering my real identity. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah.

INCREDIBLE. SEAN Anyways, that's the time a guy pressed the wingswall off button and killed 230 people. Someone did it, someone pressed the wings fall off button. I guess in this case it's more like he caused the wings fall off button to be there for someone else to press inadvertently. Yeah. I mean, I was using the general we, not the guy picture here.

Also the guy picture here designed the button more than anything else. Jesus Christ. This has been a harrowing one like it's been a minute since we we had one that gave me the real fear Yeah, because I I whenever I accidentally mentioned it last time it was uh, You noted how the horrifying the concept of the in-flight entertainment system that kills you was yeah So I was like, okay, this is this this one, because this is purely engineering, this is electrical, and structural engineering, and fire engineering, which I don't know if that's a thing. I made that one. And it is, and in service of the gambling industry, which is one of the worst things

on earth. So, great, fantastic. Yeah, I mean, what did we learn? Folks don't gamble. Gambling's bad. Yeah. Don't watch the movie on the plane. I know this is telling this to capitalists, and, y'know, all hitherto existing history

is a process of class struggle, right, and it's a sort of historical inevitability that it ends up this way, but please, be more careful with your flag carrier intellectual property rights. Please don't kill a bunch of people, not least because you'll kill a bunch of people, which is bad, but also because the result will be a less compellingly branded airline. Yes. SWISS INTERNATIONAL does own the Swiss Air brand these days, they just don't do anything with it.

What the fuck? What the fuck. What the fuck. Okay. This, I, mmm... It's interesting, because I normally end a really harrowing episode on a downer, but this is one where I'm ending angry. SEAN Sorry. ALICE I will say, you know, it does seem like this problem occurred, but we seem to have

largely solved it, because there have been very few airline accidents until quite recently when they got the guy from MTV's road rules to run the Department of Transportation. ALICE Oh fuck, we completely forgot to put in the Air India crash, because we got overtaken by events. It's fine, we'll talk about it next time when we know more about it. I'm reading here from the Wikipedia page, to prevent the trademark from becoming void through disuse, Swiss licensed it to hopscotch air, which operates a fleet of Cirrus SR22 planes in the US, which are just little Cessna type

things. In Switzerland, the trademark is protected through its use by an aviation sports club, undignified. They gotta just put it on a big plane. Infuriating. They have it even- I don't even think they've done the retrojet thing that most of the airlines have. I might be wrong about that. Nah.

Nah. That'd be a smart thing to do, yeah. I mean, people like seeing Swiss Air. Anyway. Yes. So, we have a segment on this podcast called Safety Third. Shake hands with danger. podcast called Safety Third. So hello, Justin, Liam, November, et al.

That's probably the most reasonable one that I've heard so far, I think. I'm writing to you with tales of poisoning at the Botanical Garden. Thank you for the perfect opening sentence of a safety third. Oh, real quick, before we get into it, if they wanna send in safety thirds, where do they send them? JUSTIN Where do you send safety thirds? You send them to our email, which is somewhere on the YouTube page, I don't believe we're allowed to put it- ALICE It's WTYPpod at gmail.com, I'm pretty certain.

JUSTIN Yes, that should be about a page long, and send us some pictures if you want. And I think you can submit them on the site, but it doesn't work very well. We have a website also. Anything, anything you say we will read on the air. Uh, yes. Well, maybe. We get like, more than one a week, and we only podcast once a week, theoretically. And in practice, less than that.

I'm working on it, alright? Look, we're all working on it, we all have... Anyway, safety third. I would like to clarify real quick that that is a poisoning exclamation point at the botanical garden. Yes. Of course. Much like panic at the disco, yes.

Yes. Just wanted to make sure that was conveyed because I feel it's important. Yes. I am a horticulturist, which is a glorified gardener, and an unnamed public botanic garden. I have been working this job for nearly three years, against my better judgment. The following events unfolded two years ago, when I was still a fresh new gardener who believed in the inherent goodness of people and nonprofit organizations. That's such a bad idea. Yeah. At this unnamed garden, us horticulturalists operate out of an office slash greenhouse building.

While we spend the majority of our days toiling away outside in the Georgia heat, we return regularly to our home base office for water refills, Gatorade chugging, and hand washing. The horticulture office draws its water from a well on the property, unlike the public visitor center and administrative offices, which use city water. One early spring day, the white porcelain sink in our horticulture office turned blue. Mm. Mm. Mm. Mm. Mm. Mm. Mm. Mm. Mm. Mm. Mm. Mm. Mm. Mm. Mm. Mm. Mm. Mm. Mm. Mm. Mm. Mm. Mm. Mm. Mm. Mm. Mm. Mm. Mm. Mm. Mm. Mm. Mm. Mm. Mm. Mm. Mm. Mm. Mm. Mm. Mm. Mm. Mm. Mm. Mm. Mm. Mm. Mm. Mm. Mm. Mm. Mm. Mm. Mm. Mm. Mm. Mm. Mm. Mm. Mm. Mm. Mm. Mm. Mm. Mm. Mm. Mm. Mm. Mm. Mm. Mm. Mm. Mm. Mm. Mm. Mm. Mm. Mm. Mm. Mm. Mm. Mm. Mm. Mm. Mm. Mm. Mm. Mm. Mm. Mm. Mm. Mm. Mm. Mm. Mm. Mm. Mm. Mm. Mm. Mm. Mm. Mm. Mm. Mm. Mm. Mm. Mm. Mm. Mm. Mm. Mm. Mm. Mm. Mm. Mm. Mm. Mm. Mm. Mm. Mm. Mm. Mm. Mm. Mm. Mm. Mm. Mm. Mm. Mm. Mm. Mm. Mm. Mm. Mm. Mm. Mm. Mm. Mm. Mm. Mm. Mm. Mm. Mm. Mm. Mm. Mm. Mm. Mm. Mm. Mm. Mm. Mm. Mm. Mm. Mm. Mm. Mm. Mm. Mm. Mm. Mm. Mm. Mm. Mm. Mm. Mm. Mm. Mm. Mm. Mm. Mm. Mm. Mm. Mm. Mm. Mm. Mm. Mm. Mm. Mm. Mm. Mm. Mm. Mm. Mm. Mm. Mm. Mm. Mm. Mm. Mm. Mm. Mm.hmm. Mm-hmm. Not thrilled. Mm-hmm. Being idiots and assuming the greenhouse guys were just washing chemicals down the drain or something else which was normal, none of us worried too much. The sink remained dyed blue for the better part of three months.

Not great. That is until one day when the greenhouse assistant saw me refilling my water bottle from the kitchen sink and said, You guys aren't drinking that water, right? Oh, God. Oh, God. Okay. It turns out the horticulture manager had sent the well water off for testing weeks before, after the sink first turned blue. The results showed seven times the EPA limit of copper, and noticeably high levels of nitrates." Mmm. Delicious fertilizer. Yeah, that's good, delicious, that's good for you, right? Copper, I'm not sure.

So what plants crave, or something. Yeah, I know, copper, definitely. Further, that's why Gatorade is blue. It's cause of the climate. Cause of the climate there, yeah. Yeah, that's what plants crave, yeah. Further investigation revealed that years ago, in an attempt to simplify the irrigation lines running from the well to the greenhouse, the manager had inadvertently removed the backflow preventer. This crucial piece of plumbing kept the tank of concentrated plant

fertilizer from back washing into the well, the same well that us gardeners had been drinking out of for our entire respective ten years. When horticulture manager had figured this out weeks before he had neglected to tell anyone but his greenhouse assistant, myself and three other gardeners continued to drink the water for weeks after the contamination was discovered. By our best guess, the semi-constant influx of nitrogen-based fertilizer, or the blue, began to corrode our copper water lines which were also bluish, and these combined factors caused the distinctive blue staining in our sink.

Horrifyingly, when we hammered open the filter in the britter pitcha we recently adopted, it was also stained neon blue. I could write pages about HR's inhuman response to our collective poisoning, the fiasco that was our blood testing and subsequent medical bills, and the administration's ultimate refusal to do anything to remedy the contaminated well. But I shan't. Too long. Don't read. Gartner still drink out of bottled water coolers to this day." I am having the thing that we last got with the, um, sort of cat litter one, where I'm

like, I think if you haven't already you need to speak to a lawyer about this. Yeah, I was about to say, you know, this is a... The company should be able to... That time you got poisoned? Yeah, no, the company should be able to give you water. Yeah. Even the government lets you drink water. Come on. You should do something about this. And, um, yeah, I'm not... I don't know if I can say what, but you should do something about this. Yes. My senior co-worker quit over the contaminated water which she had been unknowingly drinking

for five years before discovery. She got pregnant nearly a year after quitting and had to be induced early due to the liver damage caused by her poisoning. Jesus. Jesus Christ. It's a comedy podcast, folks. JUSTIN It's a comedy podcast about engineering disasters. Very funny things occur.

ALICE Yeah, but I mean, I had someone ask me about what I did for a living the other day and I had to explain, and I said it's a true crime podcast, but the crime is social murder. JUSTIN Yes. crime podcast, but the crime is social murder. And I stick by that one. And, Jesus, it's not always a fun time, is it? SEAN Yeah, it's not good, not good. I mean, even sometimes it seems kind of, uh, how do you say, trivial. It's like, no, don't drink the blue water.

ALICE Yeah. This is thoroughly reinforcing my whole contamination anxiety thing. I look forward to washing out every glass I drink from about five or six dozen times. Yeah, well, what water are you using to do that? Oh, I mean, I'm also worrying about that separately, so don't worry. I'm worrying about the wiring as well. Yeah, you gotta get good city water through good lead pipes. No copper pipes. Gotta be lead.

See, I was gonna make a quip about using bottled water, but notably the UK is where Coca-Cola tried to sell bottled water and it also came out poisoned. Oh good, yeah. I know. Listen, Glasgow tap water is very very good, comes straight down from a lock, tastes fantastic. Big fan. So, yeah. I know my water is good because it comes out of the school cool and it goes through a nuclear

reactor on the way here. Oh fuck yeah. Yeah. Yeah, no contaminants. Just pure, unfiltered radiation. Which is fine. Genuinely though. Yeah. ALICE- Genuinely though. JUSTIN- Anyway, cheers and fuck the A asterix, B asterix, G asterix, DAS-

ALICE- Hold on, let me tab back over to the thing so I can read this, what? JUSTIN- Yeah, no, I'm not certain what this is. SEAN- I presume it's the name of the garden, based on the- ALICE- Oh, that tracks, yeah. JUSTIN- That could be the case. SEAN- The B and the G, I would assume, is a botanical garden. JUSTIN- Oh yeah, that's a good point. From Kelsey, they them.

Thank you Kelsey. Thank you Kelsey. Please, please take these people to the cleaners. Oh yeah. Oh, shit. Do the thing again. Shake hands with danger. Our next episode will be on Chernobyl. Does anyone have any commercials before we go?

Maya. Yeah. Yeah, let me do my usual self promotion. For the most part, you could find most of the things that I do at my website, which is Maya walk with dot me. I am currently in the middle. Currently in the middle. I hope you liked the I did the poster just for the header. I don't know if you've ever looked at it. I'm currently actually doing a run of photography prints using equipment that I bought from the large pharmacy chain that's going out of business here in the United States. This is purely a novelty thing, but people seem to like my photography

except these aren't selling particularly well, so I'm going to plug them here. They're only a limited set of ten for each one so you know this is not a big deal. It's most, it was like half for a joke anyway, but one way or another. That can also be found on my website. It can also be, you just have to put shop in front of the URL. You can find me on Twitter and blue sky, both of which are some variation of Maya walk with me. Those are kind of the important ones. My sub stack is linked in all of those. That's the important one. My podcast is actually only on Twitter because like I said, I haven't dealt with it in a year.

So I need to get back to that. It will probably be on blue sky by the time I'm there by the time so at the time you people hear this I don't actually know I'm trying to think what else I have I don't know I'm poor give me money that's all I can really advise there you go that that's the that's the important part yes yes because it's a core part of it all put your money in other places that's true all right I don't have anything to plug. I don't know what happened to Liam.

Did I mute myself again? God damn it. I you might have. Oh, yeah. You haven't said anything for like the past 20 minutes and a half an hour. I was muted. That's my shit.

Ah, I it's OK. That's OK, folks. I went to the bathroom and came back. And then I yeah, it's fine. All right. Well, sorry. Sorry, we were okay, folks. I went to the bathroom and came back, and then I, yeah, it's fine. All right, well. Sorry, we were talking over you. No, it's fine, okay. I'm sure someone will leave a hurtful comment about how they liked it better.

Wow, wow, wow. Well, we have closure now, at least. Good night, everybody. All right. Good night, everyone. That was a podcast.