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In the dead of the night, halfway over the Atlantic ocean, an Airbus A330 carrying 306 passengers and crew suddenly runs out of fuel. The lights go out, the oxygen masks drop, and the noise of the engines is replaced with an eerie silence. In pitch darkness, the giant aircraft begins drifting down towards the ocean below. The pilots are stunned, and begin trying to glide the aircraft as far as possible. The flight attendants prepare the passengers for an emergency ditching in the ocean something which is likely be a death sentence for all on board.

This is a living nightmare, but incredibly it never had to happen in the first place. Many accounts of this incident focus on its technical aspects, but that is only half of the story. The truth is that at bottom, this is a fascinating story about human psychology. It’s a story about how people make decisions under pressure, when faced with ambiguous information. This is the story of Air Transat flight 236.



All music licensed through Epidemic Sound

Final report:
https://www.fss.aero/accidentreports...

Map tiles by a href="http://stamen.com"Stamen Design/a, under a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/b..."CC BY 3.0/a. Data by a href="http://openstreetmap.org"OpenStreetMap/a, under a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/b..."CC BY SA/a.

Picture: FAA, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons




00:00 Intro
01:07 Flight background
01:43 A330
02:11 Pilots
03:15 Departure from Toronto
03:41 Cruise
04:26 An unusual indication
05:42 Another strange indication crossfeed
06:14 Diversion
07:07 A fuel leak?
09:21 The real problem
09:41 Confirmation bias
10:36 Fuel imbalance
11:50 Fuel leak procedure
12:14 Framing bias
12:56 Engine 2 flameout
13:41 Engine 1 flameout glide
14:30 Passenger prognosis
15:05 A forced choice
15:57 Gliding the A330
18:08 Coming down
19:35 Final approach
21:18 Aftermath
21:45 Alternate scenarios
22:21 Source of the fuel leak
22:49 Final verdict
23:45 Safety improvements
24:11 Thanks!