Air Crash Investigation Special Report is a three-part Canadian documentary television series produced by Cineflix as an addition to the main series (Air Crash Investigation), which investigates series aviation disasters.
The mini-series premiered in South Africa on DStv's National Geographic Channel on Sunday 6 April 2008, at 21h00. There are three hour-long episodes in the series.
Repeats
Mondays: 03h00
Tuesdays: 21h00
Wednesdays: 00h00, 03h00
Synopsis
Every day, millions of passengers board airplanes and fly to destinations all over the world. Few of them are actually aware of the potential dangers that come with a modern global lifestyle.
This three-part series of special reports sets out to investigate some of the most devastating accidents in aviation history and examine what consequences they had for the industry.
In Ripped Apart, we see how commercial jets rely on a pressurised atmosphere to keep passengers alive and revisit some of the most compelling aviation disasters of the last fifty years to expose the explosive power of decompression.
Along the way, we look at the many breakthroughs and design innovations that were implemented only after something went horribly wrong.
Fatal Fix examines how disasters in the sky can be caused by the tiniest fault in the aircraft. Marvels of engineering, today’s modern jetliners are made up of hundreds of thousands of parts.
Keeping these behemoths in the sky requires constant maintenance and repair and if just one tiny flaw is overlooked, the result can be catastrophic.
Lastly, in Who’s Flying the Plane? watch how automated technology exists not to replace pilots, but to assist them.
When pilots climb into the cockpit of a modern jetliner, they put their trust in an automated computer system that can control virtually every aspect of flight. It's a complicated relationship between man and machine and when it doesn’t work perfectly, disaster can strike in an instant.
Featuring gripping re-enactments, archival footage and eyewitness accounts, revisit some of the most troubling aviation disasters that resulted from problems with autopilots and computerized systems.