Mayday Air Crash Investigations - S09 E08 - Miami Mystery
Category
📚
LearningTranscript
00:00Miami Beach, Florida. Sun, sand, and calm blue seas.
00:12But when a tourist points his camera towards the sky, he captures a scene of horror.
00:19A plane is falling to the sea.
00:23We have a code 4. Repeat code 4. A plane down in the water.
00:26As soon as I saw this, I realized, I'm like, oh no, this is the Chalk's airplane crashing.
00:32The downed plane is Chalk's Ocean Airways Flight 101, bound for the Bahamas.
00:41Could it have been a collision with an object? Could it have been a fire? Could it have actually been a criminal act?
00:49Let's notify the FBI.
00:51The incredibly rare video may hold the answers.
00:54Can you enhance that for me?
00:56An airline renowned for safety has made a fatal error.
01:01But it will take investigators hundreds of hours to finally uncover it.
01:07Bingo.
01:08Bingo.
01:26Bingo.
01:31The port of Miami, December 19, 2005.
01:43Giant freighters and ocean-going cruise ships are a common sight.
01:49But there's another, much smaller craft that's often seen in this port.
01:56Chalks Ocean Airways flies seaplanes in and out of this busy waterway.
02:04Today, flight 101 from Fort Lauderdale is making a brief stop over here on its way to the Bahamas.
02:13Feather propellers?
02:15Check.
02:16Shut down engine number one?
02:18Shutting down engine number one.
02:23Chalks flies to two regular destinations, both in the Bahamas.
02:28Bimini, where flight 101 is scheduled to land this afternoon, and Paradise Island.
02:35Ladies and gentlemen, this is your captain speaking.
02:37We're just making a short stop over here in Miami to pick up a couple passengers.
02:41We apologize for the delay.
02:42We'll be on our way again soon.
02:46How many are we picking up?
02:47Just two, but they're VIPs.
02:54For a small community like Bimini, Chalks seaplanes are a lifeline.
02:59It's just so much easier in the seaplane to get to the North Island where most of the population
03:03is than going to the airport down there.
03:04So that was the main thing.
03:05It was a convenience factor.
03:06Welcome aboard.
03:07I see your boarding passes.
03:08Certainly.
03:09Sergio D'Anguillacourt is a Bacardi Rum executive.
03:13He's the great-great-grandson of the company's founder.
03:19The family is well known in the local Cuban community for their anti-Castro politics.
03:25He and his wife are flying to the Bahamas to buy a yacht.
03:29The passengers settled in?
03:31We're all set.
03:36Good afternoon, folks.
03:37We'd like to welcome you aboard Chalks Ocean Airways Flight 101 to Bimini.
03:41Our travel time to Bimini will be 25 minutes.
03:44Hope you enjoy the flight.
03:46Let's have the start-up checklist, please.
03:48Roger.
03:49Michelle Marks is in command of today's flight.
03:51She was promoted to captain earlier this year.
03:56First officer Paul De Sanctis joined the airline eight months ago.
03:59Starter on.
04:00Starter on.
04:01This is his first flight with Captain Marks.
04:04All clear to the taxi?
04:07All clear.
04:15The Grumman Mallard is a twin turboprop design.
04:19It has a V-shaped hull and underwing pontoons.
04:26It's designed to carry up to 17 passengers.
04:33The plane has retractable landing gear so it can operate on either land or sea.
04:38Gear coming up.
04:43Take off in the Mallard, depending on the days, it could be a lot of fun or it could be a real challenge.
04:49Weight and balance check.
04:51We're good.
04:53The Miami seaplane base has no control tower.
04:58The crew has to keep a lookout for boat traffic as they taxi through one of the busiest ports in the world.
05:05Taking off out of Miami in the shipping channel, it's kind of like trying to take off during rush hour traffic.
05:11You've got boat traffic, wave traffic, the wind, the airplane to deal with.
05:16And everybody's going different speeds and you're trying to get up and go and navigate around everybody.
05:21So it's always a handful.
05:27Flight 101 will take off from X-44, a seaplane base near a channel known as Government Cut.
05:33Prepare for take off.
05:36Roger.
05:37Ready to take off.
05:38Both pilots have their hand on the throttles.
05:42It's to prevent the captain from inadvertently pulling back if the plane hits a wave.
05:49Forty-five knots.
05:50Fifty knots.
05:51Fifty knots.
05:52Fifty knots.
05:53Fifty knots.
05:54This is the moment most passengers are paying for.
06:07The take off.
06:08Half speed boat, half plane.
06:11It's a unique thrill.
06:13Fifty knots.
06:14Fifty knots.
06:15Fifty knots.
06:16Fifty knots.
06:17Fifty knots.
06:18Fifty knots.
06:19For the pilots, accelerating through the waves is often the most difficult part of the flight.
06:26The airplane itself was really hard to fly as far as on the water, getting onto the steppe, which is what we call getting on plane.
06:34And in rough sea conditions and in rough wave conditions, it could be a real challenge.
06:43But this take off goes smoothly.
06:50Flight 101 is no longer a boat.
06:53It's now a plane en route to Bimini.
06:57It's 2.38 in the afternoon.
07:07The plane's flight path takes it past South Beach, where sunbathers and surfers are out in force.
07:20Just less than a minute into the flight, the Grumman Mallard is climbing through 500 feet, well below the clouds.
07:29Then...
07:39The plane rolls violently and dies.
07:46The pilots barely have time to register what's happening.
07:50Their struggles are in vain.
07:52By chance, a tourist from New York catches Flight 101's final moments on his camera.
08:0760 seconds after takeoff, the plane slams into the ocean.
08:13Lucas Bocanegra is a lifeguard stationed on South Beach near the Chalks Ocean Airways sea lane.
08:28As soon as I saw this, I realized, I'm like, oh no, this is the Chalks airplane crashing.
08:34We have a code four, repeat, code four, a plane down in the water.
08:39This is Lucas, we're launching the jet ski.
08:44The two lifeguards are the first rescuers to go looking for the plane.
08:59We drove as fast as we could to the scene of the accident.
09:05There was a lot of things coming through my head.
09:06I was nervous, scared.
09:09I was kind of full of adrenaline.
09:12We wanted to go in and try to rescue as many people as we could, but at the same time, we've never trained for a situation like this.
09:21As soon as we turned Government Cup, those jetty rocks, we noticed that it was very calm, very quiet.
09:27It wasn't like the ocean side where it was very rough.
09:29There was no waves.
09:30It was very, kind of, very eerie.
09:41At first, Lucas Bocanegra finds no sign of Flight 101 or any of the passengers.
09:47Little by little, we started seeing debris float up onto the surface of the water.
09:59And we saw some chairs, some luggage here and there, and suddenly we noticed it was a body in the water.
10:04As soon as we put the body on our jet ski, we realized that from his injuries that there was nothing we could do.
10:15From there, it was just try to recover as many bodies, you know, bring them back for their families.
10:27News crews swarmed the beach.
10:29Chalks Flight 101 plummeted into the channel in full view of tourists lining Miami Beach.
10:36Even a fraction of a second, the whole plane was engulfing flames.
10:40Black smoke and then an explosion. Pure fire in the sky.
10:44It was so surreal, we couldn't believe that we actually witnessed that.
10:50Chopper 4 over the wreckage as Miami Beach Coast Guard looked for any survivors.
10:54But the effort is futile.
10:59We retrieved some of the bodies, but we were unable to find anyone that had survived.
11:08All 20 people on board are dead.
11:11Including pilots Paul De Sanctis and Michelle Marks.
11:15The residents of Bimini are devastated by the horrific news.
11:25It was very sad for the crew and the friends that I had lost on the airplane.
11:30You never expect an accident to actually happen.
11:33And to see that on television like I did, it was very, very sad.
11:37In Washington, senior NTSB investigator Bill English is put on the case.
11:48I was just in my office doing some routine paperwork for something else.
11:53And the director stuck his head around the corner and said,
11:56Oh, there's been an accident.
11:58And I said, Well, what is it? And he mentioned a Grumman Mallard.
12:01So I immediately knew it had to be Chalks.
12:03Within hours, investigators are at the crash site, where 19 bodies have been recovered.
12:13One is still missing.
12:15I was very familiar with Chalks Airways.
12:18I'm a seaplane rated pilot myself.
12:20And there is the reputation, the legend of Chalks Airways, the oldest continuously operating airline.
12:26Chalks has a long and rich history.
12:29The airline was founded in 1917.
12:33During the Prohibition era, passenger lists included notorious rum runners, and later Hollywood movie stars.
12:40Chalks planes even patrolled for German U-boats during World War II.
12:45The novelty of flying at Chalks was just all that history, all the people that have gone, and it was really a great place to work for that.
12:52The Grumman Mallard flying boat that crashed was built in 1947.
12:59Chalks Ocean Airways is the only airline that uses Mallards to transport passengers.
13:07They're not really a mainstream type of airplane, and so there's always that nostalgia about them.
13:13Salvage crews find the plane's black box. Investigators send it to the NTSB in Washington.
13:29The box promises to reveal critical information about what the pilots were doing in the seconds leading up to the tragic mid-air disaster.
13:36In any investigation, the flight data recorder and the cockpit voice recorder are a great desire.
13:48The more data, the better. We can always learn something.
13:51But Bill English knows he isn't going to get all the data he wants.
14:02Okay, thanks.
14:04The only recorder on board the Mallard was a cockpit voice recorder, or CVR.
14:10Most airline aircraft have two flight recorders.
14:14The flight data recorder, depending on the aircraft, will record all sorts of parameters of the flight, altitude, airspeed, control positions, and so on.
14:25The Chalks airplane was not equipped with a flight data recorder. It did have a cockpit voice recorder.
14:32Though the lack of flight data is a big disappointment, media coverage of the crash gives investigators a very rare piece of evidence.
14:40Authorities revealed that the final seconds of flight 101 were captured on the amateur video. The dramatic footage was shot by a tourist on South Beach.
14:50Let's get a copy of that video.
14:58Okay, let's see it.
15:00The video only captured the final seconds of the plane crash, but it confirms eyewitness reports that a wing ripped off in mid-air.
15:10Can you enhance that for me?
15:14The video showed the wing just after separation from the aircraft, the main part of the aircraft fuselage rolling off in the other direction, and the fire and smoke starting from that.
15:29It was quite startling that the wing would fall off in this plane.
15:33It was a beautiful day, the water wasn't rough on the take-off, and all of a sudden this wing just dropped off. It must have been absolutely devastating.
15:43However, the video can't reveal why the wing came off.
15:53Answers to that question may lie at the crash site, where salvage crews are finishing their recovery of the wreckage of flight 101.
16:05The right wing is found separate from the plane, but largely intact.
16:11Wings falling off aircraft, modern day situations, is a very rare extreme event, and there's only been a few cases of them in the past 20 or 30 years.
16:26In Washington, another type of examination is already underway.
16:37At the NTSB lab, technicians are busy analyzing the Mallard's cockpit voice recorder tape.
16:43The cockpit voice recorder, CVR, which does what it sounds like, records the pilot's voices talking to each other or on the microphones.
16:59But the tape is a jumble of voices and sounds. Technicians can't retrieve any useful information.
17:05It turned out that the erase head function, it's just like a tape recorder that most people are familiar with.
17:15It didn't erase the old stuff, so every subsequent flight kept getting recorded over and over and over again,
17:21and just became a muddled sound, and it wasn't audible to us or useful.
17:28It's another setback.
17:29Okay, let's revisit this again because we're running out of options here.
17:43Investigators have fewer and fewer tools to work with.
17:47Bill English considers the possibility that Flight 101 hit turbulence so violent that it tore the plane apart.
17:53But the weather on the day of the crash doesn't support that theory.
18:00There were no storms that could have caused such severe turbulence.
18:07Clearly, something else had torn this plane apart.
18:14There's a possibility the Mallard collided with something in the water before takeoff.
18:18Seaplanes don't take off of a conventional runway.
18:24They're in water where there can be things like logs or other debris,
18:28which could potentially cause structural issues with an aircraft.
18:36But before they can reach a conclusion on that theory, investigators consider some other intriguing evidence.
18:42It's an urgent advisory issued by the Federal Aviation Administration, or FAA.
18:48It warns that due to a faulty part, the propellers on the Mallard could come off during flight.
18:53You're kidding me.
18:56Something such as a blade separation, losing part of the propeller, could cause a great structural load on the aircraft.
19:01English now has a solid lead, but his team is still missing the evidence they need to prove their case.
19:16The entire island is devastated by the loss of life, as investigators searching for answers wait for more wreckage to be pulled from the sea.
19:32In the aftermath of the crash, Chalk's Ocean Airways grounds its remaining fleet of four Grumman Mallards.
19:38At the NTSB's Miami command post, they're working to identify various plane fragments and other debris from the crash.
19:55We started out with the wing itself that separated the spar, which is the main part of the structure of the wing,
20:01and any of the other fracture surfaces, looking for obvious initiation factors.
20:07They carefully examined the propellers, looking for evidence that might confirm suspicions raised by the FAA advisory.
20:19But it's another dead end.
20:23We're able to determine all the blades were attached and the bending that we saw was the expected pattern from proper operation
20:29when those blades hit the water.
20:34Once again, they're back to square one.
20:41Investigators focus their attention on the fractured wing.
20:46They've noticed sooting on parts of it.
20:49It's evidence of a very rapid fire.
20:54We want to find anything that could be the initiating factor for the wing separation.
20:58Could it have been a collision with an object?
21:00Could it have been a fire?
21:01Could it have actually been a criminal act?
21:04The burn marks raise a sinister possibility.
21:07An explosion.
21:09A bomb.
21:18This now falls outside the NTSB's area of expertise and authority.
21:23Let's notify the FBI.
21:24The FBI helps us in many of our investigations and we will utilize some of their experts to rule out terrorism or a criminal act.
21:41If it was a bomb that brought down Flight 101, a likely target would have been one of the 18 passengers.
21:50Thanks for coming in. I'm going to need your help on this.
21:54One name stands out on the passenger manifest.
22:00Sergio D'Anguillacourt.
22:03Welcome aboard.
22:04I'm going to see your boarding passes.
22:05Certainly.
22:06There are rumors on the internet that the crash was an assassination plot and D'Anguillacourt was the target.
22:15His family made a fortune in pre-Castro Cuba.
22:18They were so opposed to Fidel Castro's regime that they had allegedly supported clandestine attempts to overthrow his communist government.
22:27This is your copy.
22:28All right.
22:29Now, there's something I want to show you.
22:30We can't tell if it's just soot or it's explosive residue.
22:31A bomb will leave chemical traces and distinctive patterns in the torn metal.
22:47FBI technicians are specially trained to detect them.
22:50The samples from the wreckage will be tested at FBI labs in Quantico, Virginia.
23:12Four days after the accident, salvage crews are still bringing in wing fragments found at the crash site.
23:18So, we need everything that looks like it come from the right wing.
23:36Can we get some light over here?
23:45Over stress.
23:46Most of the damage they see is from over stress fractures.
23:50Areas where the metal was literally ripped apart when the wing tore off.
23:56Quick.
24:00That's the scene.
24:02When metal is suddenly stressed to the point of breaking, the fracture leaves a very distinctive rough edge.
24:08It's easy to distinguish it from fractures that have developed slowly over time.
24:16Cut this from here to here and get it to Clinton, Washington.
24:19As we started to examine the right wing, spar and other components on scene at the Coast Guard Station or the seaplane base, this was a visual examination there.
24:33We didn't have the sophisticated lab tools that we have at headquarters.
24:37They identify parts to be shipped to the lab in Washington, where they hope closer inspection will reveal exactly what went wrong with the wing.
24:45Hey, Clint. Clint. Clint, we're sending you as much of the wing as we have your way.
24:51Yeah, okay.
24:56Yeah, no, I'm still waiting for that report.
24:58The results from the FBI explosives test come in.
25:01Is that...
25:02Oh, yeah?
25:03Yeah.
25:04A mid-air bombing assassination could explain everything.
25:17But there is no explosive residue on the wreckage.
25:21Okay, so that rules that out.
25:29Structural failure is now the chief suspect in the downing of Chalk's Flight 101.
25:35Well, that's all that's left.
25:38That's tomorrow.
25:42It was obvious the airplane had a catastrophic structural failure.
25:45So we needed to find out the cause, the initiating factor of that structural failure.
25:53He needs to know more about the long history of this particular Grumman Mallard.
25:57It's very typical in any accident investigation, we want to look at the maintenance history of an aircraft.
26:04For an aircraft that is 60 years old, that's even more so important.
26:09It takes days to comb through the 28 boxes of old records.
26:13We want to make sure that we can develop an entire history of this aircraft, what sort of chronic problems may have shown up in the maintenance of the aircraft, and what types of work had been done on any of the factors that looked likely to be involved.
26:28Clint Crookshanks is a structures investigator for the NTSB.
26:42When we go into an investigation, we try to go in with a very open mind and look at the wreckage and let it tell the story for what happened.
26:53We wanted to look at every piece that broke on the right wing to determine if this was an age-related failure or if it was something that was caused by a structural overload.
27:04As with most aircraft, the Mallard's wings are built from aluminium alloy.
27:11The spars run the length of each wing.
27:14In between the spars are stringers that give added support.
27:19Together, these parts make up the wing box, which also doubles as a fuel tank.
27:24And then the skin is over top of all of that structure to kind of give a smooth aerodynamic look to the wing.
27:34All of these together work to carry the flight loads that the wing is designed to carry.
27:40Once you compromise one piece of that structure, the ability to carry the normal flight loads has been compromised.
27:45Over the years, the wing box had been repaired many times.
27:55Chalk's mechanics had patched up areas damaged by corrosion.
28:00Which is not unusual for an aging aircraft, especially a seaplane.
28:05The fact that they land on water means that their take-off and landing loads are different than you would have on a land-based airplane.
28:11Also, they're always in water and the corrosive effects of water are going to happen more readily on those airplanes.
28:18But when investigators examine the rest of the Chalk's fleet, they find that the Mallard's are in far worse shape than they imagined.
28:26Corrosion repairs.
28:29Corrosion.
28:31Corrosion.
28:33Corrosion.
28:35Corrosion repairs.
28:38Lots of them.
28:39Corrosion.
28:43The accident airplane and the other airplanes in Chalk's fleet were rife with maintenance issues.
28:48Corrosion was rampant on all the airplanes.
28:50There was evidence of shoddy maintenance practices on all of their other airplanes.
28:54other airplanes many many of the repairs exhibited extremely poor workmanship in
29:02quality double triple drilling of holes excessive grinding of corrosion scars on
29:10the material and this involved the structural repairs that were made to the
29:16aircraft over past few years Cruickshank's attention is drawn to a
29:23section of the lower right wing there is a metal patch called a doubler on the
29:29surface of the wing skin a doubler is simply a sheet of metal that goes over
29:36top of the skin and it it acts as a load transfer it acts as a second piece of
29:40skin to patch the crack it's kind of like the patch on a pair of jeans this is a
29:47big repair job you sure we don't have anything on this it's an intriguing
29:56discovery the patch is located exactly where the wing broke off from the rest
30:02of the plane
30:07when he takes a closer look at this section of the wing Cruickshanks notices the
30:12edges are smooth and shiny totally unlike the rough edges he's been seeing on
30:17other debris we got to see what's under this this crack is not from over stress
30:25instead Cruickshanks suspects it developed over many years as the result of metal
30:31fatigue metal fatigue is process by which any piece of metal wing spar or anything is
30:40repetitively loaded and unloaded you can think of it as bending a paper clip back
30:44and forth and everyone's done this and after a while it eventually breaks metal
30:49fatigue in the wings is caused by the stress of flight over the lifetime of the
30:53aircraft in the case of this aircraft every time it took off the wing is loaded
30:59that's that's lifts that gets the airplane up into the air every time it
31:03lands the wing is now unloaded and there's no more stress on the wing
31:07structure anymore that's just like bending that paper clip back and forth
31:10Cruickshanks is eager to find out what's underneath the metal patch
31:17okay let's see what the stubble is hiding
31:28they find even more metal fatigue deep cracks cut across the wing the extent of
31:40the damage is staggering a crack 40 centimeters long
31:46investigating further Cruickshanks makes another disturbing fine
31:58three machine holes in the skin forward of the leading edge all three appear to be stopped drill holes
32:08the holes indicate the Chalk's mechanics have been trying to stop the crack from spreading further
32:17years earlier a mechanic had spotted the crack on the lower surface of the wing
32:26he repaired it by drilling a hole in the path of the crack it's called a stop drill hole
32:38the end of a crack you could you can see even with the naked eye is sharp it comes to a point that tends
32:46to want to develop a crack more by drilling a hole at the end of the crack that would spread out the
32:52stress and the idea is to stop the growth of the crack there but the stop drill holes didn't work
33:01an attempt was made to repair that skin on three different occasions by stop drilling even as
33:09mechanics put in more holes the crack kept growing after the third stop drill an attempt was made to
33:18further repair the wing by attaching doublers on the interior and exterior surface of the skin but
33:25the doublers didn't work either the crack on the plane skin continued to grow investigators now know
33:35the right wing was damaged long before the day of the accident what they don't understand is why
33:48the crack could not be stopped proved but a glimmer of an answer comes when they learned the plane was
33:55sending out warning signs of a deeper more serious problem the Chalk's airplane involved in the accident
34:02were showing evidence of chronic fuel leaks for a long period of time for many years according to
34:07the log fuel leaks from the right wing were repaired again and again but they kept happening the crews started
34:15to notice repeated fuel leaks during standard operations and we tried to bring it up to attention to
34:21management just for our concerns just two days before the crash it happened again while doing routine
34:30maintenance on the mallard a mechanic came across fuel dripping from the right wing they always address
34:38the problem with trying to reseal the fuel tanks or trying to fix whatever problem they thought they
34:42had it always seemed to be a reoccurring issue the procedure for plugging a leak was to apply a
34:50chemical sealant to the inside of the empty fuel tank the sealant would take a day to dry then the
35:00plane could be refueled and returned to service the leaks should have been a clue that the crack in the
35:09wing skin was just the tip of the iceberg but there was a much more dangerous problem with the wings
35:15interior structure fuel leaks in this particular aircraft are indicative of a problem with the wing
35:23structure in fact Grumman put out a service bulletin back in 1963 that warned mechanics chronic fuel leaks
35:31are an indicator of a structural issue with the aircraft okay see what we got here crookshanks examines the
35:45pieces that make up the right fuel tank some kind of sealant he wonders why the fuel leaks persisted in
35:54spite of the constant efforts to repair them carry that scraper please thank you beneath the layers of
36:06sealant he finds his answer bingo cracks in a critical support beam called a Z stringer it's the piece that
36:18the plane's skin was directly attached to all right will you finish cleaning this off and get some
36:23pictures okay crookshanks finds evidence that chalk's mechanics had tried to repair the stringer it appears
36:37that they did some grinding on this disease stringer to remove a fatigue crack however they never went back
36:46in and re-inspected that area instead they only applied chemical sealant to the area to make it leak
36:54proof and in the process concealed the damage chalk's made repeated attempts to repair the airplane by
37:03stop drilling the wing skin cracks adding doublers over top of the cracks but they never addressed the root
37:10of the problem which is the crack C stringer the reason they couldn't address the Z stringer as it was
37:15covered in fuel tank sealant the broken Z stringer weakened the entire wing now with every takeoff and
37:24landing the plane's skin was absorbing the forces over time the skin began to crack as well the final
37:35outcome was inevitable the fatigue cracking reached critical length and the wing separated from the airplane
37:43investigators conclude that a hidden crack in a key component of the right wing led to the devastating crash of flight 101
38:07chalk's failure to identify such a serious problem now forces investigators to re-examine the airline's long history
38:19chalk's ocean airways had an image as one of the safest airlines in the world despite the age of their fleet the
38:30airline had an outstanding record of safety dating back almost 90 years chalk's safety record was great they
38:38had never lost a passenger in all the years of operation chalk was an old established company but it
38:46seems to me that somewhere along the line the management and the quality of the work done had slipped quite a bit
38:53from in the past years what have you got on the financial state of this company investigators are
39:02beginning to suspect that the company's reputation for safety may have been undermined in recent years
39:07by money problems financial issues in an airline especially a small carrier like this can manifest
39:13themselves in many ways personnel are sometimes one of the first things to go a search of chalk's financial
39:20history uncovers some trouble in the 1980s chalk's went through a string of owners before going bankrupt in 1999
39:27the airline was revived by a miami businessman but it kept losing money
39:37just a few months before the crash the last attempt to sell the business fell through
39:46not doing so well it wasn't a secret that we were having financial difficulty the pilots are taking
39:57pay cuts and the captains had taken concessions and you know we downsized a lot as far as personnel
40:02it wasn't just personnel that felt the pinch it was difficult for chalk's to find spare parts and to do
40:10some of their repairs chalk's had a number of other unflyable aircraft that they owned that they would
40:16cannibalize for spare parts there were maybe only 50 or 55 aircraft ever built in that case the
40:24original manufacturer Grummond was no longer in production of that aircraft they no longer supplied
40:30parts the airlines deteriorating health and the shortage of spare parts had a direct impact on safety
40:37there's so much regulation and there's so much just necessity to make the airplane fly it's it's
40:45hard it's hard to skimp on maintenance and not impact reliability if you don't have reliability then you're
40:52just spiraling downhill but no matter how tight the finances were as a commercial airline chalk's should
40:59have been closely monitored by the federal aviation administration
41:07in fact the FAA did assign an inspector to work closely with chalk's
41:14the FAA inspector which is called a principal maintenance inspector was responsible for the oversight of the
41:21maintenance program as carried out by chalk
41:24the inspector was aware the plane was suffering from chronic fuel leaks and yet inexplicably he gave
41:35chalks a clean bill of health just two months before the crash
41:39what is this guy doing
41:48investigators are at a loss to explain why the FAA inspector didn't pick up on warning signs the chalk
41:59seaplane was giving off the fact that chalk was an old established carrier maybe they just accepted well
42:07there's only two or three planes it's a small operation they only fly during the nice weathers and
42:17they're good old boys over there they know what they're doing in effect the FAA didn't step back
42:23and take a look at that forest for the trees and find out just what's going on in the maintenance
42:28program with these chalks aircraft the FAA may not have found fault with chalks but it turns out that
42:36several people very close to the airline did we did talk to this group of pilots who had left chalks
42:45prior to the accident and every single one of them did have some story about maintenance aspects on
42:51their aircraft whether it had to do with fuel leaks or other maintenance aspects they all had some
42:58level of concern about the way chalks was taking care of these very old airplanes
43:05in fact the pilots were so concerned that in the year leading up to the crash many of them met to
43:11discuss the problem of declining maintenance the captains of the company decided that it would be best for
43:16us to get together as a group discuss the issues that we had to try to get our concerns addressed one
43:22major issue that had happened we had an elevator cable that had snapped in flight and the crew
43:28luckily was able to get the airplane down using power and different settings and shifting people
43:33but most scenarios that would have been an accident in itself in aviation there's error chains that they
43:39talk about and you have to just if you keep compiling one link after another it's only a matter of time
43:44before an accident will occur and i from my point of view i thought that if they kept going down the same
43:51road that they were going down something could happen eventually captain weber decided he'd seen enough
43:59close calls my turning point and why i decided to leave chalks was i just had seen too many things in
44:06the recent months too many mechanical issues that were major issues in my mind and i had 300 failures
44:12myself that year and i had a wife at home that was pregnant i had lost i guess my confidence in the
44:18company's ability or the airplane and i just had had enough
44:26the ntsb's report on the crash of flight 101 harshly criticizes the faa for not detecting growing
44:33maintenance and financial problems at chalks
44:40had the maintenance program or the faa stepped back and said these aircraft need more than just
44:47a one-time fix they they need something much deeper than this the accident probably would not have
44:52happened it also uncovers a loophole in the faa's aging aircraft regulations which require extra
45:01inspections for older planes but those rules didn't apply to mallards
45:07the grumman mallard was manufactured in 1947 it only carried 17 passengers and it was not a transport
45:18category airplane therefore it was exempt from these supplemental inspections what we have here is the faa
45:24has made an aging airplane safety rule and they've exempted the oldest airplanes in the fleet
45:29the ntsb recommends that the faa expand its oversight of aging planes
45:39when we determine the probable cause of an aircraft the point is to do this so that similar accidents
45:46won't happen again in the future i think we've used this accident to point towards
45:53the industry and the faa to make sure that they take a look at the overall picture of what's going on
46:00at an air carrier
46:05flight 101 spelled the end of chalk's ocean airways
46:09a few months after the report was released the airline shut down
46:26there was a lot of history and a lot of family community involved with the passengers as well as
46:31the people in the airline so to see the whole airline and everything else kind of go down with the
46:37airplane is enough additionally you know emotional for everybody that ever worked there or ever loved the airplanes
46:52you