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San diego, september 25th, 1978. an nbc news crew captures a small plane spiraling to the ground after it has collided half a mile up with a much larger 727. behind us we heard a tremendous explosion. we knew at that point it was a lot more than just a single plane. and of course, we found out later it was an airliner. both pilots in the cessna are killed along with all 135 aboard the jet and 7 people in the residential neighborhood below. police set up a makeshift morgue at a nearby high school, and immediately, the questions begin. who s at fault? what caused this tragic accident? how could it have been avoided? to understand what happened, it s critical to know what transpired between air traffic control and the psa crew in the two minutes leading up to the ....
something started falling out of the sky. people started just going, oh, my gosh, oh, my gosh. what is that? and i just clicked the camera on right away and just moved out to the left side, and i m looking up, and something like a comet was coming down from the sky. the photographer for the county is standing over here on this side. so, when the collision happened, hans looks up this way and hans got off two shots of the psa-182 before it crashed. when i looked up, all i saw was the airliner with the engine on fire, and it was starting to bank to the right, and a big chunk of the leading edge of the wing was torn off. so, i knew that the plane, you know, had to crash. it couldn t possibly survive. and everything happened very fast. i just got off one shot, sort of by instinct, and the second picture was almost the ....
One of the dc-8 s engines tears through the fuselage of the super connie. the twa plane breaks into pieces and goes down on the spot, crashing in staten island s miller airfield. but the united jet manages to stay aloft for 8 1/2 more miles until it s over park slope, brooklyn, where tom regan, then 20 years old, is standing on the street. i crossed the street at 7th avenue and sterling place, just stepping on the corner, when i heard a loud, loud whine. and when i turned around, the wing of the plane, united airlines, was catching into the roof of the building that i had just left. and there was a tremendous explosion. immediately i dropped to the ground. and then moments after that, there was a second explosion. bang! ....
Over the central amazon, causing the disaster. now, that s crazy. of course, when the plane s instruments were studied, it was clear that the plane had been steady as a rock at 37,000 feet. joe sharkey is held in brazil for two days. the pilots, joe lapore and jan paladino, are held for more than two months. when they are finally allowed to leave the country on december 9th, 2006, they receive a warm welcome back at their company headquarters in long island, new york. but the pilots problems are far from over. nine months after the accident, the brazilian government indict the american pilots as well as four of its own air traffic controllers for exposing an aircraft to danger. the international aviation community has come out strongly against criminalizing accidents. we have to know what they were thinking, what decisions they were making, why they acted ....
Await further instructions, but there are problems. the plane has two navigational instruments used at the time to determine position. one of them isn t working. and the plane is also traveling more than 500 miles per hour, a speed later determined to be excessive, and the dc-8 flies past its clearance. the united crew lost its bearings. i would equate it to driving down a street. if you know where you are and you know the second left turn is the turn you need to make, that s great. but if you didn t see the first road to the left, you would drive beyond it because you didn t recognize the first cue. at 10:33 a.m., laguardia tower advises twa of traffic off to its right. no one realizes it, but the united dc-8 is heading straight for them. then, seven seconds later, as both planes approach 5,000, there s a brutal collision. ....