Air accidents: last words of pilots captured in black box recordings in air disasters

WARNING: distressing content

The cockpit voice recorder is one of the most important, but disturbing, remains of a plane crash.

One of the two parts that make up the aircraft’s black box, the cockpit voice recorder captures conversations and alarms on doomed planes to help investigators determine what went wrong.

But while those recordings are essential, they are often difficult to listen to.

These are some of the most chilling last words from the cockpit that capture the panic, confusion, and sometimes acceptance of the flight crew in the final moments before some of the most infamous accidents in history.

Pakistan flight 8303

The Covid-19 pandemic has practically brought air travel to a halt, but 2020 was not without fatalities, with one of the worst being the crash of Pakistan International Airlines Flight 8303 in Karachi in May.

Ninety-seven people on board died but, amazingly, two people survived when the plane lost two engines and crashed into a residential area after multiple attempts to land at Jinnah International Airport.

A transmission of the pilot’s final exchange with air traffic control indicated that he knew the Airbus A320 had engine problems.

“We’re back, sir, we’ve lost two engines,” the pilot said, according to an English transcript.

“Sir, mayday, mayday, mayday Pakistan 8303.” Then the transmission ended.

Survivor Mohammad Zubair told reporters that the last he heard before the accident was the pilot telling passengers over the intercom that they had engine trouble and that landing would be “troublesome.”

Air France Flight 447

All 228 passengers and crew were killed when Air France Flight 447 from Rio de Janeiro to Paris sank on its belly in the Atlantic Ocean in June 2009.

For years, the cause of the accident, the worst in Air France history, remained a mystery. Cockpit recordings would later reveal chaos in the cockpit, as technical problems with the A330 were compounded by the fact that the experienced pilot was asleep, leaving a novice in charge when problems arose with the tools they measure. the speed and altitude of the plane.

When the captain returned to the cockpit, the plane was coming to a stop and it was too late.

“Shit, we’re going to crash! Not true! But what’s going on?” First Officer David Robert yelled as rookie copilot Pierre-Cedric Bonin struggled to control the plane.

As a series of alarms continued to sound, someone said, “Fuck, we’re dead.”

Captain Marc Dubois was the last to speak. “I pass ten degrees,” he said. Two seconds later, the plane crashed into the Atlantic Ocean, off the coast of Brazil, at 200 km / h.

Lion Air Flight 610

One of the worst recent aviation tragedies was the mysterious accident of a Lion Air flight in the Java Sea off Indonesia in October 2018.

All 189 people on board were killed when the plane crashed after a short and irregular flight. The incident was the first of two fatal accidents involving the new Boeing MAX 8 aircraft.

Six months after the accident, sources close to the investigation revealed the contents of the cockpit voice recordings, which captured the pilots trying to understand why the plane was flying erratically.

Sources said the captain, who was piloting the plane, asked the first officer to review the plane’s manual for abnormal event checklists.

For the next nine minutes, the pilots remained calm while trying to control the plane.

In the last seconds before the accident, the captain of Indian origin was silent and the first officer, from Indonesia, said “Allahu Akbar”, or “God is the greatest.”

Pacific Southwest Flight 182

In September 1978, Pacific Southwest Airlines (PSA) Flight 182 collided with a Cessna plane while descending and was about to land at Lindbergh Field, which is now San Diego International Airport.

135 people died on the Pacific Southwest plane, two on the Cessna and seven on the ground.

Due to the recording and subsequent investigation, it was determined that the accident occurred when the PSA crew lost sight of the Cessna and did not disclose that fact to air traffic control.

The recording of the PSA aircraft captures the sound of the impact and the response of the flight crew in the next 20 seconds until the accident.

Captain: “What do we have here?”

First officer: “We are hit men, they have reached us.”

Captain (on radio): “Tower, let’s go down, this is PSA.”

Seconds later, the captain is heard again. “This is it, baby!”

The last words before the end of the recording are: “Get ready. Ma, I love you.”

Tenerife airport disaster

It happened more than four decades ago, but the Tenerife airport disaster in Spain remains the deadliest plane crash of all time.

On March 27, 1977, two Boeing 747s, one operated by the Dutch airline KLM and the other by the now-defunct Pan American, collided on the runway, setting off a catastrophic fire that killed 583 people on both planes.

The accident occurred after a series of unfortunate events that caused the Pan Am plane to get in the way of the KLM plane as KLM prepared to take off. The Pan Am crew could be heard yelling at the unconscious KLM plane moving down the runway towards him.

“There is!” Shouted Pan Am captain Victor Grubbs in a voice recording in the cockpit. “Look at him! Damn that son of a bitch is coming!”

With that, the two powerful jets collided in a catastrophic accident that resulted in the highest number of aviation deaths on record.

United Airlines Flight 93

United Airlines Flight 93 was one of four commercial airliners hijacked by al-Qaeda terrorists on September 11, 2001. The flight had taken off from Newark Liberty International Airport in New Jersey, bound for San Francisco with 44 people on board. , including four kidnappers.

Flight 93 crashed into an empty field in Pennsylvania. It was the only one of the planes hijacked on September 11 that did not reach its intended goal. The 9/11 Commission concluded that the hijackers crashed the plane to prevent the passengers and crew from regaining control.

The cockpit recording captured the demands of the terrorists who stormed the cockpit and the pleas for mercy from the flight crew. The last words were in Arabic: “Give it to me” was said eight times before the phrase “Allah is the greatest” was repeated over and over again before the accident.

The last words of a crew member were: “Down. Push, push, push, push, push.”

LOT Polish Airlines Flight 5055

LOT Polish Airlines Flight 5055 with 183 passengers and crew on board had taken off from Warsaw Frederic Chopin Airport for San Francisco with a stopover in New York.

But he never left Poland.

Shortly after takeoff, the May 9, 1987 flight encountered multiple catastrophic events involving two engines and the aircraft’s elevator. About 30 minutes after the first engine exploded, the plane landed at Kabaty Woods on the outskirts of Warsaw.

The cockpit recording captures an “orderly response” from the flight crew as they discuss their options with air traffic control, according to Flight Safety Australia. The decision was made to try to land in Warsaw, but the plane failed.

Those horrible final words were spoken in Polish, but translated into English they were: “Good evening, bye, we perish!”