a boeing 747 is on its way back to south africa from taiwan during september 7 1987 during the days of apartheid the plane is a half passenger half cargo plane the main crew have just taken over just under an hour from maritus the scheudled stop during apartheid flights had to take longer routes to their destinations. the first sign of trouble is a smoke warning in the cargo hold on the main deck which is already bad and they start to lose electronics on the plane. the plane can’t divert as maritus is the nearest airport and its 300 kms away the crew decide to fight the fire but it doesn’t help they begin a decent to 4500 meters and start decending without clearence but they are allowed to. the crew follow a checklist to get rid of the smoke on the plane the airport prepares for the landing. the crew decide to take a risky manuevr first turning the fans into a setting that makes it worse than they open the doors to clear the smoke this also doesn’t work and in fact not long later the smoke enters the cockpit. not long later a call from atc goes unanswered and they find very limited wreckage in the ocean and no survivors there are several theroies to the crash but as the cvr failed quickly into the emergency we don’t know one is complete strucal failure to the plane two the plane just decend into the ocean due to crew incapacation. the fire is also not found what caused it but the batteries in the cargo container is not likely to be that lethal the theory that somebody had put illegal goods on to support the aparthied regime is quite often believed but we will probabally never know and as a youtube video points out there are a lot of inconsistances to do with the evidence.
next time a overweight commuter flight stalls.
Harrison’s world 