Episode 181: Swissair Flight 111

turns out there is actually a "plane falls out of the sky" button on your infotainment system, it just takes a while to work check out maya's new podcast https://x.com/qotmpod?s=21and maya's internet webzone: https://mayawalkwith.me/ LINK TO BUY A VAN FOR LIAM’S COWORKER https://helphopelive.org/campaign/24216/ Our Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/wtyppod/ Send us stuff! our address:Well There's Your Podcasting CompanyPO Box 26929 Philadelphia, PA 19134DO NOT SEND US LETTER BOMBS thanks in advance in the commercial: Local Forecast - Elevator Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

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. Okay.

• 0:04November Kelly?

  Look at that, I work out one day and all of a sudden my palms don't hurt from clapping anymore.

• 0:12Justin Roczniak?

  Alright, alright, alright, we're going now.

• 0:14Liam McAnderson?

  Are you okay?

• 0:15Justin Roczniak?

  Am I okay?

• 0:16Liam McAnderson?

  Are you okay?

• 0:17November Kelly?

  I'm seeing a beautiful vision of the 1990s. I'm sorry you're not okay, what's going on?

• 0:21Justin Roczniak?

  Oh, no, I'm fine. I was, I was just saying that as a rhetorical gesture.

• 0:27November Kelly?

  I see, I see.

• 0:28Justin Roczniak?

  Yes.

• 0:28Liam McAnderson?

  I was worried.

• 0:29November Kelly?

  Hmm.

• 0:30Liam McAnderson?

  As I have to be because you're my best pal.

• 0:32Justin Roczniak?

  No, the big issue right now is that I've cleaned up enough of my office that I can lean my chair back, but it leans back farther.

• 0:41Liam McAnderson?

  That's the worst thing you've ever invented. Yeah, cuz like, you, Ross and I have the same chair, so I, he's on the video, but I am, so let me demonstrate something for you.

• 0:49Liam McAnderson?

  Oh, boy!

• 0:49November Kelly?

  I'm, I'm willing to get competitive about this or indeed anything, let's fucking go.

• 0:54Justin Roczniak?

  Hold on, hold on, we gotta, we gotta. Ah, shit.

• 0:58November Kelly?

  Go down, okay.

• 1:01November Kelly?

  Okay, okay, right, we're good.

• 1:03Justin Roczniak?

  No, these, these things, these things really need a limiter on.

• 1:06November Kelly?

  This is, this is stunt podcasting.

• 1:08Justin Roczniak?

  There's probably a way to do that, anyway.

• 1:11Liam McAnderson?

  Oh, god, oh, fuck, I crushed my balls.

• 1:14November Kelly?

  This is, after this long, it took us, uh, this long to pivot to video, but the pivot to video is a little like, fu- like, four-minute thing ahead of the episode that is just us reclining our chairs too far.

• 1:28November Kelly?

  Oh my god, I missed this. Yeah, yeah, me too.

• 1:32Justin Roczniak?

  Here, here, here we are. Um, alright, let's just, let's just, this is another man reclining his chair, but that one probably doesn't.

• 1:40November Kelly?

  His doesn't recline very far.

• 1:41Liam McAnderson?

  Before we get into the, before we get into the news, I have an announcement to make.

• 1:45November Kelly?

  Okay.

• 1:46Liam McAnderson?

  First to praise the glorious hogs and then berate them for not doing enough.

• 1:49November Kelly?

  Hmm.

• 1:50Liam McAnderson?

  Uh, so you glorious hogs raised about $4,000 for my coworker's grandson. He has muscular dystrophy, he needs a wheelchair van. We're up to $4,666, hail Satan.

• 2:02Liam McAnderson?

  But we need more money.

• 2:03November Kelly?

  Hail Satan.

• 2:05Liam McAnderson?

  And you're gonna give us more money. So I'll put that in the video description.

• 2:08November Kelly?

  Perfect, yeah.

• 2:08Liam McAnderson?

  Okay, let's get into this reclining male. Are these are these Cas PortaPro headphones?

• 2:13November Kelly?

  You you have been watching too much too much dank pods, I think.

• 2:17Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah.

• 2:17November Kelly?

  To be able to recognize that off the dome.

• 2:19Justin Roczniak?

  I'm interested in what's going on with the tie.

• 2:22November Kelly?

  Hmm.

• 2:22Liam McAnderson?

  I want this tie. It's a shame that this man is going to explode and die.

• 2:26November Kelly?

  It's it's very whimsical. You know, the 90s were a whimsical tie sort of time.

• 2:30Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah, the fort, the fort, the what is it, the third gen Taurus with the little, the little, the little, little cute little ass.

• 2:36November Kelly?

  Hmm.

• 2:36Liam McAnderson?

  What I'm saying is I want to fuck the Ford Taurus.

• 2:39November Kelly?

  You have been watching too much dank pods.

• 2:42Justin Roczniak?

  Hello and welcome to Well, There's Your Problem. It's a podcast about engineering disasters with slides.

• 2:50Liam McAnderson?

  And definitely not fucking up my Taurus.

• 2:52Justin Roczniak?

  I'm the person who's talking right now. My pronouns are he and him. Okay, go.

• 2:57November Kelly?

  It's the podcast where we plug two podcasts before our own. I'm November Kelly. I'm the person who's talking right now. My pronouns are she and her. Yay, Liam.

• 3:04Liam McAnderson?

  Yay, Liam. Hi, I'm Liam McAnderson. My pronouns are he, him, his. I'm doing that now.

• 3:09November Kelly?

  Oh, god damn it. You you outwoke me? You you come into my own home and outwoke me?

• 3:14Justin Roczniak?

  My house on the day of my daughter's wedding.

• 3:17November Kelly?

  And I hope that your first child will be a non-binary child.

• 3:23Liam McAnderson?

  Hey, man. Give me 30 seconds and I'll get up to speed with any pronouns.

• 3:29November Kelly?

  I did I did an uncomfortably close to Bernie Sanders Luca Brazzi there. I'm not thrilled about how that came out.

• 3:36Justin Roczniak?

  99% of the pronouns are used by 1% of Americans. Both of me, Bernie Sanders, we're gonna redistribute the pronouns.

• 3:49Justin Roczniak?

  Go to www.bernysanders.com.

• 3:51Liam McAnderson?

  I am no longer asking for your pronouns.

• 3:56November Kelly?

  We have a guest.

• 3:57Liam McAnderson?

  We have a guest.

• 3:58Justin Roczniak?

  We have a guest.

• 3:59Speaker 03

  Hello. My name is Maya Ventura. My pronouns are it, it's, and she, her, which is four, so I've now taken that.

• 4:06November Kelly?

  God damn.

• 4:06Speaker 03

  That crown.

• 4:09Speaker 03

  I run a newsletter. It's called Laser Chronicles. Some of you read it. Most of you probably know me from the last time I was on.

• 4:16November Kelly?

  Yeah, but welcome back. I mean, pretty close to consecutive guests.

• 4:20Justin Roczniak?

  Chronologically very recent.

• 4:22Liam McAnderson?

  Maya, Maya.

• 4:23November Kelly?

  Yeah.

• 4:24Liam McAnderson?

  You have a, you have a podcast to plug too, bud.

• 4:26Speaker 03

  I do. Yes, I was gonna do that at the end and I forgot. So thank you. I'm also.

• 4:30Liam McAnderson?

  Figured you would.

• 4:32Speaker 03

  I'm also, I also host Queens of the Monsters, which is a podcast about Kaiju films.

• 4:37November Kelly?

  Hell, ooh.

• 4:38Speaker 03

  Which has been dormant for a year and is going to hopefully be back up before this episode comes out. But if not, it will be immediately afterwards. So.

• 4:47Speaker 03

  Looking forward to that.

• 4:48Justin Roczniak?

  Hell, yeah. So what we see on the screen in front of us is a man. A man who is relaxing in a luxurious seat on an airliner.

• 4:58November Kelly?

  This is, this is like peak 90 zero vibes. Look at the arm holding the not iPad in front of him like.

• 5:05Justin Roczniak?

  Oh, yeah.

• 5:06November Kelly?

  That's so overbuilt. Like now that would be a flimsy little like flex thing, but that's like built in there like a throttle quadrant. It's like.

• 5:13Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, that thing, that thing folds into the armrest. That thing is like, you know, it's made out of metal, like a man, a person had to make that as opposed to an iPad, which I assume just sorts, sort of, you know.

• 5:24November Kelly?

  Well, a child had to make that.

• 5:25Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, someone, someone, uh, so someone thought about it and it came into being through like AI or something. I don't know.

• 5:33November Kelly?

  Before, before all of the label was externalized and abstracted from you.

• 5:36Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, exactly. Exactly. This was made by, uh, you know, a horrible man in an Airbus factory.

• 5:43November Kelly?

  It's true. This was made by a horrible Frenchman.

• 5:45Speaker 03

  It's like, uh, AMG doing the one man, one engine, but it's just one, one angry, uh, striking French worker.

• 5:52November Kelly?

  Hmm.

• 5:53Speaker 03

  One shitty little tablet thing.

• 5:55November Kelly?

  He's got, he's got a tiny little bottle of champagne. Uh, he's drinking that champagne out of a.

• 6:00Justin Roczniak?

  Okay, so today, today we're going to talk about when entertainment systems go wrong. Swissair Flight 111.

• 6:10Speaker 03

  Well, hang on, we're, we pivoted to videos. Let me do this real quick.

• 6:14Liam McAnderson?

  Why entertainment god naughty, god wild?

• 6:17November Kelly?

  No, no, I'm not fond of that. Also, also, you're not in the thing because we just have the video before the slideshow starts because we're not getting devs like cut in our own video at this point. Like, that would be a-

• 6:29Liam McAnderson?

  It's stuck like this, there's nothing I can do.

• 6:30November Kelly?

  Okay, okay. The expression, it's a, it's a, it's a source of pain. Like, it's-

• 6:34Justin Roczniak?

  We'd have to get like a full, we'd have to get like a full streaming setup, right? Where like everything goes on. I have to get another monitor.

• 6:43Liam McAnderson?

  You have two, what?

• 6:44Justin Roczniak?

  That, no, I have to get another one.

• 6:47November Kelly?

  It's just, everything, everything about this podcast somehow always becomes more work and yet we never release it anymore consistently.

• 6:57Liam McAnderson?

  Nope, we never will, fuck you.

• 6:58Justin Roczniak?

  Nah, unlikely, unlikely. And then I have to get, you know, you know, we have to get four extra inputs, one for, one for Liam, one for Nova, one for me, one for the guest, one for activated windows.

• 7:11November Kelly?

  At this point, at this point, we just buy some kind of hyper yacht and we fly us all out to international waters.

• 7:18Liam McAnderson?

  We could probably expense a hyper yacht, we have a good account.

• 7:21November Kelly?

  Yeah, to, to record this in person, you know, I say international waters because like, obviously I'm not going to the US anytime soon because they will find the JD Vance memes in my phone and send me to El Salvador.

• 7:32Justin Roczniak?

  Oh, right, yeah, I forgot they were doing that. We didn't put that in the goddamn news because first we have to do the goddamn news.

• 7:40November Kelly?

  Recursive.

• 7:41Liam McAnderson?

  That was a tremendous-

• 7:44Justin Roczniak?

  Hold on, let me get that.

• 7:49Justin Roczniak?

  There we go, there we go.

• 7:53Justin Roczniak?

  Um, Zoran Mamdami.

• 7:56November Kelly?

  Mm-hmm, M-A-M-D-A-N-I. Let's fucking go.

• 8:01Justin Roczniak?

  Along with Brad Lander, did the RRR not to not to suspenders dance to Andrew Cuomo and killed him?

• 8:11November Kelly?

  Andrew Cuomo has died. He has been killed.

• 8:14Justin Roczniak?

  Andrew Cuomo has been killed.

• 8:16November Kelly?

  And in the words of Brad Lander, "Good fucking riddance."

• 8:19Justin Roczniak?

  Thank god.

• 8:20November Kelly?

  Yeah.

• 8:21Liam McAnderson?

  God. But who is gonna... No, I don't want to do it.

• 8:24November Kelly?

  I'm gonna, I have died.

• 8:27Justin Roczniak?

  Who is going to bring home the ZD?

• 8:32November Kelly?

  So, I get to talk about this. Bless my stupid puppy life. I get to talk about this on three separate podcasts, one of which is entirely mayor-focused. We've talked about this on Trash Future. We talked about all the political implications of that. We're gonna talk about the mayoral implications. Mostly for this one, I'm just soaking up the vibes, because the vibes were immaculate.

• 8:53Justin Roczniak?

  The vibes are really good. Everyone loves Zoran. Zoran is so good. Everything about him is positive. This man has never had a negative vibe in his life.

• 9:05November Kelly?

  No, no, he's amazing. And like, the thing I was saying on TF as well is that like, there are people like this everywhere, right? Like, I don't want to do hero worship in the sense of like, I want to do great man theory to New York City, right?

• 9:22Justin Roczniak?

  No, no, I'm gonna start a cult of personality around this guy. I think that's a good idea.

• 9:27November Kelly?

  By the standards of politicians, yeah, he's unusually charismatic and like, everything like that. He's very good at what he did. I don't think he put a foot wrong in the campaign, but...

• 9:37Justin Roczniak?

  I think he should become Stalin.

• 9:39November Kelly?

  I agree. I agree completely. I think governor, senator, president, after we change a couple of amendments, but like, and listen, I'll be proud to fight and die for him in American Civil War II.

• 9:52Justin Roczniak?

  We could make him an Ayatollah.

• 9:54November Kelly?

  I don't know if that... Anyway.

• 9:57Liam McAnderson?

  That's not gonna resonate with the Midwest voters, man.

• 9:59November Kelly?

  The thing I was gonna say is, you know somebody like this, or you know someone who knows someone like this, and what this is, is a success of organizing, right? Of having particularly DSA NYC, being able to create a candidate and support a candidate like this. Because a few years ago, he was, you know, he was doing like, uh, like... flitting and stuff, right?

• 10:22Justin Roczniak?

  Yes.

• 10:23November Kelly?

  And that's, that's hard work on his part, but that's hard work on everybody's part. And, you know, I'm, I'm certain he would tell you the same thing, right? So it's not just, and like, I think we're allowed to have some hesitation about electoralism. I'm sure in office, he's gonna do some things by nature of being in office that are gonna be bad. But it's, it's like, it's strategic, right? And you're allowed to be happy about this. You can live out. You have permission to live out.

• 10:49Liam McAnderson?

  And the worst people in the world are real mad about it, which is not how you work.

• 10:52Speaker 03

  That, that's the important part in all this, I would say, certainly as far as I've experienced.

• 10:58November Kelly?

  Andrew Cuomo is successfully sent back to the suburbs for one.

• 11:01Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, this is true. Even those of us who are fucking technocratic nerds who have concerns about free buses. Pretty happy about this result.

• 11:10November Kelly?

  You just, you just don't like him because he's a bus guy and you're a train guy. And those are like two houses alike in dignity, you know?

• 11:16Justin Roczniak?

  Shut up.

• 11:24November Kelly?

  But yeah, so he's, he's now got a like, because the other thing about this is it's been structured in such a way that he's having to fight his way through increasing levels of creeps. Because now he's got to beat Eric Adams and like whatever kind of insane third party write-in candidate that Bill Ackman tries to organize.

• 11:44Justin Roczniak?

  Oh, yeah. And, and there's a GOP candidate as well.

• 11:48November Kelly?

  Isn't it Slua again?

• 11:50Justin Roczniak?

  Slua, yeah.

• 11:52Speaker 03

  They didn't have a primary. They just nominated him by acclamation.

• 11:56Justin Roczniak?

  Incredible. This is, this is fucking.

• 11:58Speaker 03

  It's like St. Peter, yeah.

• 12:00Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, this, this is like centrist infighting. I can't believe these centrists are like so fucking disorganized.

• 12:05November Kelly?

  You gotta, you gotta be glib. You gotta be smug. If anybody says any shit about Zoran, you gotta like, uh, get completely like peaceful and be a tiffic in your expression. And you gotta hit him with a vote blue no matter who.

• 12:18Justin Roczniak?

  Yes, exactly.

• 12:19Speaker 03

  The thing about the centrist infighting is that my, my understanding from what I have heard from people who worked in New York, I used to be an organizer, I should probably clarify. From what I've heard in New York, this is basically what happened to Andrew Cuomo, because Democratic voters sort of told establishment officials, people in power, party officials, whatever, that they didn't like any of the candidates like towards the end of last year. So they were like, okay, we're going to give you Andrew Cuomo. And then they gave them Andrew Cuomo. And this is where we are now.

• 12:49Justin Roczniak?

  This is, I, I, it's amazing because like all the other candidates just, you know, everyone united and was like, okay, okay. Whoever you vote for, just don't vote for Andrew Cuomo. This was like a non, like just a don't vote for Andrew Cuomo election. And everyone was pretty chummy, which is pretty funny, which is apparently something you can do with a ranked choice of voting. Yeah. I don't know. We got to expand this system. They'll never let it happen again.

• 13:14Speaker 03

  Please, please let us have it in Philly. I am so tired of Cheryl Parker.

• 13:18November Kelly?

  As, as far as the like Cuomo campaign as well, like if you think about it this way, he came out with two messages, right? Message number one, I know it's against the odds, but all 13 women are lying.

• 13:32Justin Roczniak?

  Number two, I stand with Israel.

• 13:34November Kelly?

  Exactly, exactly. Right. And, and, and the thing is like Eric Adams and whoever else is going to be able to like, uh, go into fucking Zoran's old tweets where he's like, defund the police or whatever. And you have that argument now, but he didn't have to have it previously because the argument that he was having instead is actually, I'm not a member of the Al Qasam Brigades. And that's an insane and racist thing to say about me. Like, and it was so obvious to everybody, like, and it just, it completely backfired. And I think you have to look at this, apart from anything else, is this like seismic shift in terms of like. Israel and Palestine in the American like electoral calculus.

• 14:17Speaker 03

  One of the more interesting things was the day after the election, but all of the New York conservatives tried to try to tie him to nine 11 in order to do racism, but like

• 14:25Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah, they were just like, America forgot. It was like

• 14:28Justin Roczniak?

  They did find his passport in the rubble.

• 14:33November Kelly?

  The problem with politicians, right? Sometimes you look at them and you're like, you've never done anything interesting in your life. You've, you've advanced too early, too, too fast and too high. And you're just like, yeah, if he was doing nine 11 at the age of 10, you know, it's like, what hope is there for the rest of us, you know? Nine 11 at 10, mayor of New York City, a year younger than me. And it's like, I'm, I'm having a midlife crisis, probably.

• 14:55Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, I, I, if, if, yeah, I, I wish I had done nine 11 at 10.

• 15:03Liam McAnderson?

  You were 10 when nine 11, no, you were eight when nine 11 happened.

• 15:05November Kelly?

  I was eight. Which episode of the podcast should we put on in the holding room? Just so you can understand why you're getting sent to ourselves.

• 15:12Justin Roczniak?

  I'm a, I'm a US citizen. I'm allowed to do nine 11.

• 15:16Liam McAnderson?

  National board, dude.

• 15:17November Kelly?

  I'm not allowed to be on the podcast with you saying that you're allowed to do nine 11 is the problem.

• 15:22Justin Roczniak?

  I have a constitutional right to do nine 11.

• 15:27Liam McAnderson?

  Why am I being detained? I know my rights. I know my rights.

• 15:31November Kelly?

  Day one, not even of the Zoran administration, but the Zoran nomination. And you're like, getting a bit ahead of it. Like I have the right to do nine 11.

• 15:41Speaker 03

  It's not even day one. The, the RCV thing is like next week.

• 15:44Justin Roczniak?

  Shut up.

• 15:46Liam McAnderson?

  We're a man, you don't know.

• 15:50Speaker 03

  It's like, but like the interesting thing is that of course, the New York conservatives pulled on nine 11, but like the average conservative everywhere else, including the executive branches, let's use the nine 11 guy these days.

• 16:00Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 16:01Speaker 03

  So that didn't, that didn't work out too good.

• 16:02November Kelly?

  So I mean, it's, it's also, um, like, they're also trying to suggest that he's going to do Sharia law in New York City.

• 16:11Speaker 03

  That one.

• 16:13Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, let's go.

• 16:16November Kelly?

  Better than the NYPD, probably.

• 16:17Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 16:18November Kelly?

  I haven't checked, but if we, if we can do like the woke Sharia, if we can institute that, then let's fucking go, you know?

• 16:27Speaker 03

  I, I, yeah, I would support woke Sharia at this point. Why not? Fuck it.

• 16:31Justin Roczniak?

  Everyone has to have, everyone has to dye their hair. Everyone's gonna have to get a septum piercing.

• 16:39November Kelly?

  You actually, listen, you are allowed not to have neo pronouns, but you just have to pay a tax for it. It's a small thing. It's like a formality, you know?

• 16:53November Kelly?

  Yeah, so I'm, I'm, I'm really happy. There is of course always the scope. This is a, if you have the right to do nine 11, right? I as a leftist always have the right to like piss and moan about anything and like ruin anybody's day. And so there is a theoretical way where you're like, ah, this is a delictualism. It's a distraction. It's not gonna do anything. It's like, you know, it's, it's taking people away from burning down the Walmarts or whatever, right? And if he socializes the Walmarts, then there won't be even any point in burning down the Walmarts.

• 17:21Speaker 03

  So that's a good point.

• 17:22Justin Roczniak?

  That's horrible. That's horrible.

• 17:25November Kelly?

  So I, I guess you could do that, but the thing is if you're doing that, you are um, sort of more radical than the Communist Party of India brackets Marxist, which congratulated him today on having, on having been nominated. So.

• 17:40Justin Roczniak?

  And so I only subscribe to Communist Party of India brackets Maoist.

• 17:47Speaker 03

  I believe there are several of those last time I checked, or at least several.

• 17:51November Kelly?

  More all the time. It's like atomic decay, you know?

• 17:53Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 17:54Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 17:55November Kelly?

  Yeah. So I, I obviously very happy to hear that like every New Yorker who wears glasses uh, is gonna be killed. And like an army of halal cart guys is gonna be sort of like armed and deputized to enforce the woke Sharia.

• 18:08Justin Roczniak?

  I was about to say, they're gonna, there, there's gonna be, there's gonna be state-run grocery stores and you have to, you're gonna have to go there. And you're gonna have to purchase deli meats.

• 18:18November Kelly?

  It's gonna be like a reasonable amount of money. Yeah, it's, they're gonna make you do that like in Communist Cuba.

• 18:23Justin Roczniak?

  They're gonna nationalize Boar's Head.

• 18:28Speaker 03

  Considering all the hysteria, that's probably not a bad idea.

• 18:34November Kelly?

  Yeah, so I mean.

• 18:34Justin Roczniak?

  People are gonna have to smuggle in Deats and Watts and Deli meats.

• 18:38November Kelly?

  This is, this is the first time that I've felt good about things politically, anything politically for a minute. And I know it's, it's like different because I live in a different country. I'm, you know, thousands of miles away. It doesn't affect me directly, but I'm happy for my friends in New York. I'm happy for my, my friends in America because like if it is possible to learn any lessons from this, I have total faith that the Democratic Party will fail to do that, right? But if they do, if they surprise me, then the rewards are great, right? Because people like it when you believe in things and they like the policies. And if you just advocate on that basis, then you do very well. I know it's completely foreign to everything the Democratic Party wants to do anywhere, but learn the fucking lesson, guys.

• 19:19Justin Roczniak?

  Maybe this finally collapses the Democratic Party.

• 19:23Speaker 03

  No, that, that, that blood machine, uh, blood machine never break, right?

• 19:27November Kelly?

  It's like, do you want abundance, the thing that is very well thought of by a bunch of columnists and fails all the time? Or do you want this, right? So.

• 19:35Justin Roczniak?

  Well, I think, I think, I think the abundance guys like Zoron.

• 19:38November Kelly?

  Yeah, he doesn't like him back though, which is really shocking. It's like, why, why wouldn't you follow me back? It's like, they're trying to get on Chappa.

• 19:46Speaker 03

  Matt Iglesias doesn't like him and he's like, as far as I can tell, the head, like head abundance guy these days.

• 19:50November Kelly?

  The abundance pope.

• 19:52Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, Matt Iglesias turned himself into the abundance guy when I think the, the actual abundance guys seemed to be a little nicer. But Matt Iglesias is now the face of the movement and he's the worst guy imaginable.

• 20:04Speaker 03

  Yeah, they had, they had their, they had a weird fucking conference in DC, uh, like a couple of months ago. And it was genuinely the most surreal thing I've ever seen, including all the times I've worked in politics.

• 20:14November Kelly?

  Yeah. Yeah. So good things are possible. Uh, I liked Realism is back on the menu. Uh, wolf hell.

• 20:20Speaker 03

  That's true.

• 20:21November Kelly?

  Like, it's, it's, it's all good. Um, and I, I, I don't know how that translates to a British context other than fuck, maybe we'll join the Green Party. I don't know.

• 20:30Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. Speaking of good things being possible. Uh.

• 20:35November Kelly?

  That's, is, are we, wow, okay.

• 20:37Justin Roczniak?

  We bombed Iran and it didn't do shit.

• 20:41November Kelly?

  Right.

• 20:41Liam McAnderson?

  That's true.

• 20:42November Kelly?

  Where, where are you articulating the good thing here? Like, is, is the good thing that Iran appears to have, like, weathered being bombed by the US Air Force?

• 20:52Liam McAnderson?

  We've knocked a door in, apparently.

• 20:54Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, we, we like, you know, sort of, uh, again, there was a, a sound in the bunker.

• 20:59Liam McAnderson?

  Some kind?

• 21:00Justin Roczniak?

  There is a sound in the bunker that sounded like the upstairs neighbor's cat jumping off a table.

• 21:06November Kelly?

  All it cost was like $2 trillion and like 18 hours of flying time for 100 aircraft.

• 21:12Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, I was about to say, this is like a hundred and something million dollar operation.

• 21:16Liam McAnderson?

  Being like, well, how come if we bombed Iran, the, the B2, uh, took 36 hours to do it, but I can take a flight from and it's just like.

• 21:26Justin Roczniak?

  It's because of Flat Earth.

• 21:29Liam McAnderson?

  They were just like, no, they got it confused with the B-50.

• 21:31November Kelly?

  Well, the problem, the, the problem in this guy's, and the reason, the reason why there's possibly been not much damage is because of the opposite of Flat Earth, which is Pointy Earth.

• 21:41Liam McAnderson?

  Uh, yes, the mountain.

• 21:42November Kelly?

  Yeah.

• 21:43Liam McAnderson?

  Born around, raised in a cave, nukes and fucking is all I crave.

• 21:46November Kelly?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I mean, I, I think it's, because we're doing this podcast, obviously, uh, the, the goddamn news has never been more overtaken by events like fucking World War III almost started while we were out there for a minute.

• 21:56Justin Roczniak?

  We gotta wait another couple of months before doing an Oops All News.

• 22:00November Kelly?

  Yeah, yeah, but we, we, we sort of like, um, ended up with Israel trying to start a war with Iran and drag the US into it. And then Trump agreeing to like bomb the side of a mountain, um, and then getting really mad at everyone involved, um, which is.

• 22:19Liam McAnderson?

  I did a good job.

• 22:20November Kelly?

  Yeah. First time, first time you got like a president dropping, uh, the word fuck on a like live broadcast, which was cool.

• 22:29Liam McAnderson?

  No, Biden already did it when he was VP. I guess he was VP, not president.

• 22:33November Kelly?

  Oh yeah, you're right. Yeah.

• 22:35Speaker 03

  This is a big fucking deal. Yeah.

• 22:36November Kelly?

  Big fucking deal. Yeah.

• 22:37Speaker 03

  But there's, I will say, there's a lot of people who are like, the, the thing about him saying that he wants peace after bombing is obviously illogical and just a diversion. But like, no, Donald Trump is very much this stupid.

• 22:49November Kelly?

  Yeah, he is. Yeah. Thank you for your attention to this matter.

• 22:53Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 22:55November Kelly?

  But yeah, so, I mean.

• 22:57Justin Roczniak?

  We're, we're all gonna throw a few bombs at each other and we're gonna shut up afterwards, right? This is like, you know, a stupid fight you had when you were drunk after a night at the bar.

• 23:08November Kelly?

  I'm kind of, I'm kind of.

• 23:10Justin Roczniak?

  That was pretty dumb.

• 23:11November Kelly?

  And now, now, after having done this and after having been sort of like bombed a little bit in return, Israel are like, okay, well, that was cool. Now we're going back to the genocide in Gaza.

• 23:21Speaker 03

  Right. They literally said that.

• 23:23Justin Roczniak?

  This is true. Yeah.

• 23:24Speaker 03

  I guess so. The nuke wasn't that big a deal.

• 23:26November Kelly?

  Apparently not. No. And I mean, I, I hold out hope for Trump getting frustrated and petty and doing a kind of like Zelensky style humiliation to Netanyahu, but I, that would, that would be cool, but I'm not holding my breath.

• 23:40Justin Roczniak?

  Be pretty cool. Yeah.

• 23:43November Kelly?

  J D Vance hitting him with the, have you even said thank you once?

• 23:46Speaker 03

  I do like the idea, uh, but I read.

• 23:50Justin Roczniak?

  They throw his dirty laundry at him. Like the literal dirty laundry he brings each time.

• 23:59Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, I, I don't know. This, this, this struck me as like an extremely funny thing when it was happening, when it was like, oh, we bombed Iran. It was like, okay, you know, the first five minutes you looked at, he like, oh, this is horrifying. Then you realize what they bombed and it's like, oh, they tried to bomb the thing that's inside a mountain.

• 24:16November Kelly?

  Yeah.

• 24:17Speaker 03

  Genius.

• 24:19November Kelly?

  The, the non-mountain bombing is bad, but at least now it seems to have kind of, like, come to an end for the moment. Nothing new to say about Israel being a kind of like, dangerously genocidal, war-mongering state, right? Which is a threat to, at this point, global security.

• 24:41November Kelly?

  And the, the sole check on that is a real estate developer from Queens getting mad at them. So, that's cool.

• 24:48Speaker 03

  I will say the Islamic Republic of Iran are the most patient people on earth, I think at this

• 24:52Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 24:52Speaker 03

  They have earned an award for that, certainly. Because this is, of course, now the second time that they've been bombed. The first time they just kind of sent the drones and did nothing else. And then this time, they, the largest, the most warmongering country in the world bombed them. So they just kind of sent the drones and not much else.

• 25:10Justin Roczniak?

  Well, they're still trying to figure out how to kill SpongeBob.

• 25:14Speaker 03

  That's true. That's a good point. I didn't think of that.

• 25:16November Kelly?

  When, when they bombed that one US base, Trump said one of the funnier things he's ever said, which is just by way of arranging this, where they're like, they called ahead, right? To be like, hey, can we bomb your base? Yeah. Is, is, is like, one okay?

• 25:31Justin Roczniak?

  Hey, when's a good time? When can we drop a bomb? And Trump's like, oh, you know, about, you know, 1pm. What's up with you? And, you know, he's like twirling the quarter of the phone around.

• 25:44Speaker 03

  So how's, doing anything, Lynn?

• 25:46November Kelly?

  It, it, it's just, it's really funny. The like, remaining kind of command of the like Iranian armed forces are just like, all of their colleagues are getting like effortlessly murdered with their families. And they're like, you know what? We're gonna have to escalate this a bit. I'm gonna move to the next chapter of this book by this guy, Bodriar. And we're gonna like, we're really gonna sort this out. And I call the Americans and ask if I can bomb that base.

• 26:16Speaker 03

  We, we do conceivably have better negotiations, standpoints with Iran right now than we do Israel.

• 26:22November Kelly?

  Yeah.

• 26:23Speaker 03

  Let's, yeah, that's.

• 26:25November Kelly?

  The, the joke I always tell about this is, I, I came up with this when it was the Soleimani assassination, and it's still true, that like.

• 26:32Speaker 03

  I forgot about that.

• 26:32November Kelly?

  Being, being a kind of Iranian decision maker is like, you've trained for years to become a kind of chess grandmaster, and you're up against a guy who keeps eating your pizzas, right?

• 26:43Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 26:46Speaker 03

  No, that seems perfectly reasonable.

• 26:48Liam McAnderson?

  Spit it out.

• 26:51Speaker 03

  I will say, whenever this happened, I was watching the social network and it took about five minutes before I put my phone down and kept watching the movie. So that was, you know, that whenever this is the closest we can come to a major global conflict, I would say it's interesting, but the fact that one's party, which is Israel, wants to make a major global conflict and can't do it. So, you know, that's very amusing to me. I don't want to say nothing ever happens, but like Iran are very patient people and they might want to make nothing ever happen.

• 27:20November Kelly?

  I feel like you've kind of, I feel like you've kind of guaranteed an Iranian nuclear weapon on a long enough timeline.

• 27:26Speaker 03

  Well, we did that as soon as we scrapped the JCPOA.

• 27:29November Kelly?

  That's true. That is true.

• 27:31Speaker 03

  Yeah. So, you know, that's not the really new there.

• 27:33Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. Yeah. You know, I mean, at this point, you know, the biggest threat right now is the Israelis getting really mad at nothing and doing the Samson option.

• 27:43November Kelly?

  Hmm. Cool. Yeah.

• 27:44Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. You know, I don't know. They probably, they'll probably do that at some point. You know, they put out all these videos of like, oh, Iran is going to nuke Paris and then they nuke Paris.

• 27:56Speaker 03

  Yeah. Honestly, honestly, get along with it. Maybe it'll kill some of the rats.

• 28:02Speaker 03

  I've already seen the mod Alyssa. Just get rid of Paris. It's fine.

• 28:05November Kelly?

  Size of postage stamp.

• 28:08Speaker 03

  It was bigger than I thought because I had been told by everyone that it was smaller than I would think it would be. And then it was bigger than I thought it would be because I had like internalized that so much. That's a good managing expectations, okay?

• 28:21Justin Roczniak?

  I've been to the Frasier Gallery. I know how small paintings can be. They can be really small.

• 28:26Speaker 03

  I remember I was at the V and A with my dad and they have this gigantic like royal portraits that are like 12 feet tall. And my dad like grabbed a curator and was like, why is it so big?

• 28:39November Kelly?

  I just don't, I don't want Israel to nuke Paris because my ex lives there and I'm fond of my ex. Can we negotiate on this? Can we nuke somewhere that I'm probably never gonna go like Stockholm?

• 28:49Liam McAnderson?

  Oh, they can't nuke Stockholm.

• 28:51Justin Roczniak?

  Oh, sure. Leon must be destroyed.

• 28:53Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah.

• 28:55November Kelly?

  Uh, do we know anyone in Frankfurt? This is, this is a global podcast. There's an old Russian joke, right, which came up again in the, um, in the, in the context of the Ukraine war, where the Russian generals are like, okay, well, we gotta bomb the West. Where do we bomb? And like, we're gonna bomb Paris. And it's like, no, my wife likes to go shopping there. Uh, okay, we're gonna bomb London. You can't bomb London. My kid goes to school there. Okay, well, we're gonna, we're gonna bomb, fuck, I don't know, like Geneva. All my money's there. And they, they argue about this for like an hour and eventually they're like, all right, fine. We bomb Veronish, which is in, in Russia.

• 29:30November Kelly?

  Cause it's the one place that none of them care about, right?

• 29:33Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 29:35Justin Roczniak?

  We're gonna, folks, folks, we're gonna bomb Moline, uh, Davenport.

• 29:42Liam McAnderson?

  I wanna go to Davenport.

• 29:43Justin Roczniak?

  What are, what are, what are the other, what are the Quad Cities?

• 29:45Liam McAnderson?

  Get it over with.

• 29:48Speaker 03

  I mean, we could, I mean, they could always take the, the funniest option and nuke Moscow. And just like, total agents of chaos.

• 29:57Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, let's see what happens. Yeah.

• 30:00November Kelly?

  Is Israel bored of not getting the attention nukes Kiev and Moscow simultaneously?

• 30:05Justin Roczniak?

  Simultaneously.

• 30:06Speaker 03

  That's true. They could do that.

• 30:07Liam McAnderson?

  All right, feel that out, dickheads.

• 30:09Justin Roczniak?

  Yang Yang as well.

• 30:12November Kelly?

  The one, the one option, the one country on earth deterrence doesn't work against.

• 30:19November Kelly?

  Aside, aside from Poland.

• 30:21Justin Roczniak?

  Oh, yes, obviously. It's because they have solidarity.

• 30:26November Kelly?

  That's right.

• 30:26Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 30:27Speaker 03

  That's true.

• 30:27Justin Roczniak?

  And Pope, well, they don't have a Pope anymore.

• 30:30November Kelly?

  They're still dining out on the one, yeah, America has a Pope. You know, America's the Pope's nation.

• 30:36Speaker 03

  No, he went to Villanova, doesn't count.

• 30:40Speaker 03

  I mean, I can't make fun of the White Sox anymore because I feel slightly bad like I'm

• 30:44Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 30:44Speaker 03

  Like I like I'm not I I'm making more points against me to get into heaven in case Catholics are correct.

• 30:51Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, well, what can you say but go Sox? That was.

• 30:59November Kelly?

  And also with you.

• 31:00Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. And with your spirit.

• 31:03Speaker 03

  Fuck.

• 31:04November Kelly?

  Yeah, I changed it on you.

• 31:07Justin Roczniak?

  That was the goddamn news.

• 31:11Justin Roczniak?

  We talk about in-flight entertainment.

• 31:14November Kelly?

  Oh shit, yeah, okay.

• 31:16Speaker 03

  Stare straight ahead at the.

• 31:18November Kelly?

  Raw dog it. Why is I saw the TV glow on here?

• 31:24Speaker 03

  That's actually my picture.

• 31:25November Kelly?

  God, watching I saw the TV glow at the beginning of like an 18 hour flight, you get your egg cracked, you're like, oh, fuck, I'm in the hell zone and you've got another like 16 hours of flying.

• 31:37Speaker 03

  Oh, boy.

• 31:38November Kelly?

  And you're flying out somewhere so you can't even get home to start transitioning. You're just like, hmm.

• 31:45Speaker 03

  Well, the good news is this is my picture and I took it on a flight to Seattle. So, I mean, it's a relatively good place to end up at the end of that.

• 31:52November Kelly?

  They just meet you off the plane, you know?

• 31:54Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 31:54Justin Roczniak?

  Yes. You know, you know what? You know what film I watch on the airplane?

• 31:59Speaker 03

  Is it Airplane?

• 32:00Justin Roczniak?

  Yes.

• 32:01November Kelly?

  It's a good film to watch on an airplane.

• 32:03Justin Roczniak?

  It's a pretty good film to watch on an airplane.

• 32:06Liam McAnderson?

  I so I have an audiobook that I only listen to while I'm flying. And I refuse to listen to it at the other time. So like I've had to listen to this in like two hour sprints over the past like four years, almost halfway through, baby.

• 32:21November Kelly?

  My my my version of raw dogging is I sort of semi raw dog. I wrap it up, right? Like, but not very effectively. I I like I take my.

• 32:29Liam McAnderson?

  Paper towel.

• 32:29November Kelly?

  Yeah, gross. I take I take my like noise cancelling headphones and I just listen to music, but I'm looking at my phone to see what the music that I'm listening to is all the time.

• 32:39Liam McAnderson?

  Yep.

• 32:40November Kelly?

  That's that's the real like autism locking in and I'm doing that for like five, six hours.

• 32:44Justin Roczniak?

  What happens to me is, you know, I get a beer and I sit down and, you know, when there's some mild turbulence, I'm absolutely terrified.

• 32:54Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah, you are. With you is my, is my version of hell.

• 32:57November Kelly?

  Like a, like a cat that's been splashed with water. You're just like digging into the seatrests.

• 33:02Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah.

• 33:02Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, this is true. Yeah.

• 33:03Liam McAnderson?

  He does do that.

• 33:05Speaker 03

  I flew on a very small aircraft in a whiteout this, uh, back in February. So I no longer feel any fear on larger aircraft. Uh, which is an experience I do, I recommend for everybody and also do not recommend for anybody.

• 33:17Liam McAnderson?

  I gotta turn my air conditioning down because it's 200 million fucking degrees in Philly and I have three desktops running in here.

• 33:23Speaker 03

  It's also 2 million degrees here and I've had to close mine in the other room because it's too loud. So, uh, I'm suffering, but that's fine.

• 33:30November Kelly?

  You should, you should all move to Glasgow, the climate proof city. I was in London for a week doing the Trash Future live show. Um, and it was, it was the hottest venue I've ever done. It was like fucking 50 billion degrees in there. Uh, cause it was like a concrete basement. Um, and we got a bunch of, uh, Gwen, my wife took a bunch of like promotional photos of us. And every single one of us is like mostly sweat.

• 33:56November Kelly?

  Then I got back to London, uh, then I go back to Glasgow and it's like, oh, it's pleasantly cool. Meanwhile, like you, you look at the kind of weather app on your phone and it's like, the place that you just left is currently on fire.

• 34:06Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 34:08Justin Roczniak?

  It was 101 two days ago here. God damn.

• 34:11Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 34:11Justin Roczniak?

  The first time we broke 113 years apparently.

• 34:16Speaker 03

  Uh, is, I was gonna say something and I forget what it was. Well, it was about the weather. It's just been insufferable. Oh, right. Yeah. We've had Canadian wildfire smoke and the heat at the same time. It's been real nice.

• 34:26Liam McAnderson?

  Can you hear my fan?

• 34:28Justin Roczniak?

  No.

• 34:28Speaker 03

  No.

• 34:28Justin Roczniak?

  No.

• 34:29Liam McAnderson?

  Excellent. All right. I, I'm, I'm human again.

• 34:33Speaker 03

  Not humid again, which is actually the problem.

• 34:35Liam McAnderson?

  I, oh, I am.

• 34:37November Kelly?

  So, so.

• 34:38Liam McAnderson?

  Stinky after this one.

• 34:39November Kelly?

  So, so time was, I'm, I'm pulling us back on topic here. Time was.

• 34:42Liam McAnderson?

  Fuck you.

• 34:43November Kelly?

  If you, if, if you were, I, I, I gotta do it. If you were kind of like on a plane, you're, and you're like, I'm bored. I don't know what to do. You wandered down to the parlor or whatever, the dedicated dining room.

• 34:54Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 34:55November Kelly?

  You go to the smoking room. You do, you take part in an Agatha Christie murder mystery. Cause you're on a flying boat or whatever the fuck. And okay. It takes eight hours because it's flying at like five miles an hour, but like.

• 35:04Justin Roczniak?

  You're on a, you're on a Hindenburg.

• 35:06November Kelly?

  Yeah.

• 35:06Justin Roczniak?

  You know, and you you go and, um, you know, you, uh, yeah, you go to the restaurant, uh, and you, um, then you go to the smoking room, which has thirty five doors between you and, uh, the outside world. Yes.

• 35:20November Kelly?

  Flicking a cigarette butt off the end of the like, out of the Hindenburg must feel so good.

• 35:25Speaker 03

  Could you have asked the Marlboro Unlimited plane?

• 35:29Justin Roczniak?

  Oh.

• 35:30Speaker 03

  Fuck, yes.

• 35:31Justin Roczniak?

  Oh, shit.

• 35:31Liam McAnderson?

  Where's my Marlboro Unlimited back?

• 35:33Speaker 03

  I I I've, God, the Marlboro Unlimited was like the greatest concept to me is like the worst thing, the worst experience for any human to go through, and I would have killed somebody to get to experience.

• 35:42Justin Roczniak?

  Oh, yeah, me too.

• 35:44Speaker 03

  Even as somebody who hasn't smoked in five years. Anyway.

• 35:48November Kelly?

  It's fine. You make those five years back in about ten minutes.

• 35:51Speaker 03

  That's a good point. Yeah, that's true.

• 35:53November Kelly?

  But yeah.

• 35:53Speaker 03

  Catching up for lost time.

• 35:54November Kelly?

  Yeah, but so eventually, like, maybe, maybe you want to do something else besides go and murder one of your fellow passengers, right? Like.

• 36:01Speaker 03

  Maybe.

• 36:02Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 36:03Speaker 03

  It's very rare that I don't want to murder.

• 36:04Justin Roczniak?

  You're gonna, you're gonna have to lead a bit.

• 36:06Speaker 03

  Yeah, sorry, sorry, sorry. Uh, this is the top left here. This is, uh, what they call the, uh, first example of in-flight entertainment. It's called the world's first aircraft cinema. It says there.

• 36:17Justin Roczniak?

  Oh, my God.

• 36:18Speaker 03

  Um, this, in case you haven't noticed, it's just a regular film projector that they're loading into what it looks like a Ford Tri motor to me.

• 36:25November Kelly?

  Oh, that's gonna shake so much.

• 36:27Justin Roczniak?

  You gotta crank it, man. You like the propellers have a belt.

• 36:31Liam McAnderson?

  With Imperial Airlines, Altair.

• 36:33Speaker 03

  Yes, this is, yeah, the, the, this was a British innovation, except I think it started.

• 36:37Liam McAnderson?

  Such thing as a British innovation.

• 36:39November Kelly?

  We gave you, I saw the TV glow on a seatback TV, like.

• 36:42Speaker 03

  That's true. I I except I think they were actually the second to do it, and this banner is a lie, but I can't remember what the first one was. I looked it up in my research and did not write it down.

• 36:51November Kelly?

  Back in the day, you could just lie. You could just do that.

• 36:53Speaker 03

  Yes, this was the first one to have a picture taken for it, which means it basically it might as well be the first one in terms of documentation.

• 37:01Speaker 03

  Yeah, so and also notably, this was 1925. So of course, film was made of nitrate at this point. And if you know anything about nitrate film, it has a tendency, it has a tendency to spontaneously combust.

• 37:14November Kelly?

  I have a message for Germany.

• 37:18Speaker 03

  And this was not a problem, but like, it is an interesting concept to load the spontaneously fammable material aboard the very small aircraft. In any case, I don't think we killed anybody with that.

• 37:30November Kelly?

  Everybody's smoking.

• 37:31Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 37:32November Kelly?

  Everybody's throwing their like lit cigarette ends towards the back of the plane.

• 37:37Justin Roczniak?

  It's a DC3. It's basically invincible.

• 37:40Speaker 03

  That's true. I mean, it's a, it's a tri motor, which is close enough. But this was a point in time whenever planes were sometimes made of wood. And if they got too wet, the wings would

• 37:49Liam McAnderson?

  Say, wait, wait, what the mosquito?

• 37:50Speaker 03

  If they got too wet, the wings would come unglued and that would, that killed people a few times, but.

• 37:55November Kelly?

  Wings fall off button.

• 37:56Speaker 03

  Yeah, the way the wings fall off rain.

• 38:01Speaker 03

  In the, in the, the middle here, this is a ad from Trans World Airlines, an airline that I have made jokes about for the past 10 years I've been trans.

• 38:11Speaker 03

  This, this is sort of a later, but more common concept of in-flight entertainment, which is still just a film projector. But like, by the 1950s, film projectors had gotten like, normal enough that they had done a, they had started, there was like a specialized industry for this, for in-flight entertainment specifically.

• 38:27November Kelly?

  Is that what this is on the bottom left? Is that a projector?

• 38:30Speaker 03

  That, yeah, that's a later one. This was, yeah, that's a later one. This is just, this is the original one, which would have just been a film projector, not really that far off from the same technology on the older one. They, since of course, films have gained the technology of sound in the interim intervening 25 years, 30 years, they had.

• 38:51Speaker 03

  Developed in-flight audio, which was done by pneumatic tubes at this point in time with a system I don't, I don't really understand.

• 38:58November Kelly?

  You start getting the pneumatic tube canister through to your seats, and you open it up and it just plays a noise.

• 39:04Speaker 03

  Yeah, I don't really understand that.

• 39:06November Kelly?

  That's wild.

• 39:08Justin Roczniak?

  That is more fun than like a, a, a static card with dialogue on it.

• 39:13November Kelly?

  Well, because originally, if you're screening a silent movie in, in a plane, you know, you've got to get the projector in there and then you've got to get the pianist as well, so.

• 39:20Speaker 03

  Oh, this is true.

• 39:21Justin Roczniak?

  Oh, yeah, that's a good point, yeah.

• 39:23Speaker 03

  Yeah. Well, of course, notably, notably, planes were so loud in the first one that the pianist had to play very loudly the whole time.

• 39:29Liam McAnderson?

  Bum, bum, bum. Boom, and it falls off.

• 39:32Speaker 03

  Yes. Oh, yeah, that, that would also happen.

• 39:35Justin Roczniak?

  You have upright piano.

• 39:36Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 39:37Liam McAnderson?

  Just drag that bitch. What kind of, what kind of air, airplanes or airport specialty vehicle do you need to load the upright piano?

• 39:45Justin Roczniak?

  No, I think it's, I, I think it's like an integral structural part of the airplane.

• 39:51November Kelly?

  You'd hope so.

• 39:52Speaker 03

  Much like, much like the ashtrays, yeah.

• 39:55November Kelly?

  And the piano is going from side to side.

• 39:57Justin Roczniak?

  The piano, once the rain starts, the piano is the only thing keeping the wing on.

• 40:02November Kelly?

  It's a load-bearing piano.

• 40:06Speaker 03

  Um, well, yeah, the pneumatic tube thing.

• 40:09November Kelly?

  That's this load-bearing piano, you shouldn't have detuned.

• 40:15Speaker 03

  The pneumatic tube thing is weird and I don't understand it. As far as I can tell, Delta had them until like 2006 on some planes, which is even more confusing because Delta flies absolutely ancient aircraft until the wings essentially fall off and they still do that.

• 40:28Justin Roczniak?

  It's because they don't put the piano on there. And they don't know, and they don't know that, okay, in certain kinds of turbulence, the only thing you can do is play Clair de Lune. That's the only thing that keeps them, keeps the wing on.

• 40:41November Kelly?

  Banging out, "Nera, my god to thee" on the DC3.

• 40:44Speaker 03

  It's gonna make the same goddamn joke.

• 40:48Speaker 03

  Buck.

• 40:50November Kelly?

  It's not formulaic, it's a callback.

• 40:52Speaker 03

  Yes. The bottom left is not one of the projectors sort of that was featured in the middle, except that's a simulated screenshot. But like, this is a slightly later one. This is a projector that is essentially made of three cathode ray tubes that do, each do red, green and blue. If you know how a rear projection TV from like the 1980s or 90s works, it's basically the same concept. They were not very, they were not great, but they could run for infinite amounts of time and didn't really require maintenance. So they were.

• 41:25November Kelly?

  It looks very space age. And I guess this is one of the things that like airplane food or whatever, that just kind of gets stagnates for a while, just plateaus. And.

• 41:34Justin Roczniak?

  What's the deal with that?

• 41:35November Kelly?

  Yeah, becomes fodder for stand up comedians because it's just a fact of life of flying that everyone has to accept. As you're, you're all looking at the movie that they screen on, like you have no choice in this.

• 41:46Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 41:47November Kelly?

  The, you can either like get the headphones or little pneumatic tubes or whatever or not. So you can either like watch this, watch Cary Grant muted or watch Cary Grant with sound, but you have to watch him.

• 41:58Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 41:59Justin Roczniak?

  I think it'd be funny if you, you were an airline and you're like, we're going to do some like really, really, uh, out there films like Fox today's in-flight film is come and see.

• 42:10November Kelly?

  Yeah, I hate flying Alitalia, they made me watch Salo, 120 days of sod.

• 42:17Speaker 03

  Could do, Letterboxd should charter aircraft for weird film screenings.

• 42:22November Kelly?

  Do not, do not give them that idea, they will do it. They have the marketing budget to do whatever kind of silly bullshit they hear someone with enough followers say on the internet. They will do that.

• 42:32Speaker 03

  Thank God I have less than a thousand followers still.

• 42:35November Kelly?

  Yeah.

• 42:36Speaker 03

  So the, the one at the bottom left, this is what they had sort of after the film projector, but it's the same basic sort of concept. You're just projecting a film from a central source. They were mostly done from tapes at this point, not like VHS tapes with like. Video eight tapes, which I'm sure like five of you are going to know what I'm talking about.

• 42:54November Kelly?

  Audience of trans women going, yeah.

• 42:56Speaker 03

  That's a fair point. Um, also, audience of like Tecmo and viewers. I know there's a fair overlap there.

• 43:02November Kelly?

  Oh, yeah, me, yeah.

• 43:04Speaker 03

  Yeah, I know you do because I know you're there because you're in the fucking paycheck credits.

• 43:08November Kelly?

  God, Jesus Christ, am I? I guess, I guess so. Yeah, that makes sense. Okay.

• 43:14Justin Roczniak?

  I should, I should become a Patreon of that guy. I like.

• 43:17Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah, I love Tecmo. He's good. He's good at his work, but that's video eight was just sort of the small tape format, not super relevant here. They use this sort of projector was common in airlines, but also a bunch of other places. You'll notice this picture is actually of it mounted in like a classroom or something. Um, but it's the exact same thing. It's just three cathode ray tubes that get really hot and put a lot of voltage through them. And they project an image and it looks bad, but you can project an image with reliability and that's what they need.

• 43:42November Kelly?

  At least, at least you can't set this one on fire with a cigarette, though.

• 43:45Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 43:46November Kelly?

  Yes.

• 43:46Speaker 03

  Uh, if you've ever watched Die Hard two, they should turn on the Simpsons with one of these.

• 43:52Speaker 03

  Uh, on the right is just sort of this, this is sort of where we are now. This is the seat back in-flight entertainment. These have been around for probably 20 years or so. Uh, this is a picture that I took. This was also on Delta Airlines. Coincidentally, uh, they have moved past pneumatic tubes and have gone towards.

• 44:06Justin Roczniak?

  Wow, 20th century.

• 44:09Speaker 03

  Yes. Um, this is just sort of how most people would recognize there would recognize in-flight entertainment as the big screen that you can touch and you can watch movies nowadays. It's for free. It used to be that you had to pay for them. But nowadays, the sort of airlines that will make you pay for them just don't give you anything at all, which is very funny.

• 44:26Justin Roczniak?

  I remember when in the back of the seat, there was a weird bulky telephone.

• 44:32Speaker 03

  Yes. Yes, first time, the first time I ever flew, my parents yelled at me for even getting close to trying to touch the damn thing.

• 44:41November Kelly?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. For touching the, the sky.

• 44:43Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 44:44November Kelly?

  Yeah.

• 44:44Justin Roczniak?

  $5,000 was a lot more in 1999.

• 44:49Speaker 03

  Well, and also, this was like 2005. So like they, at that point, they were gluing over some of them. But like some of them, the glue panels had fallen off and the foam was still there because US Airways was a bad airline.

• 45:00November Kelly?

  I always wonder, and I don't know if there's an answer to this, about whether, how curated the like seat back video is like, can I watch flight on a plane? Like, is that allowed? Am I allowed to see Denzel Washington doing coke before flying the plane? Right? Like.

• 45:16Speaker 03

  They're, they're pretty heavily trimmed. I've, every film that I have seen, except for TV Glow, funnily enough, has been like trimmed or censored in some way. I watched the first Austin Powers film on a flight like a couple of years ago, and there were actually scenes where they had cropped down the picture to censor something and did not have enough resolution. So it was just very blurry compared to the next, the scenes before it and the scene after.

• 45:39November Kelly?

  Airline Sharia law.

• 45:41Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's actually, that's actually accurate. Um, yeah, that's.

• 45:45November Kelly?

  We've got a clumsily drawn like turtleneck over Heather Graham.

• 45:51Justin Roczniak?

  I watched the French Dispatch on the plane.

• 45:55Speaker 03

  That would be, I would do that. That would be.

• 45:56Justin Roczniak?

  And it had a, you know, there was, there is a scene with nudity and it was just there. It was fine.

• 46:03Speaker 03

  I have not.

• 46:04Justin Roczniak?

  Maybe, maybe it's only on flights to Europe where they don't have morals.

• 46:09November Kelly?

  Yeah, you're scrolling past Salo.

• 46:11Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, exactly. That's, that's too, that's too tame for me.

• 46:15November Kelly?

  Yeah, I, I mean, I also, I, my question was sort of like, not so much about like sex and violence, but like.

• 46:23Speaker 03

  What they have on there, yeah.

• 46:25November Kelly?

  Well, do, do they kind of avoid, do they like block out the ones that are gonna set people off into fits of hysterics? Because they include the like wings falling off a plane. Can I watch a live on a plane, you know?

• 46:38Speaker 03

  It's a good question. You could actually look at the, I'm looking at the flights that Delta has right now and it all looks rather. Rather basic stuff. Oh, they got Jurassic Park on here.

• 46:46November Kelly?

  You do gotta kind of keep people calm, right? And like, okay, like, you're not gonna get that much exhilaration out of a tiny sort of like iPad sized screen, but like, you don't wanna hit anyone's kind of like phobia of flying. And I've always wondered about that. Like, how?

• 47:01Speaker 03

  Not something I know the answer to, but now I also want to.

• 47:03Justin Roczniak?

  It's actually all mentor pilot air crash videos.

• 47:10November Kelly?

  I'm like popping open all of my aviation disaster specific YouTube channels.

• 47:18Speaker 03

  They're putting this podcast on the flame.

• 47:20November Kelly?

  I'm like, why? Yeah, I'll fly in with Delta, yeah.

• 47:24Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah, we can be the last fucking bit. You ever see the?

• 47:26Justin Roczniak?

  Hold on, I'm talking with United, actually, yeah.

• 47:29November Kelly?

  Getting us to do the safety briefing.

• 47:32Speaker 03

  Oh, hell yeah.

• 47:35Liam McAnderson?

  You ever see the dash cam videos we show up on sometimes where people are listening to us?

• 47:40November Kelly?

  And then crash their cars.

• 47:41Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah.

• 47:42November Kelly?

  I'm sorry about your car. It's very funny when that happens.

• 47:44Speaker 03

  This is a new one. I've never heard this. This is the funniest thing I've heard.

• 47:47Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, I'm not sorry about your car.

• 47:50November Kelly?

  Doing, doing the safety briefing and it's like in the, in the very unlikely event of an emergency and you're told to assume the brace position, you're gonna wanna get your neck over something so that it snaps as quickly as possible. And you're just not, you're not present for like whatever happens next, you know?

• 48:04Speaker 03

  I'm going off camera and off mic because I gotta eat, so carry on.

• 48:08Justin Roczniak?

  That done like, done like three people do that and they're the only people who died because it was a perfectly fine land.

• 48:13November Kelly?

  Yeah, and I am sued for $500 trillion.

• 48:18Justin Roczniak?

  Don't do that.

• 48:20November Kelly?

  I do the last scene of flight, but it's like, I was on my phone. I'm on my phone now. I was posting.

• 48:28Speaker 03

  Yeah, I was gonna say, most airlines don't tell you to do the brace position, but most airlines don't really tell you anything of interest because nobody pays attention these days.

• 48:35Justin Roczniak?

  That's true, yeah.

• 48:36November Kelly?

  They try and make it like a fun little thing. It's dangerously plausible that we could do on.

• 48:41Speaker 03

  Somebody's, I think Delta started making them like a fun little thing and it just became a trend that nobody cares about because nobody watches the safety briefing.

• 48:48November Kelly?

  Oh, safety brief went viral.

• 48:51Speaker 03

  Yes, this has happened. They have talked about this. Fucking insane.

• 48:54Justin Roczniak?

  The United, the United International Safety Brief is like, you know, a fun jaunt through Europe, uh, with American in Paris playing in the background and, uh, and then like, you know, um, the, the safety seems secondary. Yeah.

• 49:11Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's about, that's how, that's how most of them are. That's it.

• 49:13November Kelly?

  Yeah, I always like, I always like the British Airways one. I usually fly British Airways when I can, if I get a choice, which you basically don't now. Um, ju- just because there's something about the corporate affect of British Airways, which has been made so deliberately soulless, because all they had was like Imperial nostalgia, and now they don't want to do that. So it's just kind of generic airline, brackets, British, which means, you know, the flight stands were like gray flannel and stuff. Um, but the affect of the safety brief is, is very much like, uh, it, it's like a therapist, right? When you are being floridly insane, just trying to like gently and calmly reassure you that you're not gonna die on the plane. Um, and I, I, I value that. I need that. I need the kind of banal Britishness

• 49:58November Kelly?

  of like, um, well, you, you know, you're probably not gonna crash into water, but if you do, there's some things that you can do, um, and just, just think about those, you know? Um, but you're probably not gonna need to.

• 50:10Justin Roczniak?

  I like United because I have the confidence that someone is an asshole. Um, they will break his legs and drag him off the plane.

• 50:17Speaker 03

  That's, that's a great, uh, that is a completely reasonable point. Yeah. As, as far as I'm aware, they have like the strongest union culture of any of the major legacy airlines. So I assume these are somehow related to each other.

• 50:28Justin Roczniak?

  Oh my God, they get the biggest fucking thugs out there to take off an asshole. Yeah.

• 50:37November Kelly?

  Italian American Airlines.

• 50:42Justin Roczniak?

  Hey, United, go fuck yourself.

• 50:46Speaker 03

  Yeah, the the the average safety briefing now on Delta, they do, they will actually, right now, they talk about their corporate history because it's their 100th anniversary this year, which is not relevant and stupid.

• 50:57Justin Roczniak?

  Hmm.

• 50:57Speaker 03

  Um, or you fly a low cost airline with no screens or on regional. And so the you just have the flight attendants giving you the most straight laced thing of your life, which they do not want to do, and nobody's paying attention to.

• 51:08Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 51:09Speaker 03

  Um, particular like the I God, I flew Frontier to Philly for the live show, and that was the most that was the most unattentive and like vaguely, I don't want to say uncivilized, but like, I don't know, that crowd was that crowd was questionable. Anyways, sorry, I keep talking about Delta. It's the only airline I fly to because I fly to Seattle.

• 51:27Justin Roczniak?

  Fifty two minutes in, we're on slide one. Let's go.

• 51:30Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 51:32Speaker 03

  Next slide. The good do, uh, so the good news is the videotape thing on the right. I already talked about on accident. Um, this was by the time the nineties came around, videotape was a lot more common. Uh, so you could start doing the whole, yeah, individual in seat entertainment system. Uh, the one on the left here, this is what Swissair had before the one we're going to talk about in a minute.

• 51:52November Kelly?

  This is the coolest thing I've ever seen in my life.

• 51:54Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 51:54November Kelly?

  I need to control. I need to control more things in my life with controls like this. I mean, if it if it was more like, uh, is the word like skewer morphic? Uh, if it if it had more like clicky clacky buttons and panels and stuff, then I'd be more in favor of it. But this is really good still.

• 52:10Speaker 03

  Yes. Yeah, this was a sort of.

• 52:13Justin Roczniak?

  This is why people still like BlackBerries.

• 52:15November Kelly?

  Hmm.

• 52:16Speaker 03

  Uh, yeah, I mean, I I kind of agree with that at this point. So I get the point. But this is so basically these just act as sort of a control hub for a videotape player that can also seek left and right. It's it's a complex to explain in a way that doesn't actually matter. But, uh, by the time the early nineties come around, somebody had this, there's somebody had decided to come up with the interactive in-flight entertainment system. And the first company to do this, uh, if you click the next slide was. Was actually Nintendo of all companies.

• 52:46November Kelly?

  Oh my god, okay.

• 52:49Speaker 03

  So they they sort of they were sort of the first major company to explore this. They they developed what they called the Nintendo Gateway System, which is very hard to find documentation about. So so some of this is like off is some of this is best guess work.

• 53:04Justin Roczniak?

  This is the this this is like a similar to the phone they charged you $5,000 if you touched.

• 53:10Speaker 03

  Actually, yes, this is the yeah, yeah. So this was the sort of first I quote unquote, interactive setup that was really installed. It was installed on Northwest Airlines and a bunch of Japanese airlines and like Air Canada and British Airways, I think. It was fancy because you could pay to play Super Nintendo and eventually Game Boy games.

• 53:30November Kelly?

  Oh.

• 53:31Speaker 03

  Which, you know, they also they also introduced this system in hotels and one other one other scenario that I suddenly can't think of, but.

• 53:39November Kelly?

  You had to be you had to work so hard to be like a gamer back in the day.

• 53:43Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah.

• 53:44Justin Roczniak?

  Oh, yeah.

• 53:45Speaker 03

  Well, this was this wasn't even the first like in-flight video game system, but the first one is so stupidly.

• 53:52November Kelly?

  The first the first one was also on a 1925 British plane, but it's like you line up in the island, play Quoits. And technically that counts.

• 54:02Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, you know, you you you see the system installed. You see the system installed in a hotel and like you have to pay extra to play leisure shoot. Leisure Leisure Suit Larry.

• 54:13Speaker 03

  Hell, yeah.

• 54:14Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 54:14Speaker 03

  You get like three hours entertainment out of that game. That's what I paid five bucks for.

• 54:19November Kelly?

  I mean, not 1990, it wasn't.

• 54:21Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah, no, I yeah, last time I played the first Leisure Suit Larry, I cheated the whole way through. So that's just how it goes. So, yeah, this was sort of the first basic like interactive one. It's kind of sort of the basic roadmap for what we have nowadays, the more common systems that we have nowadays. I don't know when these were retired. I really don't know anything about how they worked or how much they cost. I know how much it cost in hotels because that was like $5 an hour to play Super Nintendo or N64 games, which is somewhat ridiculous, but never mind.

• 54:50Justin Roczniak?

  Higher than minimum wage.

• 54:53November Kelly?

  You're gonna find like some YouTuber flying to like an island off the coast of Chile or something. In a plane that still has one of these in it and he's taken that flight solely in order to find this.

• 55:06Speaker 03

  Annoyingly, this sounds like something I would do, so I can't actually say anything negative about that.

• 55:11November Kelly?

  Oh, no, it's really cool. Like, I'm a big fan. There's a guy who just goes to like different bits of Central America looking for old planes that are still flying, so.

• 55:20Speaker 03

  Yeah, no, I wish I had the money to do this, or else I fortunately I can't. And unfortunately, I can't go to Iran for old planes anymore because we blew up some of them the other day.

• 55:28Justin Roczniak?

  Oh, that was a bad decision.

• 55:30November Kelly?

  If Israel touches a single F-14, tie me to the fucking ICBM and fire it at Tel Aviv.

• 55:38Speaker 03

  They blew up one, but and they said that it was one that was like quote unquote minutes from takeoff, but it was obviously one that they were just using for spare parts.

• 55:46Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 55:47November Kelly?

  All right, well, tie me to the ICBM, I guess.

• 55:49Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 55:50Justin Roczniak?

  They got the 747 SP out there, too.

• 55:53Speaker 03

  Not anymore. They just have the 200, which I think Israel also blew up one of those.

• 55:58November Kelly?

  God fucking damn it, can we not have anything nice in the world? Not only, right? Not only do you start a war, but like, it's not just Israel, it's like the US, it's Russia as well. It's like, not only do you start a war, but you also destroy a bunch of really interesting aircraft. I am still mad about that, Antonov. I will be mad about that until the day I die.

• 56:16Speaker 03

  I think everybody, I think most people are. It's kind of pretty reasonable, yeah. I mean, they still want to rebuild it. They still want to rebuild it out of the other one that was like half done, but they gotta find the money for it.

• 56:26Justin Roczniak?

  You're gonna have to. I mean, that was a very important aircraft globally for moving big stuff.

• 56:32November Kelly?

  Like, global logistical choke points, like, for real.

• 56:37Speaker 03

  So that was sort of the first stab at an interactive in-flight entertainment system. The second, more relevant one today, if you go to the next slide, we're actually going to get into the stuff that's relevant to this specific plane.

• 56:48November Kelly?

  What are we doing on time so far? An hour?

• 56:51Justin Roczniak?

  An hour.

• 56:51Speaker 03

  Doing great.

• 56:53Justin Roczniak?

  I've got, starting a story now.

• 56:56Speaker 03

  So, in the year 1994, Yuri Yitkis, a Soviet-born engineer who had immigrated to Las Vegas, Nevada.

• 57:03November Kelly?

  Oh, first mistake.

• 57:05Speaker 03

  Started a company called Interactive Flight Technologies Incorporated.

• 57:10Speaker 03

  The company's vision was to develop a state of the art, interactive in-flight entertainment system, close quote, they could integrate it, sell to any airlines that wanted such a thing on any aircraft, any long haul aircraft, I should say. As I've written here, the company's other vision was presumably to enrich the family because as far as I could tell, the company started with five employees, all of which in the immediate family of the first guy we mentioned.

• 57:33November Kelly?

  Hell, yeah.

• 57:34Speaker 03

  The nepotism, the nepotism angle and the small business owner angle will come back in quite a few times. Those are some deep mind.

• 57:41November Kelly?

  You can't even get into the in-flight entertainment system business if you're not an A case.

• 57:45Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 57:46Justin Roczniak?

  I have seen this exact map.

• 57:49November Kelly?

  Yeah, this is when they invented. Yeah. This is when they invented that relief map that you have spent hours bored out of your mind looking at. Yeah.

• 57:57Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. Are we there yet? No. Are we there yet?

• 58:01November Kelly?

  It's like, damn, I know what I like, ground airspeed is, that's useful information to me. Like, oh, we can watch LA Confidential.

• 58:08Justin Roczniak?

  It's because I'm monitoring the situation.

• 58:11November Kelly?

  That's a good film. I am, yeah. That, that is the benefit of the big map is you do get to be like, I'm pretty sure, like, I, I have no input over what the pilot's doing, but I'm, I'm monitoring, I'm supervising. I'm pretty sure.

• 58:23Justin Roczniak?

  I'm monitoring the situation. If something goes wrong in the, in the cockpit, I've done an ocular pat down, I can go up there and resolve any problem that may occur.

• 58:33Speaker 03

  Actually, something, something I didn't mention that's relevant to that, in the seventies, American Airlines and a couple others started putting cameras in the cockpit that they would broadcast to the cabin for passengers to look at.

• 58:45November Kelly?

  Whoa.

• 58:46Speaker 03

  And they did that until American Airlines 191 happened and an engine fell off and they all watched themselves fly into the ground at high speed.

• 58:53November Kelly?

  Nice.

• 58:54Speaker 03

  And then they stopped doing that.

• 58:55Justin Roczniak?

  Oh. Oh, but if I were there monitoring the situation.

• 58:59Liam McAnderson?

  I wouldn't have gone down like that.

• 59:02Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 59:03Speaker 03

  Well, that's, that's, that's, that's the McDonald Douglas slash Boeing seal of quality there, to be fair.

• 59:08Justin Roczniak?

  Oh, stewardess, I've played Microsoft flights.

• 59:10November Kelly?

  I'm going to remind you that you can buy from the store, which is going to be in the links, a McDonald Douglas will kill you t-shirt. I saw someone wearing one to the Trash Future live show, it looked good as hell.

• 59:22Speaker 03

  I saw someone wearing one at the Philly live show and I went up and introduced myself like, hey.

• 59:29Liam McAnderson?

  That was somebody.

• 59:31November Kelly?

  Sorry, go ahead.

• 59:32Speaker 03

  And they didn't recognize who I was instantly, which is quite funny, but I'm completely understandable.

• 59:36November Kelly?

  There was somebody, there was somebody wearing a Meat Deck shirt at the London show.

• 59:41Liam McAnderson?

  Someone bought one.

• 59:42November Kelly?

  Yeah, fine.

• 59:43Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, amazingly.

• 59:45Speaker 03

  I gotta get one of them.

• 59:46Justin Roczniak?

  People purchase our merchandise.

• 59:49November Kelly?

  People order our merch or poom.

• 59:52Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, poof. People order our merchandise.

• 59:59Speaker 03

  So by 1995, Interactive Flight Technologies, IFT, they developed the first generation system. As far as I can tell, they sold this to one airline, which was Alitalia.

• 1:00:09November Kelly?

  They really wanted to show you silo. They were, they were obsessed about it. It was fucked up, to be honest.

• 1:00:16Justin Roczniak?

  Look, it's, it, it's not for everyone. It is a cinematic masterpiece, I understand.

• 1:00:21November Kelly?

  Yeah, Alitalia doesn't exist anymore, so I can call them absolute freaks on the internet without labeling anyone.

• 1:00:28Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:00:29Justin Roczniak?

  It's just a bunch of like spaghetti westerns on there.

• 1:00:32Liam McAnderson?

  Oh, yeah. We're all gonna sit there and watch Duck You Soccer for 16 hours.

• 1:00:38November Kelly?

  I, I, I do miss Alitalia, beautiful livery, beautiful livery when applied to rally cars as well.

• 1:00:44Justin Roczniak?

  Oh, yeah, absolutely.

• 1:00:45Speaker 03

  Also, it was a livery that hadn't been changed in 40 years, which certainly is the secret to not having a good livery these days.

• 1:00:50November Kelly?

  Yep, it got put it on the Lancia Stratos and yeah, no.

• 1:00:54Speaker 03

  Yeah. So after, they bought it for the one plane, which was the McDonnell Douglas MD-11, which is the relevant plane type for this entire episode, but for here specifically. And they bought it explicitly as a test and that they would expand it to other planes in their fleet if they decided it worked good enough. Alitalia did not buy it for any more aircraft, based on the documentation I have seen.

• 1:01:15November Kelly?

  Just like we tested it, we found it to be shit.

• 1:01:18Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:01:19Justin Roczniak?

  Wasn't, wasn't good enough. I couldn't, I couldn't see, you know, the orgy as clearly as I wanted to.

• 1:01:27Speaker 03

  By 1995, IFT had relocated to Phoenix, Arizona.

• 1:01:31November Kelly?

  Question.

• 1:01:32Speaker 03

  The drug.

• 1:01:33November Kelly?

  What if it, what if it's the opposite? What if Alitalia was, was like screening Salo not because they're absolute freaks, but because they're like absolute like cinema nerds and they were, they were screening like, I don't know, eight and a half or like La Ventura or something. And they're like, well, this fucking sucks. I'm not like moved to like, you know, crying. I'm not moved to tears by the beauty of this artistic achievement at all. I hardly see the fucking thing. I'm, I'm switching over to the map instead of this. This is an insult to Italian cinema.

• 1:02:00Justin Roczniak?

  Exactly. I.

• 1:02:00Speaker 03

  It's a good point there.

• 1:02:01Justin Roczniak?

  You know, I, I miss when there was a big screen at the front of the plane.

• 1:02:04November Kelly?

  Hmm.

• 1:02:06Justin Roczniak?

  You know, obviously what they need to do is constantly fly at a lower pitch. So you have cinema seating. So you can see the big screen at the front of the plane.

• 1:02:15Liam McAnderson?

  One big vomit comet.

• 1:02:17November Kelly?

  I mean, one thing that I was gonna say about British Airways earlier is that I kind of miss airline nationalism. In the sense that like, you know, ever how when you're a little kid and you went to the airport and you were like, oh my God, there's people from all over the world. There's planes from all over the world. Everywhere has a culture and they're all wonderful, you know? And you're like, that's, that's the Alitalia plane. I don't know why everybody's crying, but like, that's the Alitalia plane. It's good. It's like white, green and red. It looks beautiful. It likes, it's, it's like emblematic, right? Um, and then you, you, you fly a different airline and you're like, oh, fuck, I'm, I'm experiencing the culture of Tajikistan because they're giving me like Tajik food. Um, and now they kind of don't really do that. You get the same food and you get the same movies

• 1:03:00November Kelly?

  just off of a kind of Netflix thing. And it's like, I want to take the, I want to take Air France and I want them to start showing me God up movies, you know?

• 1:03:09Justin Roczniak?

  Nah, nah, you go on, you go on, um, uh, British Airways and there's no movies. There's just a selection of Adrian Childs articles.

• 1:03:18November Kelly?

  Yeah. No, what it is, is it's, uh, it's Love Island.

• 1:03:21Justin Roczniak?

  Well, yeah.

• 1:03:22Liam McAnderson?

  My wife is currently watching Love Island, which makes me want to throw up in my mouth.

• 1:03:26November Kelly?

  Saluting. You're welcome for our cultural exports.

• 1:03:29Justin Roczniak?

  Baking show.

• 1:03:30November Kelly?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:32Justin Roczniak?

  airline food edition.

• 1:03:34Speaker 03

  We never really.

• 1:03:35Liam McAnderson?

  The judges on Great British Baking so a pervert.

• 1:03:38November Kelly?

  Uh, they're, they're all gross. What you gotta watch is, uh, the great Australian Bake Off, which is now going to be hosted by a friend of the show, Tom Walker.

• 1:03:46Justin Roczniak?

  Oh, hell yeah.

• 1:03:47Speaker 03

  Whoa.

• 1:03:48Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:49Speaker 03

  Shit.

• 1:03:49Justin Roczniak?

  He's got a, he's got a, uh, you know, drive a car 900 miles an hour into there.

• 1:03:59Speaker 03

  Gonna have to put that as the second entry on cooking shows I actually want to watch.

• 1:04:02November Kelly?

  Yes.

• 1:04:03Speaker 03

  I'll live there with Iron Chef, which will be there until the end of time.

• 1:04:06November Kelly?

  This is a lesson, a salutary lesson for all of us. If you drive yourself insane for long enough on the internet, eventually you will land a like lucrative job.

• 1:04:14Speaker 03

  Oh my God, fuck, I'm waiting for so long.

• 1:04:19Speaker 03

  I'm so poor and I don't have the lucrative insane internet job yet.

• 1:04:26Speaker 03

  Once, so once IFT started designing the second generation of the system, which they did after relocating to Phoenix, um, they started building it around a standard, uh, Intel based computer that ran Microsoft Windows NT server, um, which did kind of vastly expand the capabilities that they could do because they were installing a whole Intel based computer under every seat in the aircraft.

• 1:04:47November Kelly?

  Oh, sick.

• 1:04:48Speaker 03

  Yeah. Now the main problem with, uh, running like standard computer silicon in an embedded application like that is that of course computers tend to get quite warm. Yes.

• 1:04:56November Kelly?

  You're, you're doing the, the Liam's room kind of temperature gradient.

• 1:05:00Speaker 03

  I'm dying out here.

• 1:05:01Liam McAnderson?

  Actually, actually also doing the my living room temperature gradient right now, to be fair.

• 1:05:06Justin Roczniak?

  Look, if you have, if you have to run the heating in winter, you don't own enough computers.

• 1:05:12Speaker 03

  That's right, baby. Yeah.

• 1:05:13November Kelly?

  Oh, you'll never betray me, will you? Uh, 3080 exhaust. No, you won't. And the fan noise blends right into the engine noise.

• 1:05:21Justin Roczniak?

  This is true.

• 1:05:22Speaker 03

  Corinne told me, she's like, I actually find the server hum really soothing. And I was like, yeah, I bet you do. We all float down here, baby.

• 1:05:30Speaker 03

  As as far as I have read, I think that the thing about the server fans blending in with the engine noise was actually a part of their calculus. So.

• 1:05:37November Kelly?

  Amazing.

• 1:05:38Speaker 03

  Yeah. Um, so.

• 1:05:40Justin Roczniak?

  Bleed air just goes straight through as the once through cooling.

• 1:05:46Speaker 03

  So all of these machines ran very hot and it was something that IFT knew about, uh, but determined was not actually that detrimental to operation because it didn't affect the main server, which was a much less compact unit that was integrated into the internal wiring harnesses of the aircraft.

• 1:06:00November Kelly?

  Yeah, we, we, we took out one of the toilets to put in like a filing cabinet sized server and that's what pulls, uh, hope floats.

• 1:06:08Speaker 03

  Well, every airliner basically has one of these. It's just under the cockpit. If you've never seen a picture of one, it's very interesting. It's just a bunch of avionics gear that looks like server gear in like regular ass racks. It's crazy shit. Um, at least on modern planes, obviously we've built a lot of computers into these things nowadays.

• 1:06:26Justin Roczniak?

  I put this shit in a seven 27 and it's like, just a closet with servers hazardly thrown in there.

• 1:06:35November Kelly?

  Like my hard drive.

• 1:06:36Justin Roczniak?

  Air, the sink is still there.

• 1:06:40Speaker 03

  I, I will, I, to be clear, I have a 3D printer right here. If you need hard drive adapters, I will gladly.

• 1:06:46November Kelly?

  They are, they are seated in, uh, trays. They're just not like secured into those trays.

• 1:06:52Liam McAnderson?

  I'm so mad at you.

• 1:06:54November Kelly?

  It's, it's press fit. It's fine.

• 1:06:56Liam McAnderson?

  Tools, but by accident.

• 1:06:58November Kelly?

  The, the holes on the trays don't marry up with the screw holes on the hard drive.

• 1:07:03Liam McAnderson?

  Yes, they do.

• 1:07:04November Kelly?

  No, they don't. I, I'm doing fucking steam logic puzzles here to try and, to try and match them up and they don't match up. Listen, when I get a, I'm going to get evicted in like three months time. I'm going to have to move house and I'm going to have to pick up this computer and move it again. Right? So like, I, I don't know. There's, there's a decent chance this ends with the podcast buying a new computer.

• 1:07:25Speaker 03

  Yeah, don't, don't worry. Throw another credit card. We got it. Yeah, I, I understand both sides of this because I have, I have the 3D printer that can do hard drive packets, but also like next to me is a laptop that, uh, is just that the hard drive is literally floating around inside of. So like, I, I get both sides of this argument. Granted, this is 20 years old, so bit of a different scenario.

• 1:07:43November Kelly?

  What if, what if we, what if we secured it in some kind of like jelly situation, like an aspic, you know?

• 1:07:48Speaker 03

  This is there. This is some embedded hardware actually does this, like not, not like aspic, but.

• 1:07:55Justin Roczniak?

  It's just, uh, it's just floating around and like honey.

• 1:08:01November Kelly?

  Like a D and D like slime, you know, it's just in there.

• 1:08:06Speaker 03

  So they made, so they decided that the, the seats units running hot wasn't a problem because of course they didn't get hot enough to cause a problem, at least as far as they could tell. And it didn't affect the main server. So.

• 1:08:17Justin Roczniak?

  And it's only under every seat.

• 1:08:20Speaker 03

  Yes. So this, so they finished developing this and made it deployable and they called it, uh, what was it? The in-flight entertainment network, since this was the second generation, the whole system was called IFEN dash two.

• 1:08:33Liam McAnderson?

  Oh, really rolls off the tongue.

• 1:08:35Speaker 03

  Yes. What you're looking at right now is a picture of the configuration they gave to Swissair. You'll notice the films thing and they have the nice touchscreens where you can select between different languages on a film. You can watch LA confidential and French, which would make it an interesting, even more interesting film.

• 1:08:52November Kelly?

  Rollo Thomasi.

• 1:08:56Speaker 03

  C'est vous.

• 1:08:58November Kelly?

  Yeah, no, I, I, I have some thoughts about Swissair that I'll get into later.

• 1:09:02Speaker 03

  Sure.

• 1:09:03November Kelly?

  Makes, makes sense for the multi-language thing, I guess, cause, uh, otherwise you would have riots, you know? You gotta have French and German at least on that.

• 1:09:11Justin Roczniak?

  None of these films are in romage.

• 1:09:14November Kelly?

  Yeah, this is bullshit. Uh, Swiss Federal Council, please bankrupt Swissair. Oh, wait.

• 1:09:23Speaker 03

  Oh, that was, that was a good one.

• 1:09:26November Kelly?

  I'm still, I'm still mad about that. I'll be mad about that for a long time. Uh, we'll get into what the fuck is a Swiss international airlines? I'll kill you.

• 1:09:35Speaker 03

  So the, so IFT would eventually get lucky and would sign a memorandum of understanding with the national flag carrier of Switzerland, Swissair.

• 1:09:43Liam McAnderson?

  Oh, that's a citizen.

• 1:09:45Speaker 03

  Yes. May 1st, 1996, outlining a deal to install the system on 16 McDonnell Douglas MD11s and five Boeing 747s.

• 1:09:55Speaker 03

  And it involve a bizarre that cost revenue and cost sharing model that I did not really understand involving I F T paying to maintain the system on some planes and paying for some others not really that relevant it was just fucking weird.

• 1:10:07November Kelly?

  Mm hmm. Average airline financing for anything.

• 1:10:10Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's about right, actually. Uh, I F E N two notably had a killer feature that the original system did not have that being go to the next slide, please.

• 1:10:19Liam McAnderson?

  Gambling.

• 1:10:20Speaker 03

  Gambling.

• 1:10:21November Kelly?

  Gambling.

• 1:10:22Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:10:22Liam McAnderson?

  Gambling.

• 1:10:23Speaker 03

  Uh, I F T designed a system that had three games, Keno Slots and something called Risco, a game that I can't actually find any details of is presumably not the board game, which is based off of Risk, which would be fun to gamble on.

• 1:10:35Justin Roczniak?

  No, that'd be pretty fun. I think they should do like.

• 1:10:37Speaker 03

  Lots of gamble on Risk.

• 1:10:38Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, that'd be, that'd be pretty good. I mean, if you made that skill based, you know, I, I mean, so much gambling, gambling just isn't what it used to be anymore, you know, these days. Yeah.

• 1:10:50Justin Roczniak?

  You just start gambling on board games. Can we do like professional board games?

• 1:10:55November Kelly?

  No gambling on Shadow Doge.

• 1:10:57Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:59Speaker 03

  Uh, the, uh, I F T themselves would run the gambling services. The financial side of things would be handled by the Swiss Lottery, which makes this a multinational partnership, I think.

• 1:11:09November Kelly?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:11:09Speaker 03

  Uh, you would swipe your credit card and you would be allowed to spend up to $200 and win up to $3,500, which would be paid out.

• 1:11:15Liam McAnderson?

  Oh, yeah, it seems like, ah, that's a no brainer, baby.

• 1:11:19Justin Roczniak?

  What, what happens if I spend up to $200 before I win $3,500?

• 1:11:24Speaker 03

  Uh, that is a good question. I assume the answer is fuck you.

• 1:11:28Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:29November Kelly?

  Yeah. Swiss tax of money.

• 1:11:31Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:11:31Justin Roczniak?

  Excuse, excuse me, excuse me, stewardess. I, I didn't win my $3,500. There's something wrong with the system.

• 1:11:41Speaker 03

  Um, so, yeah, the gambling system or the, sorry, the Federal Aviation Administration, uh, approved I F T is overseeing the gambling operation, which as far as I could tell legally made them in the same class as casino. Which is interesting.

• 1:11:55November Kelly?

  They are based out of Vegas, right?

• 1:11:57Speaker 03

  No, they're based out of Phoenix at this point, which is a worse place, an even worse place to be.

• 1:12:01November Kelly?

  Phoenix casinos?

• 1:12:02Speaker 03

  Yes. So, all the gambling was paid out by the Swiss National Lottery, but all the infrastructure was running out of Phoenix. This is very strange setup. Uh, but they, they advertise gambling as the revenue driver, especially for those in business first class.

• 1:12:15November Kelly?

  Yeah, I mean, first class fires absolutely have that kind of money to burn and are stupid. So, yeah.

• 1:12:20Justin Roczniak?

  No, that's, that's the shit that like high rollers like is slot machines. Uh, they, they don't like the things where, you know, they're sitting at a table and doing like, you know, a bunch of card bullshit. Yeah, yeah. No, no, no, that's what real James Bond would go straight for the slot machine and just keep pulling the lever. Yeah.

• 1:12:39Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:12:42Speaker 03

  Uh, there is, you can play slots on this. It's what's going on in the bottom right there, but uh, it appears to be a bizarre nautical themed slots with fish.

• 1:12:51Speaker 03

  Swissair had actually agreed to install it on all three of the classes, first, first business and coach. But, you know, the gambling was like, they, they can, they can fleece first and business class travelers. Something fierce here.

• 1:13:05Speaker 03

  Okay. So the, the part about it being installed in three classes is relevant for the next slide, which, next slide, please. Thank you.

• 1:13:12Justin Roczniak?

  Ooh, diagram.

• 1:13:14Speaker 03

  Yes. Uh, the system was, was actually initially originally designed for the first of business class cabins. And was designed to run on the same power distribution unit as the cabin, which is normal for how in-flight entertainment systems work for presumably obvious reasons. You know, it's in the cabin.

• 1:13:28Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:29Speaker 03

  Yes. This meant that it would be powered by the electrical, by the electrical system called the cabin bus.

• 1:13:34Justin Roczniak?

  All caps.

• 1:13:35Speaker 03

  Yes, that I just writing down what it says in the official reports and in the cockpit. I don't really know why it's all caps.

• 1:13:42Justin Roczniak?

  Because it's important.

• 1:13:43Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:13:44Justin Roczniak?

  When you read it, you have to shout it.

• 1:13:46Speaker 03

  Cabin bus!

• 1:13:49Justin Roczniak?

  Cabin bus.

• 1:13:52November Kelly?

  With an air of wonder, the cabin bus.

• 1:13:55Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:13:55Justin Roczniak?

  Cabin bus.

• 1:13:58Speaker 03

  It would also, you would have a matching cabin bus breaker that would be labeled as such in the cockpit.

• 1:14:05Speaker 03

  And pulling said breaker would, in an emergency, kill all power to everything in the cabin minus essential systems. This was obviously considered essential and was on a fair amount of emergency checklist from both Swissair and McDonnell Douglas themselves, including the one for, quote, "smoke from unknown origin," close quote.

• 1:14:21Justin Roczniak?

  Oh, don't like that.

• 1:14:22November Kelly?

  You, you, you smoke in the toilet. I want my smoke on the plane to be a candle, a cigarette, right? And somebody like, and shuts off all the gambling. It's like, god fucking damn it.

• 1:14:29Speaker 03

  Yes. As Swissair-

• 1:14:32Justin Roczniak?

  There was my $3,500.

• 1:14:36Speaker 03

  As Swissair had requested that they would, that they install it on every seat on the aircraft, IFT found that the cabin power distribution would not have enough power to drive the entertainment system. The decision to install it in the coach cabin called for an entire second equipment rack in the forward main cabin. Basically, the big server unit, they were going to put two of them in there at the same time. That's what this diagram shows. You can see the first rack there towards forward of the aircraft and the second rack there towards sort of center of the aircraft. This was, yeah, this is all, yeah, this is, this is all from, emerged from investigative, investigative reports afterwards. Jesus.

• 1:15:12November Kelly?

  All, all this just to facilitate slot machines?

• 1:15:16Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's essentially the case.

• 1:15:17Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:18November Kelly?

  And red scale.

• 1:15:20Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:21Speaker 03

  Seco.

• 1:15:21Justin Roczniak?

  Resico, excuse me.

• 1:15:23Speaker 03

  I think. The decision was made to wire directly into the second of the aircraft's two AC electrical distribution systems, meaning it was isolated from any and all cabin safety measures, although it could theoretically still safely be shut down in an emergency as long as the essential AC bus remained online.

• 1:15:39November Kelly?

  Ah, okay. So you just wire it in anywhere, basically?

• 1:15:42Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:15:42November Kelly?

  Great.

• 1:15:43Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, it looks good. Guys, just splice it in there. It's fine. It's good.

• 1:15:47November Kelly?

  Going down the checklist and it's like, what is it? What do you mean shut down half the slot machines?

• 1:15:55Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, it's a circuit breaker controls the right engine and the gambling.

• 1:16:02Speaker 03

  Oh, that is a, that's tricky wiring, that is. The Federal Aviation Administration, who was overseeing this because I F T was an American company and McDonnell Douglas was an American company despite Swissair being a European carrier, would approve installing the system like this in one single aircraft, meaning that they were legally allowed to install it on other MD 11s as long as they were configured identically and the systems were installed identically to one another. This was mainly as a testing feature, although as far as I could where they just kind of ran with it.

• 1:16:32Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, looks good. Looks good to me.

• 1:16:34November Kelly?

  Better task for forgiveness than permission.

• 1:16:37Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:37Liam McAnderson?

  Right until we go.

• 1:16:39November Kelly?

  They don't like that saying at the FAA, I understand.

• 1:16:43Speaker 03

  The FAA would also approve this despite the decision to use a different, less flame retardant mylar material compared to the rest of the aircraft's wiring systems.

• 1:16:53November Kelly?

  It's a long USB cord. It's fine.

• 1:16:54Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:16:55Justin Roczniak?

  I don't have USB yet. This is like fucking scuzzy or some shit.

• 1:17:00Speaker 03

  1997, USB existed. It was just the slowest, the absolute slowest server. Yep. And Windows didn't support it yet.

• 1:17:09Justin Roczniak?

  Ah, jeez.

• 1:17:11Speaker 03

  Windows still doesn't really support it.

• 1:17:13Justin Roczniak?

  It's FireWire.

• 1:17:14Speaker 03

  That actually didn't exist yet.

• 1:17:17Liam McAnderson?

  FireWire 800. Yeah, that's how we're fucking doing this.

• 1:17:20Speaker 03

  Good rule, actually. I have so, so many FireWire cables right next to me. Despite using what essentially amounted to two separate systems, they decided to wire both of them into AC, into AC bus two, despite the fact that they could have wired one of them into the cabin bus as originally planned, which would have been more complex, but would have been easier to shut it down.

• 1:17:39November Kelly?

  Okay, so now you just don't, you can't shut down the slot machines.

• 1:17:43Liam McAnderson?

  Fail-safe slot machines. Dead man's switch, but only for slot machines.

• 1:17:48November Kelly?

  Wings fallen off, engines fallen off, stabilizers gone, slot machines still going.

• 1:17:53Liam McAnderson?

  Operational. It's like the titanium bathtub, but they're titanium slot machines.

• 1:17:58November Kelly?

  This is a flight data recorder and slot machine layout box.

• 1:18:03Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, yeah. The pilot has like a lever in the cockpit to increase or decrease the odds on the slot machines.

• 1:18:13November Kelly?

  I'm sorry that you'll. Loved one was killed. However, we recovered the cockpit data recorder and we found that they were screaming a lot, but they are entitled to about a hundred dollars worth of credit card refunds from slots. That's true.

• 1:18:28Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, actually, you know, the payout goes directly to the pilot. So there were chips flying around.

• 1:18:34November Kelly?

  The pneumatic tube full of chips.

• 1:18:37Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:40Speaker 03

  So they went ahead with installing this on all the aircraft. They had originally agreed to first unit was installed in an MD 11 in January 1997. With the plan to be to install the system in one to two planes per month of through February 1998, depending on maintenance schedules, they weren't going to bother unless it was in the hangar for something else, obviously. Swissair, the Swiss lottery and the I and IFT were contractually obligated to service the system until December 31st, 2003. Swissair, after introducing the system to public fanfare in January 1997, with a ton of press photos, some of which I've already used several times. Would consider it a success, although for reasons I can't really figure out, they would disable it in the coach cabin by April 1997. Meaning the entire power distribution issue was entirely moot and they could have switched back.

• 1:19:25Speaker 03

  They could have switched back.

• 1:19:26November Kelly?

  We're not making any money off these people, but we got to keep the sort of like wiring architecture to do it.

• 1:19:32Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:19:33November Kelly?

  Just in case.

• 1:19:34Speaker 03

  Yes. Which, you know, I can, I can see the justification for not rewiring the plane. If not for everything that's about to happen. Next slide. This is another one of them press photos I just talked about. I guess I just need to talk about the system for a minute. Swissair would get a.

• 1:19:51Justin Roczniak?

  Oh, I could get info.

• 1:19:53November Kelly?

  You could.

• 1:19:53Liam McAnderson?

  And chance.

• 1:19:55Justin Roczniak?

  Chance.

• 1:19:55Speaker 03

  That's, that's, that's the gambling.

• 1:19:57Liam McAnderson?

  I like, I like, I really like air, just air show. That's my favorite.

• 1:20:01Speaker 03

  I know it's a map, Maya.

• 1:20:04Justin Roczniak?

  They have, they have chance, but where's community chest?

• 1:20:08Speaker 03

  It's in your ass, Roz.

• 1:20:10Liam McAnderson?

  My favorite.

• 1:20:11Justin Roczniak?

  What?

• 1:20:11Liam McAnderson?

  It's in your ass. It's in your butt.

• 1:20:14Justin Roczniak?

  Okay.

• 1:20:15Liam McAnderson?

  I have a fun aside about that since I, we were on tour.

• 1:20:19Justin Roczniak?

  What did you do to my ass?

• 1:20:22Liam McAnderson?

  An ass side, if you will. I was, I was talking to Jay when we were setting up for Philly for the Fillmore. And he's like, oh, do you have this cable? And I was, I think it's probably in your, and I'm about to say, I think it's probably in your butt. And Jay cuts me off because I've been making this joke six nights in a row. It goes, I swear to God, if you say it's in my ass, I'll fuck you up. I've never seen a man like break composure like this. I think it's just like, shut the fuck up. And I was like, oh, he's broken composure. I've done it.

• 1:20:51November Kelly?

  You're declaring victory at that moment. Yeah.

• 1:20:54Liam McAnderson?

  I want to go to, what is, what do you think they got behind the paid film paywall?

• 1:21:01Speaker 03

  I was gonna ask that. Yeah. What's one of the free, one of the free films?

• 1:21:04November Kelly?

  Solo again.

• 1:21:06Speaker 03

  I didn't notice this when I was putting it together. I wonder, I have to wonder what the free films were and if it was just the safety, the safety video.

• 1:21:11November Kelly?

  You have to pay for it with a Mastercard as well.

• 1:21:14Speaker 03

  Also.

• 1:21:15Justin Roczniak?

  Train arriving at the station.

• 1:21:18Justin Roczniak?

  What else? Maybe some Buster Keaton.

• 1:21:22Justin Roczniak?

  You know.

• 1:21:22November Kelly?

  That's not a bad deal. I'd watch some Buster Keaton.

• 1:21:24Justin Roczniak?

  That'd actually be pretty good. You know, that's probably behind the paywall, actually.

• 1:21:28November Kelly?

  They didn't even have the term paywall yet. That's how like primitive they were.

• 1:21:33Justin Roczniak?

  So back then you had to put a Mastercard logo on there.

• 1:21:36November Kelly?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:37Justin Roczniak?

  To let them know, no, no Visa, no American Express, only Mastercard.

• 1:21:44November Kelly?

  Sometimes I wonder if I've fallen off and then I feel, then I remember that American Express exists and I feel a lot better.

• 1:21:50Speaker 03

  That's a good point there. Yeah.

• 1:21:52Justin Roczniak?

  They don't even deliver stuff anymore. What the fuck?

• 1:21:57November Kelly?

  American unhurried.

• 1:21:59Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:59Speaker 03

  So American Express and Western Union, two of the biggest, two of the biggest crashouts of, I was gonna say our time, but that's a much different time.

• 1:22:07Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. Look, Western Union is still going somehow. I don't know what people use it for.

• 1:22:11November Kelly?

  Remittances, genuinely.

• 1:22:13Speaker 03

  Yeah, I was gonna say, they use it for money transfer. They used to use it for money transfer to get scammed, but that's, now they just use cryptocurrency.

• 1:22:20November Kelly?

  Yeah. No, no, Western Union is like propping up the economy of a bunch of like poorer countries.

• 1:22:26Speaker 03

  Yeah, this is actually true. So as money gram is as well for the same reason. Yeah. Uh, so. So, sorry, hang on. Where was I? That's right. I had one drink. I shouldn't be this out of it. So Swissair got a fair bit of positive industry press. Passengers liked it a lot, although the features would not be as thrilling as expected. In March of 1997, Swissair told the Securities and Exchange Commission that a total of 50 people had gambled up to the $200 limit.

• 1:22:55November Kelly?

  50 Swiss whales.

• 1:22:57Justin Roczniak?

  Those, those high rollers, as I said, they love the swats.

• 1:23:03Justin Roczniak?

  They don't want that kind of in-person interaction where they can like, you know, intimidate their fellow high rollers at like, you know, a poker table or like a, a blackjack table. No, they just want to pull the lever.

• 1:23:19November Kelly?

  I mean, I'm not turning down $10,000. Like, that's not bad.

• 1:23:24Speaker 03

  It was $2,600.

• 1:23:25Justin Roczniak?

  No, all those people won $3,500. That's.

• 1:23:28November Kelly?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:23:32Justin Roczniak?

  You know what they say, the passenger always wins.

• 1:23:38Speaker 03

  By the middle of 1997, Alitalia would take a second stab at it because they were really committed to, to the, they were really committed to showing this one film.

• 1:23:48Speaker 03

  They would install it in five MD11s as a second test. They would also sign some sort of agreement with, with the Debenair from the UK and Qantas from Australia. I don't think either one of those happened. As far as I can tell, I think both IFT and Debenair ran out of money before they could even really try.

• 1:24:09November Kelly?

  I've never even heard of Debenair, so.

• 1:24:12Speaker 03

  It's Devon's, uh.

• 1:24:14November Kelly?

  Yeah, Devon.

• 1:24:15Justin Roczniak?

  Devon's airline.

• 1:24:16Liam McAnderson?

  Devon's airline, yeah.

• 1:24:17November Kelly?

  Yeah, Devon's airline, yeah.

• 1:24:19Liam McAnderson?

  Devon Air.

• 1:24:20Speaker 03

  They were, oh, they flew out of London, Luton.

• 1:24:24November Kelly?

  That's weird. Yeah, okay. I think, I think EasyJet started doing that. So not as weird as it sounds, but yeah.

• 1:24:32Speaker 03

  I mean, it's, I mean, for 1996, oh, they existed for four years. Okay, that's nice.

• 1:24:37November Kelly?

  Well done.

• 1:24:39Speaker 03

  For 1996, that would be revolutionary because of course, every low-cost carrier hadn't realized that people will pay to get screwed in every fashion that like we have nowadays. Have the spirit in the Frontier Airlines of Europe here. Anyway, Swissair themselves would have some financial difficulties, but the bigger ones later.

• 1:24:59November Kelly?

  Yeah, I was gonna say.

• 1:25:00Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, yes, but not yet. So combining that with some technical difficulties, the system had only been installed on five, on six planes by 1998. At some point in the later half of 1997, Swissair had complained that the individual systems under the seats were getting so hot that the hard drives are dying.

• 1:25:18Liam McAnderson?

  Oh, it's like Noah's computer.

• 1:25:19Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, yeah. No, well, there's just a bunch of loose hard drives under every. Right, you know, when someone like stows their bag underneath the seat in front of them and like fucks up all the hard drives.

• 1:25:33Speaker 03

  Hate to say it. IFT blamed the company that supplied the hard drives. I can't find out who that is, but if you know some of the companies that were making hard drives at the time.

• 1:25:42November Kelly?

  It's IBM. It's pretty shortlist, yeah.

• 1:25:45Speaker 03

  I could, in fact, believe that IBM was making drives that exploded like that, but I would also be tempted to blame both sides here.

• 1:25:52Justin Roczniak?

  All right, this is like, you know, this, this is, this is before we had solid state drives, so you know, it's like a platter, you know, and it's like a fucking disk that just explodes.

• 1:26:03Speaker 03

  After their, after those two problems, Swissair didn't have any other major issues. You know, that was really it up until, you'll go to the next slide.

• 1:26:14November Kelly?

  Hmm, this is, this is gorgeous. This is a, this is the bit where I get to talk about Swissair. So, so like, I'm, I'm sort of in, I'm adjacent to this one, right? So like, this, this may set off a spasm of people trying to like investigate me for like podcast nepotism. My dad lived in Switzerland for, for a long time when I was growing up. And so basically, because my parents were divorced and we had, they had like shared custody, I would like fly out regularly. I would like commute as a kid on a Swissair plane between London and Geneva. This is the least relatable story I have ever told.

• 1:26:55Justin Roczniak?

  It sounds nice though.

• 1:26:56November Kelly?

  It was, it was really nice. Like, I, I was flying on my own, which meant that like, if you're a kid doing that,

• 1:27:02Speaker 03

  Unaccompanied minor.

• 1:27:03November Kelly?

  The stewardesses make a huge fuss of you. You were allowed to go into the cockpit because they didn't know that kids could do nine 11 yet because Zoran Mandani hadn't been elected yet.

• 1:27:12Speaker 03

  Or Brod, yeah.

• 1:27:13November Kelly?

  And.

• 1:27:14Justin Roczniak?

  I'm allowed to. It's not even illegal.

• 1:27:17November Kelly?

  So like, every, every time I got off one of these planes, I would have like a little set of like pilot's wings and a little tiny model of the plane and a little like gift bag.

• 1:27:29Speaker 03

  Oh my god.

• 1:27:29November Kelly?

  And, and like a 1% more thing and a 1% more wire in my brain between, uh, older women being nice to me and me feeling a bunch of strange feelings. Um, so.

• 1:27:42Justin Roczniak?

  Did, did the pilot ever ask you about?

• 1:27:45November Kelly?

  Gladiator movies.

• 1:27:49November Kelly?

  Weirdly, weirdly, I, I, I never got sexually harassed as, as a, as a kid on a Swiss F flight, but I did get sexually harassed as a kid the first time I went to Utah. So just derive from that what you will.

• 1:28:01Speaker 03

  I mean, that makes sense, yeah.

• 1:28:02November Kelly?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. But so, um, yeah, I, I, I used to fly on these all the time. At a time contemporaneous was when we're talking about. I remember these planes. I feel very fondly towards them. I think the livery is beautiful. And again, it was a time of like, strong brand identity that was based around, I don't know, I didn't know what the fuck Swissness was despite spending half my time there, but I was like, Switzerland is when a lot of extremely beautiful women are very solicitous and very nice to you.

• 1:28:18Justin Roczniak?

  Yes.

• 1:28:19November Kelly?

  And I, I kind of still believe that today.

• 1:28:24Speaker 03

  See.

• 1:28:25Justin Roczniak?

  Nova, you ever hang around a gymnasium?

• 1:28:34Speaker 03

  See, Nova, now I'm actually jealous because I, I, I was, I, I was born in a time and did not fly for the first time until well after nine 11. So of course the cockpit was a foreign land. Where, where people were not allowed to be. Also, I phrased that wrong. I was not born after nine 11. Jesus Christ.

• 1:29:00Speaker 03

  Not giving myself enough credit here.

• 1:29:01November Kelly?

  It's cra- people who are born after nine eleven are adults now. It's crazy.

• 1:29:04Speaker 03

  Yeah, presumably some of them.

• 1:29:07Justin Roczniak?

  They will never know that it used to be you could just go to the airport terminal and hang around and watch the airplanes.

• 1:29:14Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah, we we used to be a proper country.

• 1:29:16Speaker 03

  You could do that in Seattle, but you still have to go through TSA, which why would you do that?

• 1:29:20Liam McAnderson?

  I think you could do that in Philly now too, but you also still have to go to TSA.

• 1:29:24Speaker 03

  You used to be able to do it in Pittsburgh and then they started ruining the terminal by building a new one.

• 1:29:28Justin Roczniak?

  Oh, right. Yeah, no, they're getting rid of the good postmodern terminal and replacing with some bullshit. Yeah.

• 1:29:33Speaker 03

  Yeah, I I mean, listen, there are seats behind me that are from the Pittsburgh airport terminal. I I am I I am very mad about what they are doing to my airport. In anyways, um, the thing about air, the thing about airline nationalism is also weird because we didn't. We never had a flag carrier in the US. We just had like Pan Am.

• 1:29:54Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:55Speaker 03

  Right. We just had like Pan Am as a sign of global dominance, but like, I think for, I think at the time in like the mid century, the the sign of American dominance was the fact that we built the planes, which we don't do anymore.

• 1:30:06Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, no, we don't do that anymore.

• 1:30:08Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:30:09Justin Roczniak?

  Pan Am got subsumed into, of all things, CSX.

• 1:30:13Speaker 03

  It's true, yeah.

• 1:30:15Liam McAnderson?

  Chicken shit express. Yeah.

• 1:30:16Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:18Speaker 03

  They, uh, there, there's actually, there's a, there's a weird travel agency that paid Iceland air to put a Pan Am livery on one of their planes so they can charter it as like a retro future type thing.

• 1:30:28Liam McAnderson?

  Okay.

• 1:30:28Speaker 03

  Which is fucking crazy. It's like a hundred thousand dollars a ticket for a global, for a global itinerary.

• 1:30:33November Kelly?

  The people yearn for the brands. They want the old brand identities back.

• 1:30:37Speaker 03

  They do, except they do.

• 1:30:39November Kelly?

  I want Swiss Air back, you sons of bitches, right?

• 1:30:45Justin Roczniak?

  I demand the brands.

• 1:30:48Liam McAnderson?

  Demand brand.

• 1:30:49Speaker 03

  The, the, the travel agency that's running this also did it on the cheap, so it's not a real version of the Pan Am livery and it's also on a seven five seven, which they're going to take on around the world, which is a fascinating choice.

• 1:31:00Justin Roczniak?

  That is interesting, yeah.

• 1:31:02November Kelly?

  I want, I want Swissair back. I want to return with a V. I want to be too young to experience gender dysphoria yet and have a bunch of very beautiful women be nice to me.

• 1:31:13Speaker 03

  That's, that's true. I'm jealous of the cockpit thing, but I, I understand the yearning for the older women. That part I get. Yeah. Anyways, on the topic here, the aircraft we are looking at right now is, is in McDonnell Douglas MD-11 built in 1991. It is registered HB-IWF. It is a name, I believe that's pronounced Vaude. I don't know.

• 1:31:37November Kelly?

  It's, it's Voe. Voe is the canton immediately north of Geneva. It's, it's where Lausanne is. It's where Montreux is. It's very, very pretty. It's like the whole kind of north shore of Lake Geneva.

• 1:31:52Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, it's where smoke on the water occurred.

• 1:31:55November Kelly?

  It is where smoke on the water occurred. It's also got a cool flag. If you're into Swiss cantonal flags, and why shouldn't you be?

• 1:32:01Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, and we're, we're all here for vexology.

• 1:32:06Speaker 03

  I meant, I meant to look up how that was pronounced before I, before I came here today, and then I didn't. So it shows what I know.

• 1:32:11November Kelly?

  It's all, it's all good. Canton Voe.

• 1:32:14Speaker 03

  The, the system or the IFN-2 system was built into this aircraft between the 21st of August and the 9th of September, 1997. There were some part problems that wouldn't actually get done until February of 1998. Voe would be assigned to fly Swissair Flight 111 between John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York and Geneva Airport in Geneva on September 2nd, 1998.

• 1:32:40November Kelly?

  Oh boy.

• 1:32:41Speaker 03

  Swissair 111, Swissair 111 was sometimes called the UN Express due to its route and the fact that it took off after the workday ended in New York.

• 1:32:49November Kelly?

  Yeah, people, people don't necessarily know this about Geneva, but it's kind of a company town for the UN and NGOs more generally. And so if you, if you spend a lot of time in Geneva, and as an English speaker, right, you're, you're mostly around UN people, Red Cross people, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, and their kids. And it's, it's, it's, it's weird. It's a weird vibe. It's a weird law company town, but it's cool.

• 1:33:13Speaker 03

  Makes sense.

• 1:33:14November Kelly?

  Yeah, or the like bulk of the UN bureaucracy is in Geneva. New York is just where the like important stuff, you know, the, the stuff that all the support functions are supporting is in New York.

• 1:33:25Speaker 03

  Yes, it's where they, it's, it's where they won't be able to send Netanyahu now that, now that we have Zoran.

• 1:33:30Justin Roczniak?

  Now he's Zoran, yeah.

• 1:33:33Speaker 03

  That, that will be a very interesting turn of events, whatever it undoubtedly happens. Anyway.

• 1:33:40Speaker 03

  Anyways, on September 2nd, 1998, Swissair 111 would take off from John F. Kennedy International Airport at 8:18 Eastern Daylight Time. 28 minutes late. 28 minutes after it's scheduled to depart.

• 1:33:53November Kelly?

  Had to replace a bunch of hard drives because people were gambling too much.

• 1:33:56Speaker 03

  It's probably about fair.

• 1:33:58Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, although, although like two people in first class. Who were pulling the lever because that's the highest class form of gambling.

• 1:34:06November Kelly?

  Yeah, that's right.

• 1:34:08Speaker 03

  With the, with the UN credit card presumably.

• 1:34:10November Kelly?

  Yeah. You're gambling UN money. That's gotta feel good as hell.

• 1:34:15Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:16November Kelly?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:17Speaker 03

  In command of the aircraft was.

• 1:34:19Justin Roczniak?

  I put it all on a Hootus. Let's go.

• 1:34:24Speaker 03

  In command of the aircraft was captain, I, I don't know how that's pronounced. I'm gonna go with Urs Zimmerman.

• 1:34:29November Kelly?

  Yep, pretty.

• 1:34:29Speaker 03

  U R S. Okay, good enough. A 49-year-old Swiss Air Force veteran whose birthday was September 3rd.

• 1:34:36November Kelly?

  Being, being a Swiss Air Force veteran is really funny to me because it's like, yeah, cool. You flew, I presume, fast jets. Over a country that a fast jet crosses in about 10 minutes.

• 1:34:47Justin Roczniak?

  So, the coolest thing I ever saw was in Switzerland. We were staying, a family was staying in, um.

• 1:34:57Justin Roczniak?

  We were staying in like a rented chalet.

• 1:35:01Speaker 03

  Nice.

• 1:35:02Justin Roczniak?

  You know, down, down, down the road is, uh, down the road is, um, a, uh, what you call it? A sort of a hotel there where I had one of the best bolognese's I've had in my life, like a spaghetti bolognese, right? But they had a back deck and at the other side of the back deck was a cliff. And the cliff went down, you know, several thousand feet. This was, uh, what? This was in the village of Haflu, uh, which is just near Myringen, which is like. I forget what the canton is. Um, and you could, you know, when, when I was there, you could look over the side of the railing. You could see the Swiss Air Force doing maneuvers below you.

• 1:35:41November Kelly?

  Down.

• 1:35:41Justin Roczniak?

  You were looking down on the plains.

• 1:35:43November Kelly?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:35:44Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:45November Kelly?

  Yeah. Myringen is in Bern, by the way, just if you're curious.

• 1:35:49Speaker 03

  I had a.

• 1:35:50Justin Roczniak?

  No, it's not. Is that, oh, is the whole thing a canton of Bern?

• 1:35:54November Kelly?

  So, so there's two cantons. There's, there's like Bernstadt and fuck another one. Um, just like burned like Canton, right? So it's, it's to the city and the thing.

• 1:36:07Justin Roczniak?

  Oh, I see. I see. I was thinking of, uh, shit, because it took a long time to get the burn from there. Not, not that long of a time because the trains are very good.

• 1:36:16November Kelly?

  Wait, no, I'm fucking, I'm stupid. I'm confusing Basel and Bern. Um, but yeah, it is in Bern.

• 1:36:22Justin Roczniak?

  Gotcha. Okay. What's the other thing about that trip that was relevant? I forget. Shit. Up that not, not.

• 1:36:27November Kelly?

  I mean, I, I can keep throwing Swiss facts in. I had the, the freshest, nicest glass of milk in my life that I've ever had in a hotel in Lausanne.

• 1:36:35Justin Roczniak?

  And a very, very, very positive experiences in Switzerland. Yeah.

• 1:36:40November Kelly?

  Well, I, I think this, I'm really funny for the, the arc of this podcast to be glazing Switzerland. Like, not that we, not that they don't deserve it, but like.

• 1:36:48Speaker 03

  It's quite ideologically interesting. Yes.

• 1:36:50Justin Roczniak?

  Yes.

• 1:36:54Justin Roczniak?

  We all just move there and be neutral. Politics are over. The only problem is, uh, we'd all have to get together in a big town meeting and Nova wouldn't be able to vote.

• 1:37:08November Kelly?

  It's fine. I'm, I'm, I'm not using it. It's fine.

• 1:37:12November Kelly?

  But yeah, so the, the Swiss Air Force are really, really cool. They used to fly, uh, BF109s, which are the, the only BF109s you're allowed to acceptably think are cool because they're not Nazis. They're just, uh, neutral.

• 1:37:25November Kelly?

  They used to fly FA18s as well. Um, and the only other thing I know about the Swiss Air Force is that in terms of like air defense and air interception, they keep office hours, which I think is one of the funniest things because it's such a small country. They will like intercept aircraft over Switzerland, Monday to Friday, nine to five. Out with that is France and Germany's problem.

• 1:37:48Speaker 03

  Makes, yeah, that makes sense. This is, this conversation is very funny to me. It was never been anywhere particularly near the European continent.

• 1:37:55Liam McAnderson?

  Keep it that way.

• 1:37:56November Kelly?

  It's, it's good. They go good milks.

• 1:37:58Speaker 03

  I got two very conflicting, very conflicting arguments there in both ears.

• 1:38:03Justin Roczniak?

  Wow, nice, nice milk, nice cheese.

• 1:38:06Speaker 03

  Nazis.

• 1:38:07Liam McAnderson?

  A lot of them.

• 1:38:08November Kelly?

  Good chocolate as well. Music boxes.

• 1:38:11Speaker 03

  Yeah, good chocolate.

• 1:38:11Justin Roczniak?

  Watches are pretty good.

• 1:38:13Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:13Justin Roczniak?

  The trains are pretty good.

• 1:38:15Liam McAnderson?

  Switzerland live show, but just add a watch shop.

• 1:38:18November Kelly?

  I would be thrilled to do a Switzerland live show.

• 1:38:21Justin Roczniak?

  Switzerland live show.

• 1:38:22Speaker 03

  I, I would also go to the li- watch live show, even though every watch I wear is Casio right now.

• 1:38:28Justin Roczniak?

  It's when I do it on the bridge in Luzern.

• 1:38:30November Kelly?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:31Liam McAnderson?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:38:32Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. No, they gotta, we have to do it at the Transport Museum, but we need to meet Swiss Gareth Dennis first.

• 1:38:38Speaker 03

  Oh, I love that.

• 1:38:41November Kelly?

  We gotta, well, we do it in Montreux, you know, like, well, as soon as the Jazz Festival clears out, we do it in Montreux on the lakefront and then just make sure the venue catches fire.

• 1:38:51Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, we shouldn't tell them that first.

• 1:38:54November Kelly?

  No, no, no. There'll be a surprise.

• 1:38:58Speaker 03

  Uh, second in command onboard this aircraft

• 1:39:04Speaker 03

  was First Officer Stefan Low, I believe. This time I actually went and looked it up during that last diversion. And I might still be wrong, but that's what Google Translate told me, so I can blame them. Uh, he was a thirty-six-year-old with relatively low hours in commercial aviation, but was also a Swiss Air Force veteran.

• 1:39:20November Kelly?

  These two guys have both flown FA-18s in circles over the same ALP together.

• 1:39:25Justin Roczniak?

  Yes.

• 1:39:26Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:39:26Justin Roczniak?

  They can only turn left.

• 1:39:30Speaker 03

  Also onboard the flight were eleven flight attendants and one purser, bringing the total crew to fourteen alongside two hundred and fifteen passengers, meaning we had a total of two hundred and twenty-nine people onboard this aircraft. This was not a full flight. It was about seventy-two percent of revenue passenger seats occupied.

• 1:39:46Liam McAnderson?

  Imagine being able to sit and gamble on not a full flight and you can still smoke.

• 1:39:51November Kelly?

  The dream.

• 1:39:52Liam McAnderson?

  The dream.

• 1:39:53November Kelly?

  You're, you're going from New York to Geneva. It's, yeah, no, fantastic.

• 1:39:57Speaker 03

  Unfortunately, you're probably not going to New Geneva, as we're going to get into.

• 1:40:01November Kelly?

  Ah, damn.

• 1:40:02Liam McAnderson?

  No, you're going into it, yeah.

• 1:40:03Justin Roczniak?

  You're not going to space today.

• 1:40:05Speaker 03

  Yes. I mean, there's gonna be a lot of smoke involved. It's just not coming from the cigarette that you're holding in first class. In any case.

• 1:40:14Speaker 03

  In any case, about 15 minutes after takeoff, the aircraft would experience a radio blackout for 14 minutes. This was just kind of determined to be a crew error that wasn't, did not represent any sort of functional issues with the aircraft. They had just tuned the radio wrong, but it was mentioned in the, in the official report, so I felt like I had to put it here.

• 1:40:29November Kelly?

  It's like, it would like it is.

• 1:40:32Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, they got the old fashioned tuner with like the, you know, the, the, the physical thing that went back and forth. Hold on, I think I can get limba.

• 1:40:44Speaker 03

  My dad and your dad just agreeing and disagreeing, but howling at each other over the Swissair. Yeah.

• 1:40:50Justin Roczniak?

  Oh, if my dad and your dad were pilot and the first officer.

• 1:40:54Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:40:56Speaker 03

  You guys ever seen a fistfight on a plane?

• 1:41:02Speaker 03

  At 10:10 PM Atlantic daylight time.

• 1:41:05Justin Roczniak?

  Uh-oh, I've, I've been there.

• 1:41:08Speaker 03

  At fif- so 58 minutes after takeoff while flying over the south coast of Nova Scotia, Captain Zimmerman detects the distinct smell of smoke, but a visual inspection did not confirm the presence of smoke. Cockpit crew initially dismissed it as normal smoke from the air conditioning system being configured incorrectly, which happens sometimes on these older MT11s, and the smell went away after a brief moment.

• 1:41:29November Kelly?

  I mean, there's a lot of like weird bad smells you can get on planes. Like, yeah.

• 1:41:33Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, cuz like, you know, you, all the air that's coming in, you're getting from the bleed air system, so it goes through the engine.

• 1:41:39Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:41:39Justin Roczniak?

  You know, and this is, this is like, uh, you know, just one of those things that happens on airplanes. Sometimes you, you know, it inhales a bunch of air, uh, that happens to have smoke in it. But, you know, the other thing which is interesting about this one is this is back before, you know, the cockpit door had to be locked.

• 1:41:56Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:41:57Justin Roczniak?

  You know, back then, people could just walk in.

• 1:41:59Speaker 03

  It was also before cockpit crews were banned from smoking, up there notably, so. Do, I don't, not that that was a factor, but it's probably something worth considering in terms of the smell of, the idle smell of smoke someplace.

• 1:42:11Justin Roczniak?

  All right, you should probably be allowed to smoke. Sometimes it's a really stressful.

• 1:42:14Speaker 03

  Yeah, or dip or something.

• 1:42:15November Kelly?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's, it's like, I just saw the movie Flight and the thesis of the movie Flight is that drinking makes you a bad pilot, but cocaine kind of cancels it out.

• 1:42:25Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's, yeah, speedball, yeah.

• 1:42:27Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, yeah, exactly, you know.

• 1:42:31Speaker 03

  But I believe, I believe that China only banned smoking for the, for the cockpit crews in 2017.

• 1:42:37November Kelly?

  Amazing. They have way better cigarettes there, like the packaging's way cooler.

• 1:42:41Justin Roczniak?

  I imagine like the Chinese cigarettes are probably good for you.

• 1:42:45November Kelly?

  Yeah.

• 1:42:45Justin Roczniak?

  They probably have that now.

• 1:42:48Speaker 03

  We smoke, we smoke in the Changhua's aboard the, aboard the, the Comac built aircraft. Except they actually hadn't, they actually hadn't built any of those in 2017. So never mind.

• 1:43:02Justin 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 is this one.

• 1:43:45Justin Roczniak?

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

• 1:44:05Speaker 03

  If you'll go to the next slide, please. There's a few pictures on this one.

• 1:44:09November Kelly?

  Oh, these are the two most swastika men I've ever seen in my life.

• 1:44:13Liam McAnderson?

  These guys have done some, done some stuff, yeah.

• 1:44:16November Kelly?

  These, these images conjure up like fondue and rushdie to me. Like these are, yeah, sure.

• 1:44:22Speaker 03

  Yeah, on the, yeah, th- this is actually the only reason I included the fixtures because they look to be the most European men alive. On the left is Captain.

• 1:44:30Liam McAnderson?

  Sorry.

• 1:44:32Speaker 03

  That's a good point. Yeah, sure. They should have chose the better words there, my bad.

• 1:44:35Liam McAnderson?

  We're on our own ways here.

• 1:44:37Justin Roczniak?

  This guy, this guy, this guy could be like a really good cop in an 80s movie.

• 1:44:43November Kelly?

  Oh, yeah, yeah. Well, they both could is the thing.

• 1:44:46Justin Roczniak?

  Actually, though, yeah.

• 1:44:47November Kelly?

  Buddy cop movie, you know?

• 1:44:49Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, no, we, we need to get these folks on film. I mean, they're dead, but we really need to get them on film.

• 1:44:54Speaker 03

  He's got, if, if you got rid of the mustache, he's got like a Phil Collins thing going on almost, which is interesting.

• 1:44:59November Kelly?

  They don't make guys who are bald this way anymore.

• 1:45:02Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:45:03Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 1:45:03November Kelly?

  For which I'm desperately glad, but like.

• 1:45:08Justin Roczniak?

  Everyone's gotten ashamed of it.

• 1:45:09November Kelly?

  He's got the Dracula flow. It's crazy.

• 1:45:12Speaker 03

  Yeah, actually, I was, I was going to point out the widow's beak. That's impressive.

• 1:45:18Speaker 03

  Uh, the, the guy whose hair we're making, the dead guy whose hair we're making fun of on the left, that's Captain Zimmerman. On the right is First Officer Lo.

• 1:45:25November Kelly?

  I don't know if it's right to say that we're doing it on the left, just because we're a leftist podcast, doesn't mean this got like a class character to it.

• 1:45:33Justin Roczniak?

  Look, pilots are in unions. They're workers.

• 1:45:35November Kelly?

  That's true.

• 1:45:36Speaker 03

  That's true.

• 1:45:39Speaker 03

  Four minutes later at 10:14 PM, smoke smell comes back. And this time, actual visual smoke that comes alongside it. Captain Zimmerman declares a pan-pan situation, which indicates extreme urgency, but not necessarily an emergency, which is not the sort of thing you typically do whenever there's smoke in the cockpit, but never mind. He also requests that the plane be vectored to return to, quote, "a convenient place," which is what the transcript says. Immediately deciding that Boston was the best option, Boston being 270 miles away. Not really sure what the thought process was there.

• 1:46:13Justin Roczniak?

  All right, the plane goes pretty fast. It's probably fine.

• 1:46:17Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, I don't know.

• 1:46:19Speaker 03

  Well, Moncton Center, that would be Moncton in Canada.

• 1:46:23Liam McAnderson?

  Don't go there. Never fucking go there.

• 1:46:25Justin Roczniak?

  Aye, that town, yeah.

• 1:46:27Speaker 03

  Ruined our lives.

• 1:46:31Justin Roczniak?

  It's like New Jersey, but somehow hotter and much worse.

• 1:46:34Liam McAnderson?

  It was 101 degrees there.

• 1:46:36Justin Roczniak?

  It was 101 when we were in Moncton, yeah.

• 1:46:40Speaker 03

  Horrible. Moncton responds by saying that they can vector them to Boston, but they can also do it to Halifax, which is 76 miles away as opposed to 270. The Swissair crew responds with the quotes, "We prefer Halifax from our position," which is interesting passive language. I'm not really sure what caused that.

• 1:46:57November Kelly?

  A bunch of smoke inhalation.

• 1:46:59Speaker 03

  Well, yes, because at this point, they also pull up, put on the oxygen, the big oxygen mask they have for the cockpit crew.

• 1:47:04Justin Roczniak?

  Well, the captain had to think for a moment and he was like, okay, I need to go somewhere where I can slide over the hood of a police cruiser.

• 1:47:13Speaker 03

  Yeah. Hazard in here, right?

• 1:47:15Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, Austin made a lot of sense, but then he realized, no, Halifax is probably also using Ford Crown Victorias at this point.

• 1:47:23Speaker 03

  That's a good point, yeah.

• 1:47:24Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 1:47:26Speaker 03

  1019, the Halifax controller starts lining them up for the runway there, tells them that they are 35 miles from the runway, which is just a couple of minutes of flying time, give or take, which is, you know, this is the good, this is the good place. You want to be two minutes from the runway if your plane is actively smoking at you from an unknown source.

• 1:47:43Justin Roczniak?

  The plane being on fire was very, very bad because there's not much you can do.

• 1:47:47Speaker 03

  Yes, generally true. This is the, the, the big through line through any, anytime you look at a plane that's been on fire, that, that does tend to happen.

• 1:47:56Justin Roczniak?

  The shit that killed Stan Rogers?

• 1:47:59Justin Roczniak?

  Oh, God.

• 1:48:00Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:48:00November Kelly?

  We'll get, we'll get to that.

• 1:48:02Speaker 03

  I was, I was going to mention that as my example, but interestingly, that didn't really suit, catch fire super hard until they were on the ground. So it's, they opened the door and all the oxygen made everything explode. Anyway, the Swissair crew responds by saying they're too high, which is kind of reasonable. Halifax responds by vectoring them via a longer approach to give them a few more minutes to actually get the plane closer to the ground. At 1021.

• 1:48:25Justin Roczniak?

  As, if some folks are not like, super familiar with the dynamics of an airliner, it is difficult to go down fast sometimes.

• 1:48:36November Kelly?

  Unless you want to really, unless you want to kill everybody, like.

• 1:48:40Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, yeah, it's, it's, it's pretty bad if you're approaching the runway and you're going 400 miles an hour.

• 1:48:45Speaker 03

  That's bad.

• 1:48:46Justin Roczniak?

  You want to avoid that situation. The brakes don't work good.

• 1:48:53Justin Roczniak?

  The brakes are good. They're not that good.

• 1:48:57Speaker 03

  10:21 through, uh, two, yeah, two minutes later Halifax asked them the amount of fuel and the number of souls they have on board the aircraft. Um, they always use the term souls in air tra- in aircraft accident reports. I've never quite understood it. Just bizarre.

• 1:49:11November Kelly?

  I, I, I just assumed it to be a convenient way of including everybody who's on board.

• 1:49:16Speaker 03

  Yeah. Oh, it seems, I mean, I don't want to say it sounds weirdly religious, but like it sounds a little bit weird.

• 1:49:22November Kelly?

  It is weirdly religious. I think it's probably a nautical holdover as much as anything.

• 1:49:25Speaker 03

  Oh, that's a, that's a good point there. Yeah.

• 1:49:27November Kelly?

  It's, it's also like, if you need something that encompasses, uh, crew, passengers and miscellaneous, you know?

• 1:49:34Speaker 03

  Yeah. It's a good, it's a good point.

• 1:49:36Justin Roczniak?

  It's, it's gonna be difficult if you're carrying a lot of like philosophical zombies.

• 1:49:42Speaker 03

  Oh, that's not gonna make weight. That's a shame.

• 1:49:44November Kelly?

  Yeah. Say, say your number of souls were like observed or?

• 1:49:47Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. Also, of course. We have to have a debate about this now.

• 1:49:53Speaker 03

  Also, of course, people that sold their souls with the Swiss National Lottery at one point or another could do it. It'd be some sort of problem here.

• 1:49:58Justin Roczniak?

  That's a good point. It's a good point. Yeah. Gotta, gotta check some people off the list. Nope. They spent their $200.

• 1:50:06November Kelly?

  Wait, wait a second. We have some people who work at the World Intellectual Property Organization on here.

• 1:50:11Speaker 03

  Still there is.

• 1:50:15Speaker 03

  Uh, Swiss Air crew responds to that with the realization that, oh, we probably have a little bit too much fuel to guarantee a safe landing and asked to be taken out over a body of water to dump the fuel. At 10:22, one minute later, they turned to the south, now flying away from the airport, but still within 45 minutes of the runway.

• 1:50:33November Kelly?

  I don't want a Monday morning quarterback on my Monday morning, under my Monday morning quarterbacking podcast, but the, the kind of decision making here and the kind of, uh, forward thinking or lack thereof, it feels, it, it, this feels lurching from one thing to the next, you know, which I understand they are busy and also presumably terrified, but.

• 1:50:53Justin Roczniak?

  It's been six minutes. Yeah.

• 1:50:56Speaker 03

  It has been a total of six minutes. Yes.

• 1:50:58Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 1:50:59Speaker 03

  The short duration of this is is pretty fucking difficult for me to cope with when I had to put this slideshow together.

• 1:51:07Speaker 03

  At the same time, he was having, at the same time, Captain was having this conversation, First Officer was working through the checklist for smoke/fumes of unknown origin. Pictured here on the, on the right is a different smoke checklist from the Swissair. Emergency checklist, this is for air conditioning smoke. It is basically of the same thing. As a matter of fact, this is the first thing you're supposed to do if there's a smoke of unknown origin. Notice down at the bottom, it says, "Refer to emergency procedure, smoke/fumes of unknown origin, if smoke is not of air conditioning origin." This checklist is relatively important, excuse me, because of course.

• 1:51:41Justin Roczniak?

  You'd hope so.

• 1:51:42Speaker 03

  Yes. This is, I believe, something like 90% of piloting is working through checklists, and that includes in this situation. And indeed, as a result of reading through the checklist, sometime between 10:22 and 10:24, crew cut power to the cabin bus in accordance with checklist. Which would ideally have cut off continued flow of electricity to a fire in the cabin systems. However, of course, as previously mentioned, the flight entertainment system was not wired into that system, so power continued flowing to it.

• 1:52:11November Kelly?

  Cut off everything except the slot machines.

• 1:52:13Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, not, not the gambling must.

• 1:52:15Liam McAnderson?

  Why don't they build the whole plane out of the slot machines?

• 1:52:19November Kelly?

  So you're seeing the lights go off, the emergency lights come on, and you're still able to watch LA Confidential. It hasn't even paused.

• 1:52:26Justin Roczniak?

  Yes.

• 1:52:27November Kelly?

  That's a concern.

• 1:52:29Speaker 03

  Well, the other, another thing that the bus cut off, however, were the recirculating fans in the upper cabin ceiling. It's got the air supply to the cabin. It's effectively isolated from the other parts of the aircraft wiring systems. As of course, the, as of course, the, at this point, unknown fire. Was at the very forward cabin, so you can see a progression map of it at the top, at the bottom left there, which is rather low res, but hopefully you'll get the picture. This effectively gave it a grand total of one place to go, which is forward and directly into the cockpit ceiling.

• 1:52:59November Kelly?

  Oh, good.

• 1:53:00Justin Roczniak?

  Uh, not ideal, not ideal. I would, I would say that, that probably is not good.

• 1:53:04Speaker 03

  At 10:24, so where, what, what are, uh, what are we here? We are basically at like less than a minute after they turned, they turned off the electricity to the cabin. While still en route to dump fuel, Swissair crew told the Halifax controller, quote, "At this time, we must fly manually," indicating that autopilot systems had already been damaged enough that they disconnected and they had to control the airplane entirely by hand. Seventeen seconds later, they finally choose to declare an emergency and about 15, hold on, 20 seconds after that.

• 1:53:35Justin Roczniak?

  20 seconds, yes.

• 1:53:35Speaker 03

  Yes, they declare an emergency for the second time. Not really sure why they did it twice, but to be fair, I guess that's better than not doing it at all, which they had, which was what they had done previously.

• 1:53:44November Kelly?

  Just really like to underline, per my previous scream for help.

• 1:53:48Speaker 03

  This was, this was the last radio transmission that received from the aircraft directly. Thirty-five seconds later, 10:25 and 40 seconds, the aircraft's flight data recorder stops recording because of course the fire was now destroying that part of things. One second after that, the cockpit voice recorder also stops recording and therefore everything that happens after this is some, is some flavor of conjecture because there's literally nothing to go off of except for various forensic conclusions.

• 1:54:17November Kelly?

  I'm not thrilled about that, that's.

• 1:54:20Justin Roczniak?

  Nah, nah, this has gone poorly.

• 1:54:23Speaker 03

  Yes. Twenty-four seconds later, at 10:26:04, the transponder stops transmitting entirely, meaning that nobody can see any data from, from the aircraft with the exception of the primary radar at Halifax, which can see it because it's radar and not because it's transmitting anything. Notably, they can't see the aircraft's speed or the aircraft's altitude at this point. Somewhere in the next three minutes, the fire has gotten bad enough that it is now visible in the cockpit and presumably the forward cabin. We don't know that for sure.

• 1:54:50November Kelly?

  Nightmare.

• 1:54:51Speaker 03

  Yes. Captain Zimmerman gets up out of his seat to fight the fire himself. The details of what happened here are pretty impossible to determine, but they but considering they found what they did of him nowhere near his seat. Oh, don't like that. That seems like a relatively safe bet. They also found they also found them pretty close, and I believe the term used at one point was fused to some of Swiss to some of the to some of Swissair's MD 11 flight manuals. The basic conclusion I think forensic scientists have come to is it's Zimmerman got up to fight the fire and he used the manual to do so.

• 1:55:24November Kelly?

  Ah, I mean, as a kind of like, um, video game logic, use manual on problem. It's it's more literal, but like.

• 1:55:33Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:55:33November Kelly?

  I maybe this is a naive question and not that it would have done anything, which is probably why there isn't, but you'd think there would be like a fire extinguisher in the cockpit, right?

• 1:55:41Speaker 03

  I'd be too I I think my understanding is that there is, but I I am guessing it was on the part of the cockpit that was currently on fire.

• 1:55:48November Kelly?

  Ah, and it's yeah, you gotta you gotta extinguish the fire on the fire extinguisher in order to use the fire extinguisher to extinguish the rest of the fire.

• 1:55:56Speaker 03

  Yeah, the most most aircraft have a sort of a little handheld extinguisher, I believe is close to the door.

• 1:56:02November Kelly?

  Yeah.

• 1:56:03Speaker 03

  I don't really know. It's obviously it varies from aircraft to aircraft. I think some of the newer ones will mount it under the seat, which is a smarter place for it to be. But either way, uh, obviously this doesn't really work.

• 1:56:13Justin Roczniak?

  He's going out. He's going out to just sort of bat it.

• 1:56:16Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:56:17Justin Roczniak?

  With some paper. I mean, you know, it's a valiant effort, but insufficient.

• 1:56:22November Kelly?

  Yeah.

• 1:56:23Speaker 03

  Uh, based based on what or based on what investigators have been able to piece together, because that's what we're operating on at this point. Captain was likely either incapacitated or already dead or already dead whenever the aircraft crashed, even the first officer is the sole living living person in the cockpit to control the plane at this point.

• 1:56:41November Kelly?

  Your your plane is burning down around you and your boss has also just been burned to death immediately behind you is.

• 1:56:48Speaker 03

  What a terrible day at the office. Yeah.

• 1:56:50Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, yeah, that's continuing to burn to death. Again, this.

• 1:56:54Speaker 03

  He's already dead, Roz.

• 1:56:55November Kelly?

  Uh.

• 1:56:57Speaker 03

  Maybe. I don't know. We close the windows in our own ways here. Somewhere around 10:30, which.

• 1:57:02Justin Roczniak?

  Attempted to attempted to stop, drop and roll, but there's not a lot of space in there.

• 1:57:06November Kelly?

  Yeah, that's true.

• 1:57:07Speaker 03

  Somewhere around 10:30, so about a minute, there's somewhere between a minute and two minutes after he after the captain gets up to fight the fire and then immediately dies. First Officer Lowe shuts down the second engine, which is the one in the tail. This almost certainly has no effect on the aircraft's flyability. And there's obviously no reason, no way for us to know why he did that. Wouldn't really have done anything.

• 1:57:28November Kelly?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:57:29Liam McAnderson?

  Hit buds at this point, yeah.

• 1:57:30Speaker 03

  Yeah. At this point in time, for the last one minute and eighteen seconds of flight, we have no idea what really happened. So all there is is a couple of different theories. Um, most of them revolve around the fact that the first officer was flying the plane by himself at night with no instruments, with the cockpit full of smoke and fire, and a large oxygen mask in front of him. And therefore, while it was possibly still somewhat controllable to an extent we don't, we don't know, we're never going to know. It's not really reasonable for any sort of normal human to control it under that many, that many different circumstances going on at one point in time, right?

• 1:58:08Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. Is the MD-11, uh, does it still have direct cables from the controls to the control services?

• 1:58:17Speaker 03

  Um, I don't, I, this would have, this was the, this was the fly-by-wire. Your, uh, the MD-11 was designed in the late eighties. I don't know the answer to that off the top of my head, um.

• 1:58:28November Kelly?

  But all we can say is this is McDonnell Douglas living up to the slogan once again.

• 1:58:33Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:58:33Justin Roczniak?

  Yes.

• 1:58:33Liam McAnderson?

  That slogan again, folks, will kill you.

• 1:58:36Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:58:36Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 1:58:37Speaker 03

  I, I don't know off the top of my head, but in any case, it does, in any case, if that were the case, then it wouldn't have mattered. Because of course, flight control cables would have been very burned through. But in any situation, didn't really matter. Cause even if the first officer was not, was not struggling to see or incapacitated. Um, yeah, I mean, he had all that to deal with. If the, if the controls didn't work, or if he shut the engine down, doesn't really matter one way or another. We're moving towards sort of the same general ends to endpoint here.

• 1:59:03Justin Roczniak?

  Yes.

• 1:59:04Speaker 03

  Um, at ten thirty-one and eighteen seconds, so exactly seventeen minutes in total, after the crew first transmitted the pan-pan call and asked to fly three hundred miles to Boston, the aircraft hit the ocean nose down at a speed of about three hundred forty-five miles per hour. Exerting a force of 350 Gs across the aircraft and its contents, meaning it has turned to dust, killing all 229 people onboard, not including people that had already died before impact, which was probably at least one, but given that the fire was also above the camera, it could have been more than that. We don't really know.

• 1:59:37November Kelly?

  You always hope to, you know, that everybody gets like peacefully-ish incapacitated by smoke inhalation, rather than being terrified and burning to death and then plunging directly into the ocean.

• 1:59:50Speaker 03

  Yeah, but notably, of course, even if they had done that, they still would have seen the smoke and fire. So peacefully is still probably not quite worth that.

• 1:59:57November Kelly?

  Peacefully-ish, relatively.

• 1:59:58Justin Roczniak?

  You always joke about, you know, you have the button on your seat rest that makes the engine fall off or that makes the plane crash. And on this flight, someone did that. It happened.

• 2:00:13Speaker 03

  So that is, that is the end of this aircraft. 229 people are now dead. Somewhere in, there's somewhere in the water near Halifax.

• 2:00:24Justin Roczniak?

  Crashed directly into the Titanic.

• 2:00:28Speaker 03

  The only reason we know where, we know when it crashed was because it set off a seismometer nearby.

• 2:00:34November Kelly?

  Jesus.

• 2:00:35Justin Roczniak?

  Oh, God.

• 2:00:36Speaker 03

  Yeah, because, you know, at this point, all they had really was the primary radar that didn't really show any details. So if the, if the entire plane had disappeared from the radar, I assume they would have assumed it crashed. But like, they wouldn't have had any way of knowing if it was just more things failing. In any case, that's the end of this plane and the end of these two guys and the end of a bunch of other people as well. And the end of, and the end of whoever won their $3,000, $3,500.

• 2:01:02Liam McAnderson?

  Now it's the water log too, on top of everything else.

• 2:01:05Speaker 03

  Yes, that's true.

• 2:01:06November Kelly?

  Say, yeah. And he was one day away from his birthday as well.

• 2:01:09Speaker 03

  Yes, from turning 50 specifically.

• 2:01:11November Kelly?

  Wow.

• 2:01:11Speaker 03

  Yeah, feel a little bad for him, particularly because he, you know, notably didn't, he notably did not die in the crash directly. He died before that. Puts him in sort of a really strange position.

• 2:01:23Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, well, I understand 50 is when you start getting reactionary politics, right? I don't know. The age keeps increasing every year though, so I don't know.

• 2:01:35Speaker 03

  Next slide. Now that we're done talking about the active flight, uh, here is what that same plane from two slides ago looks like at this point in time.

• 2:01:42November Kelly?

  It's always crazy to me how much, uh, how well all the like structural bits are able to hold up to, uh, the stuff that like liquid liquefies, uh, every person in board.

• 2:01:53Speaker 03

  Yeah, metals, metals are very strong material.

• 2:01:56November Kelly?

  Chant some metal. Yes. Big fan of metal.

• 2:01:58Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 2:01:59Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, metal's pretty good.

• 2:02:00Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:02:02Speaker 03

  Uh, hence the problem with the wood planes. We talked about quite a bit earlier. That was, uh, we figured, we figured that out. Pretty early on, but it still took about 20 years of commercial flight for us to get that far.

• 2:02:11Justin Roczniak?

  If they had a piano on this plane, though.

• 2:02:14Liam McAnderson?

  Just structural piano, of course.

• 2:02:15Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 2:02:17Speaker 03

  Well, actually, they had a, they had two Picasso paintings on board it, uh, which obviously did not survive this.

• 2:02:24Justin Roczniak?

  Oh, God.

• 2:02:24Speaker 03

  So there was some, some form of art, just not piano, some form of culture, I should say. Uh, the search and rescue operation, which the Royal Canadian Armed Forces called Operation Persistence.

• 2:02:34November Kelly?

  Just kind of pick something that sounds vaguely positive, you know, Operation Midnight Hammer.

• 2:02:39Justin Roczniak?

  Look, we're gonna, we're gonna find someone alive. Uh, well, no.

• 2:02:43Speaker 03

  No.

• 2:02:43Justin Roczniak?

  Never mind.

• 2:02:44Speaker 03

  This, yes, uh, my understanding is.

• 2:02:47November Kelly?

  You, you call it Operation Persistence if you're expecting not to find very much for a long time.

• 2:02:51Speaker 03

  Cause you're persistent. Yeah.

• 2:02:52Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 2:02:54Speaker 03

  Uh, they've, well, seeing as they actually, there, there was no way for anybody to know it crashed, but on the official side, because of course, they hadn't seen, they had no idea what was going on with the radar. All they had notably was a couple of guys, local, who called 911, I believe is, uh.

• 2:03:08November Kelly?

  Calling, calling into the like Moncton police to be like, hey, I think I just saw a bunch of Swiss guys get turned into soup.

• 2:03:16Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, well, that's, that's roughly what happened for them to realize that they had lost it, I believe. Uh, the seismometer thing I mentioned, but they didn't realize that till later. It's just that how we know what time it was. Uh, but pretty much immediately, once they got there, they would find a field of wreckage. Uh, and would start to call off most of the rescue part of the search and rescue operations. About three hours after it started, about 3:30 AM Atlantic time. Once the operation began or switched to salvage, it was mostly guided by underwater sonar and dive and diving operations. Initially, mostly using American Navy ships and sailors from the US's grapple, based out of Philadelphia.

• 2:03:52Justin Roczniak?

  Weird name.

• 2:03:53Speaker 03

  We're number one. They, they would find the flight data recorder on September 6th and the cockpit voice recorder on September 11th, 1998, to be clear.

• 2:04:01Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 2:04:04Speaker 03

  Next slide.

• 2:04:04November Kelly?

  Oh, this is cool. The, the fucking like, um, um, NTSB Kintsugi frame.

• 2:04:11Speaker 03

  Yeah. Well, this is the Canadian one.

• 2:04:14Justin Roczniak?

  Do they have multiple of these or they just have one that they keep reusing?

• 2:04:19November Kelly?

  Shovel around. You gotta have a different one for each aircraft, surely.

• 2:04:21Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, that's a good point. Yeah, that's true.

• 2:04:24Speaker 03

  The, the, the, the one for TWA 800, they had in a hangar until like last year, I think.

• 2:04:29Justin Roczniak?

  Wow.

• 2:04:31Speaker 03

  Actually, when was that? Because I remember, I remember there being a big deal about it because people make a big deal out of the one plane crash. Um, and can't find it quickly enough. In any case.

• 2:04:41November Kelly?

  Something disturbing about the velvet rope in front of it.

• 2:04:43Speaker 03

  That's a good point. Yeah. Well, notably, that's a CTV reporter. He's got the CTV hat on standing in front of there. So they probably didn't want them getting too close to the horrible, horribly mangled pieces of metal.

• 2:04:54November Kelly?

  Yeah.

• 2:04:55Justin Roczniak?

  Hmm. That's a good point. Yeah.

• 2:04:56Speaker 03

  As authorities recovered more of the aircraft, they gradually reconstructed just the forward section of the aircraft from the cockpit sec, from the cockpit back to just the first class cabin. This is, this is the entirety of what they managed to recover and successfully piece together.

• 2:05:10Justin Roczniak?

  Wow.

• 2:05:11Speaker 03

  You'll notice it's not super complete. They did retrieve, uh, what was it? 98% of aircraft debris by December 1999. So notably in the intervening year I had been born, which is cool. Investigators in the press would find a specific concern to focus on by the first week of October 1998, less than a month into the investigation. Next slide.

• 2:05:33November Kelly?

  Okay, we're gonna do some real like, uh, crash detective shit here. Okay. Ideal.

• 2:05:38Speaker 03

  Uh, the, the, the TSB, the Transportation Safety Board, that's the Canadian one I remember now. Find one very peculiar part of the aircraft's wiring harnesses, that being multiple segments of wire that had damaged insulation. All of these segments of wire were components leading to the power supply of the in-flight entertainment system. Several segments of wire here had become so damaged that the copper was fully exposed, obviously before it had been crushed for 350 G. Anyway. In fact, it had gotten hot enough that the copper core had actually started to melt, which you can in fact see the picture of here.

• 2:06:11Justin Roczniak?

  This is very, this is very melted looking.

• 2:06:14Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's not, that's not good.

• 2:06:15November Kelly?

  Wild to be able to pull these cables out of the ocean and identify them by function as well.

• 2:06:21Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, that's, yeah, I mean, that's what these investigatory boards are made to do, but I guess I never really thought about that. That's pretty fucked up.

• 2:06:29Justin Roczniak?

  That's their job, you know, they, they, they have this and then, you know, as long as they don't accidentally pick up a piece of the transatlantic cable, which presumably could have happened here, and then completely cut off America and Europe, um, leading to World War III.

• 2:06:44November Kelly?

  Of course.

• 2:06:46Speaker 03

  They generally accept that explanation for this, that the TSB would come up with, which was not verifiable for obviously a number of reasons regarding the fact the plane had exploded, basically, was that the, I, the in-flight entertainment network system drew so much power that the wires, which were too thin for that level of power drop, would actually, actually have the insulation melt off of it in certain places, leaving the bare metal entirely exposed. The electrified copper core of the wires then came in contact with the Mylar blankets that were insulating the entire system beneath it. Of course, this was an essential part of the aircraft's insulation system entirely, but the fact that you had electric electrified wire touching it is not great, and it means that it tends to arc.

• 2:07:25Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, well, everything's Patrick chemicals.

• 2:07:29Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 2:07:29Justin Roczniak?

  And, uh, some of it's less flammable than others, but, uh.

• 2:07:34November Kelly?

  Turns out it's all dead trees, even when it's not wood.

• 2:07:37Speaker 03

  True, yeah.

• 2:07:37Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 2:07:38Speaker 03

  Now, Mylar is.

• 2:07:39Justin Roczniak?

  Everything's made of wood.

• 2:07:41November Kelly?

  Yeah.

• 2:07:42Speaker 03

  That's a good point there, yeah. Uh, Mylar is a material with a high enough ignition point that it's generally considered somewhat fireproof to an extent, uh, but the conclusion that the TSB came to was that the arc happened enough times and was hot enough that it probably damaged the Mylar, either ignited it, or the blanket that it was, or the insulation blanket that it was covering, which is of course much more flammable.

• 2:08:04November Kelly?

  Oh, you set fire to your fireproofing? You don't want to do that? That's the opposite of what it's supposed to do.

• 2:08:08Justin Roczniak?

  That's not good. Why didn't they use asbestos?

• 2:08:13Speaker 03

  That's a great point.

• 2:08:14Justin Roczniak?

  They should have, instead, but, well, listen, I, I know a lot of people are, have some problems with the Trump administration saying asbestos is okay in certain applications now.

• 2:08:28Justin Roczniak?

  But

• 2:08:28Speaker 03

  I can't argue with that.

• 2:08:30Justin Roczniak?

  It's it's not made of wood. It's one of the few things we have.

• 2:08:36November Kelly?

  It's made of rocks. It's made of rocks.

• 2:08:38Justin Roczniak?

  It's rocks. Yeah.

• 2:08:40Speaker 03

  Could build a whole airplane out of rocks.

• 2:08:43Justin Roczniak?

  We made the whole airplane out of asbestos. You imagine it has like, you know, you walk in the airplane and like the floor is

• 2:08:52Justin Roczniak?

  No, the floor is like the nine by nine tile that your grandma's kitchen has.

• 2:09:02Speaker 03

  So basically, what what of course happens whenever you have a an arcing set and arcing wire that is hot enough to melt a Mylar covering is that, of course, you get a fire that burn that sparks and burns very, very, very hot.

• 2:09:17November Kelly?

  Oh, good.

• 2:09:18Speaker 03

  So in a part of the aircraft, it is filled with active electrical wiring of many gauges and many thermal insulation material. This would also mean a fire that would spread extremely fast, particularly particularly given the whether whether or not it was fueled by active electrical current, which, of course, would have increased the heat. At a point, doesn't really matter too much. Fire is its own thing.

• 2:09:42Speaker 03

  But it does. One thing that you can do to keep it to spread is keep it from spreading to particularly sensitive systems above the cockpit is to not turn off the recirculating fans that cut off airflow from that part of the aircraft to the cockpit.

• 2:09:55November Kelly?

  Which is an essential step on the checklist.

• 2:09:57Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 2:09:58November Kelly?

  Right.

• 2:10:01Speaker 03

  The MD 11 in particular was designed to use a circuit breaker system that it's that it would not trip whenever it detected arcing and would trip based on a calculation of time and current correlation that I don't really understand. But it meant that the aircraft would think that everything was perfectly fine and nothing out of the ordinary was going on throughout any of this because it was presumably, as far as we can tell, arcing for quite a longer, quite a lot longer than just the one flight. Yeah, so yeah.

• 2:10:27November Kelly?

  You could have flown on this exact plane and had this be like arcing against the fireproofing the whole time. And it's just you just get unlucky that it happens like six minutes into this one, you know?

• 2:10:40Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's about. Yeah, the flight from Geneva the previous day, I imagine I imagine this was.

• 2:10:45November Kelly?

  Going back in my head about when I took flights where.

• 2:10:51Speaker 03

  The next slide, that's all I have for that one. The diagrams there are rather are interesting demonstration of wire, but really the part with the melted copper was sort of the most important thing there. It was like, that doesn't really happen unless things get much hotter than they ever than anybody would ever reasonably consider.

• 2:11:07Justin Roczniak?

  Ideally, you don't have metal melting on the plane.

• 2:11:10Speaker 03

  Yes. The Transportation Safety Board of Canada would release the preliminary report on the crash of Swiss Air Flight 111 on August 30th, 2000. The report concluded everything we discussed on the last slide, but that the primary fault for the accident lied with the Mylar material being considered too flammable, albeit still within standard. The quote that I put here is aircraft certification standards for material flammability were inadequate, and they allowed the use of materials that could be ignited and sustain or propagate fire. Consequently, flammable material propagated a fire that started above the ceiling on the right side of the cockpit. The fire spread and intensified rapidly to the extent that it degraded aircraft systems and et cetera, et cetera. To some extent, this is a football kick, more so rather kicking the football. My phrasing was a bit weird there.

• 2:11:55Speaker 03

  Um, it was really the only conclusion they could come with, come to beyond any reasonable doubt, because they could not really conclude, given the forensic evidence that they had. I E. The remains of the aircraft, they couldn't really conclude if it was directly the fault of the in-flight entertainment system. But like, the main source of the damage was the wiring going to the in-flight entertainment system that everybody has had previously complained ran too hot.

• 2:12:18November Kelly?

  Good enough.

• 2:12:19Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, and this is one of those ones where they got off on a technicality.

• 2:12:23November Kelly?

  Yeah.

• 2:12:24Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 2:12:24Justin Roczniak?

  Well, you know, it could have been something else. It was probably this. Could have been something else.

• 2:12:28Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 2:12:31Speaker 03

  And also between, also another conclusion was that the transfer, the T S, sorry, not the conclusion the T S B reached. Was that the crew didn't have any way of knowing how severe the fire was whenever they shut down the fans. So they, they couldn't really be blamed for doing that, even though it was, it did event was what killed the aircraft as far as we know.

• 2:12:49November Kelly?

  It was, it was on the checklist. You're supposed to follow the checklist.

• 2:12:52Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, so the checklist, that's like, the pilots seem to have done everything that was, could be reasonably expected.

• 2:13:00November Kelly?

  Yeah, this was including trying to fight a fire with a three-ring binder.

• 2:13:05Speaker 03

  Yeah, yes. Yeah, this is the, the crew very much worked by the book here, except the problem was the book itself.

• 2:13:11November Kelly?

  Yes. And again, literally.

• 2:13:15Speaker 03

  The release of the preliminary report led to a coalition of involved parties, namely Swissair, Delta Airlines, who had co-chaired Swissair on the flight and were also an American company, so it's easier to get damages out of them, and Boeing, who had bought McDonnell Douglas, to offer families of the victims an undisclosed settlement.

• 2:13:34November Kelly?

  You are Boeing to receive an undisclosed settlement.

• 2:13:37Speaker 03

  Actually, you're not.

• 2:13:38November Kelly?

  You are not Boeing to receive an undisclosed settlement.

• 2:13:43Speaker 03

  The families involved voted to reject taking that settlement entirely.

• 2:13:47Justin Roczniak?

  Good for them.

• 2:13:48Speaker 03

  Instead opting to sue all of those companies, and also DuPont, who made the Mylar, and Interactive Flight Technology, remember the name from earlier, back now, totaling $19.8 billion in sought damages. A US judge would rule against punitive damages in 2002, but various dealings meant that they still received some compensation. The numbers aren't really clear there, it doesn't really matter too much. It's just a good way to bring IFT back into the picture. Because in the real world, the press immediately started asking questions about what the wiring was hooked up to, which was, of course, the in-flight entertainment system.

• 2:14:24Justin Roczniak?

  There we go.

• 2:14:25November Kelly?

  Which Swissair had advertised very heavily.

• 2:14:27Justin Roczniak?

  Yes, and presumably they lost huge amounts of money on, because they lost $3,300 each time.

• 2:14:36Speaker 03

  That's true. Swissair would go out of their way to turn it off on all aircraft by October 29th, 1998, and promised they would remove it as soon as the maintenance schedule allowed for it. And of course, everybody else who had contracted IFT immediately canceled any and all contracts they had with them for reasonable reason.

• 2:14:57November Kelly?

  Guy working for Alitalia, just going through and with his bare hands ripping terminals out of the seatbacks.

• 2:15:06Speaker 03

  It was later reported by USA Today, actually, that the IFN2 system had been certified by a subcontractor named Santa Barbara Aerospace, who the FAA determined had not properly audited or tested the system, and their approval of it was technically invalid to begin with.

• 2:15:23November Kelly?

  Oh, good.

• 2:15:24Speaker 03

  One quoted certification engineer, whose name is here, the last name that I can't really pronounce, but his first name is Edward.

• 2:15:30Justin Roczniak?

  Edward.

• 2:15:30November Kelly?

  Milonarchik.

• 2:15:32Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 2:15:33November Kelly?

  Yeah.

• 2:15:36Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 2:15:38Liam McAnderson?

  That's what they come to the podcast for. Hell, yeah.

• 2:15:40Justin Roczniak?

  We're all here, and between us, we can all pronounce one Polish last name.

• 2:15:47Liam McAnderson?

  Shouldn't you be able to do this?

• 2:15:49Justin Roczniak?

  No.

• 2:15:52Speaker 03

  I mean, my wife's Polish and doesn't know how to pronounce her own last name. So like, I understand.

• 2:15:58Speaker 03

  He said, or he's also said to USA Today that I have to come to him with the request that he certify the original system in 1994 as quickly as possible because they were rapidly running out of operating capital.

• 2:16:09November Kelly?

  Oh, good. Okay. Yeah. Just we need you to say this is safe because we are running out of money.

• 2:16:15Speaker 03

  He did. Notably, he did not sign off on this. But presumably this is for good, presumably for good reason. I mean, the first system wasn't what failed, but to be fair, they only got seven solid on one plane and then took it out immediately afterwards. So.

• 2:16:27November Kelly?

  Just like immediately catches fire.

• 2:16:29Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:16:29November Kelly?

  It's like Homer Simpson's bowl of cereal.

• 2:16:34Speaker 03

  So by any, any reasonable conclusion, by any reasonable assertion, assertion, I don't know where I pulled that word from, or any reasonable assertion, IFT was the primary party at fault here, as did everybody else who was not bound by legal investigatory restrictions. So this isn't very good for them.

• 2:16:54Justin Roczniak?

  This is, I would not like to be in this situation.

• 2:16:57Speaker 03

  Yes. Now, what now? I would like to, now if we go to the next slide, going to do a sort of where are they now here with these dead?

• 2:17:05November Kelly?

  Oh, god damn it. This break my fucking heart. Why don't you?

• 2:17:09Speaker 03

  Yes. March to by March 2001, Swissair was losing 1 million francs per day and was nearing bankruptcy.

• 2:17:17November Kelly?

  Listen, is it a bad business decision to kill a bunch of your own passengers? And is it a bad business decision to be heavily over leveraged and everything? And is it a bad business decision to allegedly maybe have a bunch of embezzlement? Yes.

• 2:17:34Justin Roczniak?

  I've spent a Swiss franc, I've spent a Swiss franc before and it's not very much money compared to a dollar.

• 2:17:42November Kelly?

  That's also true. That's also true, but is is that a good enough reason to take away a beautiful? Whole corporate language from the world and replace it with something that looks like a budget hotel chain?

• 2:17:55Justin Roczniak?

  Could I sustain losing 1 million Swiss francs per day? No, but an airline, that should be fine.

• 2:18:02November Kelly?

  Basically, what an airline does is sustain vast amounts of financial losses. Anyway, I miss this stuff. I still have a little shoulder bag cabin luggage thing with the old Swissair brand on it. And I'm going to keep it for as long as I possibly can until it falls apart.

• 2:18:19Justin Roczniak?

  They should have switched, they should have switched currency to something that was even cheaper. Like, I don't know, Turkish lira or something.

• 2:18:26November Kelly?

  Yeah, if you measure it in zloty, it's not so bad.

• 2:18:30Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, it's not, they're not bad at all. Yeah. Rubles.

• 2:18:36Justin Roczniak?

  What do they have at India?

• 2:18:37November Kelly?

  Uh, rupees.

• 2:18:38Justin Roczniak?

  Rupees. But then you have to do like crores and locks. That's like more difficult.

• 2:18:43November Kelly?

  Hmm. Yeah.

• 2:18:45Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 2:18:45Speaker 03

  Well, the the various financial difficulties of Swissair here.

• 2:18:50November Kelly?

  The main tragedy here, to be clear.

• 2:18:53Speaker 03

  There was a lot of them that came that were sort of rooted in stuff that happened before this crash, but it didn't really do them any favors. For a couple of reasons. Number one is that, of course, crashing a plane tends to cost money. Yeah, no, no, no repeat customers. Yeah. Yeah. Also, of course, ten, also, of course, people don't, people don't really want to fly on you that much, particularly if it looks, even if it looks at first like it might have been your cruise fault or whatever, or your airline's fault. And even if it wasn't, and like, to be clear, it was kind of their fault here. So, you know, not really great for business.

• 2:19:25November Kelly?

  Pretty, pretty certain I was still getting packed on to and off of these things, like.

• 2:19:28Speaker 03

  Well, I mean, that's, that's reasonable. I mean, they, they, I mean, where they operated for like three years after, uh, four years after that accident happened. So it's clearly not, not, it was a more terminal decline that was probably already going to happen at the time, but didn't really help them.

• 2:19:43Justin Roczniak?

  I see you presumably in smaller planes that didn't have the entertainment system.

• 2:19:47Speaker 03

  That's also, yeah.

• 2:19:48November Kelly?

  That's true.

• 2:19:48Speaker 03

  They only, they only had it in the MD 11s and like some of the, the, some of the seven fours and they took it out of all of them anyways. Um, now of course, Swissair was losing a million francs per day in March 2001. Uh, travel market would get much worse in September 2001 for reasons, for reasons.

• 2:20:03November Kelly?

  Oh, Roz. Yeah.

• 2:20:04Justin Roczniak?

  Hmm. Yes. No, I didn't do that. That was, that was some foreigners.

• 2:20:08November Kelly?

  Roz. And one 10 year old, apparently. If you believe Andrew Cuomo.

• 2:20:15Speaker 03

  On October 5th, on October 5th, Swissair effectively collapsed. Swiss government would promise a loan, would promise a loan to keep operations running in the short term, which they later increased to cover the entire operating, the entire winter operating season, which point all aircraft and operations would be transported to Swiss Regional Airline Crossair, which was renamed Swiss International Airlines.

• 2:20:38Speaker 03

  His last Swissair flight flew on April 1st, 2002.

• 2:20:42Justin Roczniak?

  April fools.

• 2:20:43Speaker 03

  Swiss International Airlines is still the flag carrier of Switzerland.

• 2:20:46November Kelly?

  Yeah, they try, they try, they try and fucking trick you by being just like, Swiss, not the same. Fuck you.

• 2:20:54Speaker 03

  Well, they, my understanding is they wanted to keep the Swissair brand, but there was a bizarre sort of copyright and legal restriction from them doing so.

• 2:21:01November Kelly?

  Yeah, I, I think like the federal government owned it or something. I don't remember how it works out, but yeah.

• 2:21:07Speaker 03

  Yeah, this is, is, it's very, very, I mean, there's obviously a sort of brand image thing consideration there, but also there was a le, the legal side of it was very strange and confusing. Um, in any case, they would retire the MD 11s by 2005 because of course they weren't great airplanes. We talked about this last time I was on the podcast. Interactive flight technologies, under the weight of scrutiny from the global press and investigatory authorities alike, would simply bail from the situation and declare bankruptcy in 1999. Yeah, the CEO of the company, Mikhail Itkis, the son of the first CEO we talked about way earlier, would go on to change his name to Mike Snow in 2004, start a new company.

• 2:21:45November Kelly?

  Like the DJ?

• 2:21:47Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, like the guy who made the, yeah, the songs, yeah.

• 2:21:53November Kelly?

  I got a little bit of Genghis Khan.

• 2:21:55Justin Roczniak?

  Don't want you to get it on with anyone but me, yeah.

• 2:21:58November Kelly?

  Banger, I mean fantastic video.

• 2:22:00Justin Roczniak?

  Very good one, yeah.

• 2:22:01November Kelly?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:22:03Justin Roczniak?

  That is, that is a music video about killing James Bond.

• 2:22:06November Kelly?

  That is true, that is true.

• 2:22:07Speaker 03

  Oh shit, that's a good point there, yeah.

• 2:22:10Speaker 03

  In 2004, he would start a new company called Interstate Cargo, manufactured cargo trailers, established in association with, at the time, the current governor of Arkansas, if you click the next slide.

• 2:22:21Justin Roczniak?

  Oh.

• 2:22:22Speaker 03

  That would be Mike Huckabee.

• 2:22:23Justin Roczniak?

  Mike Huckabee, the funny Republican, yeah, I remember that.

• 2:22:27November Kelly?

  Guy who looks like a sort of like slightly melted Kevin Spacey, yeah.

• 2:22:30Justin Roczniak?

  Yes.

• 2:22:31Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 2:22:31November Kelly?

  The guy who accidentally tipped the hand about like Operation Midnight Hammer by tweeting a kind of prayers up tweet 40 minutes early.

• 2:22:40Speaker 03

  That sounds about right, yeah. I mean, but one of them was bound to do it.

• 2:22:44Justin Roczniak?

  This is true, yes.

• 2:22:45November Kelly?

  Current US ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee.

• 2:22:48Speaker 03

  Oh, I forgot, yeah, I keep forgetting about that.

• 2:22:51Justin Roczniak?

  Oh, yeah, yeah.

• 2:22:52November Kelly?

  The thing about the Trump administration, part two, is the like, the biggest piece of shit you've ever heard of is just like in a federal government job, and you don't know about this, and you'll find out about it, and you'll take some psychic damage, and you'll be like...

• 2:23:04Justin Roczniak?

  It's not, it's not enough. I need Chris Christie to be appointed to something.

• 2:23:11November Kelly?

  Where can Trump exile him to?

• 2:23:12Justin Roczniak?

  Where?

• 2:23:13November Kelly?

  Governor, like, fucking ambassador to like the South Sandwich Islands or something.

• 2:23:19Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, no, he's ambassador to the island that's only like penguins.

• 2:23:25Justin Roczniak?

  And he's enforcing the tariffs.

• 2:23:31Speaker 03

  The trailer company Interstate Cargo does still exist. Mike Snow is still CEO of it. His LinkedIn doesn't list any employers prior to the year 2000, which is interesting.

• 2:23:42Justin Roczniak?

  I didn't do it.

• 2:23:44Speaker 03

  Yeah, I would, I would like to, and I would like to actually close this by pointing out that he still has a Twitter account. If you'll go to the next slide, I've included some of the people that he, or some of the people that he follows on that.

• 2:23:55November Kelly?

  Incredible. Okay, great.

• 2:24:00Speaker 03

  So this is of course the CEO of a trailer manufacturer who previously built an in-flight entertainment system that killed 229 people.

• 2:24:08November Kelly?

  And he loves the Babylon Bee.

• 2:24:09Speaker 03

  He does.

• 2:24:10Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, and Cat Turd.

• 2:24:12November Kelly?

  Doge, Doge Coin. I like the logical kind of progression of thought there. JD Vance and of course Scott Adams, who is responsible for a similarly heinous crime in the form of the comic strip Dilbert.

• 2:24:25Speaker 03

  That's true. That's a good point there.

• 2:24:28November Kelly?

  Jesus Christ, the, the, the, the, the modern Republican Party really is just a drain for all of these, these guys to fucking like sink into, isn't it?

• 2:24:37Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 2:24:38November Kelly?

  It's like, hey, come, come hang out with the Republican Party. We got, we got Cat Turd. We got the guy who killed a bunch of Swiss people.

• 2:24:45Justin Roczniak?

  Maybe that's why, that's why Chris Christie hasn't been, you know, taken into the machine because he has too much integrity.

• 2:24:56Justin Roczniak?

  Man, I know for a fact that one time he took a phone call in a quiet car on M-Track, but then realized his mistake and left.

• 2:25:05November Kelly?

  You know, we call that.

• 2:25:06Justin Roczniak?

  Which is something Joe Biden didn't do.

• 2:25:08Speaker 03

  Yeah, I was gonna say, actually, this is a relatively high bar.

• 2:25:12Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 2:25:14Speaker 03

  So that was, that was the end of this story. I just wanted to include this last slide as a, as a nice demonstration of.

• 2:25:20November Kelly?

  Yeah, a better life, a better life awaits you as a right wing child. You know, you can get away with anything.

• 2:25:26Justin Roczniak?

  I was about to say, maybe we should pivot to being right wing. I don't know.

• 2:25:31November Kelly?

  I think some of us would find it harder than others.

• 2:25:33Justin Roczniak?

  It would be very difficult.

• 2:25:35November Kelly?

  Although you say that, you say that I don't know, I could do that. I could run the de-transgrift where you just go like, I'm de-transitioning because of the, I was tricked into it by, by doctors who forced me into it. And then you just don't de-transition.

• 2:25:50Justin Roczniak?

  What if you like do a false backstory? And you say you're de-transitioning into a woman?

• 2:25:58November Kelly?

  I, yeah, that's interesting. That's interesting. I could, I could buy that. Yeah.

• 2:26:02Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 2:26:02November Kelly?

  I was a vulnerable little girl who was forced onto testosterone through the sick machinations of the National Health Service. And now I'm rediscovering.

• 2:26:12Justin Roczniak?

  I was about to say.

• 2:26:13November Kelly?

  My real identity. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:26:15Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 2:26:22Speaker 03

  Anyways, that's, that's, that's the time a guy pressed the wings fall off button and killed 230 people.

• 2:26:27Justin Roczniak?

  Someone did it. Someone pressed the wings fall off.

• 2:26:30November Kelly?

  I guess in this case, it's more like he, he, he caused the wings fall off button to be there for someone else to press inadvertently.

• 2:26:36Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:26:36Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 2:26:37Speaker 03

  I mean, I was using the general we, not the guy picture here. But like also the guy, also the guy picture here designed the button more than anything else.

• 2:26:43November Kelly?

  Yeah. Jesus Christ. This is, this has been a harrowing one. Like it's been a minute since we, we had one that gave me the real fear.

• 2:26:51Speaker 03

  Yeah, because I, I, whenever I accidentally mentioned it last time, it was, you noted how the horrifying, the concept of the in-flight entertainment system that kills you was.

• 2:27:00November Kelly?

  Yeah.

• 2:27:02Speaker 03

  So I was like, okay, this, this, this is a good one because this, this is purely engineering. This is electrical and structural engineering and fire engineering, which I don't know if that's a thing.

• 2:27:12November Kelly?

  And it is. I mean, in, in service of the gambling industry, which is one of the worst things on earth. So, great. Fantastic.

• 2:27:22Justin Roczniak?

  I mean, what did we learn? Uh, folks, don't gamble. Gambling's bad.

• 2:27:26November Kelly?

  Yeah.

• 2:27:28Speaker 03

  Don't, don't watch the movie on the plane.

• 2:27:30November Kelly?

  Be, I, I know this is telling this to capitalists and, you know, all hitherto existing history is a process of class struggle, right? And it's a sort of historical inevitability that it ends up this way. But please be, be, be more careful with your flag carrier intellectual property rights. Like,

• 2:27:47Justin Roczniak?

  Yes.

• 2:27:48November Kelly?

  Please don't kill a bunch of people, not least because you'll kill a bunch of people, which is bad, but also because the result will be a less compellingly branded airline.

• 2:27:58Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 2:27:58Speaker 03

  Swiss International does own the Swiss air brand these days. They just don't do anything with it.

• 2:28:03November Kelly?

  What the fu- what the fuck? Okay. This, I, hmm, it's in, in, interesting because I, I normally end a really harrowing episode on a downer, but this is one where I'm ending angry.

• 2:28:14Speaker 03

  Sorry.

• 2:28:16Justin Roczniak?

  I will say, you know, it does seem like this, this problem occurred, but we seem to have largely solved it because there've been very few airline accidents until quite recently when they got the guy from MTV's Road Rules to run the Department of Transportation.

• 2:28:34November Kelly?

  Oh, fuck, we completely forgot to put in the Air India crash because we got overtaken by events. It's fine. We'll talk about it next time when we know more about it. I'm, I'm reading here from the Wikipedia page, "To prevent the trademark from becoming void through disuse, Swiss licensed it to Hopscotch Air, which operates a fleet of Cirrus SR22 planes in the US, which are just little Cessna-type things. In Switzerland, the trademark is protected through its use by an aviation sports club, undignified."

• 2:29:03Justin Roczniak?

  Ah, nah, they gotta just put it on a big plane.

• 2:29:06November Kelly?

  Infuriating.

• 2:29:07Speaker 03

  They haven't even, I don't even think they've done the, the, the retrojet thing that most of the airlines have. I might be wrong about that.

• 2:29:12November Kelly?

  No.

• 2:29:13Justin Roczniak?

  That'd be a smart thing to do. Yeah. I mean, people like seeing Swiss air. Anyway.

• 2:29:17Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 2:29:18Justin Roczniak?

  So we have a segment on this podcast called Safety Third.

• 2:29:25Justin Roczniak?

  So, hello, Justin, Liam, November, et al.

• 2:29:31November Kelly?

  Sure.

• 2:29:31Speaker 03

  That's probably the most reasonable one that I've heard so far, I think.

• 2:29:34Justin Roczniak?

  I'm writing to you with tales of poisoning at the Botanical Garden.

• 2:29:38November Kelly?

  Thank you for the perfect opening sentence of a safety third. Oh, real quick, before we get into it, if they want to send in safety thirds, where do they send them?

• 2:29:48Justin Roczniak?

  Where do you send safety thirds? You send them to our email, um, which is somewhere on the YouTube page. I don't believe we're allowed to put it-

• 2:29:57November Kelly?

  [email protected], I'm pretty certain.

• 2:30:00Justin Roczniak?

  Yes, that should be about a page long, and send us some pictures if you want.

• 2:30:05November Kelly?

  Yeah.

• 2:30:06Justin Roczniak?

  And I think you can submit them on the site, but it doesn't work very well. We have a website also.

• 2:30:11November Kelly?

  Anything, anything you say, we will read on the app.

• 2:30:14Justin Roczniak?

  Uh, yes, well, maybe. We get like more than one a week, and we only podcast once a week theoretically.

• 2:30:20November Kelly?

  Yeah.

• 2:30:21Justin Roczniak?

  And in practice, less than that.

• 2:30:23November Kelly?

  We're, I'm, I'm working on it, alright, I, mm.

• 2:30:27Justin Roczniak?

  Look, we're all working on it. We're all, we all have, anyway, safety third.

• 2:30:32Speaker 03

  Um, I really, I would like, I would like to clarify real quick that that is a poisoning exclamation point at the Botanical Garden.

• 2:30:38Justin Roczniak?

  Yes.

• 2:30:39November Kelly?

  Of course, of course.

• 2:30:40Justin Roczniak?

  Much like panic at the disco, yes.

• 2:30:42Speaker 03

  Yes. Just wanted to make sure that was conveyed, because I feel it's important.

• 2:30:46Justin Roczniak?

  Yes. I am a horticulturist, which is a glorified gardener, at an unnamed public Botanic Garden. I have been working this job for nearly three years, against my better judgment. The following events unfolded two years ago, when I was still a fresh new gardener, who believed in the inherent goodness of people and nonprofit organizations.

• 2:31:13Speaker 03

  That's such a bad idea.

• 2:31:14November Kelly?

  Yeah.

• 2:31:16Justin Roczniak?

  At this unnamed garden, us horticulturalists operate out of an office slash greenhouse building. While we spend the majority of our days toiling away outside in the Georgia heat, we return regularly to our home base office for water refills, Gatorade chugging, and hand washing. The horticulture office draws its water from a well on the property, unlike the public visitor center and administrative offices, which use city water. One early spring day, the white porcelain sink in our horticulture office turned blue.

• 2:31:59November Kelly?

  Hmm, hmm, hmm, not thrilled.

• 2:32:02Justin Roczniak?

  Being idiots and assuming the greenhouse guys were just washing chemicals down the drain, or something else which was normal, none of us worried too much. The sink remained dyed blue for the better part of three months.

• 2:32:19November Kelly?

  Not great.

• 2:32:20Justin Roczniak?

  That is until one day, when the greenhouse assistant saw me refilling my water bottle from the kitchen sink, and said, "You guys aren't drinking that water, right?"

• 2:32:31November Kelly?

  Oh, God. Oh, God. Okay.

• 2:32:33Justin Roczniak?

  It turns out the horticulture manager had sent the well water off for testing weeks before, after the sink first turned blue. The results showed seven times the EPA limit of copper, and noticeably high levels of nitrates.

• 2:32:50November Kelly?

  Hmm, delicious fertilizer.

• 2:32:53Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, and that's delicious. That's good for you, right?

• 2:32:56November Kelly?

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:32:57Justin Roczniak?

  Copper? I'm not sure.

• 2:32:59November Kelly?

  It's what plants crave, or something.

• 2:33:01Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, I know, copper, definitely.

• 2:33:03November Kelly?

  Yeah.

• 2:33:04Justin Roczniak?

  Further, that's why Gatorade is blue. It's because it's what...

• 2:33:08November Kelly?

  Because of the color, yeah.

• 2:33:10Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, that's what plants crave, yeah.

• 2:33:13Justin Roczniak?

  Further investigation revealed that years ago, in an attempt to simplify the irrigation lines running from the well to the greenhouse, the manager had inadvertently removed the backflow preventer. This crucial piece of plumbing kept the tank of concentrated plant fertilizer from backwashing into the well, the same well that us gardeners had been drinking out of for our entire respective tenures.

• 2:33:41November Kelly?

  Oh, gosh.

• 2:33:42Speaker 03

  My great.

• 2:33:43Justin Roczniak?

  When the horticulture manager had figured this out weeks before, he had neglected to tell anyone but his greenhouse assistant. Myself and three other gardeners continued to drink the water for weeks after the contamination was discovered. By our best guess, the semi- constant influx of nitrogen-based fertilizer, or the blue, began to corrode our copper water lines, which were also bluish, and these combined factors caused the distinctive blue staining in our sink. Horrifyingly, when we hammered open the filter in the Britter Pitcher we recently adopted, it was also stained neon blue.

• 2:34:25November Kelly?

  Hmm.

• 2:34:26Justin Roczniak?

  I could write pages about HR's inhuman response to our collective poisoning, the fiasco that was our blood testing and subsequent medical bills, and the administration's ultimate refusal to do anything to remedy the contaminated well. But I shan't. Too long, don't read. Gardeners still drink out of bottled water coolers to this day.

• 2:34:51November Kelly?

  I am having the thing that we last got with the sort of cat litter one, or I'm like, I think if you haven't already, you need to speak to a lawyer about this.

• 2:35:02Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, I was about to say, you know, this is a...

• 2:35:05November Kelly?

  That time you got poisoned?

• 2:35:07Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, no, the company should be able to give you water.

• 2:35:11November Kelly?

  Yeah.

• 2:35:11Justin Roczniak?

  Even the government lets you drink water. Come on.

• 2:35:15November Kelly?

  You, you should, you should do something about this. And yeah, I'm not, I don't know if I can say what, but you should do something about this.

• 2:35:26Justin Roczniak?

  Yes, my senior coworker quit over the contaminated water which she'd been unknowingly drinking for five years before discovery. She got pregnant nearly a year after quitting and had to be induced early due to the liver damage caused by her poisoning.

• 2:35:42November Kelly?

  Jesus.

• 2:35:42Speaker 03

  Jesus Christ.

• 2:35:43November Kelly?

  Yeah. It's a comedy podcast, folks.

• 2:35:46Justin Roczniak?

  It's a comedy podcast about engineering disasters. Very funny things occur.

• 2:35:51November Kelly?

  Yeah, but I mean, I always I had someone ask me about what I did for a living the other day, and I had to explain. I said it was a it's a true crime podcast, but the crime is social murder.

• 2:36:02Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 2:36:03November Kelly?

  And.

• 2:36:04Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 2:36:04November Kelly?

  I I stick by that one. And Jesus, it's not always a fun time, is it?

• 2:36:10Justin Roczniak?

  Man, it's not good, not good. I mean, even something that's like, you know, it seems kind of kind of, uh, how do you say, trivial. It's like, no, don't drink the blue water.

• 2:36:21November Kelly?

  Yeah, this is thoroughly reinforcing my whole contamination anxiety thing. I will I look forward to washing out every glass I drink from about five or six dozen times.

• 2:36:32Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, well, well, what what water are you using to do that?

• 2:36:36November Kelly?

  Oh, I mean, I'm also worrying about that separately. So don't worry. I'm worrying about the worrying as well.

• 2:36:41Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, you gotta get you gotta get good city water through good lead pipes, no copper pipes, gotta be lead.

• 2:36:48Speaker 03

  See, I was gonna make a quip about about using bottled water, but notably the UK is where Coca-Cola tried to sell bottled water, and it also came out poisoned.

• 2:36:57November Kelly?

  Oh, good. Yeah, no, I listen, Glasgow tap water is very, very good. Comes straight down from a lock. Tastes fantastic. I'm a big fan. So, yeah.

• 2:37:06Justin Roczniak?

  I know my water is good because it comes out of the school cool and it goes through a nuclear reactor on the way here.

• 2:37:12Speaker 03

  Oh, fuck, yeah.

• 2:37:13Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. Yeah, no contaminants, just pure unfiltered radiation, which is fine.

• 2:37:21November Kelly?

  Genuinely, though, yeah.

• 2:37:22Justin Roczniak?

  Anyway, cheers and fuck the A asterix, B asterix, G asterix, D.

• 2:37:29November Kelly?

  Hold on, let me tab back over to things. I can read this. What?

• 2:37:32Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, no, I'm not. I'm not. I'm not certain what this is.

• 2:37:35Speaker 03

  I presume it's the name of the garden based on the.

• 2:37:38November Kelly?

  Oh, that tracks.

• 2:37:39Justin Roczniak?

  Oh, that could be. That could be the case. Yeah.

• 2:37:41Speaker 03

  The B, the B and the G, I would assume is botanical garden.

• 2:37:44Justin Roczniak?

  Oh, yeah, that's a good point. Uh, from Kelsey, they, them.

• 2:37:47November Kelly?

  Uh, thank you, Kelsey.

• 2:37:49Justin Roczniak?

  Thank you, Kelsey.

• 2:37:50November Kelly?

  Please, please take these people to the cleaners.

• 2:37:53Justin Roczniak?

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:37:54Liam McAnderson?

  Like, that's, that's not good. It's no good. Um, hmm.

• 2:38:01Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:38:01Liam McAnderson?

  Troubling.

• 2:38:02Justin Roczniak?

  Anyway, our next episode will be, oh, that was Safety Third. Yeah.

• 2:38:06Liam McAnderson?

  Oh, shit.

• 2:38:07Justin Roczniak?

  Uh.

• 2:38:08Liam McAnderson?

  Do the thing again.

• 2:38:09Justin Roczniak?

  Shake hands with danger.

• 2:38:11Liam McAnderson?

  Hands with danger.

• 2:38:12Justin Roczniak?

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

• 2:38:16Liam McAnderson?

  Maya.

• 2:38:17Speaker 03

  Yeah, uh, yeah, let me do my usual self-promotion. Um, for the most part, you could find most of the things that I do at my website, which is MayaWalkWith.me. Uh, I am currently in the middle.

• 2:38:32Speaker 03

  Currently in the middle. I hope you liked the, I did the poster, just for the header. I don't know if you've ever looked at it.

• 2:38:36Liam McAnderson?

  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:38:39Speaker 03

  I'm currently actually doing a run of photography prints using equipment that I bought from the, uh, large pharmacy chain that's going out of business here in the United States. Uh, this is purely a novelty thing, but, uh, people seem to like my photography. Um, except these aren't selling particularly well, so I'm going to plug them here. They're only a limited set of 10 for each one, so, you know, this is not a big deal. It's most, it was like half for a joke anyway, but one way or another. Uh, that can also be found on my website. It can also be, uh, you just have to put shop in front of the URL. Um, you can find me on Twitter and Blue Sky, both of which are some variation of Maya Walk With Me. Um, those are kind of the important ones. My Substack is linked in all of those. That's the important one.

• 2:39:19Speaker 03

  My podcast is actually only on Twitter because like I said, I haven't dealt with it in a year, so I need to get back to that. It'll probably be on Blue Sky by the time, by the time. So by the time you people hear this, I don't actually know. Um, I'm trying to think what else I have. I don't know. I'm poor. Give me money. That's all I can really advise.

• 2:39:34Justin Roczniak?

  There you go. Uh, that, that's the, that's the important part.

• 2:39:37Speaker 03

  Yes. Yeah.

• 2:39:38Justin Roczniak?

  Yes.

• 2:39:38Speaker 03

  So this is a core part of it all.

• 2:39:40Justin Roczniak?

  Put your money in other places.

• 2:39:42Speaker 03

  That's true.

• 2:39:43Justin Roczniak?

  All right. Um, I don't have anything to plug. I don't know what happened to Liam.

• 2:39:47Liam McAnderson?

  Did I mute myself again? God damn it.

• 2:39:49Justin Roczniak?

  Uh, you might have.

• 2:39:51Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah, you, you haven't said anything for like the past like 20 minutes, half an hour.

• 2:39:56Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah, I was muted. That's my.

• 2:39:57Justin Roczniak?

  Ah, shit. Ah.

• 2:39:58Liam McAnderson?

  Uh, I, uh, it's okay. It's okay, folks. I went to the bathroom and came back and then I, I, yeah, it's fine. All right. Well.

• 2:40:06Justin Roczniak?

  Oh, oh, oh, sorry. We were talking over you because we didn't hear you.

• 2:40:10Liam McAnderson?

  Okay.

• 2:40:12Liam McAnderson?

  I'm sure someone will leave a hurtful comment about how they liked it better.

• 2:40:15Justin Roczniak?

  Wow, wow, wow. Well, we have closure now at least.

• 2:40:18Liam McAnderson?

  All right. Good night, everybody.

• 2:40:20Justin Roczniak?

  All right. Good night, everyone. That was a podcast.