19000 feet above the Pacific Ocean
a propeller cuts a hole in a passenger plane
As the propeller came off
I thought, "Oh crap!"
That is gonna kill me, it is gonna cut me in two
Cabin pressure dropping
The pilots fight to control their plane
Well we all knew that
Boy, this is a part of as bad as it can get.
They can barely get turned around
There was no way that we could have landed the airplane
Dispatch, Reeve 8
Gotta get some controls back
or I absolutely cannot land
Turn off the autopilot
You are out of your freaking mind?
The pilots managed to get within sight of a runway
We were essentially passengers now
But soon discovered that this landing is impossible
Brace yourself boy
Son of a bitch
I was shocked and cold and sick
Mayday Mayday
Fight for Control Reeve Aleutian Airlines Flight 8
Cold Bay, Alaska.
A frontier town at the tip of the Alaska Peninsula.
surrounded by the Aleutian mountains
and thousands of kilometres of ocean.
Reeve Aleutian Airlines
is one of Cold Bay s
only links to the outside world.
It operates a small fleet of ragged planes
carrying people and cargo across the state and beyond.
Reeve Aleutian Airlines Flight 8
prepares to leave Cold Bay for Seattle, Washington.
The route will take the flight over
a wide stretch of the North Pacific Ocean.
54-year-old Captain James Gibson
is a harden bush pilot
with more than 25 years experience
flying Alaska s tough terrain.
"Set takeoff thrust."
Gibson s flight engineer
"Thrust set."
is 45-year-old Alaskan Gerald Moose Laurin.
His first officer is 39-year-old Gary Lintner
Generally we flew that route once a week.
On this particular day
we re scheduled for five hours flying time.
"Gear up."
"Flaps up, Gary."
"Flaps up."
"Uh, Reeve 8 is off the ground about two-three."
"Reeve 8, roger, and have a good flight."
There are ten passengers on board,
mostly hunters and anglers.
Wendy Kroon is the senior flight attendant.
We were heading to Seattle.
It was a beautiful day, it was clear, no turbulence
highly unusual, highly unusual.
There should ve been a turbulence
Pacific winds
and the nearby Aleutian mountains
often create turbulence guides.
Captain Gibson will cross the North Pacific
aboard a Lockheed L-188 Electra
powered by four turbo-prop engines.
They re, um, just incredibly tough airplanes.
stronger than ten Alex Stewart like I used to always say.
Gibson finishes turning his aircraft on course towards Seattle
when he hears an unusual buzzing sound.
"You hear that, Gary?"
"I do."
"Not sure."
I noticed that the vibration that I was feeling in my feet
and vibration that was in the glass was different.
And that s the first time I ve ever come across that,
and I thought, "This is a little different."
"What the hell "
"Go check a little, will you?"
"Yeah, you bet."
As Gibson and Lintner wait for
Moose Laurin to report back,
the vibrations become more pronounced
I distinctly remember looking down
and seeing my control yoke shaking.
And I turned to Jim and I said,
"Jeez, look at this!"
And Jim and I were kind of looking at each other across the cockpit,
and finally he says,
"Screw this, let s turn around."
Meanwhile,
Wendy Kroon helps Laurin check the engines
The engineer said, "I want you to come back and check
No.4 engine and see if you could see anything."
And just as I looked out of the window, the engine
as the propeller came off,
I thought, "Oh crap!"
"It s gonna kill me, it s gonna cut me in two!"
But it flew forward and then it came back.
It slapped the engine and then the underneath.
The prop tears a hole at the bottom of the plane.
There was a big, huge bang.
"Holy crap!"
"Wendy, are you OK?"
Then of course the cockpit gets all foggy,
and there s almost no sound
because your eardrums were popped.
The hole in the fuselage has caused an explosive decompression.
"Cabin pressure dropping!"
The rapid change in air temperature and pressure creates heavy fog.
which obscures vision
and starves the plane of oxygen.
So when you try to breathe it,
you end up getting lightheaded and you can actually pass out.
It s a little disconcerting because of the fog, and it s quiet
Um..
you d think "Jeez, am I dead or not?"
Oh god.
Finally when the fog cleared I saw out of the window
that we were in a right turn.
A right turn is taking the flight northwest towards the Bering Sea.
And so I naturally grabbed the yoke
to try to level the wings.
"Jammed!"
"No ailerons either."
You felt that the yoke was in concrete.
You just felt solid as a concrete wall.
At the moment that the propeller strikes the fuselage,
junior flight attendant Victoria Fredenhagen in the back of the plane
springs into action.
After the explosions,
I wasn t sure what has happened.
But I got up and got the oxygen walkaround bottle, put that on
I went to look at the right side, and the passenger there said to me,
"You don t wanna look out the window."
And I was like, "Oh!"
There s no propeller on No.4.
Wendy Kroon and Moose Laurin are dazed by the explosion,
but they re not injured.
I had fallen all the way back on my back,
so I jumped up and my first thoughts
were to get the passengers to the back of the airplane,
but I had a really bad feeling
I stopped with one foot still in the air
And I grabbed a hold with the cargo net, I was hanging on it,
and looked down at my foot,
and ahh my heart dropped to my feet.
Fear just ran through me.
I m looking straight down my foot over a hole,
straight down at the ocean.
I can actually till these days see the ocean,
that view, the color, the white caps
The hole was more than half a meter wide.
That scared the crap out of me.
In the cockpit,
the pilots still have no idea what has happened.
Jim and I got our masks on,
And..
within seconds, Moose came through the cockpit door and said,
"Holy crap, we just lost No.4 propeller!"
Jim said, "What do you mean, lost?!!"
Moose said, "It s gone! It went, it went away!"
So he reached out for the emergency shutdown in our No.4 engine.
But James Gibson has a more immediate problem -
the lost of cabin pressure.
With the jammed control columns,
he can t descend to a lower altitude where there s more oxygen.
"Everybody...calm down. Just a second."
Jim saw that the autopilot disconnect lights were on,
and he reached over to turn the autopilot back on again.
The Electra has two sets of control cables.
The manual cables are jammed,
but the cables for the autopilot seem to be working.
"Wings leveled."
And I personally thought that was probably
one of the smartest things that anybody ever did in the history of aviation.
"Descending to 10,000."
The autopilot is now keeping the plane on a steady
and descending course over the North Pacific.
For a moment, everything seems to be under control,
Until..
"There s a hole back there, I can see straight through."
"What?"
"Yeah, right through the plane, I saw the ocean."
And then he go, "Hey, a hole through the floor?"
"Yes, a hole through the floor."
I wanted to yell at him like,
"Yes! I saw a freaking hole in the floor!"
"Go back to seat and put your oxygen on."
Gibson is flying fast, over 200 knots.
He s down one engine and his control column is jammed.
He must find a way to slow down,
or his plane will rip apart.
"Pull power back to 2,000."
"Pull!"
"Look, nothing!"
When his hand moved these throttles back,
and the horsepower gages didn t move,
I Boy, I ll tell you what, I said
"Man, I was shocked and cold and sick."
这时候我们都知道 You know, that s when I knew – well, we all knew that
"Boy, this is a really bad situation. This is about as bad as it can get."
"The throttle cables must be cut, son of a bitch!"
The pilots can t slow the engines
The speed could tear apart the damaged plane.
It s also preventing Gibson from descending as quickly as he d like.
"Come on, come on!"
"Still at sixteen-five!"
"Let s see if we can get turned around."
Gibson instructs the autopilot
to make a right turn back to Cold Bay,
but there s something wrong.
"Oh, god!"
It seems the autopilot s rudder control is also damaged.
And if we just grasp it to the right, just the slightest bit,
the airplane will start immediately rolling into a rapid right-hand turn,
and it scared the living crap out of all of us,
and the only way to get it out of that rapid right-hand turn
was to turn that control knob all the way full left,
and then it would just barely stop the right turn
and just slowly bring the airplane back.
Gibson has no way of steering his airplane.
He can t descend quickly,
and his emergency oxygen is running out.
"Damn it!"
The crew and passengers are flying straight out to sea
with no way to return to safety
and a plane on the verge of tearing itself apart.
Through terrifying trial and error,
Captain James Gibson discovers what his damaged plane
can and cannot do
"OK, stable."
His autopilot has put the plane into a slow descend,
but turning is next to impossible.
Reeve 8 is stuck at full throttle,
flying further and further from land.
"Claim an emergency!"
"Mayday, mayday, this is Reeve Flight 8."
Flight dispatcher Richard Huff
receives the call at the Reeve base
in Anchorage.
Reeve 8, they ve taken off out the Cold Bay, prior to my coming to work,
and probably 45 minutes after I have gone on shift,
they called me.
"Mayday, manual flight control ceased,
heading 104, full throttle, unable to reduce speed."
Is that you, Gary? It s Huff.
"Huff, Huff, we got nothing!"
Reeve 8, understand, no flight control, confirm.
"No, no, no, negative. We got no manual control but uh,
autopilot whatever control kind of working.
Uh, approaching 10000 feet."
Drop it at 10000 feet.
"OK, we got you."
It was the worst damage report I have ever heard in our company.
The autopilot finally gets the Electra down to 10,000 feet.
Captain Gibson activates the autopilot s altitude hold switch.
It works.
The plane holds at 10000 feet.
"Reeve 8, holding at 10000 feet, over."
"Thank god."
"It s now safe to remove your masks."
That s a whole lot better.
Passengers are no longer at risk of hypoxia,
but Gibson still can t slow down or turn back to safety.
Reeve 8, you guys going back to Cold Bay?
"Uh, we uh, we re working on it,
"trying to figure out how to fly this thing."
Everybody wants to know what s going on
so I m really busy, talking on the radio.
and I m watching Jim try
to overpower the autopilot
or help the autopilot.
The autopilot won t turn the plane around.
Gibson still can t botch his column to make a manual turn.
And I thought, well, hell maybe I can do that.
so I reached up, I grabbed the yoke, and I just, I moved it.
"Wow."
and it scared the living hell out of Jim.
盖瑞 等等 "Gary Hold on！"
i was just about to climb out of the seat, you know.
and I just feel terrible, but now at least we knew
that we could overpower or help the autopilot,
so that mean that probably are control cables were not severed.
and that was, that was really a good news.
The pilots use their combined force to muscle the plane into a slow right bank.
They begin a long turn back to Cold Bay.
The right turns will get the plane on course,
but won t provide the precision needed to land.
The aircraft being a 1950s vantage aircraft,
was not equipped with auto land type of autopilots.
It didn t have the sophistication that would allow it to line up
directly on an airport on auto land.
"We can t land like this."
"No chance, to hell."
Without manual control, there s no way to land airplane.
Even if Gibson beats the odds,
and manages to lineup with the runway at Cold Bay,
he s travelling too fast to land.
Good chance it would have gone off the end of runway
if we landed it at 200 and some knots.
Gibson won t be able to slow down.
He needs a longer runway.
"Dispatch, Reeve 8,
how long is that runway in King Salmon, about 9000 feet?"
King Salmon airport is more than 500 kilometers northeast of Cold Bay.
It s further away, but has a longer runway.
Reeve 8,
King Salmon runway is 8900 feet long, over.
"Moose, if we landed at 200 knots,
see if 8900 feet s gonna do it."
"Uh, nah, no, not even close."
Gibson considers a measure of last resort
ditch the plane in the Pacific.
"Dispatch, Reeve 8"
"I may have to ditch in the water at Bristol Bay."
350 kilometers from Cold Bay,
Bristol Bay is close to emergency rescue support
but Richard Huff is against Gibson s plan.
This is the ocean, and unlike a river,
it s got swirls, and eh no.
I was totally against the ocean ditching.
Like the 1996 ditching of
Ethiopian Airlines Flight 961,
Gibson risks cartwheeling
and killing everyone onboard if he doesn t land perfectly.
Reeve 8,
strongly advise, do not land at Bristol Bay!
"Oh, no kidding."
In Anchorage,
Richard Huff proposes another risky plan.
Flying northeast towards home base at Anchorage airport.
Anchorage International
had 2 runways that were 10500.
Plus, all the medical facilities are they were in the area
made it a better, a more viable operation.
Reeve 8, dispatch,
consider flying direct to Anchorage, over.
Fly to Anchorage is risky.
The towering mountains rise to nearly 10,000 feet.
The 700-kilometer passage
will take the crippled Electra
hrough unpredictable weather over the Aleutian mountains.
If Gibson encounters turbulence en-route to Anchorage,
it could cause more damage to his already vulnerable plane.
Reeve 8, strongly suggest Anchorage, over.
"Dispatch, Reeve 8, I heard you the first time."
"And this will be my decision, over."
"Moose, we got enough fuel to go to Anchorage?"
Uh..
yeah, yeah we re good, we re enough.
"Dispatch, Reeve 8.
Confirm weather conditions in Anchorage."
Light surface winds, 206 degrees,
at 9 knots at Anchorage.
"This thing s a damn tank, we ll make it."
"Hmm. OK, dispatch, we re flying to Anchorage."
Roger, Reeve 8, inbound to Anchorage, standing by.
By experimenting,
Gibson has slowly mastered the damaged autopilot.
He delicately adjust the rudder control,
and then adds muscle to the column.
forcing the plane on a new heading to Anchorage.
"OK, stable. Don t touch a thing."
From now, Gibson has luck on his side.
There is no turbulence as they pass over the Aleutian mountains.
But his engines are still stuck on full throttle.
In Anchorage,
ground crews prepare for disaster.
After four anxious hours,
Reeve Flight 8
approaches Anchorage Airport from the west.
Captain Gibson carefully adjusts the autopilot,
and beginning circling the airport.
His only hope is that he can somehow regain enough control
to attempt a landing before running out of fuel.
The controls were just real stiff,
and all we knew was that as long as we tried to use the autopilot
and manually helped
then we could fly the airplane a little bit,
make some turns and a little bit of pitch control.
At Reeve headquarters,
flight engineer John Minton is called in to
help the pilots find a way to land their plane.
I was walking through the scenario by the people who were already there,
and asked to help anyway I could with my knowledge of the aircraft.
"Dispatch, Reeve 8."
Hang on.
"We gotta get some controls back,
or I absolutely cannot land, over."
Roger, Reeve 8, we are working on that.
The Electra has two separate flight control systems,
they work side by side,
but are completely separate from each other.
They have the autopilot, and they have the manual.
So if one is damaged, the other is there.
And in this scenario,
the mechanical side was damaged, and the autopilot side was not damaged.
Minton considers the options,
his conclusion shocks everyone.
Disconnect the autopilot, see what happens.
All of us want to see if manual control of the airplane was an option,
and the only way to do that is to take the autopilot out of the system,
and see if the normal manual hydraulic system was workable
in any way, shape or form.
Reeve 8, John Minton suggests turning off the autopilot.
"Are you out of your freaking mind?"
If any of the manual flight cables were severed
during the accident,
and Gibson disconnects the autopilot,
there may be left with no control at all.
Yeah, we thought the airplane could possibly just go out of control.
And then if we couldn t re-engage the autopilot,
then we d really be in for a thoroughly entertaining afternoon.
And what could be his last flight command,
Gibson hits the autopilot disconnect.
"Disconnecting... autopilot."
For him to put his thumb on that button
and disconnect that autopilot,
was just about the bravest thing, I think,
he thought he ever did in his life.
The plane remained steady,
With the autopilot disconnected,
Gibson checks to see if these manual controls
have loosened.
"Nothing, damn."
They are still jammed.
Jim immediately turned the autopilot back on again.
And by this time we were pretty depressed, it was -
this was not looking good at all.
There was no way that we could have landed the airplane
just using the autopilot,
it just - there just was not enough control.
The lives of the 15 people on board depend on
the pilots getting more control of the plane.
But having spent hours struggling with
jammed manual controls and a crippled autopilot,
Captain Gibson needs a rest.
"Gary, I m tired. You got to take it."
He was just done.
and he said: "Gary you take the airplane and I m gonna take a break."
The crew was exhausted,
and out of options.
Then Lintner notices something that changes the entire situation.
I looked down at the autopilot,
And I suddenly saw that the autopilot was off...
It s... It s turned off.
And I m sitting here making turns with the airplane.
Now I ve got a good three degree bank gone, you know.
Lintner is steering the plane without any help from the autopilot.
And I turned to Jim and I said, "Hey I ve got control here!"
"What?"
You know, and man, he immediately, he s grabbed the yoke,
and two of us got on with the two of us yell
"We have pretty good control!"
And that s when we said,
"Oh man, this is, this is a whole different ball game now."
Somehow pilots have gained enough manual control to
pitch the nose up and steer a course for the runway.
So as long as we have manual control over the airplane
without the autopilot,
That we would been OK.
You give us three degrees of bank and one degree of pitch,
we will be able to do the rest.
"Huff, I don t know how,
but I ve got some control back."
"Coming in."
But Gibson still faces one major problem.
That s a ten-thousand-foot runway,
but you can still be run out of the runway
from going too fast.
He s travelling far too quickly to land.
Captain Jim Gibson is about to try landing
his badly damaged Lockheed Electra.
The plane s four engines are numbered left to right.
The first three are stuck on full throttle.
Gibson needs to shut one of them down
to slow his plane.
"Uh We ll kill No.1
to offset the loss on No.4."
No, no, no.
They shut down No.1,
they shut down everything.
Negative, Reeve 8
Engine No.1 now controls power generator for all hydraulics.
Do not shut down No.1.
The loss of No.1 Engine
and the probable loss of the hydraulic system
would have caused the crash of the air plane.
"OK, Moose. Kill No.2."
"Emergency shutdown engine No.2."
Their speed drops,
but not enough.
"185 knots. Too fast."
There was no fool on around; the lives were a stake,
on the ground and in the air.
Gibson speeds towards the runway,
still unsure how to slow his plane when he gets there.
At 8:13 p.m., he risks it all and attempts a landing.
"Let s do this."
"Anchorage, Reeve 8. Ready to land."
"Runway 6R."
Reeve 8, clear to land. Runway 6R.
"You may wanna go in the back for this."
Wendy Kroon returns to the passenger cabin
to make final preparations for landing.
I really had that strong tote you know
do my duty and get to the back
To do so, she must cross the gaping hole in the cabin floor.
I jumped across up onto the seats
with my arms trying to hold onto the overhead bins
trying to hold up as much weight as I could.
That were about 4 rows before I went down onto the floor
and it crossed and got to the back.
With barely any control and too much speed,
Gibson begins the approach.
Shoes off, place your sharp objects in the air sickness bags
- This too? - Yeah.
"Approach flaps."
"Gear down."
The pilots pull back on their columns to raise the nose for landing.
Seconds before touchdown, they cross the foot of the runway
"170 knots."
50 knots faster than normal.
"Sink rate : 800 feet a minute."
I - I ve never had to uh, myself or watch anybody else
try to land an airplane that fast.
They can do this. They can do this.
News crews capture the attempt.
But at the last minute
Gibson realizes he s still going too fast
and can t land safely.
Son of a bitch.
"Go around. Go around."
"We re good! We re good, yeah."
When we made that first pass, you could - it was too fast
and they were not gonna land,
and so it was exciting
when the gear went down and it came back up.
That was - that was good.
The airplane was very low, above the trees
as we were going up in the round
and you could see houses and people down in the yards.
The failed approach
proves Gibson may be attempting the impossible.
Our problem was that we were just going too fast.
We were - we were doing 170 knots all the way down.
Gibson must find a way to reduce his speed by at least 10 knots.
But shutting down the remaining engines is not an option.
The Electra s short wings
get most of their lift from the air pushed back by the propellers.
You can t just turn the airplane engines off and glide.
There were - there were just too much drag from those large propellers,
and so the lift of the wing would be gone completely.
So the airplane would just fall out of the air.
With two engines at full throttle
and too much speed to land,
Gibson looks out to see and begins a second approach.
"Reeve 8, tower.
Clear to second approach, Runway 6R."
"Gear down."
Planes pick up speed as they descend.
To reduce its landing speed,
Gibson decides to start his second approach
from a mere 800 feet.
He also makes a
bold decision that would make a second go-around impossible.
On touchdown, he s going to kill the remaining two engines.
"Last chance, guys."
Come on, come on, come on...
"146 knots!"
The plane hits the ground.
"Cut all engines!"
"Emergency shutdown engines 1 and 3!"
Once the handles were pulled,
the airplane was committed.
There was no turning back.
"One forty!"
With all the engines cut, the plane slows down,
but there s a high price to pay.
It s the engines that provide the electrical and hydraulic power
that controls the steering and brakes.
Now we re hurdling projectile down the runway with
uh, no hydraulic control of the airplane.
Now isn t this something we got no control .
directional control of all on this airplane.
I mean we were essentially passengers now.
We d become passengers with front row seats.
Reeve Aleutian Flight 8
speeds at one hundred and forty knots down the runway,
but Captain Gibson has no hydraulic brakes.
All he has are emergency brakes,
and they don t have nearly as much stopping power.
Overwhelmed by the speed of the plane,
the emergency brakes burst into flames
"We are having fire on the nose wheel."
"We have fire on the nose wheel."
Now we re going off the runway,
we re definitely going off the runway.
We re just looking straight into that ditch,
and Jim says "Brace yourselves, boys."
"Brace yourselves!"
"Nice!"
We are there.
There was no real emergency
cause we could sense that everything was good.
"Everybody is fine back here!"
Well, there s of course adrenaline running at that point and it just felt...
it felt good.
I think it was just surreal,
because... we were okay.
"We did it!"
"We re all good!"
"Handclap landing,
guys, handclap landing!"
When I hit the ground, one of the passengers come up to me and goes
"When s the next flight to Seattle?"
And I m looking at him like,
uh.. " I don t think you realize how bad the situation was!"
I m still amazed,
that they got it on the ground,
without hurting anybody or anything.
They didn t even put a scratch on the airplane.
We just sat there
and watched them foam the airplane.
There was foam all over the airplane
from the fire trucks and firemen,
the airplane was reasonably okay.
Passengers exit the plane,
but Gibson has one last command before he releases his crew.
"Oh, hats, coats, ties, boys!"
Jim said,
"Boys, I think we handled that real true professionals."
"I think we ought to get our hats
and coats and ties on for our departure."
After six-hour-ordeal,
Captain Gibson and his crew
have landed a badly crippled plane,
and saved the lives of everyone onboard.
It s now up to NTSB investigator
Ron Schleede to find out what went wrong.
The loss of a propeller in flight is a very serious event.
It can lead to a catastrophic accident.
It has led to catastrophic accidents in the past.
Though the Reeve Aleutian accident
was not catastrophic,
it is part of a disturbing trend.
Since 1965
there have been four cases of spontaneous
propeller loss on the Electra-188.
We have an airplane that nearly went into the ocean,
because a propeller came off,
so we needed to find out as fast as we could what caused this accident.
In Washington, investigator Dennis Grossi reviews
the cockpit voice recording
to understand the challenges faced by
the crew as they tried to land.
Shortly after takeoff, the flight crew detected a vibration.
That vibration continued on
and until propeller departed the aircraft.
Damaging the fuselage, causing a rapid decompression of the cabin,
a loss of engine controls
and the limited flight control authority.
该死 Dame it！
For Schleede,
there are only two possible causes that can explain the loss of the propeller.
A fatigue crack or some other pre-existing damage
would cause the whole propeller suddenly to separate
and that has happened before.
The other possibility is the gearbox
the powered gears that drive the propeller.
If there s a catastrophic failure there,
that can also cause the engine for the propeller assembly
and gearbox to separate.
That has also happened in the past.
His team studies what s left of the damaged engine.
Right away, it s clear that his investigation will be difficult.
The wreckage really didn t give us much of a clue.
Uh, because what we needed to look at was gone.
The propeller and the gearbox it was attached to are lost at sea.
The parts that likely caused the vibration are gone for good.
Without them, the case may be impossible to solve.
With no physical evidence to examine,
Schleede s team studies the plane s flight data recorder,
hoping it can explain the vibration.
The flight recorder on this airplane was a very rudimentary recorder.
It records by a stylus scraping a metal foil,
and so it s not a very scientific thing
compared to what we have today.
So we could not on the flight recorder determine
where the vibration came from.
The Electra has a history of engine vibration.
Vibration s so serious, it s been known to tear the plane apart at high-speed.
Investigators examine the rubber mounts designed to absorb those vibrations.
If they re worn down,
it could explain the accident.
But the mounts check out.
The investigation hits another dead end.
We could not determine even a probable cause
in this case.
When you can t do that and have to say "I don t know",
it s very hard for investigators to say.
But there is one other question Schleede hopes he can answer.
Why was Gibson s plane so hard to land?
In four other cases,
when a Electra s propeller separated,
the planes landed without incident.
The loss of propeller is not necessarily catastrophic.
It s designed to fly with only half its engines.
Yet with three engines intact,
Gibson could barely maintain control of his plane.
Something made this case unique.
NTSB investigators examined the gash
where the propeller punctured the hole.
Doesn t look like any cables are cut.
The hole explains the decompression,
but not the complete lack of control.
It s only by taking a closer look from inside the cabin
that they finally discover the root of the control problem
the badly damaged cabin floor.
That buckling of the floor, from the explosive decompression,
jammed the flight controls where the cables
ran through holes in the floor s structure.
The autopilot control cables and the manual cables
were both pinched by the collapsed floor.
"Jammed!"
But because only the autopilot uses hydraulics to move the cables,
it can apply far more force on them than a human pilot.
This is why the autopilot was able to control the plane ever so slightly.
They were able to get the autopilot
to move the control surfaces to make minimal corrections,
and keep the airplane stable.
"Hey! I ve got some control here."
"What?" But with the manual cable so badly jammed,
investigators wonder why the crew
was suddenly able to regain enough control to land the plane.
A closer look at the pinched cables
explains why they eventually came free.
Looks like they sawed their way out of this mess.
They kept pulling as hard as they could on the...
you re pushing and pulling, turning
Deep scars in the host joists tell the tale.
The pinched control cables gradually
carve channels into the airframe.
They were autually cutting right into the metal during the long flight
fbefore they landed.
That gave the crew just enough control
to get the plane lined up with the runway.
"Let s do this."
"Anchorage, Reeve 8.
Ready to land, runway 6R."
Dennis Grossi believes brute force
was only part of what made this flight exceptional.
I ve listened to a lot of CVRs
in my 35 years in the NTSB,
and there s nothing that even comes close to this one.
And the crew was quite exceptional.
"Anchorage, Reeve 8.
Ready to land, runway 6R."
Reeve 8, clear to land, runway 6R.
"Gear down."
"One hundred and seventy knots! Sink rate 800 feet a minute."
They were able to regain control the aircraft,
and started the descent, which is extraordinary.
Once in Anchorage,
Gibson resisted the temptation to land on his first apporach.
"Son of a bitch!"
Quite often when pilots are on approach and things start to go wrong,
the instinct is to get the airplane down,
and landed in spite of the conditions.
"Go around! Go around!"
The captain showed extraordinary airmanship and leadership.
Gibson s last flight command may have distinguished him most.
"Cut all engines!"
"Emergency shutdown engine one and three!"
Then of course the decision by the captain to cut power once they touch down,
you know, that - that eliminated the possibility of a go-around
So he knew, at that point,
that... that this is it.
In 1983, US president Ronald Reagan
recognized captain James Gibson and his crew
for their heroic landing.
"You two, what is the feeling when the propellers
just come through the side of the plane?"
"You know, that was uh..."
"A few moments there that I wouldn t want to repeat, sir."
"It uh... it was exciting."
James Gibson flew for Reeve for
six more years before retiring.
He died in 2010.
Gerald Lintner retired from Reeve
in professional flying in 1996.
Victoria Fredenhagen left aviation
and opened her own business in Anchorage.
Two years after their fateful flight,
Moose Laurin and Wendy Kroon married
Reeve Aleutian Airlines folded in 2000,
after 68 years of service.