Airline accidents as told by Microsoft Flight Simulator. This is the greatest idea in the history of Youtube. El Al Flight 1862 Year: 1992 Airplane: Boeing 747-200F/SCD Event: Engine comes lose on right wing, knocking off the second engine on the wing. Result: Plane crashes into high rise apartment with large death toll known as: "The worst airline disaster in the history of the Netherlands" cause: wear and tear/design flaw Let's just say the list of things that can go wrong on an airplane is huge, and you will enjoy finding out the small subset of them that have caused crashes. Also pilots can be dumb, and human error is sublime, and finding out all the ways pilots and airplane mechanics and airplane designers and aircraft controllers can err is deeply satisfying.
I remember the moment. Sunday night at eight. Question most asked after the crash: "Who were the men in the white suits witnessed during the cleanup?" The question hasn't been answered yet. A comittee concluded there are eye witness testimonies that can't be explained. A policeman was caught saying "The Mossad was there sooner than we were". The cargo plane was supposed to be just carrying consumer goods, but it soon turned out that there was a second, unlisted freight. 240 kilos of source components for the sarin nerve gas. Besides that, the tail of the airplane had been weighted with depleted uranium. El Al had not maintained Boeing's standards, and the plane showed hairline fractures. Before it came to Amsterdam, the plane had nearly been denied permission for liftoff in New York. The cockpit voice recorder has never been found. The place where the plane crashed, de Bijlmer, was created as a post-war modernist architect's dream. "The hexagonal grid would allow each apartment to get some sunlight every day. The apartments were meant for the middle class, and no apartment was designed to be “better” than another. Every man would be equal to his neighbor. At one point, Pi de Bruijn proposed to have apartments on the ground, but lead architect Siegfried Nassuth would have none of it. The ground was meant to be a collective space for everyone, according to the principles of modernism." The dream was shattered almost immediately. The apartments didn't sell, became cheaper, and were eventually rented out to low-wage immigrants. The plane crash didn't help. It made the deplorable state of the area clear for everybody. In fact, after the crash, more casualties were reported than the municipality could account for. It turned out an unknown number of illegal immigrants had died, too. And suddenly illegal immigrants became a political agenda item. Before that, no Dutch person had ever worried much about illegal immigrants. And after 40 years, it was time to plan again. Ten years ago the area was restructured. The crash had one other effect. It garnered attention in the countries the immigrants were from. That year, the Algerian civil war had started. The El Al plane crash gave one group of Algerian insurgents an idea. They hijacked a plane, rigged it with explosives, and flew it to France with the intention of crashing it against the Eiffel tower. That in turn inspired another group for their own plans with firebomb airplanes. I have heard from taxi drivers and plane nuts that there's one runway on Schiphol airport (about 10 kilometers/ 6 miles from my home, the planes fly low over my house) that's still reserved for cargo El Al flights, on Sunday nights, between 6 and 8. Nobody's allowed near.
