- 8 months ago
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00:01It should be at Agram at 10.20. We'll report back then.
00:06I'm looking for LAM 470.
00:09A jet plummets from the sky in Namibia, killing everyone on board.
00:15I have never seen an airplane this destroyed.
00:20The wreckage gives investigators their first big clue.
00:23Definitely made by the engines.
00:25There were two depressions at the very beginning of the debris trail.
00:29The plane was level. Maybe they were trying to land.
00:33But when investigators listen to the cockpit voice recorder...
00:37Something's going on in that cockpit. Turn it off.
00:40...some strange sounds point to a disturbing possibility.
00:45What the hell?
00:50D-D-D-D!
00:54Oh, fuck!
00:55Maputo International Airport in Mozambique.
01:01Maputo International Airport in Mozambique.
01:16Auto-brake set to TRO?
01:24Auto-brakes are set.
01:26Confirm takeoff configuration.
01:29Takeoff configuration, okay.
01:31Ready for takeoff.
01:33LAM 470, ready for takeoff.
01:35LAM 470, you are cleared for takeoff.
01:39Roger, Maputo Tower, LAM 470.
01:42LAM 470, you are cleared for takeoff.
01:43Here we go.
01:43Here we go.
01:54Auto-brake.
01:56You're up.
01:58You're up.
02:0149-year-old Captain Herminio dos Santos Fernandez commands LAM Mozambique Airlines Flight 470.
02:08He's one of the airline's most experienced pilots.
02:12Flaps set to zero.
02:16Flaps set to zero.
02:17The first officer is 24 and at the beginning of his career.
02:22This crew pairing with an experienced, middle-aged Mozambican captain and a younger co-pilot,
02:30this is an average, normal pairing.
02:34Auto-pilot on.
02:35It takes 20 minutes for the flight to level off at its cruising altitude of 38,000 feet.
02:52It's bound for Luanda in Angola and will fly over South Africa and Botswana to get there.
03:00The flight will take four hours.
03:02LAM Mozambique has been in existence for quite some years, actually.
03:06The late 30s, 1930s, it started operations.
03:09So it's a well-established airline.
03:12Flies mostly within Africa with a fairly small fleet of around six, seven aircraft.
03:17The direct flight from Mozambique to Angola is a crucial connection for many passengers.
03:22Those two countries are both Portuguese-speaking and they have lots of business links.
03:27There's a great mix of tourists, of business people, traveling between the two countries,
03:32specifically because of this Portuguese link.
03:35The workload should be fairly light for the cabin crew.
03:39Today's flight is undersold.
03:41Most seats are empty.
03:45The pilots are flying a recent addition to the airline's fleet.
03:49It's an Embraer 190, purchased just over a year ago.
03:54The twin-engine jet is in use all around the world, largely on low-volume routes.
04:01The Embraer 190 is a modern aircraft, very successful.
04:05It's considered a regional jet.
04:08It is a good aircraft to fly.
04:11Gabron, area control, LAM 470.
04:1345 minutes after takeoff, the jet crosses into the airspace over Botswana.
04:22The pilots check in with the Gaborone area control center.
04:26Whether you're flying across a country or across several countries,
04:30you have to go through several jurisdictions.
04:33So on a typical long-distance flight,
04:35you may have three or four different distinct air traffic control areas
04:39where the airplane has to communicate with them.
04:41The pilots confirm that they will check in when they reach a navigational point
05:02that marks the boundary between Botswana and Angola.
05:05It's been an hour since the controller in Gaborone last communicated with LAM 470.
05:29The flight should be approaching Angola.
05:31So he gives the crew their next instructions.
05:36LAM 470, Gaborone.
05:39Please continue with Luanda control.
05:41Frequency 8888.
05:51LAM 470, do you copy?
05:53But there's no reply.
06:10Five minutes later, the Gaborone controller contacts Luanda control in Angola
06:15to find out if they've heard from the crew.
06:17I'm looking for LAM 470.
06:21Are you in contact?
06:24It was intended to be handed off to Angola to Luanda.
06:27Hand-off never happened.
06:32Luanda called back and said, the airplane's not here.
06:37Five minutes before its expected arrival time,
06:41LAM 470 has still not contacted Luanda control.
06:44You haven't heard anything?
06:52Neither controller knows where LAM 470 is.
06:57It has disappeared.
07:02There are no distress calls or any signals from the plane's emergency locator transmitter.
07:09Investigative agencies from the three countries where the plane could be are notified.
07:13Botswana, Angola, and Namibia.
07:21Last contact was at 9.19am.
07:24Let's start there.
07:27Investigators from each country check their recorded radar signals
07:31to see if they can trace the missing Embraer 190.
07:39It's the Namibians who find its track.
07:42There it is.
07:46Members of Namibia's Directorate of Aircraft Accident Investigation, or DAAI,
07:52review its recorded signal.
07:55The Namibians had the radar information, showed them at cruise,
08:00and then all the way till he disappeared off of the signal, off of the radar.
08:04The data shows that Flight 470 was cruising normally at 38,000 feet.
08:16Then, it began to plunge towards the ground at a breathtaking speed.
08:21It's traveling really fast.
08:24They watched the signal for six minutes.
08:30It shows the plane falling more than 30,000 feet.
08:34Trapping in over twice the normal descent rate.
08:36It was clear that the aircraft was at cruise and disappeared from radar some thousands of feet above ground,
08:50consistent with the aircraft either attempting to land or the aircraft having some other issue where it crashed.
08:56The radar track disappears once the plane drops below 6,600 feet.
09:03But it does show that just a few kilometers from the border between Botswana and Namibia,
09:08LAM 470 was rapidly heading towards the ground.
09:12Yeah, yeah, we're checking for airstrips in the area now.
09:17I don't see any airports near their last known location.
09:21Investigators hope the pilots were able to land at an airfield.
09:25This aircraft had an emergency where they were unable to communicate with the outside world
09:35or they were too busy keeping the airplane in the sky to communicate.
09:39And they were maybe trying to land, either at an airstrip in the area
09:42or, worst case, an emergency landing away from an airport.
09:46The six minutes that passed from the time LAM 470 began its descent
09:51to the time it disappeared from radar
09:53should have been enough time for pilots to call in an emergency.
09:58The question is, why didn't they?
10:05Search and rescue aircraft deploy to try and find Mozambique Airlines Flight 470.
10:11But it's park rangers in Namibia's remote Bwabwata National Park
10:22who first come across a tangle of wreckage.
10:29It's clearly Mozambique Airlines Flight 470.
10:32All 27 passengers and the flight crew are dead.
10:42The area where the aircraft wreckage was found in the end is a very remote area.
10:47It's partially populated and it's a very open area.
10:51The site is in a roughly 280-mile strip of Namibia,
10:58straddling Botswana and Angola,
11:02putting the investigators from Namibia's DAAI in charge.
11:06Okay, we've got a lot of ground to cover.
11:12Let's find the point of impact.
11:13This was the biggest investigation they'd ever had.
11:16It was the first one involving a fatality on a large jet transport.
11:20It was an aircraft that was from outside the country
11:22with passengers on board from several other countries.
11:25So they were under the extra pressure of having an international spotlight.
11:29I have never seen an airplane this destroyed.
11:36The team combs through the debris for any clues that could help explain the crash.
11:42The debris can tell us a lot.
11:46Just the way that the debris is reflected on the ground is very important.
11:51The last radar plot of the flight showed the plane
11:54was in an unusually steep descent moments before the crash.
11:59But the crash site adds important details.
12:03Okay, so the plane came down there
12:04and was headed in this direction towards Luanda.
12:10Flight 470 was headed in the direction of its destination.
12:15It was not off course.
12:21Investigators look for other wreckage patterns to see what else they can learn.
12:25Right aileron.
12:27Take note.
12:28One of the things that the investigators are looking for
12:31is to see if very specific parts of the aircraft
12:34are in or near the major debris field,
12:37such as the tip of the wings, nose of the aircraft, the tail of the aircraft.
12:42Left flap.
12:43These parts of the aircraft tend to come off the airplane first
12:47if there's an in-flight breakup.
12:50They did find all those parts of the airplane.
12:52The aircraft was completely intact when it hit the ground.
12:57At the point of initial impact,
13:00investigators find two nearly identical pits.
13:03Let's get a measurement.
13:06There were two depressions at the very beginning of the debris trail.
13:10Thirty-two feet.
13:17Thirty-two feet.
13:27That's the distance between the two engines.
13:28They had a distance between them that was roughly the distance between the engines of the aircraft.
13:36Identical.
13:37So the plane was leveled.
13:39That implied to the investigators that the aircraft was relatively wings level.
13:43It's an important lead that shows the investigators the way in which the plane hit the ground.
13:54Investigators studied the actual shape of the crash site.
13:58Okay, we're 487 meters from the first point of impact.
14:02The wreckage pattern is long and narrow.
14:05When I see a wreckage trail that's that long and the aircraft is that disintegrated,
14:10it says that there is both a high vertical speed as it hit the ground
14:14and a high forward speed to allow the wreckage to spread over such a wide area.
14:20And that usually indicates that there is a very high speed,
14:23not necessarily an out-of-control high speed impact with the ground.
14:27The extensive trail of debris suggests one possibility.
14:32Maybe they were trying to land.
14:35To answer that question, the team examines the landing gear.
14:40Tires aren't blown.
14:46No damage to the treads.
14:48No puncture marks.
14:51They were retracted.
14:53This wasn't an emergency landing.
14:56It's the first tangible clue about what the pilots may have been doing.
15:00The crew decided not to deploy the landing gear,
15:04either because they were unwilling to do so or unable to do so.
15:09They weren't trying to land.
15:12Why were they coming in so fast?
15:13A day after the crash, there is still no evidence why LAM 470 flew into the ground in Namibia.
15:30The hope is the plane's black boxes will help solve that mystery.
15:37The handling of the flight recorders has to be painstaking, methodical, and has to be done with experience.
15:47Because you don't want to do anything that will either ruin or damage the data itself.
15:55The black boxes on board flight 470 were damaged at impact.
16:02They're sent away for analysis.
16:04Soon after, the American NTSB, or National Transportation Safety Board, joins the investigation.
16:15Anything missing?
16:17Don't think so.
16:18They send veteran investigator Dennis Jones to Namibia.
16:22There weren't many large pieces left.
16:24It's mostly all these small pieces that will be found scared all at the crash site.
16:28He's investigated air accidents throughout Africa since 1996.
16:32And they weren't trying to land?
16:34No.
16:34There was no evidence of emergency landing.
16:37Show me what else you've got.
16:39I was very impressed with the Namibian investigators.
16:44They had set up the scene very, very well.
16:46Many crash sites I get to are very chaotic.
16:49They came in at a low angle, so we think that the pilot had control.
16:53Any signs of inflate fire?
16:56No.
16:56The soot patterns indicate that the fire was post-crash.
17:04It seemed like whatever fire damage was associated with the impact, not anything that was in-flight related.
17:11Jones has worked dozens of plane crashes, but even he's baffled by the evidence from the crash site.
17:17There was almost no crater at all.
17:20There was no big crater in the ground.
17:22So that suggested to me that there was some sense of controllability.
17:27This is a puzzling clue.
17:30If the pilots had control of the Embraer, why did it crash?
17:35We were not ruling anything out.
17:37It's just that, okay, what should we rule in?
17:40We may have missed something.
17:42Maybe we overlooked something.
17:43The wreckage and the radar data tell investigators of the LAM Flight 470 crash the same story.
17:59It became quite apparent that it was high-energy impact because the aircraft had essentially disintegrated on impact.
18:06With such a rapid descent, investigators wonder if engine failure was to blame.
18:13When a jet engine is running, the rotors spin as they draw in air.
18:20The way that these turbine blades are damaged, they were definitely spinning on impact.
18:26When you take an engine that's rotating at thousands of revolutions per minute and come to a sudden stop,
18:33it tends to have certain kind of signatures, as we call it, corncobbing,
18:38where the rotors themselves get stripped, and it causes the blades to just separate and flatten.
18:45It looks like a corncob.
18:46And when I looked at both engines, the evidence was very strong that they were operating fully at the time of impact.
18:56One week after the crash of Flight 470, investigators have learned all they can from the crash site.
19:03They now need to turn their focus elsewhere for answers.
19:07So, what have we missed?
19:11When I left the scene, I said, OK, we have some answers with the machine.
19:17We don't have them all. We may have missed something.
19:20Let's look at the maintenance records.
19:22Maybe it was a mechanical issue that was kind of subtle and perhaps not very obvious at the time.
19:28The investigation moves from the field to DAAI offices in Windhoek, Namibia.
19:40Is this the last inspection?
19:43Looks like it.
19:44They begin looking into the way Mozambique Airlines was maintaining the plane.
19:50November 28th.
19:52Day before the accident.
19:58Everything seems to be done by the book.
20:01The Embraer 190, purchased brand new just a year ago, has a spotless record.
20:07The maintenance records of this aircraft were excellent.
20:09It was well maintained by Namibia Mozambique.
20:13Yeah, there was nothing wrong with the aircraft.
20:16There were no major system failures that had been repaired recently.
20:20No deferred maintenance that would have affected any major system.
20:23It, in fact, had a fairly intense inspection roughly a day before the event.
20:30Here we go.
20:33Nothing that said that the airplane itself was anything other than in top shape when it took off.
20:43With no evidence of a mechanical problem, the team turns its attention to outside factors.
20:49They review meteorological reports from the day of the crash.
20:54All right, Dennis, the data from Mon Weather Station is in.
20:57Did bad weather bring down Flight 470?
21:01Great.
21:02Why don't we start from the takeoff in Maputo?
21:07Africa is the home to some of the most fiercest and strongest thunderstorms.
21:11A thunderstorm has every hazard you can imagine along with it.
21:19It has electrical discharge and lightning that can affect your navigational systems.
21:24It has severe turbulence that can compromise the integrity of the aircraft.
21:30It has hail.
21:31It has rain.
21:33The team scrolls through a series of satellite images spanning the duration of the flight.
21:42Just some scattered clouds 3,000 feet throughout the flight.
21:47Nowhere near their cruising altitude.
21:50There wasn't anything in the weather that we became aware of that would explain why this airplane was down on the ground.
21:55What was the wind like?
22:00Nothing stronger than 11 knots.
22:02So, no problem there.
22:05When the environment doesn't have anything that was unusual,
22:09when the machine itself seems to be in operation,
22:12the area that investigators tend to go to is the operation of the aircraft.
22:16That is, were the captain and the first officer working appropriately to execute procedures in the right sequence?
22:25With both the machine and the environment ruled out,
22:30investigators have only one more avenue to pursue.
22:34Okay, let's look into the pilot records.
22:40Were the pilots responsible for the crash of Flight 470?
22:45Investigators consider if the pilots of LAM-470 played a role in causing the crash.
22:59Captain Hermanio dos Santos Fernandes.
23:03Born in Mozambique, 49 years old.
23:08Here we go.
23:09How familiar was Captain Fernandes with the Embraer 190?
23:19Positive rate.
23:21You're up.
23:23You're up.
23:29The team scrutinizes his pilot records.
23:32You're trying to see anything that might show degradation of the performance of the pilot.
23:37Captain Fernandes was not only well trained.
23:422,500 on the Embraer 190.
23:449,000 flight hours total.
23:47He was a very experienced airman.
23:51Malcolm Brenner, an expert in pilot psychology, consulted on the investigation.
23:56The captain had an unblemished record.
23:59No accidents, no incidents.
24:01He was medically qualified.
24:04All his records were up to date.
24:05The first officer was young, but had over a thousand flight hours.
24:10The two were a good match.
24:12Yeah.
24:15Flap set to zero.
24:18Flap set to zero.
24:20It's a very common practice to have a very senior captain and a more junior first officer.
24:25It enables the first officer to learn and to progress in his career.
24:28And they should work as a good team.
24:32Autopilot on.
24:35Autopilot on.
24:42Investigators have exhausted all available avenues of inquiry and come up empty.
24:48The crash remains a mystery.
24:51Any news on the recorders?
24:53Not yet.
24:54But I'll check in.
24:55Okay.
24:59Two weeks after the crash, the flight data and cockpit voice recorders are finally ready for analysis in Washington, D.C.
25:07We were eager to see what the recorders had to tell us because the recorders will help us with what the strategy will be for the rest of the investigation.
25:15Okay.
25:16We're ready for playback.
25:19Gaviron, area control.
25:20LAM 470.
25:22LAM 470, Gaviron.
25:24Report your estimated time to Agron.
25:27Number one hour.
25:28Gaviron, LAM 470.
25:30Copy that.
25:31We should be at Agron at 1020.
25:33We'll report back then.
25:34Investigators listen to the recording carefully and hear something that piques their interest.
25:42It was just a routine flight until the first officer excused himself to go to the laboratory.
25:49I'm going to step out to the toilet.
25:51Do you have the controls?
25:52No problem.
25:59The first officer leaves the cockpit.
26:01Captain confirmed, that's fine, and the first officer left.
26:15From that point on, it was quiet.
26:18Thirty seconds go by.
26:37A minute.
26:43Six minutes of near silence on the CVR.
26:46Just sound like normal things going on.
26:54The first officer is coming back.
27:00All of a sudden, you hear knocking on the door.
27:08There was no response.
27:09And then the knocking started becoming more repetitive.
27:17The cockpit door remains locked.
27:20The co-pilot of the flight wants to get back in, and the captain is not responding.
27:26During flight, the cockpit door locks automatically.
27:30It can be open from the outside with a code.
27:33But the code isn't unlocking the door.
27:39And the captain still isn't responding.
27:42Maybe the captain fell asleep.
27:43Maybe the captain is a little bit woozy.
27:46Maybe if I just hit on the door, things will go back to normal.
27:49He'll let me back in.
27:50High speed, high speed, high speed.
28:00What the hell?
28:01What's going on?
28:02The recording becomes even more disturbing.
28:06Sink rate, sink rate, sink rate, sink rate, sink rate.
28:12And then we heard the ground proximity warning system saying, pull up.
28:17Hooray, pull up, pull up, pull up.
28:20That was the first sense that we knew that the airplane was even heading down.
28:25Hooray, pull up, pull up, pull up, pull up.
28:36The investigators are stunned.
28:39It's beyond abnormal.
28:41This is strange.
28:42This is unusual.
28:44One does not expect to have a situation where a pilot is refused entry into the cockpit.
28:50Was there something wrong with the captain?
28:53The knocks that took place, there was no response to those knocks.
28:59And then all of a sudden, it comes to an abrupt end.
29:02What's going on here?
29:04The investigation into the crash of LAM Flight 470 has uncovered a shocking clue.
29:15The first officer was locked out of that cockpit for six minutes, right up until the plane crashes.
29:26And it sounds like the captain did nothing to avert the crash.
29:30Sink rate, sink rate, sink rate, sink rate, sink rate.
29:37Here's an authorized crew member is trying to get back to his position and isn't being allowed in.
29:44That's completely abnormal.
29:46We need to figure out what went on in that cockpit.
29:52The authorized co-pilot of the flight wants to get back in.
29:56Why isn't the captain responding?
29:58Go back to the moment the first officer leaves the cockpit.
30:01The team wants to review the cockpit voice recording more carefully.
30:07Did they miss anything the first time?
30:11Let's check for incapacitation.
30:14Settle incapacitation is a situation where a person appears to be normal, both physically and mentally.
30:20But for some reason, they're not performing up to standard.
30:24I'm going to step out to the toilet.
30:26Do you have the controls?
30:28No problem.
30:29Let's delete the captain's mic and tune it up.
30:31They're not thinking straight.
30:35They're not moving as quickly or with as much dexterity.
30:39One of the kinds of subtle incapacitation that can happen is hypoxia.
30:43That is a lack of oxygen.
30:47I can hear him breathing.
30:49He can still breathe and be incapacitated.
30:59Hold on.
31:01Play that again.
31:08Something's going on in that cockpit.
31:10The captain's doing something.
31:12You can hear a click and sound.
31:13It seems that the pilot that was on the flight deck was operating some mechanism.
31:18We couldn't tell exactly, but it sounded like rotating the dials, probably associated with you, autopilot.
31:26But we didn't know.
31:27We just couldn't hear a click and sound going on.
31:30We couldn't hear a click and sound going on.
31:39We couldn't hear movement.
31:40We couldn't hear movement, so there's going to be someone who's conscious.
31:42What's he doing?
31:44We couldn't hear movement.
31:46We couldn't hear movement.
31:46We couldn't hear movement.
31:47We couldn't hear movement.
31:47We couldn't hear flight commands?
31:49What they didn't hear was even more unusual.
31:51They didn't hear a single word coming out of the mouth of the captain.
31:55Not a word to the first officer, not a word on the radio, not even a word to himself.
32:01There was silence on his side.
32:06The recording leads to a grim hypothesis.
32:10Once the investigators heard what was happening,
32:13it dawned on them that there was some sort of deliberate action on the part of the captain.
32:17A captain making inputs but not letting his first officer back into the cockpit
32:23forces investigators to consider a disturbing possibility
32:27that the captain's actions were deliberate.
32:36It seems extremely unlikely that a well-trained, experienced pilot would crash an aircraft deliberately.
32:43The team needs to rule out all other possibilities before making that determination.
32:49We knew nothing about the profile of this aircraft, what it was doing.
32:53Once you get that information, now you can correlate it with the cockpit voice recorder.
32:59So, can we agree that the FDR confirms that there was nothing wrong with the aircraft?
33:04Before you start to seriously consider deliberate action,
33:09you want to make sure that you understand that all the alternatives really do not explain it.
33:14All conditions were normal.
33:16There were no mechanical faults detected.
33:18Okay.
33:20That leaves pilot action.
33:22Let's take a look at what happened after the first officer leaves the cockpit.
33:28The data will show which inputs, if any, the captain made to the flight controls.
33:34Can we isolate these four parameters?
33:39The inputs paint a harrowing picture of the captain's actions inside the cockpit.
33:45The first officer leaves the cockpit.
33:48A few minutes later, it looks like he starts to make a series of inputs.
33:52I'm going to step out to the toilet.
34:01Do you have the controls?
34:02No problem.
34:03Three minutes after the first officer leaves, the altitude is adjusted three times,
34:21instructing the plane to drop to an altitude of 592 feet above sea level.
34:26That's the clicks we heard.
34:28592 feet is well below ground level in that area.
34:54He was flying it on autopilot, which is the way you would normally land an airplane.
35:00Three minutes later, the first officer returns to the cockpit.
35:04But the captain doesn't unlock the door.
35:14Instead, he must have overridden the door code.
35:20Planes like the Embraer 190 have a control that allows a pilot inside
35:25to override the keypad outside and keep the door locked.
35:29Then, he disengages the autothrottle, starting the descent.
35:37The power was reduced.
35:40The bottles remained in the idle position.
35:43These same kinds of inputs are what you would be using during that descent to the destination.
35:49He was commanding the autopilot to crash the airplane.
35:52I can't get in.
36:06Let's not alarm the passengers.
36:08The first officer tries to be discreet.
36:11Captain, are you okay?
36:13The last thing he needs now is panic in the cabin.
36:16The first officer pounding on the door, the captain makes one last move.
36:23He employs the speed brake.
36:26The speed brake raises the plane's spoilers.
36:31Deploying the spoilers is completely outside normal procedures.
36:36The speed brakes increase the vertical speed of the aircraft.
36:40The airplane was descending at about 5,000 feet per minute.
36:43Within a minute of deploying those speed brakes, it went up to a maximum of just over 10,000 feet per minute.
36:55During the aircraft's descent, the captain leaves the autopilot engaged and doesn't touch the control column.
37:02The inputs he was making shows that the captain had a very, very thorough knowledge of the aerodynamics of the aircraft, the behavior of the systems.
37:14The effect of which was to have a very smooth, very consistent descent from crews all the way into the ground.
37:20Everything that was being done by the pilot was to the end of bringing the airplane down fast.
37:36Captain.
37:39Captain, open this door.
37:40In less than 15 minutes, Captain Fernandez deliberately takes his plane out of cruising altitude and crashes it into the ground.
37:51This was a deliberate action.
37:58There is now one burning question.
38:03But why would a pilot do this?
38:05Captain Herminio dos Santos Fernandez was a seasoned pilot with one of Africa's best airlines.
38:23What made him fly LAM 470 up to 38,000 feet and then crash it into the ground?
38:30What we do know is that it took about two minutes until the captain locked the door.
38:38And that it took about an additional minute until he initiated the descent.
38:43So during that time, you have to assume that he was thinking about life, about whether he'd want to do something like this.
38:56Okay, all right.
38:57Did you know Captain Fernandez personally?
39:01The investigation digs into the captain's life, current and past.
39:07And did he ever seem depressed?
39:09Despite finding no red flags in his professional and medical records,
39:14investigators discover his private life was another matter.
39:18The investigators found a number of traumas in the captain's background.
39:23He'd been separated from his wife for almost 10 years, but that divorce proceedings had not gone through.
39:31Heart problems.
39:34His youngest daughter was undergoing heart surgery about that time, which would have been very stressful.
39:40And if that is not trauma enough for one man?
39:44One year before, the captain's eldest son had died in a car crash, which was believed to have been suicidal.
39:52It was almost one year to the day?
39:54The anniversary of the son's death would have been about the time of this accident, just a few days before.
40:01And so certainly it would have been on his mind.
40:04Captain Fernandez, pleasure to see you again.
40:09Hello, sir.
40:10The last thing that happened is not what causes, but it may precipitate.
40:16It may essentially spring the trap that has already had all this energy behind it.
40:23Sun shines on us today.
40:24Good day to fly.
40:27Yes.
40:28Yes, it is.
40:28After the investigation of LAM 470, air safety experts struggled to explain what motivated the captain.
40:41It's really impossible for me to answer what the effect his life circumstances had on his decision at that moment during that flight.
40:50It's impossible to know from the evidence we have whether this was a deliberate act that was concocted well before the flight,
40:57or whether it was something that happened during the flight.
41:01Determining how to keep such an irrational act from happening again is also a challenge.
41:06I'm going to step out to the toilet.
41:08Do you have the controls?
41:09No problem.
41:11For many safety reasons, having two people in the cockpit at all times is important.
41:16It's called the two-person rule.
41:19Mozambique was ahead of most of the industry.
41:23LAM had started a policy that you don't leave one person alone in the cockpit.
41:28It's just that at this time it was not being followed.
41:33Having someone else in the cockpit would have given him a chance to talk about things.
41:38It may have been a chance to work things out.
41:41But the horrific circumstances surrounding the crash of Flight 470 and the death of 33 people gets little attention worldwide.
41:50If an accident happens in the first world, it's being picked up by many more media houses sometimes than when it happens in Africa.
42:01It might have had a much bigger impact and led perhaps quicker to measures from the international aviation community to address these aviation mental health issues.
42:10Then, on March 24th, 2015, a little more than a year after the crash of Flight 470, German wings Flight 9525 disappears from radar over the French Alps.
42:24Just like LAM 470, a pilot locks the other pilot out of the cockpit, makes a calculated series of flight control inputs, and lets the autopilot fly the plane into the ground.
42:39It's as though he was familiar with the LAM 470 report, you know, based on the signal of events that took place.
42:46The investigation reveals this crash was caused by the deliberate actions of the first officer.
42:51Any attention to the LAM accident would have benefited industry and very possibly would have started procedures in place that could have prevented German wings.
43:03German wings did not have a policy of having a second person in the cockpit, and that's something that you learn from LAM.
43:09LAM may very well have prevented what happened.
43:14Publicity around the German wings crash provokes a demand for action in the airline industry.
43:19Since these accidents, the industry realizes the importance of psychological well-being and screening pilots, and specifically the rule about having two people in the cockpit at all times.
43:33There's been a great deal of momentum towards adopting that universally.
43:37The world woke up to this issue after German wings, because it became a bigger focus of the press attention than the accident in Mozambique, unfortunately.
43:45But ever since, we are working as an industry to put into place a much better aviation mental health package.
43:53A system which will hopefully help us prevent these kind of accidents in the future.
43:57A system which will be very important to the future.
43:58A system which will be very important to the future.
43:58A system which will be very important to the future.
43:58A system which will be very important to the future.
43:59A system which will be very important to the future.
44:00A system which will be very important to the future.
44:01A system which will be very important to the future.
44:02A system which will be very important to the future.
44:03A system which will be very important to the future.
44:04A system which will be very important to the future.
44:05A system which will be very important to the future.
44:06A system which will be very important to the future.
44:07A system which will be very important to the future.
44:08A system which will be very important to the future.
44:09A system which will be very important to the future.
44:10A system which will be very important to the future.
44:11A system which will be very important to the future.
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