a fairchild metroliner departs hanover for dusseldorf on febuary 8 1988 just before dawn with a young crew with 2500 hours flying planes. the weather forecast is good apart from thunderstorms near landing but only 10 percent chance. the plane is deiced with 19 passengers on board and no flight attendant. the plane takes off at 715am 15 minutes late. 10 minutes after takeoff they are at curising altitude of 14000 feet for 15 minutes. the crew notice weather on the radar and they check the atis. despite the weather they think they will be landing in 15 minutes. they are 3rd in queque and are cleared to 3000 feet. 3 miuntes later they are on the localizer and are lined up with the center line they check the weather and a thunderstorm is right in front of them. they are handed to tower control but they diseapear from radar and are out of control but barely recover a mimute later th eplane is even more out of control and breaks up in flight killing all on board. the aircraft had old black boxes which didn’t help the investigation. the wreckage indicates an in flight break up and they are convinced of this. it looked like an overload fracture the flight path seemed normal until the last few minutes when they flew eractically causing the overload. the controller reports the tunderstorms that they encounter as well as moderate icing and turbullance but no other go arounds but a plane did get hit by lightning 6 miles from the field from a luthtansa 737. but lightning can’t bring a plane down these days and the crew knew about it so the weather likely wasn’t the cause. they find the black boxes failed as it started flying eractically meaning a power failure. the likelihood is very low but is possible and look at it effecting the instruments which makes them think they couldn’t see the instrument due to lighting. they look at the light bulbs they find that they were broken so it was a total power failure they suspect the lightning. they find evidence of lighting strike and figure out it was from the left side of the fuelasage forward of the wing and find the power lines were just behind that spot. they find no evidencce of electrical overload or arcing. they look at the diodes and they check if its working and find no difference in the low resistence on the flow. but they find the cracks in the diode and figure out that 1000 volts is requireed for it to crack and it was clearly lightning which is much more powerful but the odds are next to impossible. they also look into the why the crew flew into the storm which is against policy. the cvr says that the crew figurd out the weather half way through but thinks it wasn’t looking too bad and the atis didn’t say anthing so the crew thought they were fine and assume best case secnario. 11 minutes later they are told about the lightning strike the crew should have aborted the landing but they didn’t as they thought it looked ok and then break the sterile cockpit rule. they notice they are left of the center line on the captains insisstance and the fo is insisiting on landing and is confused at the captains instructions so the captain turns straight into the thunderstorm. they look into the pilots records and find the captain was the less experienced on the type then the fo this leads to distrust between the pilots. there is confusion over how the pilots handled the alittude just before the power failure. the captain rushes the flap settings causing the plane to climb leading to more errors by the captain on the controls causing a nose heavy position when they got hit by the lightning and the captain wasn’t prepared and there is nothing in the manual for this. they couldn’t even communicate with the power failure and the noisy cockpit meaning they were doomed even with controls and engine power but itt would have been near impossible to control. this meant the plane was out of control and broke up. the main conclusion is that it was pilot error.
next time air blue flight 202 i think which is episode 5 the info i have on the release schedule is confusing.
Harrison’s world 