Hello there i think i remember this film but not sure could someone tell me the ending? this may sound silly but i thought the crash occured because somebody spilt some coffe on the intrument panel during flight?
please let me know
richard
WARNING! SPOILER!
Your memory is pretty good. To try to determine what happened to the doomed flight, the investigators outfit an identical plane with dummies representing the passengers and convince the surviving stewardess played by Suzanne Pleshette to accompany them on the test flight to fill them in on everything that happened right down to the smallest detail, including who in the cockpit had coffee and where it was placed. The investigators place everything exactly according to the stewardess' recollections.
The test plane takes off, and bizarrely, alarm bells sound just like the original flight. The panicked stewardess thinks it's all happening again! Turns out that this time, just like the crash, a poorly-secured cup of coffee topples and the spilled coffee short circuits the plane's alarm system, causing a false alarm bell. On the original doomed flight, the false alarm caused Capt. Savage to think that an additional engine was out. He did everything right according to what the alarm was telling him-- except that unbeknownst to him it was a false alarm caused by a short circuit. The fatal crash was the result. Savage is vindicated.
-Brian
thank you! i had this memmory of this happening but could never remember the tile of the film.
The parallel story in feal life was the crash of flight 401, where a sensor light went out/on and the crew was so busy trying to determine if it was a false alarm or not, didn't notice the plane was descending until it was too late. We depend on machines to tell us what we need to know, but can't always trust them.
shareBut, as a pilot, you are taught and trained to always trust your instruments. I've been in situations where had I trusted my senses rather than what the instruments were telling me, I would have wound up as a greasy smoking hole in the ground.
shareLike so many airline accidents, Flt 401 was a combination of seemingly unrelated factors--a circumstance also hinted at in Fate Is The Hunter.. The crew were concentrating on the faulty nose gear indicator. The yoke sensor that disengages the autopilot when either the pilot or co-pilot applies pressure was out of adjustment. Someone bumped the yoke while leaning forward to investigate the indicator, the autopilot disengaged, the warning did not sound, and so the aircrew did not realize the autopilot was offline. The aircrew thought the autopilot was keeping them on altitude. ATC saw they were descending, but only asked them if they were okay, without warning the crew the plane was not maintaining altitude.
This is from memory. I read about Flight 401 years ago and there might be holes in my recollection, but this is roughly what I recall they determined as the probable cause, based on information from the flight data and cockpit voice recorders, along with additional research that revealed the issue with the yoke sensor, etc.
There are several places on the where you can access the Voice recorder transcript.
http://www.airdisaster.com/cvr/cvr_ea401.shtml
is one.
The last comment 'What's going on here?" indicates that the crew's focus was not on flying the plane. An eerily similar accident (United 173 in 1978) led to the first crew resource management (CRM) program. CRM has been adopted by all airlines worldwide. These accidents reveal more about human psychology than about the individual pilots. The US Air Force has done experiments with "task saturation", something which affects all humans under stress. In short, the human mind can multi-task with say 5 tasks. When a sixth is added, two tasks are dropped. Now crews are instructed to entrust one crew member with flying and the others to other tasks, like diagnosing the issue at hand. As a result, Airline flying has become very,very safe. Aviate, navigate,communicate.
Mariners have something called "Bridge resource management" as there are maritime accidents with the same cause, and operating rooms are beginning to initiate similar protocols, to reduce errors. If you think this is theoretical, consider what happens when you are driving and discover there is an angry bee in the car.