Episode 26: Aeromexico Flight 498

Hello everybody, this is Jennifer Madarice and before we get started I would just like to say a huge thank you to Jamie for the choice of today's subject. It's actually one of my favorite episodes of Air Crash Investigations so I was thrilled to be able to get to cover it for the Kickstarter. I'd also like to issue a trigger warning for some graphic descriptions of the victims in an air disaster. And with that in mind, thank you very much for listening and welcome to Disaster Area. Episode 26. Arrow Mexico Flight 498. August 31st, 1986. 82 deceased. 8 injured. In so many disasters, the loss of life and property depends on many people being in one place at the wrong time. But in the case of Arrow Mexico Flight 498, the tragedy which befell it came due to too many people being in too many wrong places at the same wrong time. Now because of that, it's a lot like setting up a play. You need to know where everybody is and who's involved. First of all, one person that you need to know probably more than anybody else is Walter Whites. Now when I say the name Walter Whites, I'm sure that a lot of you immediately think of breaking bad. This particular Walter White doesn't really have a lot in common with that Walter White except for one common denominator. They both played a part in the same sort of major tragedy. Now, this particular Walter White was 35 years old and had been a federal air traffic controller for six years. He held a bachelor's in professional aeronautics and a master's degree in business. So he's very well educated. He spent three years in the army as an air traffic controller and he held both a civilian's pilot license and a flight instructor's license. He joined the Federal Aviation Administration in November of 1980 and over the next six years he would work in four different locations in air traffic control. He worked at two airports which handled small planes. He worked at El Toro Marine Corps Air Base and he worked at the Los Angeles Traycon facility that terminally arrayed our approach control facility. You have to give a mind that all of this is going on in Walter's life while there are big upheavals in the air traffic control sector. President Ronald Reagan laid off 11,000 air traffic controllers in 1981 following a strike with the intention of replacing them with an automated system. That never came into fruition but that was one of the really big things about Reagan's administration, one of the many bad things that he did while he was president. But that's one thing you have to remember. You have to remember Walter White he's a very big player in this. He was very well liked. A lot of people who were interviewed and spoken with about this particular events spoke of him very highly and it seems like he was very well trained, he knew airplanes and he was a very hard worker. Now another set of players in this particular tragedy are the Astrada family. The Astrada family included the mom, Teresa, her husband Frank, 16-year-old Javier and 14-year-old twins Alex and Angelica. Now they did have an older son Frank Jr who was 19. He was away from the home that day water skiing. The home that they lived in was in Cerritos which is in the LA area. The dad Frank, he worked a lot of hours as a Southern California Edison repairman. But this was a lazy Sunday and it was a holiday weekend. It was a moral day weekend or labor day weekend, excuse me. They were kind of sleeping in. It was a lazy Sunday. They were sort of cheating. They weren't going to go to church. They were going to stay home, sleep in, have late breakfast. That sort of thing. Teresa decided that particular morning that she was going to make a run to the grocery store to go buy some things to make breakfast with. She goes out, she gets to the car and she leaves. When she leaves, all of the kids are still laying around a bed and her husband Frank is reading a newspaper in the living room. Now we move on to William Cramer. William Cramer was a 53 year old businessman who worked for Kaiser, aluminum and chemical corporation. As far as I can see, I saw some articles that said he was retired. I saw some that said he was still working. But basically he was somebody who was a hard worker, a businessman and you know, somebody who had a very important job. He was married to Kathleen and he and Kathleen had five children. They had actually moved to Southern California from Spokane in Washington in October of 1985. So they were still relatively new to California. You know, they've been there for almost a year at this point. But you know, even after a year you can still kind of be a little confused about where you are. He had had his pilot's license for about six years, but he had only logged 231 flight hours and most of those were in Washington, which suffice it to say is a lot different than flying over LA. Flight instructors and people who flown with Cramer had described him as a conscientious pilot who was very careful with his pre-flight checklist. I believe in the NTSB reported, calls him old made-ish. So he was very careful and he understood that he had relatively few flight hours. He was very careful and he realized that he needed more time. And now since December of 1985, he received some familiarization training for Los Angeles had gone up with some flights with some instructors. You could kind of show them around and show them what he needed to know. And he had flown seven flights in the area since then for a total of about 5.5 flight hours. He had a lot relatively, but he understood he didn't have a lot of hours. So at least he wasn't full of himself. He seemed to be from every intention. He seemed to be somebody who knew his limitations. The plane that he had was a Piper Cherokee archer that he bought for $33,000, three years prior to the day in question. It was just a little plane, a little forcedeter. So at 11.41 am on August 31st, William Kramer, his wife and their daughter Caroline is 27. They take off from on runway 29 right from Zamperini Field in Torrance, California on their way to Big Bear Lake, which is 90 miles to the east. Kramer is flying under visual flight rules, so he will not be monitored by air traffic control. Basically, he's just using landmarks, highways, et cetera, to lead him to Big Bear Lake. And the assumption is basically, you know, stay below a certain point, you know, just fly at a certain point and he will be able to go out to Big Bear Lake. That morning he bought a new map of the terminal control area over LAX, which I'll get into a little more information on what that is in a little bit. He would be flying direct to Long Beach, then direct to Paradise, and then direct to Big Bear at an altitude of 9,500 feet. He could avoid the terminal control area near LAX if he stayed below 6,000 feet. That was his flight plan. However, he was not required to and did not activate his flight plan. There were a lot of, you know, things that he was not required to do and therefore didn't do, which we'll get into. Kramer told the Torrance Tower that he was rolling, quote, "rolling" after being cleared for takeoff. And that was the last radio transmission from the plane. Now we get to Aero-Mexico Flight 498. Flight 498 was a DC9-32 built 17 years earlier. I did first started flying for Delta before going into service with Aero-Mexico in 1979. Now on the day in question, it carried 58 passengers and 6 crew. The crew, there were two crew in the cockpit. There was Captain Arturo Valdez-Prom, who was 46 years old. He had worked for Aero-Mexico for 14 years at this point. He had 10,641 flight hours, 4,632 of those were on the DC9. First officer was Jose Hector Valencia, who was 26 years old. And Valencia had been employed with Aero-Mexico since 1984. He had 1464 flight hours, 1245 of those were on the DC9. Valencia was actually flying the plane that day. Our true values from the Captain W. was actually doing all of the speaking to the ATC as far as I could tell, the air traffic control. Aeromexico flight 498 originated in Mexico City and it had stopovers in Guadalajara, Laureta and Tijuana. It departed Tijuana at 11.20am. Unlike the Piper Cherokee, the DC-9 was flying an instrument flight rules. Basically, they're not looking out the window and looking for landmarks. They're following specifically their instruments right in front of them. Now it's August 31st. It's Memorial Day weekend. I'm sorry, I'm saying Memorial Day. It's Labor Day weekend and everybody celebrating the holiday. It's a beautiful day, clear, cloudless day in Los Angeles, visibility for 15 miles. If you're flying, but it's not really a busy morning in this guy's above Los Angeles. Basically, it seemed as though there wasn't really a lot going on that morning that it was a nice lazy Sunday all around it seems. Walter White was working that day and he was approaching the end of an eight hour shift and was handling planes approaching Los Angeles from the east. He actually needed to gain some proficiency time. He was a junior air traffic controller at Traycon at that point and so he needed to gain some more time so that he could graduate from that. At 11.47am, he greets flight 498 and he tells them they will be landing on runway 25 left. At 11.50, he warns flight 498 of "traffic 10 o'clock one mile northbound." Now this is another light plane. This is another small plane. It's not cramers. It's not William Kramer's plane. So as he put it, I believe, I think it was in the NTSB report. He basically said, "If I had seen the cherry key, the Piper Cherokee, I would have said, watch out for that Piper Cherokee as well, but he did not." A minute later, he tells the flight to reduce speed to 190 and descend and maintain 6,000 feet, which flight 498 confirms. At this point, give or take, white is distracted when he notices a grumman tiger has entered the terminal control area for LAX without clearance. Now, I mentioned the terminal control area before. Basically what that is is a restricted area at a major airport where all planes have to receive permission to enter. You can't just go flying in there. You have to kind of talk to the air traffic controllers and say that you're coming and they'll give you permission or they will not give you permission. The one at LAX is basically shaped like an upside down wedding cake. Like a layer cake that's got a small layer at the bottom and then another bigger layer above that and then another bigger layer above that. And it has a uniform ceiling of about 7,000 feet. It had 12 sectors with varying floors that went lower. The closer planes went to LAX. Basically, like I said, upside down wedding cake. Just a picture of that area above LAX is very tightly controlled. The grumman tiger, which is another small plane, asks Walter White for guidance through the TCA. The grumman pilot said that they were on visceral flight rolls flying from Fullerton to Venice that the plane was at 4,500 feet and that it was requesting flight following services. At the time, Walter White didn't initially respond because the arrival coordinator was informing him that flight 498 would be on runway 24 left. White placed flight 498 on hold while he dealt with the grumman tiger. He actually basically said, you know, hold on, change the planes. And then he went back to the grumman tiger. What the grumman tiger was telling him was vague enough that White assumed that he would end up in the TCA. He didn't specifically say he wasn't the TCA. He didn't say, you know, that he was going directly to there or that he was asking for permission to enter it. He was kind of vague enough where he didn't say yes. He didn't say no. White didn't really clarify that immediately. He tells the grumman tiger pilot to switch to a specific radio channel, which the grumman pilot needs to clarify. It's basically, I didn't write down the exact number, but he's, you know, it's like 4,5,6,1 and the pilot says, you know, 4,36,1, no, 4,5,6,1, you know, they kind of go back and forth on that. While they're in the middle of doing that, disaster is striking elsewhere. White asks the grumman's altitude again. He asks, you know, if he's at 4,500 feet at this point, you know, Garmin says something like he's at 3,400 and climbing. And Walter White says, you know, kind of, it monishes him. He says, I suggest in the future you look at your TCA chart. You just had an aircraft pass right off your left above you at 5,000 feet and we run a lot of jets through there right at 3,500. The grumman pilot responds, I was with a post approach and they did not advise me, it advised me of this. I was with Ontario approach and they sent me over to you. What do you expect they do now? At this point, White doesn't answer him. He goes back, diverts his attention back to flight 498 to kind of deal with that plane. You know, that's the thing about air traffic controllers. They have to juggle all these different planes. You can't focus on one all at the same time. So he goes back to flight 498. While when he does, there have been 21 seconds between Walter White telling 498 to stand by, change of plans, and his next attempt at communication with them. So in that 21 seconds, William Kramer's Piper Cherokee has entered the restricted air space of the terminal control area at some point, maybe not in that 21 seconds, but at some point it is in that space. The Piper Cherokee had turned on an easterly heading towards the Paradise Vortac after leaving torrents. If it showed up on a controller screen, it would have shown up as a small triangle with no other information, no identification, no altitude, none of all of that stuff that you kind of, you know, if you've ever seen an air traffic control radar screen, you know, you expect to see certain numbers and there would have been none of that. There's also no sign in the air that would have alerted Kramer that he'd flown into the TCA. You know, there's no, I can't remember who said it. It was one of the documentaries, I think, but there's no big neon sign up there that says you have entered the TCA. So it's really easy to kind of fly into it if you aren't really that familiar with it and keep in mind, you know, even if you could tell whether he was in the TCA or not, you know, he may have been distracted due to the fact that he was flying using visual flight rules and was trying to find his way using the landmarks and highways below. So he's got to look out his window and find his way. You know, he's got to watch the highway and say, okay, well, you know, I have to go this way or that way. He's looking out the pilot's window, which is right ahead of him. At this point, it's 1152. So Mexico flight 498 is at 6,560 feet when the Piper Cherokee clips their tail, slicing off the horizontal stabilizer. What the horizontal stabilizer is is if you ever see a plane, the tail of a plane, and you see a horizontal bit that goes across the top of it, that's the horizontal stabilizer. So when the Piper Cherokee flies past it, it slices that off. You have to imagine that you're standing in front of the nose of the larger plane looking down its length toward the tail. The Piper Cherokee would have been flying from the right to the left and would be on the right side of the larger plane in front of the tail and level with the horizontal stabilizer right before it chops that off. At this point, the DC-9 becomes uncontrollable. Flight 498 goes into a dive and there's no way it's getting out of this dive. There is a person below who's taking pictures of family and they saw the plane falling, so they took a photo of it. The photo of the flight in its final dive shows it pointed at the ground. It's at, I'd probably say about a 50 degree angle. It's upside down. And the horizontal stabilizer is clearly missing. If you know it's supposed to be there, you can clearly see it's not there. Actually, if you look online and search for pictures about this particular crash, you may see pictures of a plane in that position that is about to crash and its wing is on fire. And this is not that plane. That is a different collision. But they do look a lot alike. It's just this particular picture is not the clearest picture and it's from very far away. That picture is a lot closer. So if you see a picture of this plane, it's not on fire. That's your tell. First officer Valencia would have been struggling to pull the plane out of the dive. The last words on the cockpit voice recorder were the captain saying this can't be. Just repeating it. This can't be. This can't be. This sounds like a horrific crash, but you have to understand that slicing off the horizontal stabilizer wouldn't have killed anybody in the DC-9. Nobody in the DC-9 would have been injured or killed at that point. They would have been killed when they struck the ground. So there in this plane, the horizontal stabilizer is sliced off and they immediately go into a dive. And they're alive that entire time. In terror. Just absolutely. Just an absolutely horrific moment. Aero-Mexico flight 498 struck a suburban neighborhood in Cerritos on Holmes Avenue between the intersections of Ashworth Place and Riva Circle. The exact home that it struck was at what is now 17915 Holmes Avenue. The rec site area was 600 feet long and 200 feet wide. Pictures of it make it look like a scorch mark across the ground. It's just a regular neighborhood, just a regular suburban neighborhood, and there is just this scorch across the ground where it's burned its path. It's not a big scorch. It's maybe from a house on one side of the street to a house on the other side of the street and a little bit diagonal. If you've ever seen pictures of Locker B and the crash there, you can imagine the pictures that came from that town that were a big crater. This wasn't that. The plane itself went into such a steep dive that any sort of crater was kind of in one house, in one area. It wasn't in a huge area like that one and it wasn't as deep. The plane was facing in a southwestern direction, which would have pointed it towards Long Beach Airport, not LAX, which they mentioned in a news report that I watched. A contemporary news report from that particular day when they were still trying to piece through a little information, so they were a little confused by that. I think they thought that maybe the plane had been headed to Long Beach. The horizontal stabilizer was found 1700 feet east of the DC-9's main wreck site. It had actually crashed onto a car that was in a driveway. The leading edge of the left side of the horizontal stabilizer was crushed battered in torn. The lower surface of the right leading edge so propeller damage. There were yellow, white, and blue paint transfers from the piper. This is where we started to get into the descriptions of the trigger warning descriptions that I warned about previously. There were some other transfers from the piper. There was insulation from the cabin. There were some debris from the fuselage skin and there were human remains that were on that horizontal stabilizer, which kind of gives you a hint of what's to come. The engines of the DC-9 were both found and they were still working when it crashed, so the plane was still working aside from the loss of that horizontal stabilizer. Only one passenger seat was found intact. It was thrown clear of the fire and it penetrated a garage door. There was an interview with a man who lived in the area and he said that there was just this hole in this garage door, a square hole, perfectly square hole, and that was what the garage door had gone through. There was a stewardess that was still sitting in it. About 10 houses were destroyed when flight 498 struck the ground. A precise number seems to have changed with every story I read. Some were completely destroyed, some were partially destroyed, but basically when it crashed it was just a huge fireball. The homes that it struck were just. I mean, they were obliterated. The hyperchiric heat crashed in a baseball field at Cerritos Elementary School. About 1700 feet away from the crash site of flight 498. It's maybe about a block and a half away. It's not that far. It's within walking distance from the DC-9 crash site. When you see pictures of it from above, when you see telecopter pictures of it from above, it actually appears mostly intact. It looks as though it glided down to the ground. But when the pictures get closer and when you see video of it, you can see that the roof of the piper had been sliced off by the stabilizer. The engine of the piper ended up in the yard of a home, 1,650 feet north of the crash site. There was a 5 by 8 inch piece of the horizontal stabilizer from the DC-9 that was stuck in a hole in the top of the piper's engine case. The right wing was undamaged, but the left wing had gouges, scratches, and orange paint transfers. And the Kramer family, all three of them, William, Kathleen, and their daughter Caroline were all still strapped in their seats. When I said there was human remains on the horizontal stabilizer and they're still strapped in their seats, you can imagine just what kind of damage was done to them. They were all decapitated. So it wasn't exactly a pretty picture. And I imagine that people who saw the news footage of that particular plane had some not so pretty images of what happened to them, just due to the fact that there was, when you look at the pictures from overhead, there's just this is dark stain across the right wing from overhead. If you're looking at it from overhead and the front of the plane is on top, the wing on your right just has this large dark stain. And I don't know if that was what that was from, but it certainly looks that way, at least in appearance. So people who looked at that at first might have thought some terrifying thoughts. At 1152 and 36 seconds, Walter White notices the computer is no longer tracking flight 498. So he starts calling over the radio to the flight. He calls eight times over the next three minutes and he gets no response. Excuse me. He then contacts American Airlines flight 333, which had been following flight 498. He contacts them at 1156 and he tells them to let him know if they see anything at their 11 o'clock. Flight 333 replies, I see a very large smoke stream emanating from the ground. There's another smoke column vertically overhead. It looks like something smoked up ahead and then went down in and this is kind of where cuts off the little little cloudy. But at this point, Walter White turns to a supervisor and says, Russ, I think I lost an airplane. At this point, he's relieved of duty. This happens all the time. If you are an air traffic controller and you are on duty and the plane crashes, they sort of take you off. So you can't handle planes that day for the rest of the day. You go and you make a statement. You have to do testing, that sort of thing. So he was relieved of duty. Hello, Captain News. Crews start arriving fairly quickly. They start flying over the scene and it's just like I said, it's just this scorched area stretched across this street. There were body parts that were strewn across the streets among the burned wreckage and the homes on fire. They would take these yellow sheets and they would put them over bodies and body parts. And so when you watch the news, you can see all these little yellow pieces of plastic that are over what you know are bodies and they're everywhere. The tail section, like I said, was a block away. The horizontal stabilizer, I mean. The emergency services were contacted within a minute of the crash and the Los Angeles County Fire Department arrived at 11.58 am. So they got there really quickly. The fire department was actually able to contain the fires within half an hour. So they did a really good job of getting that under control. But you still have to imagine what it's like living in that neighborhood and it's kind of epitomized by Teresa Strata. Teresa Strada goes to the police station. grocery store and she comes back and it's just this scene of absolute horror. Her house was gone. Her family was nowhere to be found and you get out of the car and you see all of this destruction and all of this just this body parts and end and plane parts and fire and everything and chaos and she's looking at this and just absolutely terrified and at a certain point one of her neighbors ran up and said to her, according to her, said, "Oh, your family's over here, your family's over here." And she sort of went from, "Okay, my family's alive." Okay? And she followed the neighbor and we went into the neighbor's house and it turned out that Alex was there, her 14-year-old. And that was at the point where she learned that Alex had been the only one to make it out of the home alive. There were 82 people who had died as a result of the collision. 64 people on Aero-Mexico Flight 498, which was everybody. 10 of those passengers were children. There were three people on the Piper Cherokee, William, Kathleen, and Carolyn Kramer, and then the 15 on the ground. Not just these stradas, there were also six members of the family of Howard Yakutu-Napah, who died in the crash. And then there was another family who's also affected. Laura Rickard was moving in with her boyfriend and her child Kelsey to a home on the street that day. Her friend Zocicetzeltsin, Ketzeltsin, Zoci. Look at Zoci. Zoci's what I found on the memorial so. But Zoci, Conkite, her two kids and her husband are there helping out, helping the move. So at a certain point, the husband and the boyfriend had left these two women and the three children that were there to go pick up more items, to go bring in another load to the home. Neighbors kind of saw them hanging out, having drinks, playing with the kids, and then the plane crashed. And both women and all three children died when the plane crashed into the neighborhood. Now this wasn't the first collision over a Southern California city. Eight years earlier, there they are, but remarkably similar event over San Diego. Pacific Southwest flight 182, collided with a private sesna and crashed, killing 137 people on both aircraft and seven on the ground. The sesna was a training flight and the student pilot had been wearing a special hood, which blocked out everything but the instruments ahead of them. It sort of kind of looks like a cross between a welder's helmet and blinders. It just kind of makes sure that they understand, you know, keep your eyes on the instruments. But they had, he was on the flight with his instructor and they had changed their assigned heading, but they didn't notify air traffic control. The PSA flight was told to keep visual separation from traffic, yet they did a not alert air traffic control regarding that. And air traffic control also received an alarm that the pair might collide, but they ignored it as they got multiple alarms of that sort in a day. So I mean, there were kind of a couple of series of things, like in a lot of disasters, there were a series of things that happened that caused the crash, that led to the crash. But, you know, because of that, this was just another reminder that they really needed to do something and stop collision like this from happening again. There were no mechanical issues that were found in either plane. Everything that was required to be there was working properly. I say required to be there because the, you know, there were certain things that weren't there. The Piper Cherokee didn't have flight recorders. It didn't have to have flight recorders at that particular time, and it didn't. The data and voice recorders on the DC-9 were somewhat damaged in my crash, but they were still salvageable. The DC-9 voice recorder was not very good, however. And that's saying a lot, if you've ever listened to any voice recorders from voice reporters from air crashes, they are not very easy to listen to. Even in the best of situations, just the sound of the plane and everything that's going on in the cockpit and all the radio control. It's just really hard to hear the crew speaking to one another, even when you have a very good recording. The crew is also speaking Spanish to each other, but English with air traffic control, which is fine. It's just, you know, that may have added some confusion, you know, you never know, just kind of that transition between one language and another can sometimes be a little confusing to dice out, that even makes sense to kind of figure out. In December of 1986, the NTSB held a hearing into the events which led to the collision over Cerritos. They tested everybody involved in, you know, the crews and Walter White. Walter White was tested for drugs and alcohol, but neither were found in his system unsurprisingly. The captain and first officer of the DC-9, they would have been autopsy and subjected to toxicology tests as well, but their bodies were just too damaged for this to be possible. I mean, I don't want to get into how badly their bodies were damaged, but you know, the word fragmented is used in the NTSB report. You know, these were people, these were two people who were sitting in the front of a plane that was diving toward the ground and at a high rate of speed and then it blew up. So, you know, their bodies were not in very good condition. William Kramer's body was relatively in good condition aside from the obvious, but people were kind of worried that he may have had a heart attack and that may have incapacitated him and caused the plane to go off course. His family did have a history of heart disease and they thought, well, maybe, okay, maybe he passed out and this caused the plane to go a different way or something like that. He had actually passed every previous Eccardiogram, electrocardiogram he had gone through. The Air Armed Forces Institute of Pathology did an autopsy, checked his heart tissue and they found that he did have heart disease, but he wasn't suffering from a heart attack at the time of the crash. And there were other clues to that as well. At no point did the plane show any sudden movements or dives which might have indicated he suffered a heart attack? There were no emergency call made and everybody in that plane was still strapped into the piper. So, I mean, you know, if if your father is flying a small plane and he's the only one in the plane who knows how to fly and he collapses from a heart attack, I mean the first thing you're going to do is unbuckle your seatbelt and try to get control of that airplane. So, the fact that they weren't, the fact that nobody had attempted an emergency call, you know, it kind of indicates that he more than likely was perfectly healthy when that plane collided with the Hero Mexico flight, born 98. There were also questions, obvious questions about why the two planes did not exhibit any evasive maneuvers. The two planes would have had each other within their fields of vision for a minute and 30, 13 seconds. That's an eternity. According to the safety board, 15 seconds would have been a reasonable amount of time for a pilot to avoid a collision. The thing is that now a lot of this is obvious conjecture and just kind of trying to understand, you know, what may have caused them to not see each other and therefore not make evasive maneuvers. With William Craver, I mean, he had only moved there a year earlier. He may have been lost and been looking the other way trying to get his bearings. Just from personal experience, I lived in the Washington DC area for two years and I could very easily have gotten lost in DC even after two years. So the fact that the possibility that William Craver may have been lost and may have been looking through the pilot's window to try and get his bearings is not outside of the realm of possibility. And if that were the case, the DC-9 would have been coming from his right. So then, highly likely, it would have been out that way and he would have been looking the other way so he would not have seen the plane. And of course, you know, he's trained to look both ways and to look where he's supposed to look. You know, and to look around and make sure that there's no other traffic. But, you know, his wife and his daughter aren't. And I know that that kind of seems like a cop out, you know, if a big DC-9 is coming your way, you know, you're probably going to notice. But if he's lost, they're lost. And they have a new copy of the TCA map with them. So she may be helping him find-- his wife may be helping him find directions on a map. The daughter may kind of be back seat driving, looking at the map, going, oh, go here, daddy, go there, daddy, wherever. That sort of thing. Like I said, it's a lot of conjecture, but it's reasonable conjecture in terms of why the cramers may have missed this Dc9 coming toward them. As for the piper Cherokee, that may have been so small that the Dc9 wouldn't even have seen it until it was too late. And may have also been hidden by the framework around the windows. I mean, you've seen the framework in planes that in cockpit windows, they're not always just very thin and just give you this wide range of view. There's entirely likely that you may miss something. And not to mention, I believe it was for the flight 182, the PSA of Flight 182 collision. I saw a picture online that they had taken to kind of get some idea why they may have missed. The smaller plane in that scenario. And they had a picture of a little, a little small private plane flying over a suburban area with full of homes, with different color roofs, different color homes, different colors in the background. And it's this very cluttered background with this very small plane over that. And it may be really hard to see it at first glance. So it's entirely likely that they didn't see the piper. And they didn't see it until it was too late. It was just so small that it really just escaped their attention. And to be fair, Walter White did warn them of a small plane, but not that one. So they may have been looking for the other small plane and missed the important one entirely. Walter White attended the hearing. And he testified very calmly. He stated that he had never seen the piper turkey on his screen. Another air traffic controller who worked with Walter White had said in one of the documentaries, I believe was the air traffic crash investigation episode, if I remember incorrectly, that they had made complaints before about targets not showing up on their radar. It may not have been seen due to refraction of the signal. They did do some testing with that, I believe. There's a big chunk of the NTSB report that reads a lot like-- in the words of Beatles juice, it reads a lot like stereo instructions. It's very hard to understand exactly what they were doing, but they were doing a lot of testing, a lot of flight checks with the radar using a sassana to kind of see how that would work out. If it was having that refraction of the signal, and they didn't find some of that, but their finding was basically, he should have been able to see that plane on his radar. So I guess the findings of the NTSB, they found that William Kramer had flown into LA International Airspace where he did not belong. Pilots who knew him claimed he was very well aware of the TCA and the regulations involved with entering it. However, the NTSB found that he'd likely didn't intentionally do so. It was more likely he just ended up there, and he didn't know. He was new to the area, and it's not-- like I said, no big knee on sign saying, you have entered the TCA. So it was probably just an accident or mistake on his part. They also found that Walter White was too preoccupied with the other plane to see the blip from the paper on the radar. Well, White claimed he didn't see it. The report to her term and it would have been there. The board also said that Walter White may have unconsciously dismissed the plane because it was such a secondary image. It wasn't an image that had all of those altitude and designations and all of the other things that a major plane would have. And so he may have just kind of dismissed it and thought, OK, well, put it aside. Not intentionally that he didn't do anything intentionally. It was just that things being what they were, he missed it. The report didn't specifically blame him so much, though. It was more of the limitations of the air traffic control system in their words. So they really didn't point and say, Walter White, that's the guy who did it. It was more-- along the lines of-- it was more systemic than individual. They also determined that the DC-9 held no fault in the accident. But as for the Grumman Tiger, the plane that distracted Walter White, he actually got some prison time for flying without clearance into the TCA in a reckless manner. I mean, he didn't get blamed for the crash, but he did kind of-- he did something wrong. And he went to jail for that for a little while. On February 2, 1987, while the investigation was still ongoing, another arrow Mexico flight 498 reported a near collision with another small plane over Cerritos. It didn't strike it. It just came close. But that was another thing that was kind of a little terrifying. And on August 12, an American Airlines plane and another small plane nearly collided over Santa Monica. At that point, the Federal Aviation Administration issued an emergency order to limit the free range small planes flying over the LA area. That's it. We're not doing that anymore. We need to make some changes. So two years later, the Federal Aviation Administration requires Modesy transponders on small planes, which will transmit position and latitude to the air traffic control. So they will know all of the same information that they should from the bigger planes. The Piper Cherokee in this situation didn't have one, nor was it required to have one. It was another piece that the Piper Cherokee really didn't need to have, and so it didn't have it. And the FAA also required that all jets in US airspace be equipped with T-CAS, which is traffic control of a collision avoidance system. I believe I've seen it called the traffic alert and collision avoidance system, something like that. But basically, what it is is if two planes are going to collide, the T-CAS in each plane directs the pilots which way to go to avoid that outcome. At 45 seconds before collision, the T-CAS will warn of oncoming traffic. You just hear traffic, traffic, traffic. And then at 25 seconds, there's directions on how to avoid the other plane that are given. Now, what happens is one plane hears from T-CAS descend, descend, descend, and then the other plane hears pull up, pull up so that they're both going in different directions, and the T-CAS isn't telling them the same thing. There has not been another mid-air collision in the US since these changes were put into place as far as I could find. There have been some outside of the US, however. On November 12, 1996, a Saudi Arabian Airlines flight collided with a Kazakhstan Airlines flight over Sharku, Dodgeri in India. That collision killed 349 people making it the deadliest mid-air collision ever. The report on the accident found that-- basically, the Kazakh flight was the issue there. There was some confusion and some difficulty reading instrumentation. But basically, the report required mandatory T-CAS on every aircraft flying in Indian air space. And then on July 1, 2002, a Bashkirian Airlines flight collided with a DHL flight over Uberlingin in Germany. That story's particularly sad because basically, the air traffic controller in that case was being stretched to his limits at the moment of near collision. Basically, they were-- it was nighttime. And so they started-- they did things like they decided that was a really good time to work on the phones, and they disconnected them. They-- one of his co-workers went on break. And so he had to work on two different screens that were far apart. It was-- they were just piling things onto him. And I mean, in a normal situation, it might not have been so bad. But because there was so much that was being thrown at him, by the time that he realized what was happening, he just started providing instructions to the pilots, which conflicted with the instructions that were they were getting from T-CAS. You know, one of the planes is being told to pull up, and he's telling it to descend or the other way around. It was something like that. And so because of that confusion, the two planes collided. That story's also really sad. One of these days, I will do an episode on that. But it's really sad because two years after that, the father of a couple of children who were killed along with their mother on the Bashkirian flight actually found where the air traffic control lived, went to his home, and stabbed him to death. It wasn't, you know, like I said, it's not a happy ending. It doesn't get any happier in that particular situation. Excuse me, multiple lawsuits were filed, resulting in trials and all of that. And it was found basically in the end, the fault was divided between the FAA and the Kramer estate. Plaintiffs in the cases received a total of $56.5 million. The largest settlement for $5.6 million was for Teresa Estrada. She received $868,263 for economic damage and $4.7 million for non-economic damages, including $1 million for negligent inflection of emotional distress. They mentioned in a couple of places, a specific lawsuit case that was sort of precedent for this. And I didn't really get into the details of what that case involved, but basically what it meant was being awarded emotional distress because you see disaster, you see something happen to your family that kills them. So you are standing outside your home one day and your child goes running into the house. And at that particular point, the house blows up from a gas explosion. And that was the kind of reward that that case referred to. That okay, well, the gas company did something wrong and you saw that so you get damages for emotional distress because you watched that happen. And that's just an absolutely mentally, in a mental and emotional, just a terrible thing to happen to you. And in the case of Teresa Estrada, there was some kind of debate because of course, she went to the grocery store and she didn't actually see the plane strike the house, but she just came back and everything was destroyed. So she didn't specifically see the plane hit, but it was the case basically said, you know, the lawsuit basically said, you know, it really doesn't matter if she saw the plane hit or not, the plane hit, she saw it, she came home, that's what she found. So that was what the family got as an award. I saw some newspaper stories that are in the sources that are kind of like one year later, how the neighborhood is coping. And you kind of hope that somebody made a point to get these people some sort of support, some sort of assistance therapy, that sort of thing. I'm not exactly sure what that would have entailed in 1986, some sort of help to fight off PTSD. I'm not exactly sure if they would have called it that particular time or if that was just sort of, you know, you get it in war, but nowhere else, that kind of attitude, you know, that attitude still around the day, God knows with some people. But, you know, the people who were affected by this were clearly distraught. You can read it in the articles, you can hear it in interviews, and it really just seriously affected the neighborhood. It scarred them not only physically, but emotionally. There was one story that really struck me where a family had been in the neighborhood on that day and their house had been one of the ones affected, but their little boy had been playing outside, and he had seen the plane come down. And later on, like six months later, the mom was talking to somebody about a cruise that they were gonna go on in a couple of years and how they were gonna have to take a plane to get on the cruise. And later on, she heard the little boy saying to a friend, just kind of matter a factly, while I only have three years to live, and what drives a kid to say something like that, but what they have to see that terrifies them that much, that they just kind of matter a factly thing, getting on a plane is gonna result in your death. I mean, like I said, I really hope there was some therapy for some of these people, they really deserved it and they really needed it. Walter White took two weeks off following the crash, and then he returned to work, but he very quickly requested an administrative position. Instead, I think the other air traffic controller that gets interviewed a lot of the time who worked with him at the time, basically said, you know, he worked for about a month and he just realized, he couldn't do it anymore. It's understandable. It really seemed from everything that I've read and every interview that I've seen that he was really well-liked. And the attitude of everybody else, a trick on that day was basically, it could have happened at any of us. It wasn't a matter of, you know, Walter White is bad at his job or anything like that. It was, you know, any of us could have done that. Any one of us could have, could have, could have been there when that happened, could have been sitting at that radar. There was a memorial built. It's a sculpture garden, which commemorates the crash that opened on March 11th, 2006. It's actually about two or three blocks away from the crash site, I think, to the west. It's a really beautiful memorial. It's a nice, simple memorial. The sculpture was designed by Kathleen Kerkoff and it features a pair of sculpted pieces that are each shaped like wings. They're each on their own base. One is a little bit larger and it's white. And on the base of that sculpture is a list of all the people who died on both of the planes. And then the other wing sculpture is a little smaller and darker and that one lists the names of those who died on the ground. There is also still an Aero Mexico flight 498. They did not retire that. It flies from Mexico City to Macaron, International Airport near Las Vegas, via the Monterey Airport. I actually, when I was searching for stuff on this particular crash, and I just kind of, you know, when I'm Google and put in Aero Mexico flight 498, it came up with listings. If I wanted to buy a ticket to get on Aero Mexico flight 498 and I kind of don't, I think, even though I'm kind of, oh, I think a little overly logical when it comes to getting on a plane, I don't think I could fly on Aero Mexico flight 498. I think I would see the number and just be like, you know what, I'm gonna hold off on that. I think what strikes me about, you know, flights like this and crashes like this is just watching the news footage. There was actually a lot of news footage that I found in regards to this particular crash, local coverage. It's one of those things that happened in your neighborhood and it happened in a large city. There were gonna be a lot of news stories about it. And I'm not gonna, you know, deny that a lot of it is me kind of watching these news stories, you know, just kind of marveling that it's the 80s and everybody kind of looks like the 80s. And I also, it was kind of amused one of the stories that I watched because the anchor decided that he was going to provide, you know, sort of a demonstration of what happened in regards to these two planes. And in one hand, he had a paper airplane with no tail and in the other hand, he had a little toy W. World War II bomber and I am exactly the sort of person who sat there and thought, you can't do a reenactment of this crash with those two planes. They are not the same sort of planes. The size is all wrong. There's parts that you need that aren't there. You know, it's pedantic and just kind of a little annoying even to me, but that was sort of my reaction. And I think that's kind of what interests me a little bit about this particular crash is just kind of seeing the old news footage and the, you know, a year later, news footage and how people kind of, you know, got back on their feet, but also there's a change in how we cover crashes like this because, you know, now we have more computer graphics and photos and, you know, pictures that people took on Instagram and Facebook and all of these different sources that we have for reenacting plane crashes. And, you know, you don't have to whip out the toys and the paper airplanes. You can give a more detailed description of what happened to the plane. And so it makes a little easier to understand, okay, this is what happened in this disaster. This is what happened in that disaster. And you can see another disaster too, you know, when buildings burn to the ground, and there are, you know, you go back to coconut grove and the air coi fire and, you know, other fires like that they'll tell you, okay, well, this is a map of the inside. This is how the inside of the building was set up and here is, you know, X marks the spot where the fire started. And I specifically remember in regards to the era coi fire, there is a picture. an old picture of a performance at the theater, an old black-white photo, and in that photo there's a little, you know, scratch x where the fire would have started. And to kind of see, you know, how the media covers these crashes and these disasters, and how it changes from, you know, way back in the day where they would have to, you know, you think about like the great fire of London, they were probably like, you know, drawing art and doing woodcuts or whatever they did back then. And you go to now where it's, you know, you have the technology to do something a little more detailed and to give people more information. And that just, it just fascinates me how we kind of find new ways to learn more information and translate these things more to people, especially like me. You can describe things in writing, but I would prefer to have sort of a visual to understand how these things happen and how these crashes happen. And so it's really nice to have, you know, sort of CGI and pictures and diagrams. And okay, this is what happened here, and this is what broke there. And so the changes over the years are really interesting. With the old disasters, you kind of have to squint and feel your way around because the descriptions of what happened with these, you know, with ships or with, you know, not every disaster is the Titanic. They don't have 4,000 different descriptions of what happened with them. You know, to go back to the episode on the SS Eastland. You know, there are descriptions of how that sank that, you know, you really do kind of need the visual to kind of go along with it. And you just, you know, which way the ship is capsizing that sort of thing. But that was "Aromexico Flight 498." Like I said, it is one of my favorite episodes of "Airacrash Investigations," which I should really pick them out and make a list and post them on the blog, so you guys can, like, go through and see the ones that I like the best. You can kind of tell usually because I've done episodes on them for the most part. There are some that I haven't done yet, but I will get to them. But yeah, "Airacrash Investigations," "Seconds from Disaster," those two, every episode is on YouTube. All you have to do is look for them and they're on there. And you can spend, I mean, "Airacrash Investigations" is up to, I believe, season 17. I think "Seconds from Disaster" only had about 8 seasons. And yes, I can't believe I know this sort of information, but I do. There's other episodes of other shows. Zero Hour has a couple on "Disasters." Minnet by minute has some-- Minnet by minute covered the "Mountaine Helen's" eruption, and I know it's covered other things. I mean, if there's any sort of disaster that you're interested in, just look it up on YouTube, and inevitably you will find some sort of documentary or some sort of news footage. But, you know, really, sometimes it can be a slog. As you can tell from the other day, I posted on the blog, a links to a bunch of different 9/11 documentaries that aren't conspiracy theories. Like I say about conspiracy theories. If that's your thing, that's fine. Knock yourself out. You will find plenty of 9/11 conspiracy theory documentaries on YouTube. But the problem is, if that's not your thing, and it's not really my thing, and you're looking for more, you know, more long lines of interviewing people who survive that day, who are just kind of sticking to, you know, sort of the accepted facts from that day, and not, you know, the conspiracy theories, that's what that list is for. There's probably a lot more--there's undoubtedly a lot more than I missed. But I--everyone's in a while I get into sort of the mood where I want to sit down and watch 9/11 documentaries, which, you know, seems like a weird thing to admit. But, you know, and I don't want to watch ones on conspiracy theories, because like I said, it's not my thing. I don't really mind them per se, although I do kind of find some of them very cruel to the victims. Especially the ones about New Town, I'm not really--I hate those, but I'm not gonna--I'm not gonna stutter a coat that I really, really dislike them. But, yeah, if you have any questions about documentaries and you want some suggestions regarding any particular disaster, ask me. I have probably watched them all on some level, or at least found one on every specific disaster that you might be interested in. Now, in regards to the podcast, the Kickstarter money is still not here yet, but when it gets here, I'm getting a better microphone. I'm gonna set up a nice little recording studio, make sure it's recording studio in my living room. So, it should be pretty good, but that should be next week, hopefully. If you still want to help support the podcast a little bit in a time, you can do so on Patreon. I actually changed the Patreon a little bit. Starting on this January 1st, I'm gonna be charging per episode. Basically, the reason that I'm doing this is to kind of encourage myself to do more episodes, and to kind of keep me on my toes. The other thing that I was kind of hoping to do with that is basically, if you want to support the podcast, you know, you can throw in like a buck in episode. It'll maybe end up being three or four bucks a month. And at that way, you know, it accumulates, and it can help, you know, it can help everything from buying books, buying sources to keep the lights on. You know, I'm doing this out of my apartment, so sometimes I need to pay the bills. But at least that way, you know, if you feel like you want to contribute, you don't really have a lot, you can, you know, buck an episode can't hurt. If you can do me the honor of sharing the podcast and rating and reviewing on iTunes, doing all of that sort of thing, getting it out there, you know, let's get people listening to it, listen to me being a little nerd. I, on my little podcast, I would really appreciate it. And I thank you guys so much again for all of the help you've given me over the past year, for supporting the podcast, for supporting the Kickstarter, for supporting on Patreon. And just, I am always grateful for you guys. You guys are, I just, I'm just always impressed that there are other people who are fascinated with disasters the same way as I am. So we're all nerds together about the creepiest thing in the world, or at least one of the creepiest things in the world. So with that in mind, thank you very much for listening, and until next time, stay safe. [Music]