For me, in no particular order;
Crash of the Century
The Killing Machine
Death and Denial
All Engines Failed
Mid Air Collision
Attack Over Baghdad
Panic Over The Pacific
Hanging By A Thread
Ripped from the Cockpit
Jacqueline Lee Bouvier Kennedy Onassis
My fav episodes in no particular order are:
Deadly Crossroads
Fire on Board
Hidden Danger
Out of Sight
Ghost Plane
Dead Weight
Southern storm
Phantom Strike
My least favourite is Gimli Glider. I really wish Discovery would stop playing it so much. I've seen it a gazillion times now.
My favorites:
* Explosive Evidence
* Lockerbie Disaster
* Blown Apart
* Pilot Betrayed (probably the saddest one of them, even though this crash had a relatively "happy ending"... but I felt very sorry for the Captain).
* Under Pressure (the scariest one)
And my recent favorite: Disaster At Tenerife. I was quite happy with this episode, which was relatively unbiased (yet still had some mistakes and ridiculous myths, but nothing compared to most other docus I saw).
My least favorite must be Crash Of The Century. I used to like it when I first saw it (and knew basically nothing about the disaster or the ones involved), but the more I learned, the more disappointed I became. This movie is so slanderous and full of lies it makes my blood boil.
"Yet still had some mistakes and ridiculous myths".
Such as? I don't really recall anything that's at odds with what I've read about the disaster.
"facts are stupid things" Ronald Reagan
@franzkabuki:
The usual myth is the so-called vZ's "superstar-status": people keep claiming that he was KLM's "star pilot" and "was the face/poster-boy" of the company. But this is totally untrue. He was featured on one single advert, which was published somewhere in Autumn 1976. JUST ONE SINGLE ADVERT! And many people who never saw that ad think it was all about him, a praising article about a certain pilot (I even saw this ridiculous claim in some American "documentary": the producers showed a very blurry copy of the ad, and the narrator said that it was a "complimenting article about him"). But... I own a couple of copies of this very ad, and you can easily find them on the Internet in a decent quality, and let me tell you this: the name of that pilot is NOT MENTIONED at all! The ad is about KLM and its' service, and also mentiones the Netherlands as a tourist destination. There's zero mention of his name.
Here, you can see it. The text is small, but still easily readable:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/a/a2/KLM_Magazine_that_contains_Captain_Jacob_Veldhuyzen_Van_Zanten.jpg
And this is the photoshopped "KLM advert" they used in the episode:
http://s017.radikal.ru/i410/1612/17/c2ca4c6f5dad.jpg
But the reality is that he never was on any covers and never was KLS's "model". He was just one of many random people who apeared on one of their ads. And there are two main reasons for that:
1) He was mostly a training pilot and hardly made any "normal" flying anymore, so it was much easier to use him, because most other pilots were always away flying.
2) That's something I only asume, so please don't take it as the ultimate truth, but I believe it has something to do with the fact that he had a very typical Dutch look (although there are rumours there was some Indonesian blood in him): I saw lots of KLM adverts during those years, and all the "models" always looked very Dutch/Northern European. Jacob van Zanten had that classic, typical appearance, there are many middle-aged men in Holland who have the exactly same "phenotype", if you understand what I mean.
There's also a claim that his co-pilot and Flight Engineer were "junior to him", assuming they were young and insecure sissies, but... the FA was a 48-years old man who was an extremely experienced professional (actually, it was him who was the most experienced man in the Dutch cockpit). He was a well-known, respected flight engineer, and people who knew him described him as anything but a "softie". The First Officer was new to the B-747, but he had an experience as Captain on other aircrafts and was also known as an extraverted (opposed to vZ, who was an introvert) man, who never afraid to express his opinion and would never tolerate any abuse or humiliation from anybody. Just read Jan Bartelski's "Disasters In The Air", the man knew Klaas Meurs (the FO), very well, so I have no reason not to believe him.
And the most important thing: lets suggest that the pilots "ignored" the FE when he was concerned about the American aircraft being on the runway. The FE always has the possibility to abort the flight when he suspects something might go wrong. Besides that: if you have a concern that the runway is not free, would you really go to your death just because you are "afraid of your boss"?!? If the FE really was so afraid of vZ, was his fright greater than the fright of an air crash and his own death? I really don't think so! Both pilots were sure the runway is clear (if they really had doubts, they would never take off, unless you talk about somebody who wishes to commit suicide), it was a huge mistake. The FE had his doubts, but was convinced that everything is fine. If he really thought the situation is as bad as it really was, he had the right to abort the flight instantly.
Let me make it clear: just like anybody else, I also think vZ made a huge mistake and is the main responsible for what happened. No doubt about that. I'm not Dutch, I'm not realted to him at all (just talked to people who knew him and read lots of literature about this case), and I believe that if he survived, he would get jailed. It was a big mistake on KLM's side to let a pilot spend most of his time in a flight simulator: today, a situation like this is totally unacceptable: when your number of flying hours is as low as vZ's was in 1976-1977, you can easily lose your license, so any training pilot must do enough line-flying as well. BUT! I don't like it when people who never knew or met him assume this and that and make up stories about "stardom" and such. He wasn't a star. And he never bullied his colleagues. You can also read the ALPA report, made by American investigators: they mention the fact that when both aircrafts were in Los Rodeos, the atmosphere in the Dutch cockpit was fine, there was no bulliying of anybody, and vZ was perfectly polite and relaxed.
That's why I loathe "Crash Of The Century": they made up lots of scenes which have no connection to reality (like the yelling at the flight attendants, threating to drag some of the missing passengers onboard with force and saying "goddammit" again and again (vZ was a fanatical Protestant (yes, being a religious fanatic IS bad, can't help it), so using this expression was a big sin among people like him). But drama sells better ;-)
But generally - I'm very satisfied with the newest episode. And I think Kevin Hare was a perfect actor to portray vZ. He portrayed him the way I always imagined him to be. There was no cheap drama, no slander, just neutral information. So I would rate this episode 8.5 or even 9 out of 10 :-)
Best Regards
Thank you for your detailed reply.
I totally understand what you mean by the tendentious handling of the facts the earlier Tenerife Disaster documentary is guilty of. As a matter of fact, it's not just the climate in the KLM cockpit that's been taken great liberties with, but all the made-up interactions on both planes are ridiculously hokey and silly; the dramatizations are like something out of a daytime soap opera. I think, at some point, the entire Pan Am cockpit crew actually bursts into a joyous song - surely intended as a counterpoint to the alleged rigid regime on the KLM flight deck ruled over by the heavy hand of disapproving Captain Van Zanten. And indeed the docu pulls out all the stops in an effort to make Van Zanten look like the supervillain of the story - he's consistently portrayed as grumpy, pompous, arrogant, condescending and dismissive of his colleagues as if they were some amateur schoolboys; he's like some disdainful prima donna sitting on his thrown and spitting venom. I mean, really - who could possibly take that grotesque sh-t seriously? But, apparently, it in fact has helped solidify the myth, as improbable as it may seem.
However, I still have difficulty understanding the pre-doom goings-on in the KLM cockpit. I mean, obviously, the FE wasn't SURE about the meaning of the last transmissions between the ATC and Pan Am - if he was, then indeed his actions would make no sense as you point out - but he voiced his concern, only to be overruled by the Captain (who, apparently, wasn't paying attention at all, as evidenced by his attempt to commence the take-off roll even before the preliminary clearence to hold and wait was received). There was doubt - although there shoulda been much more, considering that the exchange "report the runway clear" & "OK, will report when we're clear" doesn't sound terribly ambiguous - but the authoritative word of the Captain seems to have put that to rest. And it doesn't mean that the co-pilots had to be "young and immature sissies" to ultimately fall back on the Captain's judgement - as is understood, the seniority hierarchy within cockpit was more rigorously adhered to those days, a natural state of affairs as it were, and this "little more naturally granted authority" sometimes may have made all the difference. I mean, I don't think the industry was chasing shadows when they were pushing the basic ideas of the "crew resource management" post-Tenerife and many other crashes in the 1970's.
But, overall, Tenerife certainly remains one of the most spooky disasters for the sheer number of things that had to go wrong and did in order to facilitate the crash. The simultaneous radio transmissions being the icing on the cake.
For me though the Air France 447 crash has always been kind of special... the mystery that for a long time seemed will remain unsolved. And then finally getting the CVR transcript like a ghost story. Freaking mind-boggling.
"facts are stupid things" Ronald Reagan
Thank you for your comment. It's really nice to "meet" people who understand and can think of themselves. Thumbs up for that!
You won't believe how many people actually take "Crash Of The Century" for granted ;-) Back in 2011, when I just started to get interested in this particular disaster and knew basically nothing about it or the ones involved, I spent lots of hours reading all the comments on YouTube, and you just cannot believe how naive and stupid many of the commentators were! Like... seriously! Some people actually believed the movie was a real-time video, and the actors were the real pilots, LOL. At first I thought people who write those comments are either trolls or write it as a joke, but, unfortunately, that was 100% seriously meant. Many others truly believed that everything in the movie was taken from the black boxes (but the reality is, that the recordings only reveal the last 30 minutes before the crash: it was technivally impossible to know what was said many hours prior to the disaster). But those scenes can easily be refuted if only people would spend 10 minutes on reading the official documents. But no: it's way easier to see a cheap, pseudo-docu instead of trying to find out the truth ;-)
It's true that the hierarchy was different a few decades ago, but let's not forget about some cultural differences: while it's very common in certrain countries/cultures (like the USA, Russia, some Asian countries) that people of a "higher" social/economic status have the tendency to look down at those "beyond" them, it's very different in Northern Europe. I have been living in one of the Scandinavian countries (yes, it's not Holland, but our countries have lots of things in common, the culture is similar in many ways) for almost 15 years, and I can tell you that we live in a Socialist society, where the difference between the "poor" and the "rich" are minimal, and the so-called "education snobism" is hardly noticeable. Many people believe that all people should be treated as equal, no matter what they do for a living and how much money they earn. In most societies, a cleaning lady or a salesman in a fast food chain would be seen as inferior losers, while people with longer educations and a high-regarded job would be treated with great respect. Many people in certain European countries (the Netherlands among them) don't think like this: for them, a pilot is not better or "higher" than a nurse. I'm not saying everybody are like that, but there is some kind of tendency to see people as individuals, and not judge them because of their social status. So I don't really believe that the hierarchy in the Dutch cockpit was so great: those 3 men were close to eachother in age, and the Captain wasn't hugely experienced, and then you have the cultural thing I told about... I'm sure if those Dutchmen were Russian or Korean, then it would be more likely to have that serious hierarchy.
I believe vZ used to be a good pilot in the past, and he probably was an excellent instructor as well and "raised" many good pilots (if he really was so talentless and lousy as many people think (more than one person on YouTube said that he probably got his license because he was, well, willing to give certain sexual services to some "big bosses" in the company), the pilots he worked with would also become lousy aviators), but after he become an instructor, he was pretty much "disconnected" from real flying, and because of that he no longer was a "safe" pilot. The "instructor syndrome" turned him into a low-qualified pilot. So he made mistakes that even rookie pilots would never do. I blame KLM for allowing it, and I blame vZ for not insisting on getting more line flying. That's something I can never understand: why in the world did he never insist on flying more? I read an interview with his widow: she said that her husband was extremely happy on the 27th: he really loved to fly and was so happy he finally got the chance to do so. So WHY in the world did he agree to spend all his time on the ground?!? I just don't get it :-(
Sorry for all my typos
Best Regards