Episode 174: Air Florida Flight 90

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Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Justin Roczniak?

  Three, two, one, mark. Okidoki.

• 0:05Speaker 01

  Ow, my hands really hurt. I clapped too hard.

• 0:08Liam McAnderson?

  Oh, poor baby.

• 0:11Justin Roczniak?

  And let me start.

• 0:12Liam McAnderson?

  Oh, my god.

• 0:12Justin Roczniak?

  The slideshow.

• 0:14Liam McAnderson?

  I need everyone to know that I'm a very sleepy boy. So if you get the delirium early, that's what's happening to me.

• 0:19Speaker 01

  Understood.

• 0:20November Kelly?

  That's reasonable. I'm fully nocturnal at this point. So I'm good. I'm locked in. I'm good to go.

• 0:24Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah.

• 0:25Justin Roczniak?

  Oh, yeah.

• 0:26Speaker 01

  Didn't nap at nursery. So this afternoon was, uh, uh, that's, oh, sorry, Devin, can you bleep, uh, just in case, bleep that name? Um, the little one was, uh, did not sleep in nursery. So put down was interesting. Um, she was just crying the whole evening. So poor, poor little one. Just a moch, you know? Anyway.

• 0:44Justin Roczniak?

  That's, that's what they do.

• 0:46Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 0:46Justin Roczniak?

  Programmed to do.

• 0:47Speaker 01

  She's very good normally. She's, she's a good sport. So when she's crying, it's normally there's something, something serious up, or she's just completely knackered. In this case, it was the latter.

• 0:54Liam McAnderson?

  Oh, yeah. She's just like me in that respect. Yeah, me too. I also cry when I'm tired.

• 0:59Justin Roczniak?

  Well, I've had the lock milkshake out of the room because he was getting really aggressive about trying to get on my head.

• 1:04Liam McAnderson?

  Cause he's, yeah, he's just hard. He's just hard up.

• 1:07November Kelly?

  He's got a parasocial relationship with you.

• 1:10Justin Roczniak?

  Yes, this is true.

• 1:12Liam McAnderson?

  I can't believe this creature that I feed and house has affection for me and also wants to hump my head, baby.

• 1:21Justin Roczniak?

  All right, all right.

• 1:23Liam McAnderson?

  Enough jumps.

• 1:24Justin Roczniak?

  Welcome to Well, There's Your Problem. It's a podcast about engineering disasters with slides. I'm Justin Roczniak. I'm the person who's talking right now. My pronouns are he and him. Okay, go.

• 1:37November Kelly?

  I'm November Kelly. I'm the person who's talking now. My pronouns are she and her. Yay, Liam.

• 1:43November Kelly?

  You okay, that buddy?

• 1:44Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah, I'm great. Yay, Liam. Hi, I'm Liam McAnderson. I'm the person talking right now. Uh, very sleepy, Sleum, if you will, very sleepy Liam.

• 1:52November Kelly?

  You sound, you sound like, uh, you know, the bit in Howl's Moving Castle where he's kind of like mostly goo?

• 1:58Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah.

• 1:59November Kelly?

  Yeah.

• 2:00Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah, I'm thirty percent goo. Not the, not the fun kind, the bad kind. Drop and run goo.

• 2:08Justin Roczniak?

  Oh, we get to, we get to talk about goo later in this episode.

• 2:11Liam McAnderson?

  Are people turning into goo? Is there some sort of goo?

• 2:14Justin Roczniak?

  No, there's goo involved.

• 2:15Liam McAnderson?

  Oh, I don't like it when there's goo involved. And bringing up the rear is Gareth.

• 2:22Speaker 01

  It's me.

• 2:23Liam McAnderson?

  Gareth.

• 2:23Speaker 01

  It's the other guy, the other temp co-host of W2OP. Yeah, my name's Gareth Dennis. My pronouns are he and him. And, and I was forced under duress to change a slider position on my GoXL Mini that had been in position for months under instruction of Nova of this parish. I was forced to, under, under sort of violent, threat of violence by a certain Dr. Eleanor Yanega. I've now readjusted it back to where it was supposed, where it was supposed to be again.

• 2:53November Kelly?

  We hate to like ever change anything on our audio mixes.

• 2:57Justin Roczniak?

  Yes.

• 2:58November Kelly?

  To ask me to do so is like you, you threaten me with violence.

• 3:02Liam McAnderson?

  Cut off a limb, right?

• 3:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, exactly.

• 3:04Liam McAnderson?

  Of course. I, I've got the same mediocre audio setup I've always had and I'll ride it into oblivion.

• 3:12Justin Roczniak?

  That's the problem with audio setups is it's like, you know, you, you, you, you put it together once and you're like, I'm never touching this.

• 3:18Liam McAnderson?

  Oh, yeah. No, no, I, I, I mean, you guys have heard travel setups V1 through 17 or whatever I'm on now.

• 3:28Speaker 01

  I remember when you were on a beach, I think once in a long past episode, like we're talking like a long time ago.

• 3:33Liam McAnderson?

  London Fire, I think, yeah.

• 3:35Speaker 01

  Like a mic stand, which then you, you lost on the way to the beach. These are the setups that are, you know.

• 3:41Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah.

• 3:41November Kelly?

  Just like screaming into like half of a hollowed out coconut on a string.

• 3:47Liam McAnderson?

  You guys, you guys see Castaway, right?

• 3:51Justin Roczniak?

  Castaway on the Jersey Shore.

• 3:55Speaker 01

  That's thematic because in Castaway, there is a, an aviation incident of a sort. And we're, we're pretty much looking at one of those now.

• 4:03Justin Roczniak?

  Yes.

• 4:03Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah, I don't think it's supposed to look like that.

• 4:05Justin Roczniak?

  What you see here is the tail of a Boeing 737 200 being lifted

• 4:12Liam McAnderson?

  The rest of it.

• 4:13Justin Roczniak?

  by a crane out of the Potomac River.

• 4:16Liam McAnderson?

  Oh.

• 4:17Justin Roczniak?

  In Washington DC.

• 4:18November Kelly?

  And you're telling me that this, this was caused by a goo?

• 4:22Justin Roczniak?

  A lack of goo.

• 4:24Liam McAnderson?

  Oh, is this gonna be the nano, is this gonna be the gray goo theory, but just for devouring 737s?

• 4:29Justin Roczniak?

  No, we'll get to that in a bit. Today, we're gonna talk about the exciting story of Air Florida Flight 90.

• 4:38Liam McAnderson?

  There's nothing exciting about Florida, man.

• 4:40Justin Roczniak?

  Well, yeah, it's kind of, it's kind of a, you know, well, you.

• 4:44Liam McAnderson?

  The land that God forgot.

• 4:45Speaker 01

  Even in this case, they've exported their excitement to the Potomac River in this instance.

• 4:50Justin Roczniak?

  You can go, you can go to Epcot.

• 4:52Speaker 01

  You don't have to do that.

• 4:54November Kelly?

  You can get killed by a hurricane. You can meet the influencer lady, Carol. What's her face? No.

• 5:02Liam McAnderson?

  Carol Baskin?

• 5:03November Kelly?

  No.

• 5:06November Kelly?

  No.

• 5:10November Kelly?

  Caroline Callaway. You can meet Caroline Callaway.

• 5:12Liam McAnderson?

  Oh, the, yeah, I don't know who that is.

• 5:15November Kelly?

  Okay, okay. Well, this whole conversation with.

• 5:20Liam McAnderson?

  I told you the delirium had set in. And if it's up to me, we're gonna make this thing last three hours in some form of self-flagellation.

• 5:27November Kelly?

  I want us to do just the opposite. I want to try, I want us to try and answer the critics by taking out all of the tangents. We just keep in the stuff that's like, you know, straight down the line engineering material. Every podcast is 12 minutes long.

• 5:39Liam McAnderson?

  No.

• 5:42Justin Roczniak?

  Shut off the podcast right now. Go watch the mentor pilot video. That's only about 30 minutes. This is not going to be 30 minutes.

• 5:49November Kelly?

  None of us are pilots as well.

• 5:51Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, exactly. Exactly. In fact, we have, in fact, instead of a pilot, we have a railway engineer on.

• 6:00November Kelly?

  We kind of, we're like the opposite of authenticity. And this is the thing, right? And this is something that's been bothering me lately was I, so in order, this is a sequence of events in itself. In order to look up when we are doing our own tour, I had to, I had to Google it to just to double check. And that led me to the realization that we have a subreddit, right, which appears to be comprised entirely of people who used to listen to this podcast and now don't for one reason or another. And there are two threads. On there that aren't just like, hey, the new episode is out and they're both about me being confidently wrong about things. So brutal.

• 6:43Speaker 01

  I probably kind of likes that. I thought, yeah, there's a, you know.

• 6:47November Kelly?

  No, it's genuinely, it's genuinely like two sets of people going, hey, is anyone else noticing that that November is kind of a fucking idiot? And it's like, I am aware of this, but like.

• 6:59Speaker 01

  I have side, I have things to disagree with upon on that statement.

• 7:04Justin Roczniak?

  Abby said something useful on a recent Kill James Bond, if I recall, which is that the reviews are not for you.

• 7:12November Kelly?

  That's, that's true. But when they're kind of pointed in your direction, I mean, I try to keep a healthy sense of perspective, right? Because of the people who are like maddest at me that I could tell, they were maddest at me for disrespecting Rania Khalek and disrespecting Barney the dinosaur. So.

• 7:31Speaker 01

  That guy.

• 7:32November Kelly?

  On, on, on both of those bases, I feel okay. But yeah, I just have to remind people that I'm not an expert in anything. Right? And if I, if I sound confident about things, it's just because I'm trying to make jokes. I don't know anything about anything.

• 7:48Speaker 01

  You're a comedian. That's your, that's, that's, that's your whole point.

• 7:51November Kelly?

  Professionally an idiot.

• 7:53Liam McAnderson?

  Tell us we're comedians. I don't want to have to file a text.

• 7:57Liam McAnderson?

  I'm like, I know, I think my webcam's on. I don't remember, but I'm like, I'm hunched over clutching this seltzer, wishing for the end times.

• 8:08Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. It's about that last episode recording where like it for your camp, your webcam froze with your head, with you, with your head in your hands. I, I, I, I thought, well, that's, this is, this is funny. And then it continued to be like, is, is Liam okay? Have we broken Liam?

• 8:24November Kelly?

  Genuinely concerned.

• 8:27Liam McAnderson?

  It's just fucking Zencastr again.

• 8:32Justin Roczniak?

  Before we talk about the end times, we have to do, oh, we do have announcements. I forgot to put the slide in.

• 8:37Speaker 01

  That's fine. We can sing it.

• 8:40Liam McAnderson?

  We have a, we have a tour. If you want to find out where it is, go to our subreddit, scroll past all the threads, making fun of me for not knowing what I'm talking about. And yeah, it'll be on there. There are dates.

• 8:53Justin Roczniak?

  Still, still, uh, well, it'll also be in the description as well.

• 8:57Liam McAnderson?

  That's way simpler. Yeah.

• 8:58Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, exactly. We're nearly sold out in Washington DC.

• 9:01Liam McAnderson?

  We are sold out in DC, dude.

• 9:03Justin Roczniak?

  We are sold out in DC.

• 9:04Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah, we sold out in DC.

• 9:06Justin Roczniak?

  You know, if you want to come see us on a Tuesday in New York, there are still tickets to that show. And there are still a good amount of tickets left at the Fillmore. We do need to fill more seats at the Fillmore.

• 9:19Liam McAnderson?

  Did you see the email we got today from an unnamed venue that didn't want us there the first time?

• 9:25Justin Roczniak?

  No, I did not.

• 9:25Speaker 01

  They come crawling back.

• 9:27Liam McAnderson?

  They all bend the knee. They all bend the knee. I texted my wife as soon as I got that fucking email. I was like, mm hmm. And it was actually, I can name the venue that really didn't want us, uh, cause we're never gonna play there as long as I can help it, which is, uh, World Cafe Live. What's up, you motherfuckers?

• 9:41Justin Roczniak?

  I couldn't think of another venue that, yeah, that's the only one. I, I knew they didn't like us. Um, anyway, uh.

• 9:47Liam McAnderson?

  Oh, I was turning on the subreddit. Sorry. I've been trying, I've been trying not to obsess over this fucking thing for like two days now.

• 9:54Justin Roczniak?

  Okay. Don't, don't look at the subreddit, uh, you know, and, uh, anyway.

• 10:01Justin Roczniak?

  I will not disparage World Cafe Live, although they did not.

• 10:05Liam McAnderson?

  Did that, bud.

• 10:06Justin Roczniak?

  Well, yeah, that's a good point. Yeah. Well.

• 10:10Justin Roczniak?

  Okay.

• 10:11Liam McAnderson?

  Oh, you'll take that tone. Yeah.

• 10:15Justin Roczniak?

  Let's do the goddamn news before we impugn anyone else.

• 10:18Liam McAnderson?

  I barely, barely impugned them.

• 10:25Liam McAnderson?

  I love you all so, so much.

• 10:28Justin Roczniak?

  We're gonna have to take a couple mulligans on, um,

• 10:31Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah, we're sorry.

• 10:32Justin Roczniak?

  goddamn newsroom last week. Yeah.

• 10:34Liam McAnderson?

  That up real bad.

• 10:35November Kelly?

  I asked you fuckers for a decade where weeks happen and what did I get? More weeks where decades happen.

• 10:43Justin Roczniak?

  I was about to say, yeah, I mean, especially given the, the release cycle of this podcast, some even more wild shit will have happened by the time this comes out. Anyway, so while we were recording the previous episode, uh, the wildfires were really bad in Los Angeles and they got significantly worse over the course of recording them. So I said something along the lines of, well, it's only affecting the houses of the multimillionaires and the billionaires. Hasn't come down the mountain, down to the ordinary millionaires. Uh, no, it pretty much destroyed the entire town of, uh,

• 11:17November Kelly?

  Altona, Altona is like destroyed now. It's, it's really bad. And I mean, this is kind of a general problem with, with the goddamn news generally, right? Is that first of all, it moves faster than we do because we're a very lethargic and like sluggish podcast. We like to conserve energy. Uh, all of our tummy is hurt. But also we, we're trying to do a comedy podcast about horrible things.

• 11:42Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah.

• 11:43November Kelly?

  Uh, and it's, it's like genuinely like, we don't, yeah, we don't always hit the tone that we want to.

• 11:49Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah, we sometimes miss the mark.

• 11:51November Kelly?

  Yeah. And I think this was one of them, right? Where, uh, I mean, it's not even out yet. So I don't even know, but like,

• 11:57Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 11:57November Kelly?

  It's, it's one of those things where we were really like on a kind of tight rope there of, of trying to be like, what can we possibly say about this? And that's, that's like more and more, you know? But I think it's still worth doing. It's just, you know, how are we not going to talk about a bunch of cars getting crushed by a bulldozer?

• 12:17Speaker 01

  This is one of the things where we think about like some things, some things are best left to stew and, and, and look at the aftermath. But some things are so apocalyptic that you've got to, it'd be, it'd be a bit, you know, we'd be get caught, you know, we'd get called out if we didn't engage with it, right?

• 12:31Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. So. It's a good point. It's a good point. You know, and now we're, we're starting to look into the cleanup section of the, uh, the, the, the whole situation. And it's like Gavin Newsom has decided, okay, we're going to suspend environmental laws so we can rebuild more quickly on these places that probably shouldn't have houses on them.

• 12:50November Kelly?

  Yeah, we're gonna, we're gonna build them even more shoddily and, you know, even more sort of fire prone, just to get to build back quicker.

• 12:58Liam McAnderson?

  Build them out of balsa, right? Build back better. Build back better.

• 13:01November Kelly?

  And, and, and, you know. Burner.

• 13:03Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, exactly. God forbid you put any multifamily in there, like, you know, try and concentrate housing in areas that are less fire prone. No, it's all, it's gonna be all single family homes forever.

• 13:14November Kelly?

  As, as a kind of like Glasgow resident, I, I have some exposure of this, this strange phenomenon whereby anything burning down somehow turns to property developer's advantage. Um, and yeah, it's, it's a real mystery, right? Like, I'm not sure.

• 13:31Speaker 01

  Then, then maybe we'll get with it because none of the new houses will be insurable. So, uh, we do have that on our side.

• 13:38Justin Roczniak?

  Fifty, fifty stories of real of apartments on top of the Charles Rennie McIntosh school. Yeah.

• 13:46Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 13:47November Kelly?

  It was one day before the fire suppression system.

• 13:50Justin Roczniak?

  Again, it's burned down again. It's time to, uh, put another fifty stories on top.

• 13:54Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah. Every single time it just grows, it just becomes a Taipei one on one after two fires.

• 14:01November Kelly?

  Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, so this is, this is fucking horrifying as ever. Like, I feel like most of what we talk about now is fucking horrifying. Um, and.

• 14:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, I was following Noah's, Noah's feed closely on the night after we finished, even after we finished recording, actually, when I should have been in bed because it was 2am. But I have to say, I was, it was, it was just pretty harrowing watching it again. Yeah. Watching it going through Altadena was just, yeah. And then, of course, all the misinformation happened because the number of AI generated pictures of like Lamborghinis with fire around them and shit that then was being spewed out. It's just like, we really are on the fucking end times.

• 14:36Justin Roczniak?

  Lot of, a lot of conspiracies around it too. There's a lot of, you know, people saying, oh my God, you know, the, the space laser, you know, it's a space laser again.

• 14:44Liam McAnderson?

  No, no, you gotta be more careful with that thing. I, I, well, I shouldn't be drunk when I operate it, but that's neither here nor there.

• 14:53Justin Roczniak?

  And what else? The, you know, the insufficient water supply to the, you know, high pressure system is like somehow was deliberate or something. No, I just think this is a larger fire than was anticipated for the water system.

• 15:08Speaker 01

  Well, it's deliberate in the sense that we decide that California decided all the water should go to that like one couple that grow pistachios, but otherwise.

• 15:15Justin Roczniak?

  Resnick's, yeah.

• 15:17November Kelly?

  Yeah, no, I don't think like Antifa were going around like starting fires like people were afraid of. I mean, yeah, there's the other thing about this is that it might not to do no gods, no mess. End the career of the mayor of Los Angeles, Karen Bass, because she was on vacation for much of this. And then has fucked up every single press conference she's done in a new and like alarming way. And the most recent one I saw was where she was asked like, okay, well, do you feel bad that you're on vacation? Do you think you should have come back earlier? She's like, no, no.

• 15:54Justin Roczniak?

  No, can't say that. Yeah.

• 15:55November Kelly?

  Can't do that.

• 15:56Speaker 01

  Just lie. Just say, of course, it's not hard.

• 15:59Justin Roczniak?

  Probably wouldn't have helped, but you know, yeah, you probably have to probably have to at least say, yeah, I should be there.

• 16:06November Kelly?

  It's a real, it's a real like question anticipating the answer. Yes. Right?

• 16:10Justin Roczniak?

  Well, I mean, good on her for doing self care and not making her job or life.

• 16:16November Kelly?

  I was doing work, life balance.

• 16:20Liam McAnderson?

  How dare you? Yes.

• 16:23Justin Roczniak?

  We'll also point out that the fires are still going.

• 16:28November Kelly?

  Oh, yeah.

• 16:28Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, they're a lot more contained than they were when we recorded last week, but they are still going.

• 16:34Speaker 01

  Winds and stuff, right? So it has slowed down, but yeah.

• 16:37November Kelly?

  The real winners here are the guys who like to draw like exquisite art of planes. Because like, if you want to see some like really, really beautiful like art of, you know, the like Boeing super tanker or whatever, there's a bunch of guys on Twitter who have got you covered and they're all like, you think we feel bad or feel conflicted? They're all like, oh, I mean. You know, obviously, it's not, it's not like a good thing. It's a really bad thing. And I feel for everyone involved, but I love this fucking plane so bad. And you know what? I, I, I respect that a great deal, having a kind of like, sort of deep attraction to the spirit of John Muir and being like.

• 17:18Liam McAnderson?

  Planes, well, the people, the people that.

• 17:20November Kelly?

  They want to fuck the plane.

• 17:21Speaker 01

  They want to fuck the plane. And honestly, like, it's, it's, it's like a noble calling, as far as I'm concerned. If they're putting out art like this, it's like saying that, like, you know,

• 17:31November Kelly?

  Michelangelo wanted to fuck the statues. It's like, okay, fine, worth it, I guess, you know, like.

• 17:37Speaker 01

  A ton of flying things. One thing I did notice was the drones, right? The people were flying over and taking drone footage and crashing into firefighting planes.

• 17:47November Kelly?

  Yeah, they put a whole lot of wings of one of them, like, and like grounded all the, like, fixed wing firefighters.

• 17:52Speaker 01

  There were, there were flight restriction, like, very well advertised flight restrictions out for these guys out, kind of getting glory hunting drone shots, that they were to be grounded. And nope, they were just up and flying. It's just, yeah. Not good. Stupid drones. Yeah. And, and yeah, like, that grounded that firefighting aircraft. So that was less firefighting capacity against these fires. So great work. The guys flying the drones around.

• 18:17November Kelly?

  Other, other thing that I wanted to mention about this is, you know, of course, that California continues to use prison labor as firefighting. Like in the, I think, hundreds of, of people here. And this is, this is, this is, of it's like functionally slave labor. And I don't want to be, you know, I don't want to talk about, you know, the UAE or, you know, Saudi and talk about Kafala, not mention this here.

• 18:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly.

• 18:48Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. I mean, it's, it's definitely a, you know, it's a hell of a, it's a hell of a system they have out there in California. I'm glad. I'm, yeah, I'm just, sometimes I'm like, thank God I don't live there.

• 19:01November Kelly?

  And it's one of those things where it's like, knowing that this is gonna get worse every year and seeing how precarious it is this year and how bad it is this year. I you just think, you know, this is just gonna get more and more tenuous until something's gonna like break seriously, you know? I mean, this is, this is what it looks like when it works just about and it's still like,

• 19:22Justin Roczniak?

  I was about to say, this is not as, not as, not anywhere as bad as it could have been.

• 19:28November Kelly?

  Yeah.

• 19:29Justin Roczniak?

  But it was still exponentially worse than anything else that's happened there.

• 19:32November Kelly?

  Yeah. Yeah, like, well, looking at, looking at like, you know, hundreds of people getting their houses burned down, thousands of people getting evacuated, and, you know, whatever death toll it turns out to be, and going, well, you know, this is, this is the success story, right? Um, it just feels like the success story gets a little bit less successful all the time.

• 19:54Justin Roczniak?

  Yes. However, there was a success story, um, in other news.

• 19:59November Kelly?

  Yeah. Oh, nailed that.

• 20:02Justin Roczniak?

  So, uh, yeah.

• 20:04November Kelly?

  So there's a ceasefire now.

• 20:05Justin Roczniak?

  John Trump has negotiated a ceasefire in Gaza.

• 20:10November Kelly?

  You hate to say it, but deals really are the man's art form.

• 20:13Justin Roczniak?

  I'm, I'm kinda, I, I, I was like, you know, it did seem like for a while there, there were some people who were contrarians, who were just like, well, maybe Trump will, you know, negotiate a ceasefire. I was like, nah, they, they'll never do that. Anyway, he did that.

• 20:27November Kelly?

  Yeah, like, I, I, I remember seeing there was one of the dumbest motherfuckers to ever do it, Matt Iglesias, posted, posted like, maybe I'm, maybe I'm an out of touch elitist, but people really seem to think that there's a like ceasefire button in Biden's office that he's refusing to press.

• 20:46Justin Roczniak?

  Turns out, yeah.

• 20:49November Kelly?

  And then Donald Trump confusing it with the Diet Coke summoning button, pressed that button by accident and, and, uh, sort of like, lo and behold, you get, you get the ceasefire, which has not happened yet. Um, to be clear, Israel is still like bombing Gaza, it's still killing people.

• 21:08Speaker 01

  They never respect ceasefires, right? You look, they're still bombing, they're still attacking and bombing and wrecking up Lebanon's sovereignty, right?

• 21:14November Kelly?

  Absolutely. Also, there's this kind of like institutional knowledge in, in the IDF that like what you do in the face of a ceasefire is you, you try and like. Take and hold as much territory and inflict as much damage as you can before it starts to try and like get the most favorable position.

• 21:31Justin Roczniak?

  They're not very good at like not using their guns over there on the IDF, you know, it's they're very, very, uh, very much like, I don't know, maybe they all got carpal tunnel syndrome. So they're firing their guns constantly when they're holding them. I mean, yeah.

• 21:44Speaker 01

  Not very good at using their guns. Cause yeah, I wouldn't not, I would not describe anything that the IDF have done as being precise or, or, or.

• 21:51November Kelly?

  Competent or good.

• 21:52Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 21:53Speaker 01

  So, so that, yeah, they are moral, however. In fact, the most.

• 21:57November Kelly?

  Moral, the most moral. So, so, so we keep hearing, but yeah. So if this works, which it may still not, but I think everyone hopes that it does. Israel's also a question mark there. Yeah.

• 22:10Speaker 01

  What the fuck happens next?

• 22:12November Kelly?

  Well, so what happens next is there's a, there's an exchange of like all of the hostages for about like a thousand Palestinian, I'll, I'll say hostages as well, right? Which gives you a sense of scale in terms of like number of Palestinians held prisoner in Israel versus number of Israelis held prisoner in Gaza. And then theoretically there's like, uh, an Israeli withdrawal. There's no like mention of, uh, sort of like interdicting Hamas from governing Gaza. So they're gonna do that again. And supposedly, uh, everybody gets to go back to what is left of their homes, including in the north of Gaza.

• 22:51Justin Roczniak?

  Say the reconstruction here is going to take a very, very long time, especially if any of those Israeli material restrictions are still in place.

• 23:00November Kelly?

  Yes.

• 23:01Speaker 01

  Who's gonna go in and do it? Because you know, there, there's, I mean, the, the residents of Gaza are unbelievably, uh, sort of creative and, and, and resourceful. But there's only so much you can do with sort of like, like toxic, the, the genuinely toxic rubble that has been left behind by Israel.

• 23:20November Kelly?

  Yeah. I mean, the Biden, the Biden plan.

• 23:22Justin Roczniak?

  Like his bestest and crap. Yeah.

• 23:24November Kelly?

  Yeah. The Biden plan, you know, I don't want to like sort of dignify it with the name, right? Was sort of vaguely gestured at the idea of, uh, like the Gulf states and Saudi, we're gonna kind of, kind of like come in and invest. Which we'll see, you know.

• 23:40Justin Roczniak?

  Turn, uh, turn a Gaza Strip into, uh, NEOM.

• 23:43Speaker 01

  Yeah. I was gonna say it was a beautiful, a pretty beautiful city before. It'll be fucking horrible if they, if the, the Emiratis get their hands on it. Jesus.

• 23:51Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 23:51November Kelly?

  But I mean, I I don't know, right? And I don't know that many people do really. Um, but you know, as as a starting point, this is, you know, it's it's better than better than more.

• 24:04Justin Roczniak?

  Better than, yeah, it's better than not be bombed. Um, you know, maybe you can find the time to uh reinstall some windows or something.

• 24:13November Kelly?

  Yeah, I mean, over the course of the war, right? I mean, we didn't see it turn into into like a regional war. Uh, we we did see like Iran strike uh Israel, which was fucking wild, but it didn't like broaden beyond that.

• 24:28Liam McAnderson?

  Over, right?

• 24:28November Kelly?

  Yeah.

• 24:29Speaker 01

  We're thankful for that, I guess, yeah.

• 24:31November Kelly?

  On the other hand, uh, you know, uh, sort of like Gaza has been sort of uh functionally destroyed. Uh, Lebanon has been like brutalized. Syria has had uh like half this mountain stolen off of it. Um, and Hamas and Hezbollah have been decimated and God knows what that looks like as they try and rebuild, right?

• 24:51Justin Roczniak?

  Um, about to say, I don't think I think that when we when we get the the final death toll figures, if they're able to be figured out, because I believe they destroyed all the records in Gaza.

• 25:02November Kelly?

  Yeah.

• 25:03Justin Roczniak?

  It's gonna be an ugly number. It's gonna be a very ugly number. I think it's gonna be a lot worse than anything the Health Ministry has put out.

• 25:10November Kelly?

  Um, yeah, and I mean, ultimately, like, what you hope for is still war crimes prosecutions, right? You you hope for like Israeli leadership to end up in the fucking Hague, but it really seems like this is just the best you can get for the moment, right?

• 25:26Justin Roczniak?

  Um, sure.

• 25:27November Kelly?

  And I mean, for the people of Gaza to have survived this long, uh, those that have and to have like endured these crimes is uh sort of like this incredible testament, right? But also, uh, just kind of horrifying in terms of what the implications are for the future, not just in Gaza, but anywhere, right? Um, like, I think having having this kind of outcome of like, well, nothing kind of really changes, except you do all the crimes, you get away with it. And then I I think the feeling in in Israel is as likely as not to be, well, you know, in a few years, we just do it all over again, right? If that's the feeling, then it's it's not gonna kind of deter anyone from doing the same thing anywhere else.

• 26:10Speaker 01

  Except when we were growing up Nova, you and I same age, pretty much. The, the, the big news injustice that I sort of grew up with, that I remember, the first one that I remember actually was, um, was growing up very little, but it was the siege of Sarajevo, right? And this is this, this incredible urban siege of, you know, awful experience for the, for the residents of Sarajevo as the, um, as the Serbs, uh, you know, um, kind of basically your sniper rifles, firing missiles, just, just obliterating their city and attacking their city, making life miserable. And that, you know, that was a, that looks like a walk in the park compared to what is, what, what we've seen happen to Gaza City and to, and to the whole Gaza Strip.

• 26:53Speaker 01

  It's just incomprehensible, like absolutely inconceivable cruelty and destruction. And I, I just, it will say a lot, and I know that, that, I know that they will rebuild because you can see, we've seen the resilience of the, of the Palestinian people over the last sort of year and a half. But the, uh, but, but I mean, they will rebuild and it'll be incredible that they will, and you know, but it's the, what's the long-term future for, for them? Uh, you know, what, is this, are we just going to cycle into this again? Probably. And that's depressing as fuck.

• 27:23November Kelly?

  Yeah.

• 27:25Justin Roczniak?

  We gotta give the Palestinians their own Iron Dome.

• 27:28November Kelly?

  Yeah, genuinely.

• 27:30Speaker 01

  Give them the nuke.

• 27:31November Kelly?

  Yeah, yeah, why not?

• 27:33Justin Roczniak?

  Yep, sure. Let's, let's go with that.

• 27:36November Kelly?

  Just like kicking yourself into the sort of top left, uh, no, no, bottom left libertarian leftist quadrant of the political campus and be like, everybody's sovereignty enforced by nuclear weapons. I mean, at this point, I've heard worse ideas, you know?

• 27:50Justin Roczniak?

  Yes. Okay. We've found a long-lasting solution to the crisis.

• 27:55November Kelly?

  Yeah, exactly. Everyone with nuclear.

• 27:58Speaker 01

  Witness me flip my stance on nuclear disarmament in real time. Yeah, let's go.

• 28:03November Kelly?

  Nuclear armament. We're just giving them out. Doing like evangelism, like a stack of suitcase nukes on a, on like a stall and, you know, downtown.

• 28:13Speaker 01

  Take the liberal eccentric stance is that you deliver the nuke via the US little jetty they built.

• 28:19November Kelly?

  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. That's not even still there.

• 28:22Speaker 01

  No, it's gone.

• 28:24Justin Roczniak?

  Excuse me, sir. Have you heard the good news of our Lord and Savior, the Davy Crockett?

• 28:35Justin Roczniak?

  All right. Well, that was depressing, but let's go to a piece of fun news.

• 28:41Justin Roczniak?

  Which we also got wrong in the last episode.

• 28:43Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah, so it works done now.

• 28:45Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, the after, after two years of this thing taking up all the space, politically discourse wise in the city of Philadelphia, the downtown or the center city, Sixers Arena has been at the very last second, after all the legislation was passed, people got arrested. You know, all this crap.

• 29:11Justin Roczniak?

  They're like, nah, we're gonna stay in South Philly.

• 29:13Speaker 01

  Resistance to all oppressors, give the residents of Chinatown a nuke.

• 29:18Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 29:22Justin Roczniak?

  My understanding is this has something to do with NBC getting the broadcast rights to the NBA. Some kind of shady backroom deal occurred. You know, and consider I, I know at least some people who think Mayor Parker stole the election specifically to get this project through.

• 29:44Liam McAnderson?

  No, we ran two candidates who believe the exact same thing against each other and Cheryl Parker won.

• 29:50Speaker 01

  Liam, have you been, have you, have you, you and Tom been covering this at all on 10K losses?

• 29:54Liam McAnderson?

  Like. We're covering it on Friday, actually, but we haven't.

• 29:57Speaker 01

  So yeah, I look forward to it because I don't know what the fuck's going on and I'm fascinated to know your take.

• 30:02Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. Yeah, no, there's a lot of, there's a lot of stuff here that really, you know, is beyond me. You know, in the last episode, I was definitely like, you know, because it's hard to find a reason to like be firmly against this, at least for me.

• 30:19Speaker 01

  Because otherwise the campaigners would have found, oh, sorry, to be against it. Sorry, forgive me. Yeah. Okay. Fair point. I was thinking like a legal thing to topple it and they hadn't found it, but to actually be against it.

• 30:29Justin Roczniak?

  Because it was kind of like, okay, I mean. The ball is not that great. Um, you know, it would wreck the train station for a while. Well, possibly permanently because you would have less light coming in there. But, you know, it didn't seem like conceptually a terrible idea. But when you realize, oh, wait, the whole thing was bait and switch. I, I mean, it'd be hard to be against it. Particularly for that reason through the whole process. But I feel like everyone who was against it is vindicated. You know, and it is really funny to see our city council try and, you know, spin this as some sort of win. When they all just, you know, expended all the political capital they have to get this thing forced through.

• 31:14Justin Roczniak?

  It's, it's kinda.

• 31:16Speaker 01

  Incredible.

• 31:18Justin Roczniak?

  I don't know. It's really funny that it's not happening.

• 31:21November Kelly?

  All this over what looks like a kind of like a big picnic basket or a mall in like a sort of Central Asian country.

• 31:29Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, exactly. You know.

• 31:32Speaker 01

  Our architecture is shit nowadays. I mean, what the fuck is this? It's just, ah.

• 31:37November Kelly?

  This is Ulaanbaatar's premier shopping destination.

• 31:44Speaker 01

  The, the, the Qatari slash Saudis slash Emirati if a vacation of everything is just, yeah.

• 31:52Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. I mean, what we've sort of wound up with now is I believe, uh, the Sixers now own just two huge chunks of, uh, center city real estate.

• 32:00November Kelly?

  They should lean into this. They should have it be like a kind of like feudal liberty, like the Savoy, you know, where it's like this, these, these two blocks, like this, that's basically how the city of London started. Just do that. Just be like, you know, this, this whole area is under the jurisdiction of the 76ers.

• 32:16Liam McAnderson?

  Oh, the fiefdom.

• 32:18November Kelly?

  Yeah. You get arrested by like the basketball cops.

• 32:21Speaker 01

  The sixtum.

• 32:22Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. Oh, that'll, that'll be like a Keystone Opportunity Zone, but more.

• 32:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 32:27Justin Roczniak?

  Maybe you pay, you pay all your, your taxes directly to the Sixers.

• 32:31November Kelly?

  The Philadelphia 76ers economics, like exclusive economic area or whatever.

• 32:37Liam McAnderson?

  Arm the Sixers with a nuke.

• 32:40November Kelly?

  Yeah. Chinatown gets a nuke. The Sixers get a nuke. Problem solved.

• 32:45Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, exactly. We give every registered community organization a nuke.

• 32:54Justin Roczniak?

  Doing this to maintain, you know, we're doing this to maintain the peace.

• 32:59Speaker 01

  Giving the Green Party of England and Wales a nuke?

• 33:03November Kelly?

  I kind of support that. Yeah, sure. I think Carla Daniel should have a nuke.

• 33:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. Give Carla, yeah, that would be, I would like that, yeah.

• 33:14Speaker 01

  That, you know, I've spun them on HS2. Now we can get them, sort of, to flip them on something that I also don't agree with, which is nuclear proliferation. Let's, let's, let's crack on.

• 33:22November Kelly?

  Yeah.

• 33:24November Kelly?

  Greenham Common War Camp. I guess that is just the base at Greenham Common. I was trying to conceptualize the opposite of the peace camp, and it's just like, that's just the thing they're outside the wire of.

• 33:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. You just let them in. Yeah, yeah.

• 33:40Speaker 01

  Give them all a lanyard.

• 33:41Justin Roczniak?

  So, yeah, this is, this, this is very funny. I mean, there's nothing you can say about other, this is really, really funny.

• 33:48November Kelly?

  Yeah, this is not one I feel morally conflicted about. I feel pretty good about this one.

• 33:52Speaker 01

  Just very funny, yeah.

• 33:54Justin Roczniak?

  Well, that was the goddamn news.

• 33:57November Kelly?

  Get mad at us in the comments.

• 33:59Liam McAnderson?

  I'm sure they will.

• 34:00Justin Roczniak?

  Okay, so let's start the Socratic method here.

• 34:04Liam McAnderson?

  I hate when we do this.

• 34:06Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. What is Washington National Airport?

• 34:10November Kelly?

  Hell, it's very bumpy. It's very greebled. This is a greebled F.

• 34:14Speaker 01

  It is. They've really, that, or it looks like it's been, it's one of those models that you make out of just like cereal boxes with a Stanley knife, very carefully carved.

• 34:25Liam McAnderson?

  You had to make it 4am because your kid was like, I have a project due tomorrow and I haven't started it yet.

• 34:32November Kelly?

  Yeah, first day using my lathe and I've made the air traffic control tower at Washington National Airport.

• 34:38Justin Roczniak?

  I actually quite like the interior of this airport. It's sort of, it was all designed by Caesar Pelle. It's all, it's got a bunch of like yellow decorative ironwork in it. Yeah.

• 34:50Speaker 01

  It's like a big, big Pomodoro doodad.

• 34:53Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, it's like.

• 34:54Speaker 01

  Or is it high tech?

• 34:55Justin Roczniak?

  Almost Art Nouveau. Hold on, let me get a picture here.

• 34:59November Kelly?

  And I mean, you know, good, sort of like nice views of the planes. If you're one of those guys who likes to, you know, who wants to fuck the planes.

• 35:06Liam McAnderson?

  As we all do.

• 35:08Speaker 01

  Yeah. I don't necessarily want to fuck the player. I just want to pick out the 737 Maxes and laugh at them.

• 35:14Justin Roczniak?

  Hold on. Here we go.

• 35:16November Kelly?

  Plane shaming?

• 35:20Speaker 01

  Hire a Tate Boeing.

• 35:21Justin Roczniak?

  Okay, here's what the inside looks like.

• 35:24Speaker 01

  Oh, that's lovely.

• 35:25November Kelly?

  That's kind of like, you know. Yeah, I was gonna say secular cathedral with that vaulting. Yeah.

• 35:32Speaker 01

  Fair play. I actually quite like that. It's POMO. It's very POMO. I like that.

• 35:37Justin Roczniak?

  It's very, very postmodern. Yeah.

• 35:38Speaker 01

  Okay. A little bit of POMO. Sorry. None of us have answered the question you've set us, Ross. It's true.

• 35:43Liam McAnderson?

  Fuck them.

• 35:44November Kelly?

  Washington National Airport is the airport in Washington DC.

• 35:47Liam McAnderson?

  It's a land of contrast.

• 35:48Justin Roczniak?

  But it's not actually in Washington DC. It's in Arlington.

• 35:52Speaker 01

  Oh, fuck.

• 35:53Justin Roczniak?

  It isn't in Alexandria. I don't remember.

• 35:55November Kelly?

  It's in one of the kind of hellscapes that surround the District of Columbia.

• 36:01Justin Roczniak?

  It is. It is in Northern Virginia. It's an airport that congresspeople like to.

• 36:06Liam McAnderson?

  City, I think, but who gives a shit about that?

• 36:08Justin Roczniak?

  Well, I think Crystal City is unincorporated.

• 36:11Liam McAnderson?

  I believe you're right. Yeah.

• 36:12Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. So this is an airport that congressmen like to get mad at.

• 36:17Speaker 01

  Ah.

• 36:18November Kelly?

  Reasonable. Kind of like Westminster Tube Station.

• 36:20Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. Cause there's, it's Washington DC's local airport.

• 36:26Speaker 01

  That's why you call it a national airport. Yep. Okay. That makes sense. Yeah.

• 36:28Justin Roczniak?

  There's one further away, Washington Dulles International Airport. That's where the long haul flights are supposed to come in.

• 36:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's the one I know about. Yeah.

• 36:36Justin Roczniak?

  This one is supposed to be more for regional flights. I think there's like a hard limit on flights coming into this airport of like 1,250 miles. But every once in a while, a congressman gets mad that there isn't a direct flight from where they live to the airport. And they submit some legislation that then lets one flight violate that rule.

• 37:00Liam McAnderson?

  Incredible.

• 37:01Speaker 01

  That's kind of like the MP wanting a direct train to their constituency to London situation in the UK. That's pretty similar.

• 37:08Justin Roczniak?

  The same thing. Yeah. Um, so this airport has two names. It's National Airport. If you're a Democrat or left leaning and it's Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport. If you're a Republican or you lean right.

• 37:22November Kelly?

  Ronald Reagan and Alan Dulles. What a pair of, I guess it's John Foster Dulles, but like still, like what a pair of guys to name your airports after.

• 37:33Justin Roczniak?

  Exactly.

• 37:33Liam McAnderson?

  On the right side, Thurgood Marshall got BWI.

• 37:36November Kelly?

  Kind of perverse to name, to name an airport after a guy with one of the biggest influences in causing nine 11, but.

• 37:46Justin Roczniak?

  And who, you know, fired all the air traffic. Traffic controllers. Yeah.

• 37:50Speaker 01

  All their traffic doors and also physically one of the least aerodynamic presidents I think the US has ever had as well.

• 37:57November Kelly?

  Doing, doing graphing presidents by aerodynamic qualities are great.

• 38:02Speaker 01

  What's their bluff body ratio? Yeah.

• 38:04Liam McAnderson?

  Oh, Johnson loses this in a landslide.

• 38:07November Kelly?

  No, no, no. It's Taft. Taft is the least aerodynamic president.

• 38:11Justin Roczniak?

  The most buoyant president though.

• 38:14Speaker 01

  Terrible aircraft, possibly a good air balloon.

• 38:19November Kelly?

  Graphing presidents by land speed, airspeed and like buoyancy.

• 38:25Justin Roczniak?

  Imagine a president that's perfectly spherical and of uniform density.

• 38:31November Kelly?

  Yeah, William Howard Taft.

• 38:32Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. This is airport was, uh, I guess not an early get. I guess it was sort of in the medium term of, um, you know, the Ronald Reagan Memorial Committee on, on naming things after Ronald Reagan.

• 38:45November Kelly?

  They could have named the committee best, so to be honest.

• 38:48Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. I mean, this was the lots of things got named after Ronald Reagan and like the nineties. I believe the air traffic controller still refused to call it, uh, Ronald Reagan, Washington National Airport.

• 39:00Speaker 01

  Interesting because they just say.

• 39:02Justin Roczniak?

  National Airport.

• 39:04Speaker 01

  There's very little that's named the Margaret Thatcher X, Y, or Z in the UK. So, yeah, he, he did better than his contemporary on this side of the puzzle.

• 39:11Justin Roczniak?

  Hmm. But this is the airport. This is the airport that's like close in to Washington DC. We'll see how close in shortly. Um, now another important thing is what is the 14th Street Bridge complex?

• 39:24November Kelly?

  Oh, God. This is, this is some real like me playing Cities Skylines gore of figuring out four different times that I need to cross this body of water.

• 39:34Justin Roczniak?

  Yes.

• 39:36Speaker 01

  Testing out the different vanilla bridge types that you get on a road.

• 39:41November Kelly?

  Yeah, uh huh. I should throw a rail bridge on there too, probably, I guess.

• 39:46Liam McAnderson?

  I gotta be thorough, right?

• 39:47Speaker 01

  Yeah. And we just ran the corner from, of course, where the Triskelion is here. It's just around the corner.

• 39:53Justin Roczniak?

  That is actually sort of how that works, how that worked on this one. There has been some kind of bridge on this location since 1809, generally with some kind of draw span on it. So from bottom to top here, this is the 1904 Long Bridge. Why is it called the Long Bridge?

• 40:12Liam McAnderson?

  It's really long.

• 40:13Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, it's pretty long. It's like a mile.

• 40:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 40:15November Kelly?

  Dang, I was hoping for a guy named Long.

• 40:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 40:18Liam McAnderson?

  Dewey Long rides again.

• 40:20Speaker 01

  Isaiah Long III or something, yeah.

• 40:24Justin Roczniak?

  This is built in 1904 to replace the previous structure. Here is the 1983 Charles R. Fenwick Bridge that carries the metro over the river.

• 40:36Speaker 01

  So we're two for two on rail bridges. Happy with that? Nice.

• 40:39Justin Roczniak?

  There will soon actually be a third one, I think, downstream of the Long Bridge here for extra capacity for the commuter trains.

• 40:47Speaker 01

  Nice. Yeah. Big rail. Love it.

• 40:49Justin Roczniak?

  I mean, you know, it's taken them 10 years to plan a bridge over a three-foot-deep river, but that's a different conversation.

• 41:00Justin Roczniak?

  This is the 1950, formerly called the Rochambeau Bridge, which carries-

• 41:07November Kelly?

  Still in Louisiana, I guess.

• 41:08Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. This is now the Arland D. Williams Jr. Memorial Bridge. That'll come up later. That carries I-395 northbound. This is the 1971 current Rochambeau Bridge that carries the I-395 express lanes, which, from experience, not very express. And then at the very top here, this is the 1962 George Mason Memorial Bridge, which carries I-95 or I-395 southbound.

• 41:43Justin Roczniak?

  And one of the fun things about this spot is that when you're going over it either on a train or on the metro or in a car, you can see every form of transportation. You can see boats, but you can also see planes flying very low overhead.

• 41:56November Kelly?

  Ah, you get a little like achievement if you're here.

• 41:59Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, exactly. Exactly. You get the achievement if you see a boat and a plane and a train and a car and a truck and a bus all at the same time.

• 42:07November Kelly?

  So that's actually what determines if you get to heaven. Like, it's unfair and it's not like written down anywhere in like the Bible or anything, but that is what it is. If you, if you like, you know, died before the invention of any of those things, you were kind of fucked.

• 42:24Speaker 01

  Those are the three bridges, the three kind of bridges in the first three, do they all have a drawbridge? They all of them have a lift a bit.

• 42:32Justin Roczniak?

  So the Long Bridge has a draw span. The Rochambeau Bridge has a draw span or the former Rochambeau Bridge has a draw span. The Yellow Line Bridge does not have a draw span because they actually decided when they built the two northern spans, yeah, we really don't need boats coming up this far anymore.

• 42:51Speaker 01

  Fuck you boats. Yeah, okay, fair enough. Yeah, I'm with that.

• 42:56Justin Roczniak?

  I think the last time either of these two bridges opened was 1967.

• 43:02Speaker 01

  Okay, yeah, fine. I find myself very opinionated this episode. I'm changing my opinions on nukes and I'm very anti boat. Just some emerging opinions.

• 43:10November Kelly?

  Throw nuke, anti boat. Nuke every boat.

• 43:14Justin Roczniak?

  The only thing, the only thing about it is I do think, okay, the next bridge up the river, the Memorial Bridge, that had the wildest draw span I think has ever been designed, which was also welded shut as a result. Let me see if I can find a picture of this.

• 43:34Justin Roczniak?

  Hold on.

• 43:39Justin Roczniak?

  No, there's no way I'm finding this quickly. God damn it.

• 43:42Liam McAnderson?

  Fuck you.

• 43:44Speaker 01

  Google now utterly useless. Thank you, Google.

• 43:47Liam McAnderson?

  Thank you. Thank you, AI. We love your slop.

• 43:50Justin Roczniak?

  Okay, here we go.

• 43:51Speaker 01

  Oh, my God.

• 43:52Liam McAnderson?

  What in the goddamn shit is this?

• 43:54Speaker 01

  What?

• 43:55Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 43:55Speaker 01

  Why would you do it that way?

• 43:57Justin Roczniak?

  It's a big.

• 43:57Liam McAnderson?

  That looks like a thing to keep.

• 43:58Justin Roczniak?

  Parentheses.

• 43:59Speaker 01

  That's a thing to keep Andreessen's head in place like.

• 44:03Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. No, they they they kept the because the rest of the bridge are these sorts of sort of low, large arches. Right? So the actual draw span was the same kind of arch done in cast iron and then they had to.

• 44:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's a nice idea, but it looks like it's been designed to capture a kaiju like what?

• 44:21Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 44:23November Kelly?

  Didn't they use this in Skyrim?

• 44:27Justin Roczniak?

  This is what it looks like closed.

• 44:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's very nice. They've done a nice job. It's a lovely, flat, shallow arch that it's nice. It's lovely.

• 44:35Justin Roczniak?

  But I I have no idea when the last time that opened. It was probably earlier than 1967.

• 44:41Liam McAnderson?

  Many years ago.

• 44:42Justin Roczniak?

  That's all welded shut.

• 44:44Liam McAnderson?

  Cowards.

• 44:44Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 44:45Speaker 01

  So we've got boats. So we've got trains. We've got buses. We've got cars. We've got trucks. We've got boats. And we've got planes all in the same place. Why? Why? Why?

• 44:53Justin Roczniak?

  The express lanes here were actually supposed to originally be bus only lanes and then they gave up and made them high occupancy vehicle lanes.

• 45:01Liam McAnderson?

  Oh, that's that's sad.

• 45:04Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, but this is all the bridges are right here because I guess it's a convenient spot to put them.

• 45:09Liam McAnderson?

  That's that's where you all go. That's where I go to hang out. Yep.

• 45:12Justin Roczniak?

  And they'll they'll converge sort of into 14th Street or into I 395, which goes east, west through DC. So and of course they are located. If we look, okay, here's the White House, right? Here's the Capitol. Here's Jesus Christ.

• 45:29November Kelly?

  How did the Pentagon not get like nine 11 earlier? It's in line with one of the runways.

• 45:34Justin Roczniak?

  Yes, the Pentagon is in line with one of the runways. I don't think they usually take off going that direction.

• 45:40Liam McAnderson?

  They gotta do a whole different approach and shit. It's real weird.

• 45:43Justin Roczniak?

  But yeah, here's the 14th Street Bridges. Here is the airport. Here's the Pentagon. What else is interesting here?

• 45:50November Kelly?

  Just, just like I'm, I'm visualizing flight restrictions in my head and I'm seeing like big red and orange shapes desolating with each other, overlapping and shit. You deviate from your flight plan by like a tenth of an inch and you're shot down by a Patriot missile.

• 46:07Liam McAnderson?

  Sam battery, right, right to the dome. Yeah.

• 46:11Justin Roczniak?

  Not quite, but yes, the approach and departure routes from this airport are very strict.

• 46:19Liam McAnderson?

  They're very specific, yeah.

• 46:20November Kelly?

  Yeah, this is, this is a, this is a kind of pilot nightmare to me in my imagination.

• 46:26Liam McAnderson?

  This is running the gauntlet because if you one, one fell swoop and you are, you are a chunky marinara at everybody you've ever known as chunky marinara.

• 46:34Justin Roczniak?

  There were some really bizarre restrictions on flights in and out of the airport just after nine 11. Like, you know.

• 46:40Liam McAnderson?

  Oh, yeah, like the, if the passenger amount, right? Wasn't that restricted?

• 46:45Justin Roczniak?

  They were, they restricted the number of passengers on the flight. One of the restrictions was, I believe, if a passenger stood up within 30 minutes of arrival or departure, the plane had to be redirected to a nearby military base.

• 47:00November Kelly?

  Oh, no, okay. All right. No, yeah.

• 47:02Justin Roczniak?

  Under fighter jet escort.

• 47:06November Kelly?

  I, I have to go to the bathroom and I get everybody cavity searched by the feds.

• 47:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's it.

• 47:12Justin Roczniak?

  The actual approach into the airport is the river approach. So you come, as you get towards Roslyn here, which annoyingly has a bunch of tall buildings, the river visual just brings you down the river and on to the runway. And because, you know, right next to you, very restricted airspace and then even more restricted airspace. So, yeah, it figured out.

• 47:38Liam McAnderson?

  Don't fuck that up, kids.

• 47:40Justin Roczniak?

  Don't fuck it up. Yeah.

• 47:41November Kelly?

  I, I guess if you're going to be like a commercial airline pilot, they kind of select against you having anxiety. But this seems like a great way to start, you know?

• 47:50Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah, I would, oh, I, we would be, we would, we, we would be the opposite of Sully of the Hudson. We would be in the Potomac, but. I'm not about to get that alive out of this, bud.

• 48:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, shredded aluminium type situation.

• 48:02Justin Roczniak?

  I'd have anxiety doing this in Flight Simulator. I'd worry the FBI would show up to my door if I messed up.

• 48:10Liam McAnderson?

  Surely it would be like the FAA cops, right?

• 48:14Liam McAnderson?

  Does the FAA have cops? They gotta have them.

• 48:17November Kelly?

  Yeah, like, yeah.

• 48:18Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah.

• 48:19Justin Roczniak?

  We're preemptively revoking your pilot's license even though you don't have one.

• 48:24November Kelly?

  The FAA SWAT team, just, just come and like, break your yoke off your desk. Open up FAA!

• 48:34Liam McAnderson?

  Surely gotta have a.

• 48:37Speaker 01

  Uh, is it, is it on an artificial island or did they just completely sack off a nice natural island to build?

• 48:43Justin Roczniak?

  Uh, big, big chunk of this is Phil, I want to say. But I'm not 100% certain about that.

• 48:48November Kelly?

  If it's a real island, it's probably one of the ones where like Aaron Burr was getting into duels and shit, you know?

• 48:54Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, and this, this, this airport is in its second location because it actually used to be where the Pentagon is.

• 49:00Liam McAnderson?

  Yep.

• 49:00Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 49:01Justin Roczniak?

  Which must have been very confusing if, uh, you were trying to.

• 49:03Speaker 01

  Suddenly all makes sense. Now why, aviation had a vendetta against the Pentagon? Ah, because they made a move house. I, okay.

• 49:10Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah.

• 49:10Speaker 01

  All making more sense. Okay, right.

• 49:13Justin Roczniak?

  So, our next question. What is Air Florida?

• 49:17Liam McAnderson?

  Uh, feels like the aircraft, uh, it feels like the, the, the common carrier of my fucking nightmares.

• 49:24November Kelly?

  It feels like the plane should have a mullet.

• 49:26Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah, it kind of does here, back left on the tail.

• 49:30November Kelly?

  Yeah, actually, yeah. Business class in the front, party class in the back.

• 49:33Speaker 01

  Yeah. It's got a little mustache, yeah, yeah.

• 49:38Liam McAnderson?

  So, pilot tries to get your attention by saying where you is every 15 minutes.

• 49:44Justin Roczniak?

  So, Air Florida was originally an intrastate railroad, uh, big airline, not railroad, airline.

• 49:51Liam McAnderson?

  It would have been a lot cooler if Air Florida were a railroad, dude.

• 49:54Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 49:55Speaker 01

  That's great.

• 49:55Liam McAnderson?

  That, that would be very Florida.

• 49:58Justin Roczniak?

  So

• 49:58Speaker 01

  Bright light with wings.

• 49:59Justin Roczniak?

  Well, they did have the Seaboard airline. So this was founded in 1971 with one airplane, which was an ex Pan Am Boeing 707. You gotta start somewhere.

• 50:13Speaker 01

  Weak sauce.

• 50:13November Kelly?

  A one plane airline is a really compelling bit to me. Just hanging out, basically.

• 50:20Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. As the airline only flew within the state of Florida, it was not subject to regulation of routes and ticket prices and so on and so forth. That interstate airlines.

• 50:32November Kelly?

  Like a loophole, like the FAA can't touch you because you're regulated by the way worse Florida Aviation Authority.

• 50:40Justin Roczniak?

  Back then, it was the Civil Aviation Board, but basically, yes.

• 50:47Justin Roczniak?

  In 1978, well, okay, so despite not being subject to regulations, the airline still lost money hand over fist. It was not profitable.

• 50:56Speaker 01

  They still fumbled the bag despite the fact they weren't. Oh, brilliant. Nice work. Okay, good.

• 51:01Justin Roczniak?

  In 1978, Congress passed the Airline Deregulation Act. Now

• 51:07Speaker 01

  Serious boo.

• 51:09Justin Roczniak?

  Now Air Florida could easily expand outside the state of Florida, and they did actually very successfully. They weren't necessarily, let's say, pioneering the low cost airline model, but they shared some characteristics, right? Most notably, hiring mainly new and young pilots who would settle for lower wages.

• 51:30November Kelly?

  Great, of course.

• 51:32Speaker 01

  Tremendous.

• 51:33November Kelly?

  Yeah, paid and exposure.

• 51:34Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, exactly. They did not, uh, they did not do other things that low cost airlines do, like having, you know, all new airplanes or like a uniform fleet of airplanes.

• 51:45November Kelly?

  This must have been some of the jankiest flying you could have done in the time, you know? To be like, hey, do you want to get on our completely non-uniform fleet of planes and just like, we will pay you? Dog shit.

• 52:00Liam McAnderson?

  Exposure, yeah.

• 52:01November Kelly?

  Yeah, you have to live in Jacksonville and you're doing this basically four flight hours logged.

• 52:07Justin Roczniak?

  But you don't have to pay extra for a carry on though, so it's.

• 52:11Liam McAnderson?

  Who's saying it's bad or not, right?

• 52:13Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 52:15November Kelly?

  Also really funny to be doing this in the seventies. So all of these young pilots are like, oh, man, I can't wait to make it to the big leagues. And the big leagues is like you get hired by, I don't know, Lufthansa or something, Pan Am.

• 52:26Justin Roczniak?

  Eastern.

• 52:27November Kelly?

  And get killed instantly when your plane is blown up by the like 15 bombs smuggled onto every flight. Where you get hijacked and have to fly it to Libya or whatever the fuck.

• 52:36Justin Roczniak?

  Get that in a second.

• 52:38Speaker 01

  Oh, God.

• 52:39Justin Roczniak?

  Air Florida gets really big, really quick. They even managed to expand operations to Europe and South America.

• 52:46November Kelly?

  What? Europeans shouldn't know about Florida. I'm proof of that. It damages you.

• 52:51Justin Roczniak?

  They had a direct flight from Stockholm to Florida.

• 52:54November Kelly?

  The weirdest accent.

• 52:58Speaker 01

  What?

• 53:01Speaker 01

  Florida is like the anti Sweden. There is, it's, it's the least Swedish place you could possibly imagine.

• 53:06November Kelly?

  That's why, you know?

• 53:07Speaker 01

  Liam, I'm a Swedish expert. What, what, what the hell are your people doing going to Florida? I have questions.

• 53:14Liam McAnderson?

  Avenging the, what is it? The Vaga? What was the big shit that we?

• 53:18November Kelly?

  The Vasa, yeah.

• 53:19Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. We're gonna, we're gonna, we're gonna, yeah, we're gonna make them pay for their crimes. I like the idea in my, in my old history universe that the Vasa was sunk by Floridians.

• 53:29Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 53:30Liam McAnderson?

  And Michael Mouse is no friend of mine.

• 53:35Justin Roczniak?

  So once deregulation happened, this was the darling of investors. This was the little airline that could, right?

• 53:41Liam McAnderson?

  Oh, boy.

• 53:42Justin Roczniak?

  There's also a favorite airline of hijackers.

• 53:45November Kelly?

  Oh.

• 53:47November Kelly?

  You hijack a plane, the pilots not even really getting paid to be there.

• 53:51Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 53:52November Kelly?

  It's like, okay, man, whatever. Help yourself. You know, you want something out of the galley.

• 53:58Justin Roczniak?

  On August 10th.

• 53:59November Kelly?

  Just to see for as I get up.

• 54:00Justin Roczniak?

  August 10th, 1980, Air Florida Flight 4 with 35 people onboard, operated by a Boeing 737 from Miami International Airport to Key West, was taken over by a hijacker who demanded to be flown to Cuba. He later surrendered in Havana.

• 54:15November Kelly?

  It worked.

• 54:16Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 54:17November Kelly?

  It worked.

• 54:18Justin Roczniak?

  August 13th, 1980, Air Florida Flight 707, another Boeing 737.

• 54:24November Kelly?

  Three days later.

• 54:24Justin Roczniak?

  Flying the opposite direction with 74 people onboard, was hijacked by seven people. They demanded to be taken to Cuba, but later surrendered.

• 54:36November Kelly?

  At this point, just do flights to Cuba.

• 54:38Speaker 01

  Go to Havana, it'll be easier.

• 54:41Justin Roczniak?

  February 2nd, 1982, Air Florida Flight 710, a Boeing 737-200, with 77 people onboard from Miami International to Key West, was hijacked.

• 54:51November Kelly?

  Why is that even a flight?

• 54:52Justin Roczniak?

  The hijacker wanted to be taken to Cuba, but later surrendered.

• 54:56November Kelly?

  It's just a case of, it's just one guy. That's like a, it's like a Miami to Havana flight with a loophole. You know, it's like a big leap over.

• 55:08Justin Roczniak?

  July 7th, 1983, Air Florida Flight 8 with 47 people onboard, was flying from Fort Lauderdale International Airport to Tampa. One of the passengers handed a note to one of the flight attendants, saying that he had a bomb and telling them to fly the plane to Cuba.

• 55:26November Kelly?

  He's on sale, man. You don't just go to Cuba.

• 55:29Speaker 01

  It's like, you don't need the bomb. We, this is what we normally do, like just get comfy.

• 55:35November Kelly?

  There's just like slightly too loud of a noise from the passenger cabin and on reflex, they divert to Havana.

• 55:41Justin Roczniak?

  There's like one of the buttons in the armrest is just to take the plane to Cuba.

• 55:49November Kelly?

  I'm trying, I'm trying to hand a note to the, to the flight attendant, asking for another Coke and she doesn't read it and she just diverts the plane to Cuba.

• 55:59Liam McAnderson?

  I read it as Cuba Libre and I got scared.

• 56:03Justin Roczniak?

  The airplane was diverted to Havana Jose Marti International Airport and hijacker was taken into custody by Cuban authorities.

• 56:11November Kelly?

  Do you think it's like Cuban shitlibs who refuse to call it Jose Marti Airport on the same basis as like, you know Reagan National Airport?

• 56:19Justin Roczniak?

  I'm sure. Probably, yeah. What happens to these hijackers after they make it to Cuba?

• 56:23November Kelly?

  I mean, you probably get like debriefed by the Cuban Secret Service to make sure you're not doing some kind of double agent thing to assassinate Castro. Castro ignores that, comes up and kisses you on the lips for like way too long. You instantly fall in love with him irrespective of gender and like settle down to like a beautiful life together. It sounds pretty good to be honest.

• 56:44Justin Roczniak?

  That sounds pretty good, yeah.

• 56:46Liam McAnderson?

  Ready to go or?

• 56:49November Kelly?

  He has a little like room by the airport for this.

• 56:53Liam McAnderson?

  This used to be a motel eight before.

• 57:03Justin Roczniak?

  Hi, it's Justin. So this is a commercial for the podcast that you're already listening to. People are annoyed by these, so let me get to the point. We have this thing called Patreon, right? The deal is you give us two bucks a month and we give you an extra episode once a month. Sometimes it's a little inconsistent, but you know, it's two bucks. You get what you pay for. It also gets you our full back catalog of bonus episodes. So you can learn about exciting topics like guns, pickup trucks, or pickup trucks with guns on them. The money we raise through Patreon goes to making sure that the only ad you hear on this podcast

• 57:44Justin Roczniak?

  is this one. Anyway, that's something to consider if you have two bucks to spare each month. Join at patreon.com/typpod. Do it if you want, or don't. It's your decision and we respect that. Back to the show.

• 58:06Justin Roczniak?

  All right. Not all the flights went to Cuba, though.

• 58:09Liam McAnderson?

  Just most of them.

• 58:10Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 58:12Justin Roczniak?

  Let's talk about the airplane.

• 58:14November Kelly?

  Oh, I don't like that livery. That's that's kind of upsetting to me. That blue and green color.

• 58:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, I don't like livery, but I have to say I do love a 737 200.

• 58:23November Kelly?

  Oh, they're beautiful.

• 58:23Speaker 01

  Little ditty engine.

• 58:24November Kelly?

  Baby plane.

• 58:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's not. They're very sleek. They look so you compare this to the the flipping Maxes with their enormous bulbous horrible engines, totally out of balance. These these are lovely. Look at those little engines.

• 58:37Justin Roczniak?

  Very well proportioned. Yeah. This is a Boeing 737 200 built for United Airlines in 1969, registered N62AF, sold to Air Florida in 1980.

• 58:49November Kelly?

  Shit, it's N62AF.

• 58:51Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, this has your old fashioned low bypass Pratt and Whitney engines and everything.

• 58:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, sick.

• 58:58Justin Roczniak?

  The crew is Captain Larry Whedon. He's 34 years old. He has 2,322 hours of commercial jet flight time, but he's only done eight takeoffs and landings in snowy conditions.

• 59:10Speaker 01

  Oh, fuck. Okay, foreshadowed. Got you.

• 59:13Justin Roczniak?

  First Officer Roger Petit is 31. He has 3,353 flight hours. He was a former.

• 59:20Speaker 01

  He's enormous, actually, but ironically.

• 59:22Justin Roczniak?

  He's a former F-15 pilot, has only two takeoffs and landings in snowy conditions.

• 59:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 59:29November Kelly?

  Okay, that. I figure once you've made it two times, you're like, I can do a third.

• 59:33Speaker 01

  It's pretty easy. I'm sure there's no point in the fact that you're mentioning that, Roz, right?

• 59:38Justin Roczniak?

  They fly for Air Florida, so you know, a lot of a lot of the airports don't get a lot of snow.

• 59:42Liam McAnderson?

  How often are you?

• 59:44November Kelly?

  You're mostly flying to Havana. It doesn't snow for shit in Havana.

• 59:46Liam McAnderson?

  Right, I'm sure this won't come up again. I'm sure there's nothing to be worried about.

• 59:54Justin Roczniak?

  So on January 13, 1982, they are going to take this 737, which just arrived earlier from Miami.

• 1:00:02Speaker 01

  To Havana.

• 1:00:03Liam McAnderson?

  To Havana, right, of course.

• 1:00:06Justin Roczniak?

  Well, we don't know that. But maybe they're taking it from Washington National Airport to Fort Lauderdale Hollywood International Airport by way of Tampa.

• 1:00:17November Kelly?

  Shouldn't get to call it Hollywood International Airport. It's misleading. It's deceptive marketing.

• 1:00:22Justin Roczniak?

  So, you know, this, this flight is in, fuck you, it's January. So.

• 1:00:28November Kelly?

  Going to Fort Lauderdale in January. Okay. So like, that's like people who missed seeing their like elderly relatives for Christmas and they're trying to make it up to them in a hurry, right?

• 1:00:40Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:41Liam McAnderson?

  Sure.

• 1:00:42Justin Roczniak?

  Damn, we gotta do Christmas two.

• 1:00:45Liam McAnderson?

  Oh no, I hate Christmas two. I don't even really like Christmas one, man.

• 1:00:49Justin Roczniak?

  So we gotta talk about de-icing airplanes, right?

• 1:00:53November Kelly?

  Oh, okay.

• 1:00:54Justin Roczniak?

  So, ice and snow can affect the aerodynamic properties of the airplane and make them more difficult to fly or impossible to fly. Ice and snow can also affect various sensors on the aircraft and cause instruments to give false readings. Commercial aircraft in flight use bleed air, which is the warm air that comes out of the engines, to warm the surface of the wings. But on the ground, this doesn't really work too good because there's not much bleed air to go around, right? So the aircraft is manually de-iced by guys and cherry pickers. That's these, these trucks over here.

• 1:01:30November Kelly?

  Huh.

• 1:01:31Justin Roczniak?

  And they sprayed the goo on the plane. Some kind of antifreeze, right?

• 1:01:35November Kelly?

  Enter the goo.

• 1:01:36Speaker 01

  Enter the goo.

• 1:01:38Justin Roczniak?

  Sometimes isopropyl alcohol, sometimes some kind of salt solution, maybe some Austrian wine.

• 1:01:48Justin Roczniak?

  They spray that all over. They're never gonna live that down.

• 1:01:53November Kelly?

  Not from us.

• 1:01:54Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, they spray that all over the plane until there's no ice left. And then, once you've been de-iced, you high tail it to the runway, right?

• 1:02:02November Kelly?

  You have these like de-icing pads that like designated areas to do this in, right?

• 1:02:06Justin Roczniak?

  Yes.

• 1:02:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:02:09Speaker 01

  This is, well, yeah, okay. So this is still a time when it, they hadn't brought in the rules about exactly. How long you could be like, like, yeah, like how long you could be stood post de-icing before you could take off like that got tightened up quite a lot. I think in the nineties, if I'm remembering my air crash investigation properly.

• 1:02:27Justin Roczniak?

  We actually got tightened up very shortly after this incident.

• 1:02:32Speaker 01

  Oh, interesting.

• 1:02:33Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:33Speaker 01

  Okay, foreshadowing.

• 1:02:34Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:35Speaker 01

  Spoiler alert. Okay, cool. Um, yeah, it's worth saying, so it's okay. It's worth saying, yeah, if you get ice on the, on the wing, it's not just that it makes it like fly a bit rougher. It can have like really weird effect, like unpredictable effects and, and those effects can be quite, they can be onset quite suddenly as well.

• 1:02:53Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:54Speaker 01

  Like.

• 1:02:54November Kelly?

  Plane decides it doesn't want to fly anymore.

• 1:02:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. Like, like there are lots of popular regional aircraft that, that are very efficient turboprop type things, but there's a, there's, there's one particular ATR aircraft that, or family aircraft that had, had for a long time, had a really nasty, um, uh, icing problem and would just like throw itself into the fucking ground. Um, if, if, uh, if the conditions were perfect for kind of icing and flying.

• 1:03:19November Kelly?

  Plane with intrusive thoughts.

• 1:03:21Speaker 01

  Thanks. Literally, yeah.

• 1:03:23Justin Roczniak?

  Uh, Boeing seven thirty seven two hundred, it was known that if it were improperly de-iced, what it would like to do is to pitch up as steeply as possible.

• 1:03:33Liam McAnderson?

  Oh, hell yeah.

• 1:03:34Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. That's good. I believe. Uh, yes, definitely good.

• 1:03:38Justin Roczniak?

  And that could.

• 1:03:39November Kelly?

  It's a good alternative, right? Like of, of all the directions you want a plane to go.

• 1:03:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:03:44Justin Roczniak?

  Hopefully you go up.

• 1:03:44Liam McAnderson?

  Planes, planes.

• 1:03:45Justin Roczniak?

  There's gonna be some problems though.

• 1:03:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, there definitely are.

• 1:03:47November Kelly?

  Me finding, me finding out about a stall for the first time. Oh, this sucks. What the fuck?

• 1:03:53Justin Roczniak?

  I thought if you pull back, the plane goes up.

• 1:03:56November Kelly?

  The, the, literally the first officer on that Air France flight, the, the like pancaked into the ocean off of Brazil, did, did that almost verbatim. So, yeah. Why would I, why, why would it be bad for the plane to go too much up? It's where it's supposed to go.

• 1:04:12Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, exactly. It's where planes live in the sky.

• 1:04:14Liam McAnderson?

  The sky. They haven't left one up there yet.

• 1:04:17Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:20Justin Roczniak?

  So airports, airports in snowier climates often have dedicated de-icing pads next to the runway. Well, those in warmer clients usually require de-icing at the gate.

• 1:04:33November Kelly?

  Isn't DC kind of cold in winter? Like, that's the whole point of Die Hard 2, I think.

• 1:04:37Justin Roczniak?

  It used to be.

• 1:04:38November Kelly?

  Hmm. Okay. Yeah.

• 1:04:43Justin Roczniak?

  You would get, you would get a really good snowstorm like once every two years or so, I would say. I do remember the one week that, you know, we were completely out of school for a whole week. It was great. And that was also the first week in recorded history that the District of Columbia recorded zero murders. Everyone didn't want to go outside. There's too much snow.

• 1:05:03November Kelly?

  Oh, good boy. Yeah. Then again, John McClane racked up a bunch of murders in that snowstorm, so.

• 1:05:09Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. So National Airport is one of the latter kind. It does not have de-icing pads to this day. Um, cause this is a very rare occurrence.

• 1:05:19November Kelly?

  So you just get your de-icing at the, at the gate.

• 1:05:23Speaker 01

  And then hope that you get, get your clearance to fly off the runway fairly quickly.

• 1:05:27Justin Roczniak?

  Yes.

• 1:05:28Liam McAnderson?

  You're a little fortunate. I'm hoping you make it off the runway.

• 1:05:31Speaker 01

  Well, indeed, yeah.

• 1:05:33Liam McAnderson?

  Don't worry about, don't worry about why I said that. Don't worry about why.

• 1:05:35Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. No, just, just a random set of words.

• 1:05:38Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:38Speaker 01

  Together.

• 1:05:39Liam McAnderson?

  I'm just, I'm just talking crazy.

• 1:05:40November Kelly?

  A random, non-portentous set of words from my good friend Liam.

• 1:05:45Justin Roczniak?

  All right. So this flight is scheduled departure 12:15 Eastern Standard Time.

• 1:05:52Liam McAnderson?

  This is 2:15.

• 1:05:53Justin Roczniak?

  2:15. Did I say?

• 1:05:55Liam McAnderson?

  You said 12:15.

• 1:05:56Justin Roczniak?

  I'm a moron. Anyway.

• 1:05:57Liam McAnderson?

  No, you're not handsome.

• 1:05:59November Kelly?

  This is a cool pushback truck.

• 1:06:01Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:01November Kelly?

  Oh, really? The three genders there of like.

• 1:06:05Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:05November Kelly?

  I'm a moron. No, you're not. I love you. Cool truck.

• 1:06:08Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. This is, uh, this is not the truck they used.

• 1:06:11Speaker 01

  And therefore you can see it's in blackface, unfortunately there.

• 1:06:14Justin Roczniak?

  Ah, it's gone poorly. So this blizzard had moved in over Washington DC on this day, right? There's very little visibility. The runway was quickly covered in snow. So the airport was closed for about 90 minutes for the sake of snow removal.

• 1:06:31November Kelly?

  I bet they have a really cool truck for that. Big snow blower type thing.

• 1:06:35Justin Roczniak?

  Big snow plow, yeah.

• 1:06:36November Kelly?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:38Justin Roczniak?

  So the captain time tried to time his de-icing about as close to the airport's reopening time as possible in order to get a good spot in line.

• 1:06:49November Kelly?

  Oh, no.

• 1:06:49Justin Roczniak?

  So first he tried to get it de-iced at 2:30, right? But then the tower called him up and said, you're not moving for another 30 minutes or so, right? So the real de-icing began at 2:50. This de-icing was done by one guy who had a shift change halfway through.

• 1:07:08November Kelly?

  You never want to see it.

• 1:07:09Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. So the first guy did the left half of the airplane with a 30 to 40% glycol solution.

• 1:07:16November Kelly?

  Oh, God.

• 1:07:17Liam McAnderson?

  Oh, dear.

• 1:07:17Justin Roczniak?

  The second guy had different temperature readings and used a 20 to 30% glycol solution. That's probably not a big deal.

• 1:07:26November Kelly?

  How hard, how, how, how difficult is it for those two guys to talk to each other?

• 1:07:30Justin Roczniak?

  To talk to each other? I don't know. They're locked in the little, you know, little box on top of the truck.

• 1:07:35November Kelly?

  Yeah. Get a radio, you know, I just, I just pictured these guys like the last two Jews in Afghanistan, where they're just like, we just don't talk to each other, we're just mad at each other.

• 1:07:49Justin Roczniak?

  So there's about two to three inches of wet snow on the ground, right? This pushback truck shows up, right? And try as they might, they can't move the damn aircraft.

• 1:08:00November Kelly?

  Oh, my God.

• 1:08:01Justin Roczniak?

  The tug just spins its wheels in the horrible snow and slush and glycol goo all over the ramp.

• 1:08:07Liam McAnderson?

  Oh, no. She goo on my snow now.

• 1:08:11November Kelly?

  Is that a thing? Is that something? Yeah.

• 1:08:13Liam McAnderson?

  No.

• 1:08:14November Kelly?

  I don't know if that's something.

• 1:08:16Liam McAnderson?

  It's not.

• 1:08:18Justin Roczniak?

  Captain radioed the pushback truck and asked if he wanted them to use the reverse thrust. And the guys in the truck said, no, it's against company policy. Also, there's certain problems with this plane that can occur if you use reverse thrust in a, you know, icy environment. So please don't do that.

• 1:08:39November Kelly?

  Okay, fair enough.

• 1:08:40Justin Roczniak?

  So he does that.

• 1:08:42November Kelly?

  Oh, okay.

• 1:08:46Justin Roczniak?

  He deploys the big bucket type thrust reversers on this big Pratt and Whitney low bypass turbo fan engine. And they, the engines roar to life and for about, people say about 30 to 90 seconds, the plane is surrounded by swirling snow, ice and glycol. When they powered down and everything settled, they had accomplished absolutely nothing.

• 1:09:10November Kelly?

  So, so what we've done is we've like dad trying to move like family station wagon out of mud by like just gunning the engine in the same gear.

• 1:09:20Justin Roczniak?

  Exactly.

• 1:09:22Speaker 01

  And try that again, but in the aircraft. You love to be the person that they're like little nerdy kids standing, looking out the glass at this aircraft, you know, nosed in towards the building if it's having to push, push back and use reverse thrust. And, and then all of a sudden you just get an absolute, like the screaming dirt smacking the window, like the windows are rattling, snow firing out as the reverse thrust runs on for 90 seconds. Fucking hell.

• 1:09:47Justin Roczniak?

  Pilot sticking his head out the window, trying to figure out what's going on.

• 1:09:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, he's like, he's like, he's like bobbing on the clutch, you know?

• 1:09:54November Kelly?

  The tires are spinning, the throttle is all over it. Like there's not a single window you can see out of from the inside.

• 1:10:01Speaker 01

  Yeah. Surprising to shatter windows. I, okay, yeah.

• 1:10:07Justin Roczniak?

  So about 30 minutes pass. At 3:30, a second pushback truck was called. This one had snow chains on it.

• 1:10:15Speaker 01

  Ah, boom.

• 1:10:16Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, this worked. Air Florida Flight 90 was now pushed back and ready to taxi to the runway. There's 74 passengers and five crew onboard.

• 1:10:24Speaker 01

  Forty minutes since de-icing, I think.

• 1:10:27Justin Roczniak?

  Yes.

• 1:10:28Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, okay.

• 1:10:30Justin Roczniak?

  So Captain Larry Whedon really wants to get this aircraft off the ground, but he's stuck in line for a long time because everyone else wants to do the same thing. He's a little bit worried about how long it's been since the aircraft would de-iced, but he really, really doesn't want to go back to the gate and do it over again.

• 1:10:48November Kelly?

  List of consequences, right? On, on the one hand, I and everyone else dies. On the other hand, I have to go back and do this shit. I mean, that's relatable. That's absolutely relatable.

• 1:11:03Justin Roczniak?

  So here we are. This is straight from the report at 1540 15 cockpit voice recorder recorded a comment by the captain. Something, something go over to the hangar and get it deiced to which the first officer replied, yeah, definitely. The captain then made some additional comment that was not clear, but contained the word deiced to which the first officer again replied, yeah, that's about it. 1540 42 seconds. The first officer continued to say, it's been a while since we've been deiced at 1546 and 21 seconds. The captain said, tell you what, my windshield will be deiced, but I don't know about my wings. The first officer then commented, well,

• 1:11:45Justin Roczniak?

  all we need is the inside of the wings. Anyway, the wing tips are gonna speed up on 80. Anyway, those chuck all that other stuff off.

• 1:11:52November Kelly?

  Uh huh.

• 1:11:53Justin Roczniak?

  Now, can you tell what's happening here?

• 1:11:57November Kelly?

  It's like the opposite of crew resource management. It's two, two guys trying to negotiate their way to not having to go back to the thing.

• 1:12:06Justin Roczniak?

  Yes. The captain has come up with a clever plan. That means they don't have to deice, which is tailgating.

• 1:12:14November Kelly?

  They're just gonna, oh, they're just gonna sit, yeah. They're just gonna sit behind somebody else.

• 1:12:19Justin Roczniak?

  The plane in front of them was a DC nine, I believe operated by New York air, which is another one of those weird regional airlines that existed back then. So he's like, okay, we're gonna get up real close to that plane. DC nine has the engines all the way in the back and I'm just gonna let the exhaust from his engines take the ice off the airplane by just sort of wiggling it around, you know?

• 1:12:43November Kelly?

  You try your best not to make the Florida jokes.

• 1:12:46Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, I, there are other things that extremely high thrust forces can do to your aircraft other than take ice off the wings and probably won't take ice off the wings at the process.

• 1:13:02Justin Roczniak?

  Yes. I, this is all kinds of a bad idea. But yeah, he's sort of trying the stunt. It's like, okay, that deice the windshield. Good. He tries to deice one wing and the other wing. He tries it a couple of times and even almost seems to be working.

• 1:13:17November Kelly?

  Imagine being in the DC nine and you're like, the guy behind us is wiggling around under our exhaust.

• 1:13:25Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. What exactly is going on here?

• 1:13:28Speaker 01

  Oh my God, it's like, yeah, it's like when you got a wiped in BMW up your ass on the, on the fast lane on the M1. It's just like, come on, I'm in, I'm in a panda, I'm going at 74 miles an hour, leave me alone.

• 1:13:39Justin Roczniak?

  In 15, uh, 353 and 21 seconds, the first officer says, boy, this is a losing battle here on trying to de-ice those things. It gives you a false sense of security. That's all it does.

• 1:13:51Liam McAnderson?

  Oh, that inspires confidence. Let's do this, boys.

• 1:13:55Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:13:56Justin Roczniak?

  What's actually happening here is the exhaust from the DC9's engines is melting the snow and ice. Yes, but then the water just pools on the wing and it all becomes ice, which is even more tightly adhered to the wing.

• 1:14:10Speaker 01

  Oh, good. Oh, good. Okay. So we're converting the soft slushy ice into rime ice. Excellent.

• 1:14:16Justin Roczniak?

  Yes.

• 1:14:18Speaker 01

  Tremendous.

• 1:14:19Justin Roczniak?

  There's another thing happening simultaneously, and I don't think anyone's established why this was not fixed by the pilots. But something strange is happening to the engines, right? There's, there's a thing called engine pressure ratio, right? And so there's, there's a sensor at the front of the engine that measures the air pressure. And there's a sensor at the back of the engine also measures the air pressure. Um, the ratio of the pressure at the back of the engine over the front of the engine is your engine pressure ratio. So if you have a pressure of like near one, you're idle. If you have a pressure of like two, I don't know how high up they go.

• 1:15:02Justin Roczniak?

  That means you're producing a whole big bunch of thrust, right? You know, so the higher the number, the more thrust you're producing. Um, this is how you measure the thrust out of the engine. This is how lots of systems on the plane sort of regulate how much to open or close the throttle. Um, you know, this is, uh, this is an important source of data for the airplane, right? Um, there can be issues with these sensors though, that might give you a bad reading. Specifically in this case, ice and snow building up on the pressure gauge and blocking it.

• 1:15:35November Kelly?

  Yeah. And it, it turns out that like, just kind of taxiing behind another plane, blowing like ice and slush into your engines might make that worse too.

• 1:15:46Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, it does not. That's not, that's not a very good situation.

• 1:15:49Liam McAnderson?

  No, that's inaccurate.

• 1:15:51Speaker 01

  Yeah. And it's the sensor at the front that's going to get all the ice and slush, which of course crucially is what gives you your. Your kind of background air pressure.

• 1:16:00November Kelly?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:00Speaker 01

  So if that one gets sticky.

• 1:16:03November Kelly?

  Hmm.

• 1:16:04Justin Roczniak?

  You get an artificially high thrust reading, right?

• 1:16:08Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:16:09Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, because that's the denominator.

• 1:16:10Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:16:11Justin Roczniak?

  And that, you know, that means, you know, when you try to adjust the throttle for the amount of thrust you need, you're going to do it less than you otherwise would, which is bad if you're trying to take off and, you know, climb, right? This is why these engines are equipped with a de-icing system to compensate for this. You just run the hot bleed air through the front of the engine and hey, problem solved.

• 1:16:34November Kelly?

  Uh huh, uh huh. So they do that, right?

• 1:16:36Speaker 01

  So yeah, that's fine. Problem solved.

• 1:16:38Justin Roczniak?

  Well, yeah, and it has no performance impact. There's no reason not to use it, especially in weather like this. So anyway, they don't use it.

• 1:16:44Speaker 01

  Ah, okay. Tremendous, tremendous.

• 1:16:47November Kelly?

  Do we know why not?

• 1:16:49Speaker 01

  Team.

• 1:16:50Justin Roczniak?

  This is one of the more confusing parts because you can hear very clearly on the cockpit voice recorder, um, you know, when they're, when they're doing the, the checks at the beginning. Engine anti-ice off.

• 1:17:02Speaker 01

  Okay. Brilliant.

• 1:17:03Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. Again, these, these people are not used to flying in, in the winter time. It could just be, you know, a brain fart. It's a pretty serious brain fart, but, uh.

• 1:17:14Speaker 01

  They went into autopilot, as it were.

• 1:17:16Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. Yeah, exactly.

• 1:17:19November Kelly?

  All these guys are talking about on the runway is how much the de-icing hasn't worked and how to get the thing de-iced and then they don't remember that the engine anti-ice.

• 1:17:30Justin Roczniak?

  There's a switch.

• 1:17:31Speaker 01

  There's a switch that solves some of their problems.

• 1:17:33Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:17:33Justin Roczniak?

  I'm not a hundred percent certain, but I think you have to switch that on in flight anyway. You know, just because it's cold up there.

• 1:17:41November Kelly?

  Right.

• 1:17:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:17:42November Kelly?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:43Justin Roczniak?

  So anyway, air traffic control radios in to say that Air Florida 90 is clear for immediate takeoff. This is after quite a while more of waiting. And also there's an inbound plane about two and a half miles behind them, so move.

• 1:18:01November Kelly?

  Yeah, hurry it up. Hurry it up, the kids.

• 1:18:04Justin Roczniak?

  Apparently they like to get a lot of use out of this runway, which I think is usually the only runway they use.

• 1:18:09November Kelly?

  Oh, wow.

• 1:18:10Justin Roczniak?

  In this case, it's runway thirty six, which I believe is now numbered one. I don't know why they changed the numbers.

• 1:18:16November Kelly?

  Uh, that's weird. I always thought the numbers are the same because they refer to the angle of the, you know, the compass bearing of the thing. That's weird.

• 1:18:23Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:23November Kelly?

  Like thirty six would be three hundred and sixty degrees.

• 1:18:26Justin Roczniak?

  Even one would be, I guess, ten degree. Yeah, exactly. I think, I think sometimes they, sometimes they, they, they have a little bit of leeway on there. If it like makes it more convenient for the instruments somehow, which I think there's like a problem with a runway eighteen thirty six. I don't, I don't fully understand that. Um, but I do know they have renumbered the runways.

• 1:18:47November Kelly?

  Oh, interesting.

• 1:18:48Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. So they've done their pre, pre, uh, takeoff checklist, right? They've set the engines for an engine pressure ratio of two point zero four, which is a little higher than usual, but appropriate for this kind of weather. Right? Um, the captain hands off the controls to the first officer, who is going to be the pilot flying for this leg. Captain's gonna be pilot monitoring. Right? Uh, and yeah, this is when they don't turn on the engine anti-ice.

• 1:19:15November Kelly?

  Oh, good.

• 1:19:16Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:17November Kelly?

  Technically, it's all when they don't turn on the engine.

• 1:19:20Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. Well, this is true.

• 1:19:23November Kelly?

  The whole back.

• 1:19:23Justin Roczniak?

  They start.

• 1:19:23November Kelly?

  Trade.

• 1:19:24Justin Roczniak?

  They start to take off just around three fifty nine and forty five seconds.

• 1:19:29November Kelly?

  A while, okay.

• 1:19:30Justin Roczniak?

  Yes.

• 1:19:31November Kelly?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:31Justin Roczniak?

  And things immediately seem off to the first officer, right?

• 1:19:35November Kelly?

  Oh, this is the nightmare. You didn't like a pre like CRM shit where you're like, something feels wrong, but the guy who's kind of my boss is like.

• 1:19:45Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:46November Kelly?

  It's fine. It's fine. I've, I've, I've been gunning it the whole time. It's fine.

• 1:19:50Justin Roczniak?

  Uh, the plane, the plane feels a bit slow. You know, it's sluggish, like a wet sponge. Oh, Britain. Yeah.

• 1:19:59November Kelly?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:01November Kelly?

  Feels British?

• 1:20:03Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, they're using way more runway than they usually would. The captain is constantly reassuring the first officer who's like, very, very, uh, very uncertain about this. Nah, it's fine. Don't worry. They start to take off rotation and the plane violently pitches up.

• 1:20:20Liam McAnderson?

  Oh, good. We learned that that's good.

• 1:20:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, I remember from earlier, I specifically remember that that means that the wings are completely uninterrupted, a full aerodynamic performance.

• 1:20:29Liam McAnderson?

  Covered in ice.

• 1:20:29Justin Roczniak?

  Yes.

• 1:20:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:20:30November Kelly?

  Yeah. Yeah, more altitude for a second.

• 1:20:33Justin Roczniak?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:20:33Speaker 01

  For a little bit, yeah.

• 1:20:34Liam McAnderson?

  It's like the vomit comet. Yeah.

• 1:20:37Justin Roczniak?

  Whee! The captain yells forward, forward. Uh, the stick shaker starts going. That's the indicator that you're in aerodynamic stall. The stall warning also starts, which is another indication that you're in an aerodynamic stall, right?

• 1:20:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, that sort of thing.

• 1:20:54Justin Roczniak?

  You know, this 737 had done exactly what it was known to do in icy conditions, which was to violently pitch up.

• 1:21:01November Kelly?

  I'm, I'm, I'm looking at the cockpit voice recorder transcript here. And as they're on takeoff roll, the, the first officer is like, and this is already, he says, nah, I don't think that's right. Uh, maybe it is.

• 1:21:16Liam McAnderson?

  Oh.

• 1:21:17November Kelly?

  And then, and then he says, I don't know. And I, I want to be clear, like, not to do spoilers here, this man will be dead 40 seconds after saying this.

• 1:21:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:21:31Justin Roczniak?

  This could happen to any of us.

• 1:21:33November Kelly?

  God.

• 1:21:34Justin Roczniak?

  Gotta, gotta worry about your last words. Speak carefully.

• 1:21:38Liam McAnderson?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:21:38November Kelly?

  I'm looking for the de-iso button on my chair in case, like, you know, die in 20 seconds.

• 1:21:43Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah, me too. Oh, man. Why don't they make the whole Liam out of the black box?

• 1:21:48Justin Roczniak?

  Well, yeah, oh, the only button I have on my chair is, oh, wait, that takes the chair to Cuba.

• 1:21:56November Kelly?

  Fantastic. I mean, I'm pushing that button all the time.

• 1:21:59Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah, let's do this, man.

• 1:22:01November Kelly?

  I had too many buttons on this fucker. I've got like three, like three-way adjustable armrests and recline. I, yeah. So, you know, I wouldn't be surprised if there's a Cuban thing in here.

• 1:22:11Justin Roczniak?

  So despite the situation, they have an unreliable engine pressure, uh, ratio reading.

• 1:22:17Justin Roczniak?

  Um, the sudden stall, the bad aerodynamics here, they do manage to climb for a bit.

• 1:22:24Liam McAnderson?

  Oh, how long is a bit? We're talking minutes or are we talking nanoseconds?

• 1:22:29Justin Roczniak?

  They get up to 352 feet.

• 1:22:32Liam McAnderson?

  Oh, so you really do beat a bit, huh?

• 1:22:34Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's just some high.

• 1:22:36Liam McAnderson?

  It's taller than I am, I guess.

• 1:22:37Justin Roczniak?

  That's, yeah, that's higher than I can jump.

• 1:22:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, 100 meters.

• 1:22:41Justin Roczniak?

  Well, I could jump, uh, I could jump down from there once.

• 1:22:46Liam McAnderson?

  This, yeah, that's true.

• 1:22:49November Kelly?

  By the way, at this point, like during the, the like takeoff roll, the passengers in the back are so alarmed that some of them are putting themselves into the like brace position.

• 1:22:59Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, there were, there are a few people who are like, yeah, this is, this looks like it's gonna go poorly. People are assuming the brace position. Apparently it was a very, very, very rough, uh, takeoff roll.

• 1:23:10November Kelly?

  Funniest thing you can do in this situation is get up and go, take me to Cuba.

• 1:23:16Speaker 01

  Yeah. No, you can't stand up, of course, because then the jets come along and turn you to.

• 1:23:21Justin Roczniak?

  No, no, no, they had, they hadn't invented 9/11 yet.

• 1:23:25Liam McAnderson?

  I think they're about to.

• 1:23:26Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:29Justin Roczniak?

  So they get off the ground, they're going, they start to turn.

• 1:23:33Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 1:23:34Justin Roczniak?

  Right? And they go down.

• 1:23:37Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. Figure two is not, oh, there are some other objects involved in this as well. Okay.

• 1:23:44Justin Roczniak?

  Oh, yeah. So this is, uh, you know, there's, there's, uh, four o'clock and 39 seconds, sound of stick shaker starts and continues until impact. Um, the, uh, the, the tower, uh, you know, contacts them and says, TWR Palm 90, contact departure control. Um, the, uh, the captain at this point is saying, forward, forward, easy. We only want 500.

• 1:24:06November Kelly?

  Talking to like a horse.

• 1:24:08Justin Roczniak?

  Forward, just barely climb. And he says, stalling, we're falling. And then the first officer is like, Larry, we're going down, Larry.

• 1:24:16November Kelly?

  Half an hour. You hate to die with a Larry, you know, like that already dates it.

• 1:24:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, just, just, just use it, just use a fake name. Name him something different at that point. You know that cockpit voice recorder is gonna be on telly. So just like, you know, pick a different name.

• 1:24:30Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:31Justin Roczniak?

  Then the first, the captain's like, I know, then a sound of impact.

• 1:24:36Speaker 01

  Square brackets, sound of impact.

• 1:24:38November Kelly?

  Yeah, I mean, going from, going from, I don't know, to sound of impact in like 40 seconds is like, this is an efficient method of like.

• 1:24:46Justin Roczniak?

  This is very, very rapid disaster.

• 1:24:49November Kelly?

  Ending your own life, you know?

• 1:24:51Liam McAnderson?

  This is, this is one of those where you didn't have the chance to die with you. You only had a chance to die quickly.

• 1:24:56Justin Roczniak?

  Hmm. Now, this is, this is a point where I can add some local flavor that the air crash investigation channels can't, which is I have fallen into this river in the winter.

• 1:25:07Speaker 01

  Free of it. Off, off the Rochambeau Bridge or?

• 1:25:11Justin Roczniak?

  It's actually very close to this location. Yeah.

• 1:25:13Speaker 01

  Oh, shit.

• 1:25:16Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 1:25:18Justin Roczniak?

  I can say the thing about the Potomac is, okay, a lot of it's very shallow. Uh, this part is not. Cause this is where they used to do dredging. Um, you know, so this is, this, this is a situation and I will say the Potomac River, even when there's not ice on it, very, very cold. Um, you know, you got that fresh natural water from the Shenandoah Valley coming in.

• 1:25:38November Kelly?

  This is, this is the kind of like detail, you know, that we, uh, that people like this for.

• 1:25:45Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:45Speaker 01

  You don't get that shit on the Discovery Channel, do you? You pricks.

• 1:25:50November Kelly?

  Air crash investigation never tell you that like you're crashing at like, you know, 300 miles an hour into, into a river that's cold.

• 1:25:56Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, the river's cold. It's really cold. I have lived experience.

• 1:26:03November Kelly?

  This is really adding insult to injury. You know, your, your last kind of conscious thoughts as you're like elbows are driven through your skull are like, is that water cold?

• 1:26:11Liam McAnderson?

  Oh, that sucked. Is that a fish I see?

• 1:26:19Justin Roczniak?

  So at 4:01 PM, flight 90 crashed directly into the Rochambeau Bridge.

• 1:26:26November Kelly?

  Oh.

• 1:26:26Justin Roczniak?

  It skidded across the bridge deck. It hit six cars and a truck. It took out 97 feet of guard rail and then it fell in a river.

• 1:26:35Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 1:26:36Justin Roczniak?

  Again, the Potomac generally, a lot of it's like three feet deep. This part's 12 feet deep, which is exactly the height of a Boeing 737 fuselage.

• 1:26:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:26:44Liam McAnderson?

  Incredible.

• 1:26:45Speaker 01

  Plop and splash.

• 1:26:46Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:48November Kelly?

  And nothing else. You wash the glycol, you know, goop off of it.

• 1:26:51Justin Roczniak?

  That's a good point. Yeah. Both pilots and most of the passengers are killed instantly, as well as several people on the bridge, but a few people seated at the very rear of the plane are still alive and the wreckage is just barely above water or rather above ice.

• 1:27:07November Kelly?

  You're in a, you're in a bad situation there, you know?

• 1:27:10Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:10November Kelly?

  Just hanging out in, in the tail section of this thing above like an icy river. Uh, everybody else forward of you is dead and you're like 40 seconds ago, you were, you know, thinking, get me out of National Airport.

• 1:27:25Justin Roczniak?

  Yes, exactly.

• 1:27:25Speaker 01

  To Cuba. Yeah.

• 1:27:26Justin Roczniak?

  To Cuba. Exactly.

• 1:27:27November Kelly?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:29Liam McAnderson?

  I bet they would have to deal with the fucking de-icing.

• 1:27:32November Kelly?

  Thinking about this in, in the moment and being like, oh man, it seems like my plan to, to hijack the aircraft and take it to Cuba is really not going in the direction I hoped.

• 1:27:41Justin Roczniak?

  There's a, there's a PLO guy in the back like, oh shit.

• 1:27:45November Kelly?

  All of these guys from different seventies terrorist groups looking at each other. Just like, damn it.

• 1:27:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, they're all just looking across, across the aisle at each other, just like, just shaking their head like, you got a PLO guy, you got the, you got the Korean guy on the other side.

• 1:28:02November Kelly?

  It's like the opening of Naked Gun two.

• 1:28:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:28:10Justin Roczniak?

  So this, this, this small group of survivors are clinging on to the tail section. They're about 200 feet from shore.

• 1:28:17November Kelly?

  I'm not, I just, I mean, how thick is that ice and how deep is the river? Cause just get out and walk, you know?

• 1:28:23Justin Roczniak?

  It's not, it's not thick enough.

• 1:28:25November Kelly?

  Oh boy.

• 1:28:26Liam McAnderson?

  Oh geez.

• 1:28:27Justin Roczniak?

  Okay. So this is where we talk about the rescue efforts. One thing that happens in Washington DC is snow days, right? Um, when it snows hard enough, the federal government shuts down. They tell everyone to go home or tell everyone not to come into work that day. And usually everyone else follows suit.

• 1:28:43November Kelly?

  Hmm.

• 1:28:45Justin Roczniak?

  You know, what wonderful cultural thing in DC is there's just, you know, the government says no work today because it's snowing.

• 1:28:51November Kelly?

  Fuck this, I'm going home.

• 1:28:52Liam McAnderson?

  Nice.

• 1:28:53Speaker 01

  It's nice. It's good.

• 1:28:54Justin Roczniak?

  This is one of those days where the government shut down late, right? So there was this early rush hour and everyone was trying to beat everyone else back home.

• 1:29:03Liam McAnderson?

  Boy.

• 1:29:04Justin Roczniak?

  And this is also slightly before the Washington Metro opened into Northern Virginia. So, and there's no commuter trains. So everyone's driving, right?

• 1:29:16Speaker 01

  Great. I'm sure we've not talked in previous episode, indeed the last one we recorded about, you know, traffic blocking the way for emergency vehicles. That's, that's not going to come up in this story, I'm sure.

• 1:29:26Justin Roczniak?

  Oh, well, the traffic was so bad, it was damn near impossible for emergency vehicles to get to the crash site.

• 1:29:32Liam McAnderson?

  Oh, no. I can't believe who could have seen this.

• 1:29:37Justin Roczniak?

  The nearest coast guard vessel was the tugboat Capstan, but it was pretty far down river. And ironically, it was on another search and rescue mission.

• 1:29:47November Kelly?

  Just, just like the tugboat is almost reaching you as you fall in the river and it just turns around and it's just like, well, the needs of the many.

• 1:29:55Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. In one instance, in order to get around traffic, one ambulance was forced to divert around heavy traffic by climbing the curb and driving on the sidewalk right in front of the White House.

• 1:30:08Speaker 01

  Just, just, just the president, wait, wait, what year is it? Yeah. Just coming out and going, hey, you kids, get off my yard.

• 1:30:17Justin Roczniak?

  So there's a guy.

• 1:30:20Justin Roczniak?

  There's a guy Roger Olean. He was the first man on the scene. He wasn't an emergency responder. He didn't have any training. He was just a guy, right?

• 1:30:30November Kelly?

  Oh, we love a guy. Such stuff are real American heroes made of.

• 1:30:33Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. Well, several staff from the Pentagon looked on. He jumped into the icy river, made it a few yards out, then came back because fuck, it's cold in there.

• 1:30:45November Kelly?

  Of such stuff, a true American hero.

• 1:30:49Justin Roczniak?

  The guys from the Pentagon told him, don't do that again, but he insisted he was going to make a second go of it. This time with a rope to get him back to the shore, right?

• 1:30:58Speaker 01

  Not a bad idea.

• 1:30:59Justin Roczniak?

  This time he made it about 30 feet and then had to be hauled back. And he spent the rest of the incident warming up in someone's car.

• 1:31:07Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah, that's that's

• 1:31:09November Kelly?

  I mean, yeah, the very, very heroic, but like.

• 1:31:13Speaker 01

  That is dumb. Pretty dumb.

• 1:31:15Justin Roczniak?

  The first emergency workers on the scene were some folks in a park police helicopter called Eagle One. They show up nearly 20 minutes after the wreck.

• 1:31:25November Kelly?

  Hell, yeah. Fucking idiots.

• 1:31:28Justin Roczniak?

  They don't have cold water rescue equipment or anything like that.

• 1:31:32November Kelly?

  Hell, yeah.

• 1:31:32Justin Roczniak?

  They have are ropes.

• 1:31:34November Kelly?

  Oh, boy.

• 1:31:35Justin Roczniak?

  And they use the ropes thusly.

• 1:31:37November Kelly?

  It's like a fucking team building exercise, except, you know, real and deadly.

• 1:31:42Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah, they get to go outward bound.

• 1:31:45Justin Roczniak?

  The helicopter would drop a rope down to the survivors and then just drag them 200 feet through the icy river to the shore.

• 1:31:52Speaker 01

  Oh, no, no, no.

• 1:31:54November Kelly?

  That, Jesus.

• 1:31:56Speaker 01

  It's a very Just like you get to the end and your legs have just frost bitten off. It's just like, just they just come off, shattered from ice. No, thank you. I don't want to be turned into a slush puppy.

• 1:32:05Justin Roczniak?

  I believe a few of the people who were rescued did break a bunch of ribs in this process.

• 1:32:10November Kelly?

  Yeah, that tracks.

• 1:32:12Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. This is also a very delicate operation because the helicopters, of course, operating at low altitude between the two bridges.

• 1:32:19November Kelly?

  Just dumping a sort of helicopter crash on top of your plane crash.

• 1:32:24Justin Roczniak?

  I believe there's some footage here where they were flying so low that the, uh, the, the, the runners of the helicopter actually dipped below water.

• 1:32:32Liam McAnderson?

  Wow.

• 1:32:33November Kelly?

  Jesus.

• 1:32:34Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, I remember that. Oh, yeah. No, not good.

• 1:32:38Justin Roczniak?

  So

• 1:32:38Speaker 01

  And of course, with the inherent nature of the helicopters, that you're spending the whole time trying to stop it from crashing. That thing, it yearns for death.

• 1:32:46Justin Roczniak?

  Yes.

• 1:32:47Liam McAnderson?

  30,000 moving parts looking for a place to crash.

• 1:32:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:32:50Justin Roczniak?

  So the first person rescued was Burt Hamilton, who was in the water near the aircraft. Uh, they dragged him to shore. They went back, handed the line off to Arlen D. Williams, Jr. But he gave it away because he couldn't get free of the wreckage. So instead, flight attendant Kelly Duncan was towed to shore. Next, through the innovative technique of using two ropes,

• 1:33:13Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 1:33:14Justin Roczniak?

  Joe Stiley, Priscilla Torado and Nikki Felch were towed away and Arlen D. Williams again gave up the rope since he was still stuck, right? Uh, Torado and Felch both both lost their grip on the rope and fell off.

• 1:33:30Speaker 01

  Crikey.

• 1:33:31November Kelly?

  And just kind of raining more people across this river.

• 1:33:35Justin Roczniak?

  There's a man.

• 1:33:35Speaker 01

  There's people everywhere at this point.

• 1:33:37Justin Roczniak?

  There is a man of better constitution than Roger Olean witnessing this. He was a staffer for the Congressional Budget Office named Lenny Scutnik, right?

• 1:33:48Speaker 01

  Lenny's not Sputnik, Scutnik. Yeah.

• 1:33:51November Kelly?

  These are real like local news names.

• 1:33:53Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. He was watching from the shore when he saw Torado and Felch lose grip on the rope. And without a single thought for self-preservation, he stripped off his coat and boots and jumped into the icy Potomac River and amazingly managed to grab Torado and drag her back to shore. And then the helicopter managed to get close enough to Nikki Felch for a paramedic to step out onto the runners and get her out of the water.

• 1:34:19November Kelly?

  Jesus, they really threw this together like, you know, out of nothing.

• 1:34:24Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. Uh, Arlen D. Williams, meanwhile, was still stuck in the tail section and he was still trying to unstrap himself and the tail section fell over.

• 1:34:35Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 1:34:36Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. So he was the only death by drowning in the incident. All of this was caught by local media who managed to beat rescuers to the scene. Uh, Arlen's selflessness became national news. Um, although again, he was stuck. Um, it's thought that possibly as many as 19 other people may have survived the initial crash, but succumbed to hypothermia before they could be rescued.

• 1:35:00Speaker 01

  Graham.

• 1:35:02Speaker 01

  Bloody hell.

• 1:35:02Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, this is quite, quite ugly way to go on this flight, I would say.

• 1:35:06Speaker 01

  So the impact force, so that means a lot of people, a sizable number of people died from, is that just the shock of impact with the, with the bridge or with the water?

• 1:35:15Justin Roczniak?

  Good question, because honestly, this was, you know, in terms of like actual impact forces, this was relatively tame. Like if they hadn't hit the bridge, this would be much more survivable.

• 1:35:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, because the whole point is the thing's not going fast. That's the reason it's in the ditch. Like it's, it's, you know, it's, it's, it's in the drink.

• 1:35:32Justin Roczniak?

  It's going a little faster vertically than it should, but you know, other than that, I mean, I don't know, this, this could have been, if the bridge hadn't been there, well, they still would have crashed into the next bridge, but.

• 1:35:42Speaker 01

  Sure. Yeah, I suppose, like the diagram and figure two in the previous slide showed it stalled, so it's landed belly, you know, it's landed on its belly. So I guess it kind of probably broke up on its, between, between hitting the bridge and hitting the drink.

• 1:35:58Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, I believe that the plane did break up.

• 1:36:00Speaker 01

  In that bit.

• 1:36:01Justin Roczniak?

  Is one of the big issues and, you know, water is a much softer target than a bridge. So, yeah.

• 1:36:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, those speeds for sure. Yeah, yeah.

• 1:36:10Justin Roczniak?

  So anyway, all said and done, 74 of the 79 people on the plane were dead.

• 1:36:17Speaker 01

  Jesus.

• 1:36:17Justin Roczniak?

  Four people driving over the bridge were also killed. Four people on the bridge were also only injured, and I don't know how do you explain that to insurance?

• 1:36:27November Kelly?

  Well, at least back in the day, you could get a human being on the phone.

• 1:36:31Justin Roczniak?

  That's a good point, yeah.

• 1:36:32November Kelly?

  Okay, there's not a box on the form to take for hit by plane.

• 1:36:35Liam McAnderson?

  They threatened to take my car to Cuba?

• 1:36:41Justin Roczniak?

  Hello, State Farm. Yes, someone crashed a plane into my car.

• 1:36:46November Kelly?

  There's a box on there for like actions of Floridians.

• 1:36:50Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:53Justin Roczniak?

  Reconstructions by the NTSB determined that due to anti-ice being turned off, the plane was at a 1.7 engine pressure ratio rather than the 2.04 as recommended for takeoff in these conditions. That's enough to get off the ground, but not enough to compensate for the icing or to get out of a stall. And, you know, ultimately, this came down to pilot error, right?

• 1:37:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:37:20Justin Roczniak?

  Wouldn't you say pilot error in the airline industry, that's a lot different from like, I don't know, the railroad industry where it would be like, well, the engineer fucked up and everyone moves on with their lives. Yeah.

• 1:37:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, there's nothing we can do.

• 1:37:33Justin Roczniak?

  The airline regulators actually look into these things and make recommendations to stop this from happening, right? It was found that the flight crew was probably too inexperienced. The training programs at Air Florida were not comprehensive. Generally, Air Florida needed to change their procedures and really emphasize how to operate the aircraft in winter, especially now that they weren't just flying exclusively in sunny Florida now.

• 1:37:58Speaker 01

  They're flying into Stockholm. Stockholm is regularly snowy.

• 1:38:02November Kelly?

  This is the thing, right? This is a sort of like danger inherent to a kind of like meteoric capitalist rise, right? Like this is a business success story. It's going great. Investors love these guys. And it's like, yeah, and they're growing in a way that is like unsustainable and unsafe.

• 1:38:18Justin Roczniak?

  Yes.

• 1:38:18Speaker 01

  Yeah. It's a really common story in air crashes, actually. That story, particularly with low costs. Indonesia have had this, like Thailand had it of the massive rapid rise of low cost airlines and the staffing can't keep up. So everyone's inexperienced training can't keep up. You know, the aircraft, getting enough new aircraft in or keep it on top of maintenance can't keep up. Yeah, yeah. Really common, really common story.

• 1:38:45Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. And ultimately, it was determined that had any one thing not gone wrong here, right? If there had been more substantial de-icing. If they had activated the anti-ice on the engine, or if they even just anticipated and quickly pulled out of the stall, this, this flight would have been recoverable. You would have been able to keep going.

• 1:39:05November Kelly?

  The classic Florida cheese model.

• 1:39:08Justin Roczniak?

  Yes, exactly.

• 1:39:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, like why they didn't go for, why they didn't apply more throttle when they, both of them were feeling that there wasn't, well, okay, the, the, the first officer as pilot flying was feeling that it was not moved, it's apply more throttle, get more throttle in there.

• 1:39:24Justin Roczniak?

  I don't exactly know how that works because I'm not sure if they like were using the auto throttle.

• 1:39:29November Kelly?

  Oh, don't worry, we'll hear about it in the comments.

• 1:39:30Justin Roczniak?

  Would it, would it come, come out, come in like been confused by the EPR reading or I, I don't know. I'm going to be honest. Um, you know, it's one of those things where.

• 1:39:41Speaker 01

  But you can always override it. You know, if you apply for, if, if they, you know, if, if the pilots have pushed onto throttle and applied, you know, they, it, you know, it's a 737 200. It's not, you know, it's not an Airbus. So, you know, you, you push the throttle forward, you get more throttle. It would automatically deactivate the auto throttle. So, yeah, I'd, I'd be stumped by whether it didn't. But, you know, this isn't, it's not entirely on them. They were, their training was inadequate. They were too collectively too experienced. Like they could have had one of them inexperienced, but they have all more experience, but they didn't do that. Yeah. It's, uh, as you say, one, one thing would have solved this.

• 1:40:03Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, they managed to do, they, all the things went poorly.

• 1:40:07November Kelly?

  Everything went wrong. Yeah.

• 1:40:10Justin Roczniak?

  Air Florida's reputation was ruined. Their finances were already a little shakier than they were during their meteoric rise in the late seventies, but this accident really put a bunch of nails in the coffin, right? Passengers stopped booking Air Florida. Unless they were trying to go to Cuba.

• 1:40:30Justin Roczniak?

  The airlines started shrinking, but they refused to cut their unprofitable prestige routes to like Europe and to the Northeast of the United States. At that point, the Northeast routes to Florida were dominated by Eastern Airlines, um, which was a stalwart of the industry and would never go under, obviously.

• 1:40:52Justin Roczniak?

  They filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 1984 and they were absorbed into Midway Airlines over the next 10 months or so. And then I think Midway went bankrupt not too, too long afterwards. This is, the airline industry was not in a great place in this sort of decade or so.

• 1:41:20Justin Roczniak?

  Um, Lenny Scutnik was invited to Ronald Reagan's State of the Union address, and he became a meme.

• 1:41:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:41:30November Kelly?

  A 1980s meme.

• 1:41:32Justin Roczniak?

  Oh, yes. Whenever the president invites some regular Joe to the State of the Union, the local press now just calls them a Lenny Scutnik.

• 1:41:44November Kelly?

  Oh, that's a, that's a great photo of the guy. He's got an incredible mustache as well.

• 1:41:48Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:49Speaker 01

  Oh, nice. Love a, love a mustache. Says guy with mustache. I'm biased.

• 1:41:53Justin Roczniak?

  Roger Olean and Lenny Scutnik both received the Coast Guard's Gold Life Saving Medal. Arland Williams Jr. Also received the award posthumously. Um, even though the only person Roger Olean had to rescue was himself.

• 1:42:09November Kelly?

  It's like, you know, points for trying.

• 1:42:11Liam McAnderson?

  We can get a man.

• 1:42:13November Kelly?

  Speaks to Lenny Scutnik's nobility of spirit for not being like, that guy gets the same thing as me.

• 1:42:22Speaker 01

  He did fuck all. What's he doing here?

• 1:42:24November Kelly?

  Yeah, the Coast Guard Gold Medal for attempted life saving.

• 1:42:27Justin Roczniak?

  And the previously unnamed middle span of the 14th Street Bridge Complex was renamed to the Rochambeau Bridge. And the span the plane hit was renamed from the Rochambeau Bridge to the Arland D. Williams Jr. Memorial Bridge.

• 1:42:45Speaker 01

  Ah, the circle is complete. That makes sense. Ah, there we go.

• 1:42:50Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 1:42:50Speaker 01

  R I P to that guy who was stuck, but also did encourage people to go in front of him.

• 1:42:55Justin Roczniak?

  That is a good thing to do if you're stuck in a plane crash in a freezing river. It is kind of, you know, you look at where they're taking the back of the plane out and that is pretty close to shore. You know, it's like, damn.

• 1:43:08Speaker 01

  I can imagine it drifting though. I can see the, the thing kind of drifting along a bit. Well, by the time they're pulling it out there, you know, it took them 20 minutes to get the helicopter in. So this, this is probably happening, you know, hours, an hour later.

• 1:43:20Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, like also, but the other thing is like right around where the, the plane hit the, the river. It's like six feet deep mud most. They really, it really did hit in just the wrong spot.

• 1:43:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. I mean, it looks fucking cold. Let's be quite honest here.

• 1:43:38November Kelly?

  Oh, yeah. That that like photo is one of the likes of more viscerally freezing things I've seen.

• 1:43:44Liam McAnderson?

  Don't like that.

• 1:43:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:43:45Justin Roczniak?

  Well, what did we learn?

• 1:43:48Speaker 01

  Don't fly Air Florida unless you want to go to Havana.

• 1:43:50Liam McAnderson?

  No, deice your own plane, dickheads.

• 1:43:53November Kelly?

  Do not try and like improvise a deicing solution by just like, you know, tailgating.

• 1:44:01Justin Roczniak?

  Again, deicing is much more strictly regulated and there's a lot more, you know, mathematics behind it now. You know, it's there. There's a lot of stuff that pilots have to do in terms of like calculating how long they have between deicing and actually getting to the runway and also making sure the plane has been properly deiced. All this other stuff, you know, the the the safety manual is written in blood.

• 1:44:30November Kelly?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:31Justin Roczniak?

  This is definitely an instance of that.

• 1:44:33November Kelly?

  Blood and goop.

• 1:44:34Speaker 01

  Don't half ass this stuff. Yeah.

• 1:44:36Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, and goop. The Potomac River became a little bit more goopy that day.

• 1:44:41Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah, it's pretty goopy already.

• 1:44:42Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, that's true. The Anacostia is goopy. The Potomac is beautiful, clear waters of the Shenandoah River. And the other river, I forget which one.

• 1:44:51Speaker 01

  What is it? For a brief time, it was made gloopier.

• 1:44:53Justin Roczniak?

  Yes.

• 1:44:54Liam McAnderson?

  Gloopier.

• 1:44:55Speaker 01

  By a bunch of Floridians. Well, just two, actually, in this instance.

• 1:44:59Justin Roczniak?

  Well, we have a segment on this podcast called Safety Third.

• 1:45:04Speaker 01

  Shake hands with danger.

• 1:45:08Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:45:10November Kelly?

  Hell, yeah. My dad had this car. I mean, not this exact car, but like this kind of similar type.

• 1:45:16Speaker 01

  Oh, is it an E28?

• 1:45:17November Kelly?

  Yeah, in silver as well.

• 1:45:21Speaker 01

  I'm looking.

• 1:45:21Justin Roczniak?

  I like the I like the BMW 2002s. Those are good. Yeah.

• 1:45:26Speaker 01

  Oh, I don't know. Maybe E28. No, I might not be getting my it's because anyway, okay, it's a Beamer of that era. It's E28 era ish. Comments, shout at me. It's fine.

• 1:45:39Justin Roczniak?

  Ahoy, November. Yar, Liam. G'day, Roz. Avast, Devon. And hello to the kid that likes the trains.

• 1:45:47Speaker 01

  Hey, I've found out recently I'm possibly the oldest person here.

• 1:45:52Justin Roczniak?

  I'm Pirate Jeff and I'm going to regale you with a tale of the time I was the scurvy dog on the front line of retail entertainment and commerce.

• 1:46:02Justin Roczniak?

  My time as an escape room host.

• 1:46:04Liam McAnderson?

  Oh no.

• 1:46:05Justin Roczniak?

  Ever told you my secret strategy for escape rooms?

• 1:46:09Liam McAnderson?

  Don't go.

• 1:46:10Speaker 01

  Just burst through the walls like the jug of.

• 1:46:13Justin Roczniak?

  No, you just don't go in in the first place, then you've already escaped.

• 1:46:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, that'll death. That works.

• 1:46:18Justin Roczniak?

  I've beaten every escape room.

• 1:46:26Justin Roczniak?

  Anyway, I worked in a multinational arcade and bowling corporation that had special chains of high end, we're gonna assume this is supposed to be barcades, but it says barcodes.

• 1:46:40Justin Roczniak?

  A licensed bowling alley that sells a premium experience.

• 1:46:44Liam McAnderson?

  Oh no.

• 1:46:46Justin Roczniak?

  That included.

• 1:46:46Speaker 01

  A brothel?

• 1:46:47Justin Roczniak?

  Two escape rooms.

• 1:46:49November Kelly?

  Escape from the bowling alley. Panic at the disco.

• 1:46:53Justin Roczniak?

  You get a, you get stuck in the pin machine.

• 1:46:59Speaker 01

  Now that's terrifying.

• 1:47:00Justin Roczniak?

  No, that is bad. I imagine those things can really mutilate you if you fuck up.

• 1:47:05November Kelly?

  Oh, I'm, I look forward to our like bowling machine mutilation safety third. W T Y P pod at gmail.com right then.

• 1:47:14Justin Roczniak?

  I got.

• 1:47:14Speaker 01

  Didn't we have a bowling machine safety third years ago? We, not me, I was just a lowly listener at the time. I'm sure you did.

• 1:47:22Justin Roczniak?

  Got sucked into the ball return.

• 1:47:24Liam McAnderson?

  I'll show you a ball return.

• 1:47:28Speaker 01

  Oh, here it is.

• 1:47:29Liam McAnderson?

  Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh.

• 1:47:32Justin Roczniak?

  One of these escape rooms was based on old pirate's tales and the other was based on the myth of Poseidon and the lost city of Atlantis. They were both rooms lined with polystyrene drywalls, complicated puzzle electronics that were handmade for the rooms, which all ran off a strawberry pie. Is that a new?

• 1:47:54Liam McAnderson?

  Raspberry pi. Yeah, I don't, that would be an error. I don't know.

• 1:47:59Justin Roczniak?

  And wired to work on a European power board, even though it was in Australia.

• 1:48:05November Kelly?

  Okay.

• 1:48:05Justin Roczniak?

  Management liked to run the room with the main lights off to make it harder. That also meant you couldn't see the trip hazards on the floor or really read the clues. The place was a fire hazard, so they built it right next to the fire exit just in case.

• 1:48:21November Kelly?

  Oh yeah, that makes it completely safe. Fine. Good. Yep. Okay.

• 1:48:24Justin Roczniak?

  Atlantis had a waterfall made out of a single line of hose and a fish tank pump.

• 1:48:30Justin Roczniak?

  It needed a chlorine pill in it every time we filled it up because the water would evaporate inside because the air conditioning was broken and caused black mold to grow in the walls.

• 1:48:40November Kelly?

  That's Jackie Wrong's house.

• 1:48:42Justin Roczniak?

  Patrons would either be drunk or eight years old, so they would just yank and tear at anything that might look like a clue. They were ripping lights out of their sockets and clawing like rats at puzzle boxes.

• 1:48:54November Kelly?

  Oh no. Incredible. Also really enjoyed yank and tear from the Kids Bob version of the Doom soundtrack.

• 1:49:03Justin Roczniak?

  I had to watch and monitor the progress on a screen with headphones on. So imagine having to listen to escape room audio for over four hours each shift. Children screaming at the most basic stimulation, adults traumatizing and yelling at their children. Having to listen to a moron solve a puzzle you know like the back of your hand. It drove me mad. I once got chastised by a manager in short pants that didn't like that I had evacuated the escape room when the fire alarm went off because the floor manager hadn't said to do that over the radio yet.

• 1:49:38November Kelly?

  Uh huh.

• 1:49:38Justin Roczniak?

  I eventually got fired when, after a long shift at work, I got drunk at the bar and decided to drive drunk on wagwan midnight, which is some kind of Japanese car game, I believe. I used my staff card to upgrade my BMW 2002 turbo and race other customers.

• 1:50:04November Kelly?

  What? I heard drive drunk and I'm like, okay, don't, not, not a fan of this, but now, now you tell me that this is how you drove drunk?

• 1:50:12Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 1:50:13November Kelly?

  You drove drunk on an arcade cabinet? That's, that's cool. Like doing the, actually, I'm not only am I good to drive, but like it makes me a better driver.

• 1:50:23Justin Roczniak?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:50:24November Kelly?

  Yeah.

• 1:50:27Justin Roczniak?

  They said I had stolen-

• 1:50:28Speaker 01

  The number of hours I played Driver 2 half cut, like, yeah, that's like, absolutely. Good stuff.

• 1:50:34Justin Roczniak?

  They said I had stolen fifty dollars worth of value from the company for using my staff card to play free games.

• 1:50:42Speaker 01

  What? Yeah, fuck them.

• 1:50:44November Kelly?

  No fun allowed.

• 1:50:46Justin Roczniak?

  Turns out later, they had criminally underpaid me for my work, so they had to pay out upwards of one thousand dollar re-dos. Which is what they call them in Australia.

• 1:50:56Liam McAnderson?

  Yes.

• 1:50:57Speaker 01

  Famously, yeah.

• 1:50:59Justin Roczniak?

  Yarg Boy now works in the dodgy world of exhibitions and event setup. Thanks for all your hard work, Pirate Jeff. P.S. Give November her goddamn mail.

• 1:51:11Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:51:12November Kelly?

  Yeah, that's real. That's real.

• 1:51:16Speaker 01

  Thanks Pirate Jeff.

• 1:51:18Justin Roczniak?

  Thank you Pirate Jeff.

• 1:51:19Liam McAnderson?

  Thank you Pirate Jeff.

• 1:51:20November Kelly?

  Getting lapped by a pirate in a BMW 2002 Turbo.

• 1:51:26Liam McAnderson?

  Yarrr. Yarrr. I love pirates.

• 1:51:29Justin Roczniak?

  That's the sound. That's the engine note.

• 1:51:30Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah.

• 1:51:34Liam McAnderson?

  Turbocharged.

• 1:51:35Speaker 01

  Really, really getting nervous to play it.

• 1:51:43Speaker 01

  Well, the people will be sending off in the comments about that, too. I'm really getting nervous to play Driver now. I just, I don't know why. It's reminding me of that game particularly, but uh-

• 1:51:50Justin Roczniak?

  The sound of the turbo dumping is like a parrot.

• 1:51:53Speaker 01

  Actually, maybe it was the mention of Havana so many times. That's maybe what it was. So, yeah. Cause you could drive around Havana in the first game, of course.

• 1:52:01Liam McAnderson?

  Take this video game to Havana. Yes.

• 1:52:04Justin Roczniak?

  Well, you're gonna have to, you know, to Air Florida and Flight Simulator first.

• 1:52:10Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah. All right. Let's get out of here under two hours.

• 1:52:13Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 1:52:14Speaker 01

  I know. Look at this. One hour fifty-eight forty-one seconds.

• 1:52:17Justin Roczniak?

  That was safety third.

• 1:52:22Justin Roczniak?

  Our next episode will be on Chernobyl. Does anyone have any commercials before we go?

• 1:52:27Liam McAnderson?

  Buy Gareth's book.

• 1:52:28November Kelly?

  Buy the book.

• 1:52:29Justin Roczniak?

  Buy the book. Buy the tickets to the tour.

• 1:52:31Speaker 01

  Buy tour tickets. Stay tuned for all exciting tour news that hasn't already come out. Actually, I don't know if there is any exciting tour news coming up, but the tour, buy the tickets. Listen to all of our respective many podcasts, of which there are dozens. And have a nice time. Don't fly Air Florida, which you can't anymore.

• 1:52:49November Kelly?

  Never use Reddit.

• 1:52:51Liam McAnderson?

  Never use Reddit. Yeah.

• 1:52:53Speaker 01

  Never use Reddit and also always.

• 1:52:55Justin Roczniak?

  Never go on Reddit.

• 1:52:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's it. Yeah, exactly. Just always never go on Reddit.

• 1:52:58Liam McAnderson?

  Good night, everybody.

• 1:52:59Justin Roczniak?

  Night. Good night, everyone.

• 1:53:01Speaker 01

  Good night.