Episode 187: National Airlines Flight 102

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

• 0:00November Kelly?

  All right, if we, if we, if we do a sync point, then I'll, I'll come straight in.

• 0:03Justin Roczniak?

  A point of synchronization.

• 0:05November Kelly?

  Yes, synchronizing point.

• 0:07Justin Roczniak?

  Yes, one, two, three, mork. Okay.

• 0:12November Kelly?

  It feels strange for it to go up. I'm, I'm used to going down.

• 0:16Justin Roczniak?

  Well, I said point of synchronization as opposed to sync point. Therefore I had to go backwards.

• 0:23November Kelly?

  I see, I see. Got you.

• 0:25Liam McAnderson?

  Listen to her. She sounds like she's gonna die.

• 0:29November Kelly?

  I have been sick for so long and I'm on Manjaro, which means I am, I'm, I'm doing like one meal a day. So I'm, I'm struggling. I'm on like a severe caloric deficit and I'm sleeping all the time and I have been up for about 25 hours.

• 0:48Justin Roczniak?

  Are you pregnant?

• 0:49November Kelly?

  Um, I, I'm, let me get back to you on that one. I may have to check.

• 0:53Liam McAnderson?

  You might as well be, might as well be.

• 0:55November Kelly?

  Yeah.

• 0:56Justin Roczniak?

  My god.

• 0:57Liam McAnderson?

  I, I am, I'm gone off that Ozempic. And by which I mean, I'm on Ozempic because I, I'm a fat boy. And yeah, I, I am, I am subject to Ozempic tummy. So I am similar, I am, I'm in your boat.

• 1:10November Kelly?

  Yeah, it's, it's real bad. It's real bad. I mean, yeah, hard, hard to kind of ask for sympathy for that when it's as expensive as it is. Um, but I needed to get it for surgery and I'm at my, I'm at my target weight for surgery. So, um, you know, watch the space. Thank you. Lost like 30 kilograms in like, like three months.

• 1:28Justin Roczniak?

  I was up really late last night because I was going completely insane because I realized that the AI data center, like water consumption.

• 1:35November Kelly?

  Oh, this thing again?

• 1:36Justin Roczniak?

  Is, yeah, it's probably, it's probably a CIA thing. Yeah, no, it's like fake. It's like completely fake. Like you, you, you, you actually. Everything about AI data center, water consumption, like it gives you a flow rate right there, like upfront. And you can just calculate what the size of pipe would need to be to feed the thing. It's like, oh my God, this is going to drain all the water from the entire county. And then you run the numbers and it's like, nah, it's a 10 inch pipe with a five horsepower pump.

• 2:06November Kelly?

  Yeah, just need to see how much, what size of data center they need to build, you know, or want to build.

• 2:11Liam McAnderson?

  Before we get any further, I want to reiterate, by the time this goes out, we'll have one day left for the domestic violence dance-a-thon, which makes it sound like we're dancing for domestic violence, but we're not.

• 2:23November Kelly?

  Yeah.

• 2:23Liam McAnderson?

  We're dancing to prevent domestic violence.

• 2:25Justin Roczniak?

  Against domestic violence.

• 2:27Liam McAnderson?

  Against domestic violence. Thank you, Roz. So give us your money. There's one more day. Give me your money and I'll do a fun dance for you. Give me your money. Thank you.

• 2:35Justin Roczniak?

  All right. Excellent.

• 2:36Liam McAnderson?

  Links in the description.

• 2:37Justin Roczniak?

  Yes, I believe James's fundraiser is also still ongoing. I didn't check it today. But that's also going to be down in the description. Anyway, so, hello and welcome to Well, There's Your Problem. It's a podcast about engineering disasters with slides. I'm Justin Roczniak. I'm the person who's talking right now. My pronouns are he and him. Okay, go.

• 3:02November Kelly?

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

• 3:07Liam McAnderson?

  Yay, Liam. Hi, it is good to be back. I am Liam McAnderson. My pronouns are he, him, and not an advocate for domestic violence, an advocate against that.

• 3:16Justin Roczniak?

  Yes.

• 3:19November Kelly?

  Flash that up on screen with like a picture of you. It's like, not an advocate for domestic violence, but an advocate against domestic violence.

• 3:25Justin Roczniak?

  Like a campaign poster. Starting a charity that's pro domestic violence or found, I guess that's just the Republican Party.

• 3:32Liam McAnderson?

  That's the NRA or.

• 3:34Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, or the NRA.

• 3:36November Kelly?

  The FOP, the police one.

• 3:37Liam McAnderson?

  The FOP, yeah, yeah. The FOP is for domestic violence. Absolutely.

• 3:41November Kelly?

  Yeah, that is, that is the three of us. We are edited by Devon and we are research assisted by research assistant Sam. So thank you to both of them for their work on this one. What you see before you, and I should say, the most sleep deprived member of us is, is kind of helming this one. I did a lot of the slides for this, so I'm so sorry in advance. What you see before you is a field in Afghanistan. It's not supposed to look like that.

• 4:12Justin Roczniak?

  No.

• 4:12November Kelly?

  Because today we're going to be talking about National Airlines Flight 102, which may ring some bells to some of you.

• 4:19Liam McAnderson?

  I'm sorry, is this, is this showing 62 total slides?

• 4:22Justin Roczniak?

  This is.

• 4:23November Kelly?

  Don't worry about that. Some of them are quite short.

• 4:25Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 4:26Liam McAnderson?

  I, I have been tricked by that before, lady.

• 4:28Justin Roczniak?

  That's what, that's what they all say.

• 4:33Liam McAnderson?

  It's hour seven we go and.

• 4:37November Kelly?

  In order to establish how this plane shaped remarkably plane shaped scar on the landscape got there, we're going to talk about it over the course of five or six hours. But first, we have to do.

• 4:50Justin Roczniak?

  The goddamn news.

• 4:58Justin Roczniak?

  Actually, side note there, my understanding is that on the first all hands call with CBS, that's how Barry Weiss ended the call was saying, we're going to do the goddamn news.

• 5:09November Kelly?

  The fucking news. She did. She did the like, you're a goddamn newsman thing.

• 5:14Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 5:15November Kelly?

  Which is incredible. I look forward to CBS nose diving, much like the subject of today's episode.

• 5:23Justin Roczniak?

  Oh, yeah. Yeah. Well, okay. So where to start? There was a big ice raid in Chicago, among other things which happened in Chicago. They brought in like Black Hawk helicopter and all kinds of crap and all kinds of like police and ATF and ICE and FBI and every single kind of law enforcement you can think of, right? They all descend on this apartment block in the South Side. And they, they, they're like, well, you know, there's probably a couple of trend day Aragua people in there. So we're just going to go in and arrest and evict every single person.

• 6:01November Kelly?

  Yeah. Would you believe that this was done at least partially at the behest of the landlords?

• 6:06Liam McAnderson?

  I would absolutely believe that. Mao Zedong had some points.

• 6:10November Kelly?

  Yeah. They called this Operation Midway Blitz because they're all Nazis.

• 6:15Justin Roczniak?

  Oh, yeah. I mean, this apartment building, I took a look around here on Google Maps. This thing's, you know, apparently it is pretty rundown as it is. It's like 600 feet from the beach, though. So I can understand why, you know, the landlords like, I gotta get everyone out so I can gentrify this place. You know, but also like.

• 6:34November Kelly?

  Win win because they get everybody out and ICE gets like their fucking sizzle reel of them like, you know.

• 6:39Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, exactly. Look at us putting zip ties around this baby.

• 6:45Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah, we're the good guys.

• 6:47Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, we zip tied a bunch of babies together and sort of dragged them around like a, like a rope.

• 6:53Liam McAnderson?

  Oh, that is dark. Thank you, Ross.

• 6:55November Kelly?

  I hate these fucking chuds so much. These, these, these Nazi motherfuckers. Somebody's gotta start.

• 7:00Liam McAnderson?

  I agree, but you still can't say that.

• 7:02November Kelly?

  I'm dead serious. Like, at what point? If, if not now, then when?

• 7:07Liam McAnderson?

  No, it is, it is, it is good. I'm gonna have to take that out of the episode. These people, kneel them over a ditch. Sorry, Devon, you're gonna get your money's worth here.

• 7:15Justin Roczniak?

  I was about to say, this is gonna be, this is gonna be a, a, a quite, quite a few, uh, quite a few bleeps right there. Yeah, I mean, stuff's getting rowdy in Chicago, it seems, um, you know, cuz they, they send in, they sent in ICE, right? Everyone's mad about it. People like falling around ICE in their personal vehicles, honking the horns and screaming, "Hey, this is ICE vehicle." You know, sort of like the, uh, the Japanese communists with the van with the speaker on it, you know? That's, that's what it reminded me of.

• 7:43November Kelly?

  We, we need some like noise trucks, yeah.

• 7:45Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, exactly. And then, uh, um, what else? Well, one of those people, this is a separate incident. They were falling around ICE in their personal vehicle and, uh, the ICE guys, uh, just decided to stop and shoot her five times.

• 8:01November Kelly?

  Yeah, as I said, they're already shooting at you for no reason. Um, and I mean, shit is, shit is popping off in, in Portland as well, or rather it isn't, right? Because Donald Trump has insisted and Pam Bondi has insisted that, um, that Portland is a kind of like lawless hellscape of, you know, anarchist violence as opposed to what it really is, which is a lawless hellscape of anarchist vegan tray bakes. Um, and so, uh, all of the federal government's most armed chuds are currently sitting around sort of like shooting pepper balls at Presbyterian ministers and like people in fursuits and stuff.

• 8:38Justin Roczniak?

  Um, I mean, this is, this is, uh, you know, we, we are seeing the, the end stage of a very long process of, you know, Fox News saying that, uh, every single urban liberal is killed five times a day by crime. Um, cuz the people, the people in charge actually believe it now. And they're like, "My God, we have to send in the National Guard." And then they arrest like, uh, uh, you know, every single, uh, you know, tortilla lady in the entire damn city and throw them in a concentration camp. Um. Stuff's bad.

• 9:14November Kelly?

  I, I, I don't know. Maybe, maybe I'm like, uh, like falling for it, right? By saying the thing that Dev just had to bleep. Maybe because like, uh, Portland as a city is, is seemingly like not rising to the provocation. And this is making them madder and madder. Like, it really does seem like they're kind of poking the kind of like, American, like populace with a stick and being like, come on, do something. Do something.

• 9:37Liam McAnderson?

  Oh, we'll do something.

• 9:38Justin Roczniak?

  Uh, again. They, they wanna drop a nuke on Chaz.

• 9:41Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah, they do.

• 9:42Justin Roczniak?

  I mean, that, that would, that would do them like, no end of, uh, no, no end of, uh, you know, they'd be very pleased about that if they could nuke Chaz. But Chaz has to be built first, and that is not, or rebuilt. Um.

• 9:57November Kelly?

  I haven't, yeah, I haven't thought about Chaz in a minute.

• 9:59Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah, me neither. I, I do, I do wanna say, as a social worker who works with immigrant population, uh, get fucked.

• 10:05Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 10:05November Kelly?

  Yeah.

• 10:06Liam McAnderson?

  Please stop scaring my clients. Thank you, you dick cheeses.

• 10:09November Kelly?

  They keep, they keep trying to send the National Guard places. Did you see that one photo? And I, I mean, listen, we're Ozempic or no Ozempic, we're still a, we're, we're still a hearty podcast. But did you see that one photo of the Texas National Guard arriving in Chicago?

• 10:23Liam McAnderson?

  I, it's okay to body shave those people. Knock yourselves out.

• 10:27Justin Roczniak?

  The one thing, the thing about them sending, the thing about them sending the Nat, the Texas National Guard in particular is like, okay, Governor what's his face, uh, you know, was like.

• 10:37Liam McAnderson?

  Paxton, is that him or is he the Attorney General?

• 10:40November Kelly?

  He's the Attorney General, I think.

• 10:42Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, no, it's, uh, it's, um, um, Greg Abbott, that's who it is.

• 10:46Liam McAnderson?

  Greg Abbott, yeah. One of Greg Abbott's fucking Nazis, yeah.

• 10:48Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. Was like, a while back, he was like, you know, uh, we can't, he, he, he tried to make a big political statement by saying, we're gonna take all these asylum seekers and undocumented immigrants, and we're gonna send them up north on coach buses into various major cities.

• 11:03Liam McAnderson?

  Oh, yes.

• 11:04Justin Roczniak?

  See how they like it, right? And it turned out, yeah, a major city of like two, three million people can take a couple coach buses of immigrants each day and be fine. So, I, I, I, everyone got along. Nothing bad happened. And I, I guess this is the culmination of that, is people got so mad, now we have to send the Texas. National Guard to go terrorize people that Texas uh kicked out um.

• 11:29November Kelly?

  Yeah, yeah, it's it's I it's maddening genuinely um and I don't I don't know um. I I I'm I'm speaking now directly to every general officer who was in the audience for Pete Hegseth calling you a fat gay woke. You will be reincarnated as a lotus flower, you know, like it is possible just to do it. Um, just think about that. Just just bear that in mind, you know, you went to like staff college, war college, whatever. Uh, you you have like sort of like, you know, decades of experience and and what you do and and you're being bossed around by these fucking Nazis. Just think about it. Just maybe, you know, have a think.

• 12:15Justin Roczniak?

  Find the most Corsican guy among you and um.

• 12:22Justin Roczniak?

  Go from there.

• 12:23November Kelly?

  I I'm not asking you to become Corsican. I'm saying that one day, when the time is right, you will look in the mirror and you already will be.

• 12:34Justin Roczniak?

  Well, in other news.

• 12:38November Kelly?

  Yeah, this is some more like the forces of evil are way better at their jobs than I was led to believe by Disney movies shit.

• 12:45Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, I was about to say the uh the global Samudh Filatilla, which is delivering aid to Gaza, was waylaid in international waters and everyone was taken prisoner. And then, uh, you know, the most moral army in the world uh committed some light war crimes. Just light war crimes. It's fine. Just a little dusting of war crimes. Yeah, exactly. I understand the police were responsible for most of the torture.

• 13:10November Kelly?

  Yeah, in in many ways, Israel is as it's often been kind of the like innovator, the kind of the like uh the tip of the spear for like every suppressed like suburban fascist uh sort of like wank stain. In that they actually got to torture Greta Thunberg, which has been the thing that all of these sad pricks have been fantasizing about for the longest time.

• 13:34Justin Roczniak?

  Fucking weird as hell, by the way.

• 13:35November Kelly?

  Yeah, yeah. I mean, like, this is she's she's an adult now, so I guess it's legally not child torture, but they.

• 13:43Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, it's not. It's adult torture. They wish it was, though. Fine.

• 13:46November Kelly?

  Yeah, for real. Yeah, I, and I mean, the, the thing is, like, part of the point of them doing this was, you know, their kind of awareness raising that if they can, if they can do this to, you know, like, Irish senators and like, you know, South African politicians and Greta Thunberg, then how much worse are they doing to Palestinians all the time? And the answer is a lot. And that's all out there. That's, that's written about. People know about it. It's just, uh, you, you, you hope to try and make people care a bit more. Um, which, I don't know. Um, I, I, I hope works. I think any, any sort of action against Israel, uh, in, in that sense, you know, politically is, is justified. Um, so, uh, it's just,

• 14:31November Kelly?

  the, uh, once again, it's the triumph of these fucking, uh, like monstrous-

• 14:38Liam McAnderson?

  Wildly evil lunatics.

• 14:39Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 14:39November Kelly?

  Yeah.

• 14:40Justin Roczniak?

  I'd say Philistines, but that's an old word for Palestinians. Um.

• 14:46Liam McAnderson?

  I just keep calling people maroons. Thanks to you.

• 14:49Justin Roczniak?

  Maroons. Yeah. Well, no, maroons are slaves who escaped their masters and fled into the mountains.

• 14:55Liam McAnderson?

  Well, now I feel bad.

• 14:56Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, exactly. You should feel bad.

• 14:58Liam McAnderson?

  I was going on, I was using it instead of moron.

• 15:01Justin Roczniak?

  Oh, using it in the Bugs Bunny sense. Okay.

• 15:03Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 15:05November Kelly?

  You gotta use like a poltroon or something. And, and somebody would tell me if that's offensive, because I don't know what it means.

• 15:10Liam McAnderson?

  I'll go over troglodyte. There we go.

• 15:12Justin Roczniak?

  Troglodyte. There you go. Now, the, uh-

• 15:15November Kelly?

  Of course, now a poltroon has a very different sort of meaning to it.

• 15:18Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah, it's, uh, inverse Roz.

• 15:20Justin Roczniak?

  Yes. Now, obviously, okay, they're, they're, they're trying to do the, uh, they're trying to do this insane Trump peace deal where they turn Gaza into Miami Beach right now, um, which is very stupid. Probably won't work. Um, uh, the other thing I guess is-

• 15:37November Kelly?

  Tony Blair in charge of it.

• 15:39Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, I know. It's really bad. Um, you know, there's gonna flatten everything and everyone's gonna be evicted and, you know, there'll just be like a horrible genocide. I don't know if that's gonna go anywhere, just because I, I think, you know, probably the Hamas negotiators are smarter than that. Um.

• 15:55Liam McAnderson?

  As soon as they get a chance to not get nuked, right?

• 15:58November Kelly?

  Yeah, it's, it's, uh, it's also Trump can commission a kind of like, uh, you know, Gaza Vice, right? Like, uh, a couple of guys in like white linen suits and loafers. Um. Yeah, I, I, I don't know what's gonna happen other than that, you know, uh, it's, it's two years since October 7th. Uh, like give or take a day. Um, and, uh, it's just everything that has been downstream of it has been grimmer than you can possibly imagine, you know?

• 16:28Justin Roczniak?

  One bright spot, though, out of all of this. Did you see Greta Thunberg's autism shirt?

• 16:33Liam McAnderson?

  With the reptile thing firing off two automatics?

• 16:36Justin Roczniak?

  No, I was, yeah, it was the, with the two skeletons with, uh, with the guns. Yeah.

• 16:41Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah.

• 16:41November Kelly?

  There's, there's a lot of reasons to admire that woman, but the fact that she brought a shitpost to torture prison is, is like an extra one.

• 16:51Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, no, it's, uh, it's wonderful. Uh, that was, that was great. Um, yeah, I, I, I.

• 16:56November Kelly?

  I'm critical support for Greta Thunberg. She's genuinely, as far as I know, she's been on the right side of everything.

• 17:03Justin Roczniak?

  Mm-hmm. Uh, yeah. Uh, Greta Thunberg, come on the podcast.

• 17:07November Kelly?

  Um, yeah, absolutely. Embrace Greta's thought.

• 17:11Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 17:12November Kelly?

  Dictatorship of the Greta-teriate.

• 17:14Justin Roczniak?

  Um, and I guess in, in, in less international news.

• 17:23Justin Roczniak?

  So.

• 17:24November Kelly?

  I like the Chyrons.

• 17:26Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 17:26Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah, it doesn't change. Don't worry about it.

• 17:29Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. So now, uh, in the previous episode, uh, I mentioned, uh, briefly, like, you know, all right, it looks like some crazy set the news is about to drop. Some crazy set the news drop. So if we recall, uh, recently, um, the Republicans in the Pennsylvania Senate, uh, refused to pass any kind of budget that provided any kind of funding for SEPTA, the Southeast Pennsylvania Transportation Authority. Um, and SEPTA was going to contract its network significantly and raise fares in order to cover the insane budget deficit that would result. Then some lawyer guy was like, uh, I don't, I think all your finances are fake. You can't do that actually.

• 18:14Justin Roczniak?

  Forced them to dig into capital funding in order to, uh, um, you know, fund operations through the. Next year when maybe a budget will happen, who knows? Um, let's just hope that there's no massive need for capital funding, right? Well, uh, as of exactly last week from the day of recording, the National Transportation Safety Board sent down a recommendation saying these old trains, the Silverliner fours here, they're about 50 years old. Um, and, uh, I think six of them have caught fire in six months. And so, um, the, uh, the NTSB was like, listen, uh, you guys gotta take all of these out of service and Good luck suburbs.

• 18:57Justin Roczniak?

  Fix the damn problems, right? And that's two thirds of the regional rail, you know, commuter rail fleet, right? Jesus. So, um, we got fucked. Yeah. Really bad.

• 19:14November Kelly?

  Uh, it's really not great when people who are like implacably opposed to your existence or you having nice things control the entire federal government, is it?

• 19:22Justin Roczniak?

  Oh, yeah. No, this is the state government. That's the worst part.

• 19:26November Kelly?

  Um, Jesus.

• 19:27Justin Roczniak?

  You know, so, uh, so we, we essentially, uh, there, there's, these are out for inspection at this point. You know, theoretically, some of these issues can be corrected that are causing the trains to catch fire. But they're 50 year old cars. They need to be replaced. But you need the money that would otherwise be set aside to replace them in order to continue basic operations. That's some dumbass lawyer and an equally dumbass judge said you have to do. Uh, it, it's, it's a bad situation to be in. Also said dumbass lawyer is about to make them reverse the fare hikes. I think we're just not gonna have like SEPTA in like six months. Yeah.

• 20:08Justin Roczniak?

  It's all gonna go away. Everyone's gonna have to drive a car or ride a bike and get hit by a car. Um, well, good luck, Roz. Yeah. Oh, well, um, that'll be the end of the podcast. No, no, we'll still go all the way.

• 20:20November Kelly?

  Hey, man, maybe everyone will get like.

• 20:22Justin Roczniak?

  But. Yeah.

• 20:23November Kelly?

  Maybe everyone will get bikes pilled and like, uh, Philly will look like Amsterdam in six months.

• 20:28Justin Roczniak?

  Oh, wow. You know, that'd be, that would be ideal.

• 20:30November Kelly?

  Ideal, but, uh.

• 20:32Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 20:33November Kelly?

  Hope springs eternal, you know?

• 20:35Justin Roczniak?

  So, yeah, that's, uh, that, that's, uh, that's, that's off the cuff, uh, analysis of the current situation. We're fucked. Um.

• 20:43November Kelly?

  Seems real bad, yeah.

• 20:44Justin Roczniak?

  We'll go into detail about that at some point in the future, I think, as the fuckadness increases. Um, so that was the goddamn news.

• 20:57November Kelly?

  Beautiful. Okay, so we are gonna have a bunch of different, in order to explain the thing, we're gonna have to ask ourselves, what is X?

• 21:08Justin Roczniak?

  What is terrorism?

• 21:10November Kelly?

  Um, it's the, it's, it's the use of violence to enact sort of exemplary political change. Um, and I, I, it's, it's, it's value neutral, as far as I'm concerned, but you know what? People aren't ready for those kind of like adult international relations discussions, so we ought to talk about what is Afghanistan?

• 21:31Justin Roczniak?

  That's an illegal thought.

• 21:33Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah.

• 21:34November Kelly?

  Yeah. What is, what is Afghanistan? What is the global war on terror?

• 21:39Liam McAnderson?

  A big fat L.

• 21:41Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. I, I, terror won the war on terror.

• 21:46November Kelly?

  Absolutely. Like drugs won the war on drugs.

• 21:48Liam McAnderson?

  Why should I have to take my shoes off at the airport, you fucker? Yeah, exactly.

• 21:52November Kelly?

  Poverty won the war on poverty. Like, even back to FDR, want really won the war on wants. Like, you make war on an abstract concept, you lose.

• 22:01Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, I was about to say, I, I don't, I can't think of any of those wars that anyone won.

• 22:05November Kelly?

  Go ahead and write in.

• 22:06Justin Roczniak?

  I think LBJ came close. LBJ came close with the war on poverty, but then, then he was, uh, you know, uh, it, it, they, they wouldn't let him take the gloves off, you know?

• 22:17November Kelly?

  Another, another run of rolling thunder against poverty and we would have managed. Yeah. But so Afghanistan, uh, you may be familiar, it's the country highlighted in green here. Um, and between 2001 and 2021, the US and a little like coalition of the willing called ISAF, um, were, uh, like, uh, occupying and engaging in counter insurgency in, in order to back up a kind of extremely decrepit and corrupt Afghan government. Um, was, was sort of like the occupying power of Afghanistan. And this was part of a broader campaign called the Global War on Terror, which encompassed like,

• 23:00November Kelly?

  not just stuff like the war in Iraq, but also like, you know, down to drone strikes in Somalia. Uh, you name it, the Philippines, it was all over. Um, as I say, you may remember the some of this stuff. On the other hand, it's already passing into history, you know, like you listen to this in a few years and the Zoomers will be like, what is in Afghanistan? What is, what is the, uh, AUMF? Right?

• 23:19Justin Roczniak?

  Afghanistan, that's where Saddam Hussein was, right?

• 23:22November Kelly?

  Why not, Roz? Yeah, where he's keeping the, um, where he was keeping the WMDs. Just as a little preview of-

• 23:27Justin Roczniak?

  WMDs, yeah.

• 23:28November Kelly?

  Where's, uh, where this is going to go. Um, ISAF, the, the International Security Assistance Force, um, which was America plus, you know, in, in kind of descending order like Britain- American friends. France, Germany, yeah. Um, uh, there, there was this kind of chauvinistic joke amongst Americans that, that ISAF stood for. I saw Americans fighting on the kind of, uh, false belief that the Americans were doing all of the heavy lifting. Um, I would like to submit that ISAF should stand for inadequately secured American freight. And we will get into why.

• 24:00Justin Roczniak?

  Yes.

• 24:01November Kelly?

  Oh, boy. Okay. I love to hear inadequately secured freight. Mm hmm. This is a, this is a podcast about cargo. Next slide, please.

• 24:09Justin Roczniak?

  Yes.

• 24:10November Kelly?

  So in Afghanistan is a place called Bagram. Uh, Bagram is an ancient city, but it has an airbase next to it. Um, it's been in the news lately because Trump wants it back. Um, and is trying to like, I guess, buy or rent it back from the Taliban, which- Are we gonna do a Guantanamo Bay thing? Are we gonna? Yeah, I, I guess he wants to. Um, so, so Bagram was, was built by the Soviets in the fifties, or at least it was built nominally with like Soviet assistance. Um, and they-

• 24:40Justin Roczniak?

  The Americans were also involved in some weird way.

• 24:43November Kelly?

  Um, well, so this was real kind of like great game hours between Afghanistan and like Cuba. Um, but as far as I know, this was a kind of a Soviet assistance project. Um, and they did a really good job, though. Like, it's a, it's a kind of well situated uh, outside of Kabul and like pretty defensible terrain. And this, it had this like, uh, really durable 3,000 meter long concrete runway, which means you can just land heavy aircraft on it all day, which is very useful if you ever, you know, thinking as the Soviets here, thinking ahead, in case you ever need to invade and occupy Afghanistan. Um, it's a real kind of

• 25:24November Kelly?

  poison chalice thing to be like, hey, we got you an airport. It is, by the way, the airport that we are going to invade you in if we need to.

• 25:31Justin Roczniak?

  Well, that, that and obviously the railroad they built to Afghanistan to invade.

• 25:36November Kelly?

  Yeah. Um, but so this is, this is a great place to run an occupation of Afghanistan out of, which is what the Soviets did. Um, in, in the sort of Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. This was like the main Soviet base. Um, and, uh, when the Soviets were kicked out, it was sort of like left largely intact and it, it became this kind of like Afghan two fort. Um, because it's so fucking big and this runway is so long. This is a fairly normal situation during the civil war where the Taliban would be operate, would be like occupying one end and the Northern Alliance would be occupying the other end and they'd both be shooting at each other and like, you know, firing rockets at each other and denting

• 26:20November Kelly?

  the fucking runway and occasionally blowing up outbuildings and stuff.

• 26:24Justin Roczniak?

  Air traffic control must have been a nightmare.

• 26:29November Kelly?

  So, um, yeah, this, uh, this state of affairs lasted until about 2000, when the Taliban kicked the Northern Alliance out. Um, and they got a year to celebrate before, um, Bush started the war in Afghanistan and, uh, it was, it was captured by, by us, weirdly, by the British. Um, and yeah, uh, you're welcome. And it became a, like the largest American base in Afghanistan. Um, they put in the second runway, uh, which is also concrete, like three and a half thousand meters. Um, they put in, uh, like a CIA torture prison called the Salt Pit. Um, but most importantly, they put in, next slide, please, a Pizza Hut.

• 27:14Justin Roczniak?

  Ooh.

• 27:15November Kelly?

  Really soak in those vi- how much is that NATO?

• 27:19Liam McAnderson?

  I think so.

• 27:20November Kelly?

  I mean, I guess legitimately.

• 27:22Liam McAnderson?

  Meal deals. Look at that.

• 27:23November Kelly?

  Actually, could be. If we have docs to kind of like GWOT Nate, then I'm sorry. Yeah, this is it's a containerized Pizza Hut. And.

• 27:34Liam McAnderson?

  American logistics have no superior.

• 27:36November Kelly?

  This is sort of where I'm going with this. Yeah, like.

• 27:41November Kelly?

  So Bagaram was the center of like American logistics. Everything or almost everything came through there. If we if we go to the next slide, please, I'm going to try and explain military logistics to an American. So imagine.

• 27:56Liam McAnderson?

  I'm sorry. I'm sorry. The country, the country that got the ice cream. Okay, okay.

• 28:03November Kelly?

  Yes, no, you are still the best in the world at it. I know. I just wanted to get the burger joke in.

• 28:10Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah, all right. So I'm imagining a burger king as you want. Yes.

• 28:13November Kelly?

  Thank you.

• 28:13Justin Roczniak?

  I just ate a burger.

• 28:14November Kelly?

  I want a burger. The.

• 28:17Liam McAnderson?

  What'd you have on your burger?

• 28:18Justin Roczniak?

  I had, I got, I got a burger. It had some kind of special sauce. It had lettuce and onions. It had Cooper Sharp cheese. And it had some mushrooms. I got it from Pizza Plus West.

• 28:33November Kelly?

  I'm not a mushroom on burger enthusiast.

• 28:35Liam McAnderson?

  No, neither am I.

• 28:37Justin Roczniak?

  I like that.

• 28:37Liam McAnderson?

  No, why should November get to go to sleep?

• 28:40November Kelly?

  I like, I like, I like onions. Anyway, so yeah.

• 28:43Liam McAnderson?

  No, no, no, no, I'm not done.

• 28:46November Kelly?

  The like, the logistics of the sort of like. US military in the global war on terror involved this huge, long supply chain. Which required not just kind of a lot of functional stuff, but also a decent amount of luxury in some of these places, which is why Bagaram had a Pizza Hut and Burger King. It's why the US Embassy compound in Iraq had, you know, like the fucking swimming pools, right? And so for all of this, you've got to move a lot of shit into Afghanistan. And you can't do that by land because all of the land borders are either.

• 29:24November Kelly?

  A, closed, B, horrendously insecure and kind of geographically inaccessible anyway, or C, Iran. So.

• 29:34Liam McAnderson?

  Oh.

• 29:35November Kelly?

  Yeah, everything. I mean, to be fair, there is a lot of traffic coming over the kind of Iranian Afghan border. It's just mostly IEDs and IRGC guys. So everything that you want, your Burger King, whatever it is, has to come in by air. And the US is-

• 29:53Justin Roczniak?

  The Afghanistan Uzbekistan peace bridge is unfortunately nowhere near anything.

• 30:00November Kelly?

  Yes. And-

• 30:01Justin Roczniak?

  You gotta run everything on a truck through the Solang Tunnel and then everyone dies.

• 30:06November Kelly?

  It wasn't really convenient for you to like build a railway in either. So yeah, everything has to come in by air. The US is very good at transporting stuff by air, right? You did the Berlin airlift. And so the US Air Force has a kind of organic capability to do that, which is what it's doing in the in the photo. It's moving the Burger King. But at a certain point, you need so much stuff that you're overstretching those resources, which you need for other stuff. Particularly, you might need them in Iraq.

• 30:34November Kelly?

  And so it's also expensive. Plus, you have the pre the preeminent factor in any decision making in the war on terror, which is, can we make a private company run this for profit and extract some money from the federal government?

• 30:50Liam McAnderson?

  Oh, I love to eat war crime burgers brought to you by Blackwater.

• 30:55November Kelly?

  Well, this was all like contracted to-

• 30:57Justin Roczniak?

  Nothing more patriotic. There's nothing more patriotic than ripping off your government.

• 31:01Liam McAnderson?

  That's true.

• 31:01November Kelly?

  Yes, as far as I know, all the all of the like Burger King stuff was contracted to like Sodexo and like KBR. So like or Halliburton, there was there were a ton of companies that that were getting rich off of this. But so in that spirit, we go to the next slide, please. We've got a kind of chain of command here, starting on the left with the United States Transportation Command or US Transcom. I am allowed to find that funny.

• 31:29November Kelly?

  So transgender command exists to like centralize all the different services need for moving transgender people around. It's under a four star general.

• 31:40Justin Roczniak?

  And the supplies, big tankers full of Estradial.

• 31:44November Kelly?

  Exactly, yeah.

• 31:45Justin Roczniak?

  KC-135 entirely full of it.

• 31:51November Kelly?

  Hooking up the probe to that. Yeah. Basically, this was this was kind of formed because in the 80s, like the kind of war plan, something which was sort of exercised under the name Reforger, was all of the NATO forces in Europe, comma Soviet invasion, would need to like, sort of do a fighting retreat to buy time for everything in the US to get shipped to Europe, right? And the US didn't really have the capacity to do that organically, and it couldn't really build it. And so what this was about was about coordinating either contracting with or just straight up commandeering civilian transport in order to move all of your tanks and your gunships and stuff

• 32:37November Kelly?

  from the US to Europe.

• 32:40November Kelly?

  And so it has a bunch of civil, like naval transportation in the, I think it's called the Military Sea Lift Command. It has an army one, but it also has the Air Force Command, which is the Air Mobility Command. And the Air Mobility Command runs the Civil Reserve Air Fleet, which is a program by which the US Air Force contracts with a bunch of American airlines to take up its excess transportation needs. And so if you deployed to Afghanistan, there is a decent chance that you did part of that journey on like a passenger airliner. That's why.

• 33:19Liam McAnderson?

  Just like a Delta plane. Yeah.

• 33:20Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, yeah, just like, that was an airline we had in 2001.

• 33:24November Kelly?

  American.

• 33:25Justin Roczniak?

  CWA still around?

• 33:27November Kelly?

  I don't think so. I mean, Transworld Airlines would have been apt, I suppose.

• 33:31Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 33:32November Kelly?

  Weird, I think they contracted with Hawaiian. Hawaiian and Alaska. So, yeah, it gets really strange. But basically, they're there to kind of like take up the slack when the US Air Force itself is kind of like out of transport capacity, because it's too busy like moving the Burger Kings. So, next slide, please. One of those airlines is National, National Airlines, which is a car.

• 33:58Justin Roczniak?

  They deliver the world.

• 33:59November Kelly?

  They deliver the world.

• 34:00Justin Roczniak?

  Natty airlines.

• 34:02November Kelly?

  Daddy hair.

• 34:03Justin Roczniak?

  Daddy hair.

• 34:04November Kelly?

  They're a pretty small operation. They're a cargo airline out of Ypsilanti, Michigan, which hadn't really done much of notes. Their, their, their business used to be like ferrying Chrysler employees between plants. But they got in on this, this civil reserve air fleet thing very strongly. Because they had this subsidiary called National Air Cargo. And basically they had this relationship where the Air Mobility Command would call National Air Cargo. National Air Cargo would call National Airlines with here's what the shit they want to move is and we'll do it. Right. Sort of no questions asked. And they do a lot of flights in and out of Afghanistan.

• 34:48Justin Roczniak?

  Don't open the package.

• 34:50November Kelly?

  Yeah, I have simple rules. Yeah. And, and pretty quickly that becomes the bulk of their business.

• 34:55November Kelly?

  Ypsilanti is also home to the world's first Dominos. Yeah, interesting. Just coming back to, to fast food again. By the way, their, their business is.

• 35:04Justin Roczniak?

  I've, I've got 30 minutes to move this Dunkin' Donuts into this 747.

• 35:12November Kelly?

  Their business is so focused on Afghanistan that the FAA can't inspect any of those flights. Because it's too dangerous and the State Department won't let them come to Afghanistan. There's genuinely like correspondence from the State Department.

• 35:25Justin Roczniak?

  Okay, so it actually is the transporter.

• 35:27November Kelly?

  Yeah, like the State Department's like, we don't want to pay for like armored vehicles for the FAA. So just don't inspect them. So they're fine. Shut up. Yeah, like all of the kind of stuff that you have to do to maintain your certification as like an airline. What they do is every couple of years, they just take one of their 747s. Fly it around empty between different American cities with the FAA on board. So they'll like tick off, you know, pilots and stuff and the plane, but there's no cargo operations actually happening. And the FAA is just like, that happens in Afghanistan, so it's not our problem.

• 36:05Justin Roczniak?

  All right, it's good. Don't worry about it. It's good.

• 36:07November Kelly?

  Mm hmm. We're, we're set up for success here. Next slide, please.

• 36:11Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 36:11November Kelly?

  Sounds like it. Next, we must ask ourselves, what is the surge? So.

• 36:17Justin Roczniak?

  The surge.

• 36:17November Kelly?

  Oh, dear. The surge. This is, this is General Stanley McChrystal. And this is an unedited screenshot from a Facebook video that his startup consultancy posted about leadership lessons. And the Chiron there says, expect to fail and celebrate it too. And. That's his podcast. But that's true. That, that is true, but that's also in the finest tradition of, of his kind of like military leadership.

• 36:43November Kelly?

  You might remember Stanley McChrystal, he was the guy that Obama ended up firing.

• 36:48November Kelly?

  He, he was kind of like the tail who tried to wag the dog in terms of getting the Obama administration to, to do what he wanted, which was give him all of the money and all of the troops in the world in order to pursue this kind of strategy of, of like, population centric counterinsurgents. And one of the ways he went about this was he, he got kind of overall commands in Afghanistan. And almost immediately he wrote and then leaked this report saying, if you don't give me everything I want, we're going to lose the war in a year. So, nobody wants to lose the war in a year. And ultimately, there's this kind of tug of war between

• 37:31November Kelly?

  the kind of squishier Dems and the more hawkish Dems, and especially the like military leadership who are, and who are like coin pill as well. Where the right, the right wing want sort of like more troops. And the sort of liberal wing want those troops to not stay for long. And Obama, of course, a sort of great compromiser manages to deliver kind of the worst of both worlds, which is, we're going to deploy a lot of troops to Afghanistan, but for three years maximum.

• 38:03Justin Roczniak?

  Right. So, so we're actually, well, is three years a long time? I don't know.

• 38:08November Kelly?

  Um, I mean, it depends on your perspective, but essentially the kind of thing that McChrystal wanted to use them for. And at one point he asked for 85,000 troops, which I'm not sure the US actually had.

• 38:21November Kelly?

  He, he wanted to be doing kind of like institution building that would have taken potentially decades. Right? And.

• 38:29Justin Roczniak?

  Well, I, I know that if I'm trying to build stable and durable institutions, I'm going to go, send a bunch of 18 year olds with guns over there to do it.

• 38:38November Kelly?

  Well, exactly. But also, it's mostly, it's a form of kind of chaos, right? Like, it's a bad idea in both directions, right? Both because of the ideas of kind of counterinsurgency at this time, but also the idea that you're gonna half do it anyway, right? You're gonna give him part of what he wants, and then if it does work, you're gonna yank them all back, just as it starts working. So, December 2009, Obama announces that like 33,000 more troops are gonna start the process of deploying. And the reasoning, or the kind of like gloss that they put on the reasoning is, it's gonna be like a kind of circuit breaker thing, right? You get them in quickly, and then you get them out quickly,

• 39:23November Kelly?

  with like a withdrawal deadline, July 2011, three years. This didn't work, as you may be able to tell by the fact that Afghanistan is an Islamic republic right now.

• 39:34Justin Roczniak?

  I was about to say, the Taliban seems to have won that one.

• 39:38November Kelly?

  Yes, yes, handily. But the point is, the surge was intended to be like a very time limited thing, with a very sharp upswing and a very sharp drawdown. This is also when like the real upswing in drone strikes in Pakistan started happening. So, yeah, we're in a really kind of like dark time in like Americans' military deployments.

• 40:03Justin Roczniak?

  This was all like publicly known that this was the idea, right? Did they not know that the Taliban has television sets they can watch the news?

• 40:10November Kelly?

  Yeah, like the guy in the Taliban whose job is to read the New York Times, or to read the Atlantic and be like, Thomas Friedman gives it six more months, you know?

• 40:19Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, and he gradually learns to hate Bret Stephens, too.

• 40:26November Kelly?

  Taliban guy who does the New York Times just eventually just flipping through the crossword. Next slide, please.

• 40:33Justin Roczniak?

  Can you do a crossword in Arabic? I don't know.

• 40:36November Kelly?

  We're gonna figure it out. Oh, boy. Glow sticks. Yeah, I wanted to trigger some reflective PT belt trauma here. So whether the surge worked or not is mercifully beyond the scope of this paper. But the point is, it had a very firm deadline on it. And so all of these guys and all of their shit had to move into Afghanistan very quickly, and then it had to get back out very quickly. Now, these guys are infantry. That's fine. You can move them on, like, you can move them on anything. You can walk. Fuck them. That's their job. Yeah, exactly. Like, but you may notice these kind of monstrous hulking vehicles behind them

• 41:18November Kelly?

  that look like they've come out of the world's most evil Lego Technic set. This brings us, next slide, please.

• 41:25Justin Roczniak?

  El Grande.

• 41:26November Kelly?

  To the Lego Technic episode. Yeah. Oh, boy. At long last.

• 41:29Justin Roczniak?

  Oh, that'd be fun.

• 41:30November Kelly?

  To, to, we must first understand the MRAM. So you remember this guy, Donald Rumsfeld? I do remember this guy. This is the least flattering photo of him I could find. I really like it. It looks like he's giving himself a hernia trying to put on body armor. So his deal was, as you may recall, going to war with the army you have, not the army you want. Yep. And so the US invaded Iraq, particularly where this photo was taken, with Humvees, which were not armored in any sort of real way and which therefore got shot up a lot. Killed a lot of troops, which it turns out the troops don't like.

• 42:07Justin Roczniak?

  I'm not a big fan.

• 42:08November Kelly?

  As much as Rumsfeld was like, eh, fuck it, get over it. Eventually, sort of common sense prevailed. Yeah, some, some kind of common sense prevailed, right? And next slide, please. They started putting armor on the Humvees. Initially, this was like farmer armor, right? It was just like, just welding bits of kind of scrap metal to them.

• 42:29Justin Roczniak?

  You just put up a plate that you found by the side of the road on the side of your Humvee.

• 42:34November Kelly?

  Yeah, literally.

• 42:35Justin Roczniak?

  You hope that you're keep getting assigned the same Humvee.

• 42:38November Kelly?

  Yeah.

• 42:39Justin Roczniak?

  They'll be damned if I had to do this again.

• 42:41November Kelly?

  Just, just sort of like strange bits of metal getting attached to it. Um, and eventually this got kind of legitimized through like various like whatever the American equivalent of an urgent operational requirement is of, um, sort of like armor kits to apply to Humvees in the field. A lot of these didn't match color as well, which was fun. You, you would see like Marines driving around and, and like a sort of like desert tan Humvee with a bunch of green door panels on it, which was, you know, it's really inspiring. Um, and the thing is about an insurgency is that-

• 43:09Justin Roczniak?

  I'm imagining a sort of Harlequin Humvee where every single panel is a different camo style.

• 43:15November Kelly?

  Yeah, yeah. Adorable, adorable. Yeah. Yeah, it's very cute. Yeah. Um, but yeah, so, um, part of the nature of an insurgency, particularly a kind of like well-funded insurgency, well, set of insurgencies like you had in Iraq, is it adapts pretty quickly. And so, uh, these started getting defeated too. Uh, and so next slide, please. They gotta get bigger again. They gotta get bigger and heavier and you gotta put more shit on the outside of them to stop them from getting like shot into a- Oh yeah, I remember these and were they called, were they, were these like strikers or something that had these? No, strikers, a striker is a- Hypervise armor? Uh, like, um, uh, uh, an infantry fighting vehicle, but this is, this is just an up armored Humvee. Um, and you can see it's got like-

• 43:59November Kelly?

  I like the Pope Mobile box up here. Yeah.

• 44:01Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, I was about to say, this must, this, all this must be great for the suspension.

• 44:05November Kelly?

  It's not, it's not doing well, right? Um, also you can see the like big antenna on the back and also the big kind of like big black anarchist flag on the front that is meant to kind of detonate IEDs, uh, before it drives over them. There was some, they did a lot of shit to try and increase the survivability of these and it made them look really weird, which is not, you know, the main point, but this is just to say this is all-

• 44:30November Kelly?

  That suspension is struggling. Thrown together. Um, and these, these got blown up too.

• 44:35Justin Roczniak?

  Become a low rider.

• 44:37November Kelly?

  Um, so next slide, please. Make them bigger. Just keep, keep making them bigger until you've got this kind of greenhouse pergola thing on the top. Um, and the whole time-

• 44:49Justin Roczniak?

  Becoming, it's becoming Russian.

• 44:51November Kelly?

  Yeah. Just add more weight. Coke turrets, yeah. So the whole time in both Iraq and to lesser extent Afghanistan, the the other guys are working out how to like blow these things up with with some success. And so the Department of Defense go away and have a think and they ask themselves, when was the last time a like technologically superior army was occupying a country, getting blown up a lot by insurgents? And is it a comparison that makes us look good? Hmm. I wonder where we could go for inspiration that's going to be kind of politically suitable and like non problematic. Next slide, please.

• 45:32Justin Roczniak?

  Oh, boy. Okay.

• 45:35November Kelly?

  Yeah.

• 45:36Justin Roczniak?

  Up yours, woke moralists.

• 45:40November Kelly?

  So Bush wars in both senses, right? Because in in the in the 80s, both Rhodesia and apartheid South Africa were engaged in a sort of like early form of counter insurgency. We talked about it on the on the Rhodesia episode. Part of them doing this was developing all sorts of wacky bullshit to try and stop their gay shorts enthusiasts from being blown up. Next slide, please. I told you these were short.

• 46:13Justin Roczniak?

  Oh, yeah.

• 46:13November Kelly?

  So what they end up with are MRAPs, Mine Resistant Ambush Protected Vehicles. These are these are.

• 46:22Justin Roczniak?

  I'm pretty sure I've made some of these in Besieged.

• 46:26November Kelly?

  Yeah, these are these are Buffalo and Caspian MRAPs. And if we if we're looking at kind of features of them, you can you can see that they have a lot of armor, but also on the bottom, these V shaped hulls. So if it drives over a mine, it's that energy is going to get directed outwards away from the people inside. You've got like wider spaced tires with higher wheel wells so that if the the tire detonates it again, all of that energy is directed outwards. And it has a lot. More armor. Now, this makes for a very like, heavy, sort of high-sided, unwieldy vehicle,

• 47:11November Kelly?

  which doesn't necessarily matter so much if you're trying to enforce your like twisted ideas of white supremacy on the VELTS, but put a pin in this for later.

• 47:18Justin Roczniak?

  They're not very good for driving around in cities, as was demonstrated by the National Guard running over a cyclist with them in Washington DC.

• 47:27November Kelly?

  Yeah.

• 47:28Justin Roczniak?

  Excuse me, that's with a modern MRAP, not one of these guys.

• 47:31November Kelly?

  What you want to drive these around on is completely flat, dry grass, and then you'll be okay. Next slide, please.

• 47:40Liam McAnderson?

  Sure, there's a lot of flat, dry grass in Afghanistan, a country known for being flat and having grass.

• 47:46November Kelly?

  This is my favorite one. This is a Rhodesian leopard security vehicle.

• 47:51Liam McAnderson?

  What is the point of this?

• 47:53November Kelly?

  It's for one guy.

• 47:55Justin Roczniak?

  Why does it have racing slicks?

• 47:57Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah, it's like a dune buggy for hell.

• 47:59November Kelly?

  I genuinely.

• 48:00Liam McAnderson?

  A dune buggy, if you will.

• 48:02November Kelly?

  I think the point of this one was to be so light that it didn't detonate mines, it would just drive over them.

• 48:09Liam McAnderson?

  Just bounce over, okay, okay, yeah, okay.

• 48:11November Kelly?

  As far as I know, it did not work. Well, exactly, right? Like, putting a kind of like gay shorts enthusiast inside the armored phone booth here, and telling him to drive around to try not to get blown up, did not preserve white supremacy. And so ultimately.

• 48:28Justin Roczniak?

  Seven laps at the 24 Hours of Le Mans.

• 48:33Liam McAnderson?

  Can you imagine taking the signal lemons, though? That would fuck. Oh, hell yeah.

• 48:37November Kelly?

  So ultimately, anyone who didn't get blown up in one of these moved to London or Johannesburg, and the whole kind of doomed experiment collapsed in itself, and now it's called Simba Boy happily. However, these ideas did not die. Next slide, please.

• 48:54November Kelly?

  And so if you're trying to to maintain like a high rate of survivability and you don't mind getting a bit apartheid with it, then you just build these again. And that's ultimately what an MRAP of this generation is, is a lot, a lot more armor built on that same like V-shaped hull design, which makes them very, very top-heavy, especially once you start adding things like remote weapon systems. So on the left here, we have a MATV or an MATV. And on the right, we have a Cougar. And the Cougar is a lot heavier.

• 49:35Liam McAnderson?

  Cougar.

• 49:36November Kelly?

  A Cougar. Now, my question is-

• 49:39Liam McAnderson?

  I'd like this one to talk to me at the bar.

• 49:42November Kelly?

  Yeah, the 18-ton Cougar that's extremely well armored rolls up to you. What are you doing?

• 49:49Liam McAnderson?

  So I'm going home with the Cougar, obviously.

• 49:52Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, I guess so. I don't think I have too many.

• 49:58November Kelly?

  So the question now becomes, what wins in a fight between one of these, or next slide, please, a single disc of copper with a dent in it?

• 50:10Liam McAnderson?

  I'm gonna guess the the single-

• 50:14November Kelly?

  It's a single disc of copper, yeah. This is-

• 50:17Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah, shaped charges, baby.

• 50:18November Kelly?

  Yeah, so I actually have an EOD challenge coin that's shaped like one of these, which I think is a really neat sort of thing. This is, or rather becomes, something called an explosively formed penetrator, which is a technology invented by Americans to drill oil, which is ironic. You you sit one of these-

• 50:39Justin Roczniak?

  Right, yeah, because you gotta, you gotta, you gotta send all those explosives down the the the well for, well, various purposes, actually.

• 50:47November Kelly?

  Yeah, just blow the whole thing wide open so you get your oil nice and nice and clean. But so this is, this is a kind of like concave disc. You sit it on top of a, like a shaped charge, and when that charge fires, this thing turns itself inside out and gets fired-

• 51:04November Kelly?

  Like a, like a big kind of molten copper shotgun slug and it just walks through a lot of armor. Um, and this was something that, uh, in particular with like Iranian guidance, uh, insurgents in both Iraq and Afghanistan were able to use extremely effective, um, against up armored Humvees and against MRAPs. So it's really only one thing for it. Next slide, please.

• 51:28Liam McAnderson?

  Oh.

• 51:29November Kelly?

  You gotta make them heavier.

• 51:31Liam McAnderson?

  Oh, Jesus.

• 51:32November Kelly?

  Make them heavier.

• 51:34Liam McAnderson?

  This poor suspension is dying.

• 51:36Justin Roczniak?

  Tire is bulging here. This is not good.

• 51:40November Kelly?

  Make them heavier.

• 51:41Liam McAnderson?

  Oh my, oh my God. It's like something Ross and I would have designed. We were drunk. Yeah, man. What you gonna do is just put a, look at that pop mobile box.

• 51:51Justin Roczniak?

  Uh, just put, put, put more armor on it.

• 51:53November Kelly?

  The, the truck engine powering this is also struggling.

• 51:57Liam McAnderson?

  Screaming in pain.

• 51:58Justin Roczniak?

  So this, yeah, exactly. This is like, well, I like you still have, I don't, I don't know what, what, what, uh, what manufacturer this is. Maybe.

• 52:05Liam McAnderson?

  It's international. You can tell by the square.

• 52:08Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. Yeah. I thought it was, you can still see the international Harvester bodywork on the front.

• 52:13November Kelly?

  Oh yeah. I mean, the MatVs were made by Oshkosh, like, oh, these were all truck manufacturers. Um, but you can see it's got some like nice spaced armor on there. It's got some slatted armor on the windows. It's got a gigantic, fully enclosed turret. Um, so this was, this was the introduction of something called Frag Kit Six.

• 52:32Liam McAnderson?

  B seventeen on land. Let's do it.

• 52:34November Kelly?

  Basically, like when you apply Frag Kit Six to like a regular Humvee, which, which is like a normal sized vehicle ish by like present day American standards, it makes it too wide to drive on a highway and all of the doors get too heavy to open by hand.

• 52:52Liam McAnderson?

  Oh, so it's got the Rolls Royce auto closing doors?

• 52:55Justin Roczniak?

  How does, yeah, I was, I was gonna ask, you know, so it's like a, it's like a Tesla in that if you crash, you just die.

• 53:02Liam McAnderson?

  Oh, you're fucked. Yeah.

• 53:03November Kelly?

  Yeah. And.

• 53:04Justin Roczniak?

  Cause you can't open the doors.

• 53:06November Kelly?

  Every kind of MRAP chassis is bigger and taller than a Humvee already. Um, and this is where the kind of, um, weight distribution and the height really gets you, right? Because roads in Afghanistan, unlike roads in Angola, have, uh, something called turns in them. Um, now obviously this is going to be unfamiliar to Americans, but it's when a road stops being in one direction and starts being in another direction.

• 53:32Liam McAnderson?

  We have the Blue Ridge Park. Why shut your mouth?

• 53:36November Kelly?

  Yeah, don't try and drive one of these down it. So with all of this shit on top of it, if you try and turn in one of these too fast, and by too fast, I mean like 15 miles an hour, it will, it will roll over. And sometimes it will roll over in a way that it rolls down a valley into a river and you drown. Like it's, these things are like coffins, genuine. They're very good at preventing you from getting blown up. Put fire stones on these things? Yeah.

• 54:04Liam McAnderson?

  You know they did, Roz.

• 54:05November Kelly?

  Yeah. Actually, I, there is specifically a Michelin imprint in one of these that I'll come back to. Yeah, that's, that's your like story of your.

• 54:16Liam McAnderson?

  Oh, Michelin. Oh, good. So I want manufacturing my tires is the French.

• 54:21November Kelly?

  Oh, yeah.

• 54:22Liam McAnderson?

  I am a Francophile. Leave me alone. It's my one flaw as a human being.

• 54:25November Kelly?

  So. They know where all the good food is. Now you have the context for on the left, you're slightly lighter, Matt V. On the right, you're heavier Cougar. It is now 2011. The surge is over. All of these, or a bunch of these, have to come home and National Airlines are the guys to do it. At long last, I am ready to talk about the plane. Next slide, please.

• 54:47Liam McAnderson?

  Oh.

• 54:48November Kelly?

  So this is a. Got its own airplane, the 747. Yeah, 747 400 started out for Air France and as like a kind of mixed passenger freight. And then it was just converted to just straight cargo. And National Airlines calls it Lori, which I think is sweet. It's got a flight crew of three. And if we go to the, the next slide, we'll see what I mean by being a cargo plane. So it's got this floor built into it. And this floor is built by a company called Telair. And basically what you have is a bunch of different mounting points for cargo. And ideally what you have is your cargo slots into these,

• 55:31November Kelly?

  into these kind of grooves that have roller bearings in them that lock. And you can just kind of slot it into there and it holds very, very steadily. That's great.

• 55:43Liam McAnderson?

  All the way UZP, right?

• 55:44November Kelly?

  Yeah, that's great. If you have stuff that fits. You got all the, all the nice containers that you can just fit in there. Yeah, you know exactly what's gonna fit.

• 55:50Liam McAnderson?

  I assume we are not gonna have stuff that fits because we're.

• 55:52November Kelly?

  Oh, my goodness. No. Next slide, please. Yeah. So, uh, here on the right is the way you do it ideally, right? What you have there is a unit load device. Now, your, your, your, uh, your large unit loads is, it's just a container functionally. Like it's, it's of known size and shape and you know that it's going to slot into the grooves. It's going to lock in, um, and that's going to be very, very secure and you don't have to worry about it. This is ideal. You want to move as much stuff as you can this way.

• 56:25Justin Roczniak?

  It's just like the, the normal containers you see at the airport that are, you know, on the back of the baggage trolley, you know? You know, that, that's these guys right here.

• 56:33November Kelly?

  Yes, yes. However, if it doesn't fit in a unit load device, whatever it is, if, if your unit load is refused, then you have to put down, you have to put down a pallet to, to like, keep it off of the floor. And then you have to use one billion ratchet straps to just secure it.

• 56:54Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 56:55Liam McAnderson?

  It's like my father-in-law designed this. Jesus Christ.

• 56:59Justin Roczniak?

  That ain't going anywhere.

• 57:01Liam McAnderson?

  That's fine.

• 57:02Justin Roczniak?

  You have to say that for every single ratchet strap.

• 57:05November Kelly?

  Oh, exactly. Yeah. Um, and it's, it's worth noting as well, the pallet isn't attached to anything itself. It's, it's like a floating pallet. It's, it's being squished down by the weight of the thing and the ratchet straps.

• 57:17Liam McAnderson?

  It's like a log truck.

• 57:18November Kelly?

  Yeah, yeah. And you need all of these straps, uh, and every kind of correct implementation of it looks like this. It is this very strange kind of like covered in shredded paper situation.

• 57:31Justin Roczniak?

  Horrible spider web.

• 57:38Justin Roczniak?

  Hi, it's Justin. Uh, so this is a commercial for the podcast that you're already listening to. Uh, 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. Uh, sometimes it's a little inconsistent, but you know, it's two bucks. You get what you pay for. Um, 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.

• 58:21Justin Roczniak?

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

• 58:41November Kelly?

  It's awful. Yeah. Uh, next slide, please.

• 58:43Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 58:44November Kelly?

  So in the military, the person whose job it is to work out how many loads should be refused, how many straps you need for each load, um, things of this nature. Uh, the, the person who's in charge of like loads and straps is called a load master. Um, and

• 59:02Justin Roczniak?

  I'm the load master.

• 59:03November Kelly?

  Load master.

• 59:06November Kelly?

  Now, uh, in the military, this is a highly specialized and technical occupation. It has rigorous standards, training, testing, um, because, you know, militaries take this stuff seriously. They have to. Um, the FAA, on the other hand, does not have a definition of a load master. You, I, and every single one of the listeners are FAA qualified load masters. Hell, yeah. Welcome aboard, folks. I, I, I, I hope you're, you know, I hope you're pleased by this knowledge that, you know, not only are you getting a podcast episode, you're also getting an addition to your CV, to your business card, that you, you can call yourself a load master. Uh, you don't have to take any training whatsoever.

• 59:50Justin Roczniak?

  You could refuse any load, or you can choose not to refuse any load.

• 59:54November Kelly?

  Absolutely. If an airline will hire you to, to, to, to master its loads, you can be a load master. And to be honest, That's their problem now. Yeah, absolutely. So, so National, um, sends out a load master with three flight crew for this job that they've gotten, uh, the nature of which I'll explain in the next slide. Um, now this guy, this load master, he's never transported an MRAP before and his initial training was a week long. And then after that, he got like three day annual refreshers.

• 1:00:25Liam McAnderson?

  Alright, that sounds, it's all, it's all the-

• 1:00:27Justin Roczniak?

  It's probably, probably good, you know, you get your Cs and, you know, you just, uh, they renew your certification. It's fine. I mean, that's more than required. Let's get real.

• 1:00:37November Kelly?

  That is absolutely true, yeah. Um, so his job is to work out how to secure, next slide please, two MatVs and three Cougars. So two of the lighter ones, three of the heavy ones. Um, for context here, um, the MatVs weigh about 12 tons each. It's about, uh, 26,500 pounds. Don't quote me on that. Um, and the Cougars are about 18 tons. They weigh about 41,500 pounds. And so your loadmaster sits down and tries to work out how many straps.

• 1:01:10Liam McAnderson?

  We should clarify about this is British tons, right? T O N N E.

• 1:01:13November Kelly?

  Uh, no, I think these are American. Um, but so, uh, cause I'm, I'm working off of the NTSB report, so I think it's American.

• 1:01:19Liam McAnderson?

  Okay.

• 1:01:20Justin Roczniak?

  I'm imagining the loadmaster as Jason Statham.

• 1:01:24Liam McAnderson?

  Me too. In, in, in crank, for some reason.

• 1:01:28Justin Roczniak?

  No, no, no, he's, the transporter is securing the, the, the package with a bunch of ratchet straps.

• 1:01:34Liam McAnderson?

  No, it's crank, bud. Great fucking movie. Go watch it.

• 1:01:39Justin Roczniak?

  That's not going anywhere.

• 1:01:43November Kelly?

  So, uh, each ratchet strap that he has, he knows, has, is rated for 5,000 pounds of force.

• 1:01:52Liam McAnderson?

  Good ratchet strap.

• 1:01:53November Kelly?

  And he puts in, yeah, puts in a safety margin of 75%. So that means, uh, it's rated for effectively 3,750 pounds. You do the maths on that. And what that gets you to try and keep these things from moving is that you use 24 of these straps for each MatV and 26 for each Cougar. Now, because he was making it up as he went along, we don't have any photos or any diagrams of how he did this exactly. It was just what seemed right to him at the time.

• 1:02:25Justin Roczniak?

  Fill in the blanks. That's arbitrary.

• 1:02:27November Kelly?

  Yes, yeah. Now, he's not doing this just, uh, just on vibes because he does have a manual. The, uh, the cargo operations manual. Now, the cargo operations manual is written by the airline's chief loadmaster, who also doesn't have to have any particular training.

• 1:02:45Justin Roczniak?

  Wow, this goes all the way up to the top.

• 1:02:49November Kelly?

  You, you too can be a chief loadmaster if you want to. And they ask the chief loadmaster later on how he, how he kind of assembled that manual. And he says, oh yeah, I like copied and pasted the charts from Boeing and Teller's manuals and just kind of extrapolated a bit.

• 1:03:04Justin Roczniak?

  I've given myself a promotion by putting a scribble onto my business card.

• 1:03:11November Kelly?

  Yeah, it's, it's, I'm actually a senior chief loadmaster, master chief loadmaster.

• 1:03:16Justin Roczniak?

  That master chief loadmaster.

• 1:03:18Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah, played Halo. Let's do this. All right. We're 12, yes, yeah, let's go.

• 1:03:23November Kelly?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:23Justin Roczniak?

  Lieutenant, master chief, uh, general major, loadmaster.

• 1:03:28Liam McAnderson?

  Just roasting.

• 1:03:28Justin Roczniak?

  If you're, if you're a female loadmaster, does that make you a loadmistress?

• 1:03:33November Kelly?

  Yeah. I guess if you're non-binary, you could be a loadmistress, maybe.

• 1:03:38Justin Roczniak?

  Wow.

• 1:03:38November Kelly?

  Uh, next slide, please. So this is the actual aircraft and the actual MRAPs being loaded. So our beautiful 747 flies from France to Dubai, to Camp Bastion, uh, which is in Lashkargah and like southern Afghanistan. Camp Bastion is like the main British airbase, although these are American vehicles as far as I can tell. I think they're marine vehicles as well.

• 1:04:03Justin Roczniak?

  Is this one perpendicular to the direction of the aircraft?

• 1:04:06November Kelly?

  It really shouldn't be. And I don't know why it is because as far as I know, they were all loaded facing forwards.

• 1:04:13Justin Roczniak?

  I was about to say, that's what all the diagrams I've seen have said. I, I, I looked at this and I was like, maybe, maybe there's something we're not getting here. Um, who knows?

• 1:04:22November Kelly?

  Not sure. Just, just these guys had to like turn it around 90 degrees. Um, basically.

• 1:04:28Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, that could be the case. Yeah, I'm surprised it fits.

• 1:04:30November Kelly?

  The loading, yeah, the loading crew at Bastion had to make up a kind of pallet system for all of these to sit on. And they had to do that again with no instructions, no training, just do that from first principles. And so they build these pallets for them to sit on. They like deflate the tires. They build this kind of like wooden scaffolding around them so that it's, it's resting on things, not going to damage the floor. But again, this is all.

• 1:04:57Justin Roczniak?

  Theories of like, uh, of, of, of, you know, the behavior of ratchet strap material from first principles.

• 1:05:05November Kelly?

  Yeah, I mean, these haven't even been ratchet strapped down. They're being like chained to pallets, which are then kind of ratchet strapped together. If we go to the next slide, you get some, you get some views of this. Um, these are taken from the like low loader that actually kind of lifted them on, onto the aircraft. Um, and you can see that they're like chained by the chassis and the axle, which is right, which is what they should be. Um, to these, uh, like double pallets. Um, so, and, and you see that's, that's one of the cougars, which is heavier. So it's got two pallets and then the Matbies just have the one pallet. Um, next slide, please. So we're going to do some complex load dynamics here, right? Um, this is how they should have done it, and it isn't how they did it, but it's how they should have done it.

• 1:05:47November Kelly?

  Um, basically your load master following his manual, right? And having had sort of not very much training, so it's not his fault. Um, he does some like quick and dirty maths and in the sense that like, okay, well, each strap is good for 3,750 pounds, which is true. It is rated for that, but it's rated for that in one direction.

• 1:06:07Liam McAnderson?

  Oh, I like one direction. Uh.

• 1:06:09November Kelly?

  It's, it's not holding.

• 1:06:12Liam McAnderson?

  I miss Liam Payne.

• 1:06:13November Kelly?

  Anything perpendicular to it, right? Like if the, if the force is at 90 degrees to it, it's, it's load strength is zero pounds. Um, if the, the sort of load force is angled in any, in any way, it diminishes very rapidly. Um, which is why you have to have this whole arrangement.

• 1:06:31Justin Roczniak?

  You always get these fun things with like woven materials. They behave differently when you're in different orientations. Like carbon fiber has this problem too.

• 1:06:40November Kelly?

  Uh, yeah, and especially with, with these straps, they, they stretch and they jerk as well. Um, and this needs to be proof against, I think it's like either nine or 11 G in, in like every direction, because it has to be able to survive an emergency landing and not fly forward and pancake against the, against the front of the aircraft and squish the flight crew. Um, so it's got to be secured in every direction, and that means you need, it needs to have enough straps to hold it still on every angle, um, which the correct.

• 1:07:15November Kelly?

  Number turns out to be 60 for the lighter one.

• 1:07:18Justin Roczniak?

  60 ratchet straps. Easy peasy, let's do it.

• 1:07:22November Kelly?

  Yeah, yeah. Um, when, when the guy was working this out, he also kind of assumed that it had infinity mounting points in every direction, which it doesn't. Um, and also the fittings on the floor of the plane aren't all the same, right? Like, you'll notice how most of these are secured to the outermost bit, which is the strongest bit. A lot of them, it would seem, were secured to the racks that the seats would fit into. Were passenger configuration, right? Those are actually weaker than the straps are. Those max out at like 2,800 pounds. And

• 1:08:00Liam McAnderson?

  Oh, feel better about this.

• 1:08:01November Kelly?

  Slide. Yeah. Uh, we see the Cougar, which is heavier and taller. Weirdly, because of the orientation of it, it needs fewer straps. It needs 48 of them. But it's again, this very, very kind of spread out thing. After the fact, Boeing and, and Tella, the company that makes the, uh, the like flooring, went over and tried to work out how many of these you could transport safely in one plane. Boeing's answer was one of the lighter ones and Tella's answer was none, zero.

• 1:08:34Justin Roczniak?

  None.

• 1:08:35Liam McAnderson?

  Oh, none. Okay.

• 1:08:36November Kelly?

  Yeah. Like when, when the people who make your kind of cargo fitting, uh, kind of aircraft, it are like, this is not an air transportable vehicle, at least not in a 747. Uh, you have to get the like, you know, Antonov that still exists at this point.

• 1:08:54November Kelly?

  Yeah. And they had

• 1:08:55Justin Roczniak?

  Well, either that or

• 1:08:56November Kelly?

  Five of these things.

• 1:08:57Justin Roczniak?

  You take the alternative, you take the, you take the alternative strategy and just hand it over to the Taliban. You fucking figure it out assholes.

• 1:09:06November Kelly?

  They, they definitely have some that they left behind. Yeah. So really you shouldn't be doing this, but you especially shouldn't be doing this with five of them parked bumper to bumper. But so, next slide, please. So, we have a little like, logic problem here. We have a little plan X for you. So, you are in Camp Bastion with your cargo of MRAPs, and you have to get it to Dubai, which is the big staging airport for all this stuff. Now, if you draw me a flight plan from Camp Bastion to Dubai, there are a couple of reasons why it will not work, but, you know, please feel free to attempt it.

• 1:09:42Justin Roczniak?

  I would go...

• 1:09:43Liam McAnderson?

  I'd go right over Iranian airspace, fuck 'em.

• 1:09:45Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:45Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah, no.

• 1:09:46Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:09:47November Kelly?

  That's...

• 1:09:48Justin Roczniak?

  I dare you, I double dog dare you.

• 1:09:49Liam McAnderson?

  Exactly, double dog dare you, yeah, shoot this dick down.

• 1:09:53November Kelly?

  Yeah, so, your next best option...

• 1:09:55Liam McAnderson?

  Shoot this dick down in Dallas, baby.

• 1:09:58November Kelly?

  If you don't want to fly over Iranian airspace is, you could fly over Pakistani airspace.

• 1:10:02Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:03November Kelly?

  Um, the Pakistanis have also closed their airspace to military traffic. So, that's not happening either. Plus, you're flying it basically over Bin Laden's house, like, come on.

• 1:10:13Justin Roczniak?

  This, listen, this is easy. This is how I solved the Konigsberg Bridge problem.

• 1:10:18November Kelly?

  Oh, no.

• 1:10:19Justin Roczniak?

  Which no other mathematician has ever done. I, an engineer, solved it. How do you do it? You just go north, right? You go north until that becomes south, and then you pop up over here.

• 1:10:30November Kelly?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:10:31Justin Roczniak?

  No problem.

• 1:10:31November Kelly?

  That's, that's kind of what you've got to do, in the sense that you've got to, you've got to fly northeast, and then loop all the way around the edge of Pakistan, fly over India, and then up the Gulf of Oman. Now, your problem with that is that you don't have enough fuel to do that, and Bastion doesn't have enough fuel to refuel you with to do that. So, the sensible thing for you to do is to take off, fly to Bagram, which does have enough fuel, and is on your way now, anyway, and refuel there. And so, that's what they do. And it goes okay, the flight, you know, perfectly normal. The, the three flight crew and the

• 1:11:12November Kelly?

  loadmaster just in the cockpit chilling, everything seems fine. Next slide, please. So, then they get on the ground, and one of them almost says the name of the podcast. Co-pilot says, "There's your trouble," which is close enough for government work.

• 1:11:26Justin Roczniak?

  Wow.

• 1:11:27Liam McAnderson?

  Good enough.

• 1:11:28November Kelly?

  Yeah. And basically, what's happened is...

• 1:11:30Justin Roczniak?

  There's your trouble, Brad.

• 1:11:32November Kelly?

  Un- unbeknownst to them, one of the straps holding one of the MRAPs has just snapped in flight.

• 1:11:39Liam McAnderson?

  Oh, boy. Okay.

• 1:11:40November Kelly?

  And as you, as you can see here, uh, on the transcript, the flight crew are pretty nervous about this. In kind of a joking way, but, um, yeah, they're, they're sort of like, they're worried about this. And one of them jokes about like, you know, landing the thing and slamming on the brakes and not using reverse. And, and the sort of MRAP coming through the back wall. Notably.

• 1:12:04Liam McAnderson?

  Oh, good.

• 1:12:04November Kelly?

  Pilots.

• 1:12:05Liam McAnderson?

  Thank you, Freddie foreshadowing.

• 1:12:06November Kelly?

  Yeah. Notably, pilots don't train with loadmasters at all or really interact with them. So they don't, although technically it's their responsibility, they don't have any way of knowing how secure the load is or isn't, except to trust one guy, um, who it's just like, yeah, it's cool.

• 1:12:22Liam McAnderson?

  Two days ago. Yeah.

• 1:12:23November Kelly?

  Yeah. I, I, I think this one strap had like a knot in it. I'm going to tighten everything up. At one point, he says on the cockpit voice recorder, don't worry, everything moves, which is, um, casual, let's say.

• 1:12:36Justin Roczniak?

  Yes. I'm gonna go freshen up on my training material, which is just a DVD copy of, um, the transporter.

• 1:12:46November Kelly?

  Yeah, the loadmaster Jason Statham is here. He says, it says not to worry about. He did call me a cunt, though. Next slide, please. Um, and, and we see that, um, here's the conversation with the loadmaster in the room where he's like, yeah, they just moved a couple of inches because you know, it's nylon, you know? So at which point one of the pilots says, that's scary.

• 1:13:07Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, bud.

• 1:13:08November Kelly?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:09Justin Roczniak?

  Pound symbol scary.

• 1:13:11November Kelly?

  That's fucking scary.

• 1:13:13Justin Roczniak?

  Let pound symbols in here.

• 1:13:15November Kelly?

  They, they talk about putting, uh, putting a camera in the, uh, on, on the cargo deck to, to watch it. And the co-pilot says, you'd probably shit yourself.

• 1:13:27November Kelly?

  So these, these guys, they're, they're worried about it in a kind of comedic way, which is, is bad foreshadowing, I would say.

• 1:13:34Justin Roczniak?

  Fatalistic. All right. I like, I like that it's all in lowercase. It looks like a text message conversation.

• 1:13:41November Kelly?

  Yeah. Um, so he's, he's just, he hasn't even put on more straps. He's just like-

• 1:13:45Justin Roczniak?

  The group chat is skeptical about your load mastering.

• 1:13:50November Kelly?

  He's just, he's, he's cinched everything down real good. Um, so next slide, please. I gotta, I gotta date for you to read on this one, Justin.

• 1:13:58Justin Roczniak?

  It's the afternoon, afternoon of the 29th of April, 2013.

• 1:14:03November Kelly?

  Yes. And this is, this is the view from the control tower at Bagram, uh, looking, looking west towards runway three. Um, and we, we sort of have an arrow pointed at where our plane's gonna, gonna start sort of taking off from. So we're a little bit nervous maybe, but we're refueled, we're ready to go. Uh, and we're gonna, we're gonna long haul all the way around the top of Pakistan. Um, so, uh, we, we go and we start our takeoff roll. Um,

• 1:14:31Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, we start, or you start our takeoff roll, but first we have to talk about some stuff.

• 1:14:35November Kelly?

  We do.

• 1:14:36Justin Roczniak?

  All right.

• 1:14:37November Kelly?

  Oh, this is beautiful.

• 1:14:38Justin Roczniak?

  What is, what is trim, right?

• 1:14:41November Kelly?

  Uh, it's the little, it's the little clicky wheel.

• 1:14:42Justin Roczniak?

  Trim is very important to what's about to happen.

• 1:14:44November Kelly?

  Hmm.

• 1:14:45Justin Roczniak?

  Oh yeah. It's a little clicky wheel. There's a big wheel that spins around on the Boeing airplanes, you know, so on and so forth. Um, if you're like me, like I played Microsoft Flight Simulator when I was a small child until Train Simulator came out, you know, in 2001, which is the most significant thing that happened that year. Um, and if you're like me, you, you probably figured out some of the basic control surfaces, um, you know, but if you haven't, um, I have good news for you. I took the liberty of spending some of the Patreon money. Um, well, a lot of the Patriot, all of the Patreon money in a big loan on, well, there's your problems new aerospace testbed platform. This Boeing 747.

• 1:15:29November Kelly?

  It's about time we have one of those.

• 1:15:30Justin Roczniak?

  I was about to say, uh, our aerospace testbed platform, this Boeing 747. I don't know what to name it. I've tentatively named it Clipper Problem.

• 1:15:41November Kelly?

  Suggestions in the comments.

• 1:15:42Justin Roczniak?

  Subscribe to the, yeah, subscribe to the Patreon now because actually we have a lot of ongoing insurance and maintenance costs we have to deal with. Um, yeah, I also have some bad news about the Christmas bonuses. Um, so anyway.

• 1:15:57November Kelly?

  Fucking damn it. At least, at least when I blow my share of the Patreon money on cameras, it's like just my bit.

• 1:16:05Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. So, so, well, no, I, I mean, at this point, it all goes straight to Boeing servicing.

• 1:16:11November Kelly?

  Um, yeah.

• 1:16:13Justin Roczniak?

  So anyway, control surfaces, right? You've got the ailerons, right? They're at the end of the wings. They make the plane roll. Uh, one way or the other, right? Uh, you have elevators. Those guys are on the tail, right? They, they make the plane go up or down, or more specifically, they make the front go up and the back go down or vice versa, right?

• 1:16:35November Kelly?

  Right.

• 1:16:35Justin Roczniak?

  Um, then you got a rudder, right? That's on the tail, the pointy vertical bit, right? And that makes the plane do like a sick power slide. Um, so anyway, that's where I gave up and moved on to trains. Uh, very few trains have control surfaces. Uh, there's not zero though. Um, the Fast Tech 360, uh, prototype, Schenkonst had these cool air brakes that popped up like cat ears. Um, so anyway, maybe you got farther than that in flight simulator. You figured out things like, okay, the plane has flaps, right? And then those go down and they create more lift,

• 1:17:16Justin Roczniak?

  but they create more drag. So you can't go fast, right? Or on the front of the wings, there's slats, right? I don't know what those do. Um.

• 1:17:26November Kelly?

  Uh, make plane, make planes slower, I think.

• 1:17:29Justin Roczniak?

  Something like that. Yeah. Um, but then there's something called trim. And I never figured out what trim was because again, I was eight years old. So.

• 1:17:38November Kelly?

  The plane has sunglasses. I just noticed that.

• 1:17:43Justin Roczniak?

  Here we are to learn about trim. Planes do a lot of different things on the ground and in the air, right? Generally speaking, they take off, they go up for a long time, then they cruise at a level altitude for a long time, then they go down for a long time, then they land, right? If you're a pilot, you could try and mess with the elevators the whole time to keep the flight profile in where it should be, right? Or you could have a different system to just set it and forget it. If you say, I want to go up, you just set something that says, go up and you're done, right? So you trim the aircraft so that it generally goes up, or it generally goes down,

• 1:18:26Justin Roczniak?

  or it generally stays level when you're not touching the controls, right?

• 1:18:30November Kelly?

  Yeah, you're setting the resting position of the control surfaces.

• 1:18:33Justin Roczniak?

  Pretty much, yeah. This is achieved in various ways in various aircraft. The one we're going to focus on is called the movable horizontal stabilizer. We'll talk about that on the next slide. Sometimes you have like little trim tabs on the elevators, which sort of use the aerodynamics to force the elevator down, which in turn forces the airplane up, vice versa, so on and so forth. You also have something called a stabilator where the whole horizontal stabilizer is the elevator. There's probably some other stuff that I don't know about. I don't know planes very good.

• 1:19:11Liam McAnderson?

  Or neither do the rest of us.

• 1:19:12Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, you also, it's useful to be able to trim the aircraft for situations where the load distribution's a little weird, right? Like, I don't know, they shoved all the baggage in the back of the plane, or, you know, the front of the plane is full of thin people and the back is full of fat people, or vice versa.

• 1:19:30Liam McAnderson?

  That's me.

• 1:19:30Justin Roczniak?

  Maybe you're, yeah, maybe you're carrying a huge object with the weird weight distribution, right?

• 1:19:36November Kelly?

  Grotesquely heavy tricycle.

• 1:19:38Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:38Liam McAnderson?

  Fat man on a freakishly heavy tricycle.

• 1:19:41Justin Roczniak?

  You can trim the plane so that while it would have a natural tendency to go up or down, it flies level when you take your hands off the controls, right? And this reduces workload. It means that you as the pilot don't have to like, you know, pull on the yoke the whole thirty, forty minutes you're getting up to cruising altitude. It does also have the consequence, though, that if the plane is improperly trimmed and for some reason you can't fix that, all of a sudden you have a hell of a time trying to tell it what to do, right?

• 1:20:15November Kelly?

  Sure.

• 1:20:16Justin Roczniak?

  Especially if the plane isn't, you know, fly by wire and all of a sudden you have to, you find yourself in a situation where you have to summon the strength of Thor himself just to pull on the yoke to keep the plane level, right? So, you know, when trim goes bad, it's a bad situation, but that very rarely happens.

• 1:20:35November Kelly?

  Comfort, I tr-

• 1:20:36Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. Trim is not altered too many times when you're in flight, right? And all the alterations are subtle adjustments. So in a big commercial airliner, we have this assembly, right? This is a jack screw.

• 1:20:52November Kelly?

  Yeah, and you thought I was nasty for loadmaster.

• 1:20:56Justin Roczniak?

  So, this, this mechanism is at least common on Boeing aircraft. I don't know if Airbus uses something different. I have no, I don't understand planes. So, anyway.

• 1:21:08Justin Roczniak?

  Your trim requires very fine, but very authoritative adjustments, right? There's a lot of aerodynamic force on this horizontal stabilizer, which I guess I didn't mention it before. The horizontal stabilizer are like the horizontal tiny wings on the tail, right? As opposed to, you know, the, the, the vertical stabilizer, which is the vertical part of the tail. Okay, right. That, that should be relatively obvious. Anyway. So you need something which is very powerful, but very precise.

• 1:21:46Justin Roczniak?

  So, on the airliner in question today and most airliners, this is achieved by adjusting the position of the whole horizontal stabilizer by means of the jack screw. The jack screw is very simple. You've got this big, heavy threaded rod, right? That's stuck into an electric motor. There's a nut in the top of the jack screw and this is connected through some kind of linkage. To the pivot point of the horizontal stabilizer. It's very different, difficult for this nut to slip. It usually, in fact, almost always stays, well, it always stays in place. Let's, let's not even add any qualifiers there.

• 1:22:31Justin Roczniak?

  Right? One full turn of the rod is only moving this thing up or down by one thread on the rod. Here's an enormous amount of mechanical advantage and fine precision in the system. The only disadvantage, of course, is that it's very slow to adjust. You know, much slower than like an elevator or an aileron or something like that. But again, this is trim. That doesn't matter. Right?

• 1:22:55November Kelly?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:56Justin Roczniak?

  And also, uh, because again, you have so much mechanical advantage. There's not just the motor. There's cables that go all the way to the cockpit. That are attached directly to the para wheels in there. Right? So if for some reason you lose the motor, you can actually still adjust this manually with a crank in the cockpit. And so, yeah, this jack screw is like dead center. It's dead center in the back of the plane. Right? Sort of like where, eh, sort of the middle aisle would be, but it's all the way at the back.

• 1:23:33November Kelly?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:34Justin Roczniak?

  Somewhere behind that wall where like all the catering carts are. So yeah, that's, that's how you adjust the trim.

• 1:23:41November Kelly?

  All right, I got to explain hydraulics.

• 1:23:44Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, you gotta do the hydraulics. I did my part.

• 1:23:48November Kelly?

  Hydr- uh, hydraulics is easy. It's fine. It's, it's the movement juice. And what, what you do is, is you, you, you take a, you take a fluid and you compress it a lot until it's very angry, which allows it to exert a lot of force, which is great. It's what you need it to do. And you keep it very angry, very compressed in, in, in pipes. And you, you move this around and it makes the control surfaces control good. Right? And each

• 1:24:14Justin Roczniak?

  Yes.

• 1:24:14November Kelly?

  set of, uh, control surfaces is assigned to a different hydraulic system, ideally. A Boeing seven four seven has four hydraulic systems. Each one is moving different things for redundancy. Right? So like you can lose potentially a couple of these at once and still be able to control the aircraft. For redundancy sake.

• 1:24:35Justin Roczniak?

  Yes, to be clear, there are several of them to be redundant. And several of them exist for that reason, which is to be redundant.

• 1:24:43November Kelly?

  There's multiple of them. Yeah, there's more than one of them.

• 1:24:46Justin Roczniak?

  Many, there's more than one, and the purpose of that is for redundant.

• 1:24:50November Kelly?

  Systems, yes. Yeah, and you can see, if you're interested, if you're interested, you can see which one moves what. However, you'll note, system two and three here, in the middle of the, right in the middle on the bottom, system two and three control the stabilizer trim. Very important to be able to control that, that's the hand crank you mentioned earlier, of being able to move the jack screw. And so if you can't do that electronically with the motor, you have to do that hydraulically, because it's under a lot of kind of aerodynamic force. You can't do it by hand exactly, and that's why it's got two separate hydraulic systems.

• 1:25:31Justin Roczniak?

  You still can do it by hand, it's just very slow and very difficult.

• 1:25:35November Kelly?

  Okay, well, in that case, I retract that bit completely. But in any case, this lets you control all of your control surfaces, right? And if you lose the hydraulics, then you lose the ability to control those things. Next slide. So, within the plane, the plane's pressurized. So, within it, you have a pressure vessel, right? Which technically makes it, for me, close enough to being both a steam engine and a nuclear reactor. This is a diagram of...

• 1:26:04Justin Roczniak?

  A submersible.

• 1:26:04November Kelly?

  Yeah, absolutely. This is a diagram of the loading. If you look at the rightmost label, BS2365, that's where the sort of like loading dock ends. And behind that is the aft pressure bulkhead. That's where the pressure vessel ends. Behind that is the empennage, or the empenage, which is French for empanada, I believe. That's where the jack screw lives. All the hydraulics have got to get through there.

• 1:26:41Liam McAnderson?

  No, it's French for empanada, Raj, shut up.

• 1:26:42Justin Roczniak?

  No, it's French for sort of like the fletching on an arrow.

• 1:26:47Liam McAnderson?

  No, it's not. Shut up.

• 1:26:48November Kelly?

  Ah, um, yeah, this doesn't need to be pressurized, right? Like, because it's just mechanical back there. Like, the Jax crew doesn't need to be pressurized. The, the sort of like backend of the hydraulics don't need to be. And, you know, nobody's going back there. That's why we've got that big bulkhead separate. If we go to the next slide, we can see what that bulkhead looks like, in fact. And just to, just to jump forward a bit, if you're asking, why is it in funky shapes and colors? That's because these are the pieces of it that they found. So you can, you can kind of see the.

• 1:27:23Justin Roczniak?

  Spoilers right there.

• 1:27:24November Kelly?

  Sorry, but yeah, this is, this is as, as it should be. And you will note that it's got the, like, a bunch of systems passed through it, but it has to have the hydraulics pass through. You see on the bottom there, hydraulics three and four, and then hydraulic one and two off to the right. And these are designed deliberately to be separated. So like, in, in an accident, you don't lose, you know, all of them, ideally.

• 1:27:51Liam McAnderson?

  All of it.

• 1:27:53November Kelly?

  Yeah, exactly. So, just think about this bulkhead, think about like, all of the, the kind of like MRAPs sitting strapped down in front of it. If we go to the, the next slide, we can, we can, we can begin our takeoff roll. So, takeoff roll.

• 1:28:09Liam McAnderson?

  I like that it's takeoff, rotation, crash.

• 1:28:11November Kelly?

  Yes, yeah, because that's what happens, basically. The narrative on this one is, is very simple. It is a short flight.

• 1:28:20Justin Roczniak?

  Very short.

• 1:28:20November Kelly?

  What happens is, is they move to take off power, they rotate, they become airborne. So the plane is, is pointing upwards. And then, all of a sudden, the plane is pointing way too much upwards, which is not a situation that you want to be in. They go to full power and they try to push the nose down. This does not work. Plane keeps going up, plane stalls, plane smacks back down. And so you have parts littered all over the runway and this sort of like wreckage trail. If we go to the next slide, that is, that is a still from some unreleased security camera footage, which is very scary. The plane should not do that.

• 1:29:05November Kelly?

  This is the sort of like terminating bit with the landing gear still down. I love that.

• 1:29:11Justin Roczniak?

  This is not a situation you want to find yourself in.

• 1:29:14November Kelly?

  No. Yes. Yeah, this is, this is the situation of, of it having stalled so much, it is now falling downwards. And if we go to the next slide, this is, you may remember this as one of the like OG Live League videos. There was a guy with a dash cam in his car who captured this thing just pancaking down right in front of him. And it's, it's, it's a, it's a brutal watch. It's worse in motion. You know, the screen caps are kind of a mercy here, but you, you see that the, it, it kind of falls down on its side. They're able to level it out at the last second, not that that makes any difference. And then it just explodes. Like it just augurs in. Jesus. Next. Yeah. Uh, next slide, please.

• 1:29:57Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, it just, that's, that's aerodynamic stall for you. It just down.

• 1:30:01November Kelly?

  Yeah. Plane, plane does not work. It's, it's really, really scary. Yeah. Yeah. And this is a remarkably kind of intact debris field in the sense that you're finding localized bits of each MRAP in the thing. And you're, you're finding kind of like distinct parts. Fun detail here, the Taliban immediately claimed responsibility for shooting it down, which is a real kind of like just walk in with your CV kind of optimism.

• 1:30:31Justin Roczniak?

  You gotta take your wins where you can get them sometimes.

• 1:30:33November Kelly?

  I suppose. Yeah. It's just like, yeah, we did that munching block of Kerrygold butter, you know?

• 1:30:38Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. What's the Taliban equivalent of Kerrygold butter?

• 1:30:42November Kelly?

  Hmm. Not sure.

• 1:30:43Justin Roczniak?

  Probably something with like butter or something.

• 1:30:45November Kelly?

  Or something. Yeah. I got some, some more footage of the, of the wreckage. And if we, we go to the, the next slide, we'll do some reconstruction. We work out who the culprit was, and I'm afraid we've caught them red handed because on that after pressure bulkhead, there is a big telltale Michelin tire imprint. There's just a big tire dent which marries up to the spare tire on a Mat V that has just come backwards and smacked into that pretty much right in the center line as well. If we, if we go to the next slide, you will see.

• 1:31:23Justin Roczniak?

  That's not ideal.

• 1:31:24November Kelly?

  No. They've, there is a legible Michelin like tire mark. Michelin tire mark. I'm sorry.

• 1:31:34November Kelly?

  That's so grim. That sucks so bad. So I think we we found the culprit here, right? Um, if we if we go to the next slide, they find all of the the MRAPs pretty much like, you know, that that crash resistant in a sense like they find the chassis. But they also find bits of the pressure bulkhead draped all over one of them. Like it's it's covered in the kind of entrails of its victim. There is another fun detail, which is if we if we go, uh, yeah. So the MRAP in question has orange paint on it. The cockpit voice recorder and flight data recorder, the black boxes are in this little bit that sort of marks as being 104 inches off the floor on the right hand side.

• 1:32:19November Kelly?

  The the Mat V has the orange paint on it because it has just slammed back and destroyed both of these instantly. So you're not getting any kind of data off of this. Once it's done that, it has just like, uh, sort of wiped the tapes on its own to cover the sort of like, uh, the scene of the crime. Uh, if we go to the next slide, on its way through this bulkhead, it also severs two of the hydraulic system lines. They find these lines, they find hydraulic system number two, which is like, you just lose this in flight. But then if we go to the next slide, so so there's your hydraulic line. And if we go to the slide after. Oh. That's your jack screw.

• 1:33:00Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, that's the jack screw.

• 1:33:02November Kelly?

  It's not supposed to look like that. It's not supposed to have that bend in it. It is also supposed to be attached to something at the top.

• 1:33:09Justin Roczniak?

  Yes.

• 1:33:10November Kelly?

  What has happened?

• 1:33:11Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, so what has happened? Well, to do that, we have to go back to our tamed airliner, uh, you know, Clipper, uh, Clipper problem here. Yeah. Here's the example of the aircraft is previously configured with some kind of heavy cargo in here. You know, the the the big, big, big angry army truck, you know, so and so forth. Right? Uh, it's got wheels, it's got a thing on the back, you know. Yeah, so pretend, pretend, pretend it's going up at an angle like, uh, look, look at this photo. Like tilt your head a bit so it looks like the plane's going at an angle.

• 1:33:51Justin Roczniak?

  So, so anyway, it, you know, slides back and it hits the jack screw back here. And jack screw, of course, is bent. It's detached. What happens? That's right. Yoink.

• 1:34:04November Kelly?

  Uncommanded control input.

• 1:34:06Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, that, that horizontal stabilizer is now jammed down as far down as it can go.

• 1:34:12November Kelly?

  And the plane has a frowny face.

• 1:34:13Justin Roczniak?

  At this point. Yeah.

• 1:34:15November Kelly?

  It does, yeah.

• 1:34:16Justin Roczniak?

  You, you, you, you are not able at this point to make any kind of command input to that horizontal stabilizer to correct the situation. Including if you use the cable, because the cables probably aren't even attached at this point. That was a big impact, right? Um, the result of this, of course, is, you know, completely uncommanded trim to make the plane go up as quick as fast as possible. And, uh, we see here again on our tamed airliner, uh, it's going to space.

• 1:34:45November Kelly?

  Yep. Yeah, yeah.

• 1:34:47Justin Roczniak?

  Not a good situation.

• 1:34:48November Kelly?

  Right into the sod, baby.

• 1:34:50Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. Yeah, yeah. More likely, uh, you wind up in an aerodynamic stall and then you, you fall down again. This is a hard situation to recover from.

• 1:34:59November Kelly?

  Fall straight out of the sky.

• 1:35:00Justin Roczniak?

  I don't think there was a way you could recover from this, even if you had any kind of hydraulics at that point. You're, you're just gonna have to use like everything on the airplane to try and counteract bad.

• 1:35:12November Kelly?

  You're just gonna eat some shit, right?

• 1:35:14Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, pretty much, pretty much.

• 1:35:15November Kelly?

  Supposedly the NTSB had it that if they had had the hydraulics, uh, then they, they should have been able to just push out of it. But they didn't because besides shearing off the top of the jack screw, um, the, the Mat V coming backwards also took out, I think, two or three hydraulic systems.

• 1:35:39Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, I mean, you're, you're in a bad situation at that point. It's just not.

• 1:35:42November Kelly?

  Yeah, it's just, you just die. Like you, you are just going to die at that point. And you, you have enough time to know about it, but not do anything about it, which is, which is horrible. And also it's taken out the, the cockpit voice recorder. So also no one's ever gonna hear about what you thought or said about it.

• 1:35:58Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, we, we don't actually know. Yeah.

• 1:36:00November Kelly?

  Yeah. Uh, next slide, please.

• 1:36:03Justin Roczniak?

  Hey, it's Justin in post-production. So the reason November and I are in disagreement here on the precise failure mode is that the NTSB ran several simulations to determine the precise failure mechanism here, right? In one of those cases, the horizontal stabilizer was completely disconnected immediately, so there was no hope of recovery. In another case, the damage was significant but still gave some amount of control, which could have been with great effort corrected by means of the ailerons, but this was impossible because of the severed hydraulic lines. The NTSB couldn't decide on which one because,

• 1:36:48Justin Roczniak?

  you know, this crash did not leave a lot of intact evidence and forensics is an imperfect science anyway. And neither of these facts would have any real bearing on the actual conclusion of, you know, what caused it, which was that the load shifted and broke everything. Anyway, back to the show.

• 1:37:10November Kelly?

  We have a nice diagram here of exactly how that happened, which is it just rolls backwards and the kind of top edge just hits the top of the jackscrew and just shears it off. It also disconnects it from the electric motor on the other end, if that matters, which it kind of doesn't. Weirdly, this is wholly kind of mechanical rather than center of gravity. Does the NTSB also think that if all five of these had just kind of gently rolled backward, even if they were like bumped up against this bulkhead, so long as they didn't penetrate it, it still would have been controllable. But so in the end, they think it was just this one rearmost lighter vehicle that just, you know, like

• 1:37:54November Kelly?

  snapped or like broke some of the mountings or the straps and just came backwards with enough force that it just took out the bulkhead, took out the jackscrew and, you know, good night Vienna. Next slide. And you see how this kind of lines up in the other plane, which is pretty much dead on. It's just, it's right in the center line for it. And these are, these are, like I said, it's a 12-ton vehicle moving backwards. Next slide, please. And you can see that that spare tire is still going backwards to the point that it just donks off the like inside of the empennage as well.

• 1:38:26Justin Roczniak?

  Oh, God.

• 1:38:28November Kelly?

  Yeah. All of which leads predictably to the scary live leak video of this thing just goes up but too far and is uncontrollable. They can't return it to sort of like any kind of attitude that's compatible with continued flight and it just slams down into into an empty field. Next slide please. And that's the horizontal stabilizer, which came off it pretty much intact.

• 1:38:54Justin Roczniak?

  I was about to say, apparently this is the only safe place on the airplane.

• 1:38:58November Kelly?

  Just riding the horizontal stabilizer, yeah. Next slide please. So as you might imagine, everyone on board dies. This is seven deaths in total. Now, the investigation for this is, because it was some, uh, three flight crew, um, actually, I think it's like four flight crew, four flight crew, the loadmaster and two mechanics aboard. They all get killed instantly. Like the cause of death is multiple injuries, which is, you know, it's bad. And then

• 1:39:35Justin Roczniak?

  The injury is incompatible with life.

• 1:39:37November Kelly?

  Right. Yeah, yeah. I mean, at least, you know, terrifying in the kind of like moan up to, but when it actually happens, you don't know anything about it. So there's an ostensibly Afghan-led investigation. No disrespect to the Afghan transportation people, but like the NTSB kind of just take it over. And they, you know, go through and piece all this together, basically, literally, you know, writing on the panels with marker pen, like this is a tire. And the cause of this is pretty straightforward, right? Like, you don't have to train a loadmaster or like certify a loadmaster in any meaningful way. The FAA doesn't have to approve the procedures that they use for loading stuff. It doesn't have to approve the manuals that they work off of.

• 1:40:23Justin Roczniak?

  And they just have to be convinced by how you're able to say, like, yep, that's not going anywhere.

• 1:40:30November Kelly?

  Yeah, exactly. Yes.

• 1:40:32Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, I gotta slap it down. Exactly.

• 1:40:33November Kelly?

  So the FAA do

• 1:40:34Justin Roczniak?

  The most deadliest dads out there.

• 1:40:38November Kelly?

  The FAA do audit everyone's cargo manuals, which is nice, but the NTSB like they have a real kind of bureaucratic war with the FAA over this. And the NTSB, which really comes out of this story as, as like a sort of a cloutless agency, which is very sad. They, they keep pushing the FAA for years until 2022, like 11 years for them to like, implement this recommendation of like, you have to regulate what a load master is, like you have to have some kind of oversight for it. And the FAA just stonewalls them until they're forced to drop it. And I don't really know why, other than that it would be too expensive, I guess.

• 1:41:19Justin Roczniak?

  They don't want to refuse any loads, you know?

• 1:41:21November Kelly?

  Yeah, must be.

• 1:41:22Justin Roczniak?

  Who's to blame them? Yeah.

• 1:41:24November Kelly?

  American commerce, it's, it's built on loads and they're not refusing of them. And so that leads me to the kind of scary impulse on this one, which is there is nothing to stop this from happening again, like at least on an American carrier.

• 1:41:37Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. I mean, well, there is one thing to stop it from happening again, which would be the retirement of the 747. But yeah, other than that, yeah, this could happen to any other airplane.

• 1:41:49November Kelly?

  Mm hmm. It's, it, anytime you have the procedure for it is just vibe it out, just, just strap it down. So that's not going anywhere. This, this, this is one of the potential consequences. And I mean, it's been, been a kind of long walk up to that, but.

• 1:42:01Justin Roczniak?

  If you're on a flight and the passenger next to you is an MRAP.

• 1:42:05November Kelly?

  Get out.

• 1:42:06Justin Roczniak?

  Get out, yeah.

• 1:42:10November Kelly?

  Yeah, yeah. It's, I mean, it's just like obscenity piled on obscenity, right? Like the, the whole war to start with, and then the surge, and then the existence of MRAPs, and then the drawdown, and then the privatizing of this, just all kind of culminates in, in like trying to do stuff cheaply and like profiteering. And it just leads to like senseless death.

• 1:42:31Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. I mean, it, it's kind of, it's very similar to our last episode in that regard.

• 1:42:37November Kelly?

  Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. It's a real kind of futility season. I, I guess weird to say, I'd rather do a nice one, you know, but on, on the engineering disasters podcast, but Jesus Christ.

• 1:42:50Liam McAnderson?

  A lesson.

• 1:42:51Justin Roczniak?

  Actually, actually, what did we learn? Again, war is bad.

• 1:42:56Liam McAnderson?

  Afghanistan, bro.

• 1:42:57November Kelly?

  Yeah, war is bad. Yeah, that's the down downstream of downstream of war is a bunch of other stuff that kind of doesn't really necessarily register.

• 1:43:05Justin Roczniak?

  Never start, never start a land war in Asia.

• 1:43:09Liam McAnderson?

  No.

• 1:43:09November Kelly?

  Yeah.

• 1:43:10Justin Roczniak?

  No.

• 1:43:11Liam McAnderson?

  That's why the God invented the B-52. See, I'm changing it from the A-10. Now it's the B-52 that I'm obsessed with. Shut up.

• 1:43:20November Kelly?

  Well, that's, that's the story of National Airlines Flight 102 as, as best I can tell it. And thank you to Sam for, for finding all of the, the resources for this.

• 1:43:29Justin Roczniak?

  Oh, yeah. And, um, yeah, thank you. Thank you to Sam for being our newest employee, uh, so that we can eventually, you know, transform this channel into a sort of, you know, bunch of personalities talking about, uh, I don't know, ranking the, the, the best fasteners at, um,

• 1:43:46November Kelly?

  Just kind of slop where it turns into like passive income and I don't have to do anything. And yeah, that sounds horrible.

• 1:43:53Justin Roczniak?

  Exactly. This is, this is where we're going.

• 1:43:57Justin Roczniak?

  But before that happens, we have a segment on this podcast called Safety Third.

• 1:44:06Justin Roczniak?

  All right. I'm also supposed to say, uh, you too can submit a safety third. Email us at [email protected] with your safety third. A safety third is when there was some kind of workplace accident or near accident, which occurred due to your boss or supervisor's, uh, you know, stupidity or intrans-

• 1:44:28Liam McAnderson?

  Blatant disregard for your life. Yeah.

• 1:44:30Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, blatant disregard for your life. It could be your stupidity as well. Um, and, uh, yeah, keep them to about a page long. Add some pictures if you want. Okay. Um, yeah, I gotta like actually write a script out for that at some point. Um, anyway, dear Justin, Nova, Liam, and esteemed guest.

• 1:44:49Liam McAnderson?

  Man, wrong.

• 1:44:50Justin Roczniak?

  And our guest was, uh, Clipper Problem.

• 1:44:53November Kelly?

  Oh, I'm so sorry. Yeah. Well, we do esteem him, so.

• 1:44:57Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, yeah. Well, I, I, for the amount we're paying, yeah.

• 1:45:02Justin Roczniak?

  As a chemical engineer in the industrial water treatment business, I get to see a wide variety of sites from the heavy industrial mega facilities to the small sites with a few employees, from the safety conscious to the safety stupid. I've been catching up on this podcast during my drive time the last few years, but only recently did I encounter something so horrifying that I felt it qualifies for a safety third and possibly also an environmental fourth.

• 1:45:34November Kelly?

  A major fest.

• 1:45:34Justin Roczniak?

  A corporate industrial landlord, yes, this is a thing, contracted with my company to manage the water treatment at a particular facility. This site is a World War II era complex that once manufactured a large amount of one thing. The various buildings are now rented out for manufacturing, warehousing, and even a school.

• 1:45:55November Kelly?

  Oh, no.

• 1:45:56Justin Roczniak?

  Not a school administration building, but a school building with actual students.

• 1:46:03November Kelly?

  What the fuck? Where'd you go to school? Oh, disused industrial wasteland high.

• 1:46:07Liam McAnderson?

  You guys heard of Love Canal, right?

• 1:46:10Justin Roczniak?

  Oh, the shop classes are great, though.

• 1:46:13November Kelly?

  Go fight.

• 1:46:14Liam McAnderson?

  I learned so much as I, as I, as I leave shop class with four new heads. Yeah.

• 1:46:19Justin Roczniak?

  My contract, my contract is for boilers and cooling systems, but I was asked by the client to look at a sulfuric acid tank that started to leak.

• 1:46:27November Kelly?

  Next to the school.

• 1:46:29Justin Roczniak?

  They wanted my opinion on the best way to remove this tank quickly. Two, two maintenance workers who were tasked with this job told me to see this acid tank. I hear that through the magic of Nova's flappy hard drive mounts that there are sometimes visual aids accompanying this podcast. I've not yet unlocked that secret, but if you have, you may now be looking at this tank.

• 1:46:52Liam McAnderson?

  Oh, boy. Okay. Yeah, that looks, that looks great.

• 1:46:55November Kelly?

  The danger gunk.

• 1:46:56Justin Roczniak?

  It is a several thousand gallon capacity, horizontal cylinder, split longitudinally with some ooze seeping out and cracks forming along the saddles that support it. This is a classic case of a steel sulfuric acid tank with an improperly maintained vent line.

• 1:47:14Justin Roczniak?

  Sorry I keep yawning.

• 1:47:16November Kelly?

  Believe me, baby.

• 1:47:17Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 1:47:17November Kelly?

  It's okay.

• 1:47:18Justin Roczniak?

  Mild steel becomes passivated by concentrated acid. But dilute acid dissolves the passivation layer. It's like a little thin layer between the liquid and the actual steel itself, right? It dissolves the passivation layer. Aluminum is very good for that, actually. That's why aluminum doesn't rust, or it does rust. It's just the rust forms a layer that prevents the rest of it from rusting. Anyway.

• 1:47:47November Kelly?

  What the fuck?

• 1:47:48Justin Roczniak?

  Dilute acid dissolves the passivation layer and rapidly corrodes the base metal. There is supposed to be a desiccant on the vent line to remove humidity from the atmospheric air that enters the tank. If this is not maintained.

• 1:48:04Justin Roczniak?

  Moisture enters and condenses on the walls of the tank, dissolves acidic gases, and forms a dilute acid on the walls and at the liquid level.

• 1:48:16November Kelly?

  And your tank eats itself.

• 1:48:17Justin Roczniak?

  The tank eats itself, yes. The maintenance guys tell me that they were planning to prop a ladder against the tank, climb up and sit on top of the tank, unbolt the flange on the manway, and look inside to see what they're dealing with.

• 1:48:32November Kelly?

  Ah, a bunch of acid, probably.

• 1:48:33Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, I advised them to run like hell from this job as the tank could crumble under their weight, giving them a very close look at what they're dealing with.

• 1:48:43November Kelly?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:48:44Justin Roczniak?

  I don't know if you would suffocate, drown, or dissolve first if you fell into this tank when no one was around. The worst and most likely outcome would be getting rescued, then slowly dying in a hospital bed from the third-degree chemical burns covering your entire body.

• 1:48:59November Kelly?

  Industrial accidents are so cool, you can have legit reasons to fistfight your own rescuers to stop them.

• 1:49:06Justin Roczniak?

  Since I'm a curious guy, I asked them what the acid was used for. They directed my attention to the adjacent wastewater treatment building. They had also been, they had also been tasked with cleaning up, cleaning up this building, and asked if I could test some water for them. Inside, I saw a typical arrangement of clarifiers, filter presses, mixed tanks, and holding tanks. They were all full of water, probably a few hundred thousand gallons total. The maintenance guys were debating if this water should be pumped to the storm drain or the sanitary sewer. They were leaning towards the storm drain, since the water, quote, "looked so clean", unquote. I peered down into one of the tanks, and as you may now be seeing, other than some dust

• 1:49:49Justin Roczniak?

  at the surface, it was indeed crystal clear water.

• 1:49:53November Kelly?

  Oh. You know that those experiments with the open radiation source where it would just kill any animal that got within like 500 feet of it? And they just, the bodies wouldn't rot?

• 1:50:04Justin Roczniak?

  Yep.

• 1:50:05November Kelly?

  Yeah.

• 1:50:05Justin Roczniak?

  I asked if the wastewater plant had been shut down recently, and they told me, no, this system has been out of service for at least a decade, probably much longer. I peeked into the water so I could see the bottom of the tank. There was no bacterial slime, no algae, no insects or mosquitoes. In fact, no signs of life anywhere, which is a bit unusual for decades-old stagnant water. Since I'm a curious guy, I start looking around the facility a bit more, which is surprisingly devoid of any cobwebs, despite being abandoned for years. I quickly came across the two labeled pipes, which you can possibly see here are labeled "chrome waste" and "cyanide waste".

• 1:50:45Liam McAnderson?

  Oh, Jesus wept.

• 1:50:50Justin Roczniak?

  I'm sure you've covered the dangers of hexavalent chromium in an episode at some point, and cyanide needs no introduction. I don't know if we've talked about hexavalent chromium.

• 1:51:00November Kelly?

  It's in some old gas mask filters, weirdly.

• 1:51:02Justin Roczniak?

  There's a big spill of it down at Bartram's Garden. I'll go check it out. Report back. Yeah.

• 1:51:08Liam McAnderson?

  Wear a mask, buddy.

• 1:51:10Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. I've already gone through it once on my bike. I didn't see anything.

• 1:51:15Liam McAnderson?

  Oh, my God.

• 1:51:17Justin Roczniak?

  I later learned that there was an electroplating operation at this site long ago that apparently disbanded without properly decommissioning their wastewater plant. I suggested to the maintenance guys, they hold off on pumping the water anywhere as either the storm drain or the sewer would likely to lead to the at least temporary and localized extermination of all life in the receiving water body. Yeah. Also, we were probably increasing our risk of cancer just by standing in the building. I wish I had a more satisfying ending, but landlord's gonna landlord. I can confirm the acid tank was properly and quickly decontaminated and removed by an environmental contractor, but only because the tenants could see it.

• 1:51:59November Kelly?

  Landlords, particularly this landlord, should be fed to the alarmingly clear water.

• 1:52:04Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. The State Department of Environmental Protection is at least aware of the existence of the wastewater plant, but knowing their competency, they may just tell them to adjust the pH and then send it down the drain. Last I checked, the wastewater plant was still brimming with the cursed crystal clear water. At least it was last week when I snuck back in to take some pictures, since I selfishly ran out of there the first time without proper consideration for safety third.

• 1:52:34November Kelly?

  Thank you for going back to do some urban exploration on the scariest thing I've ever fucking heard.

• 1:52:40Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah, real investigative journalism by the, by the hogs. Well done.

• 1:52:44Justin Roczniak?

  From, from your pal, the water boy.

• 1:52:47November Kelly?

  I, new, new, new fear just dropped. Um, cr- cr- crystal Pepsi.

• 1:52:52Justin Roczniak?

  Except, exceptionally clear water.

• 1:52:54Liam McAnderson?

  Not like that.

• 1:52:55November Kelly?

  Exceptionally clear water.

• 1:52:57Justin Roczniak?

  Well, yeah, watch out for the exceptionally clear water. Don't go to the Bahamas, folks.

• 1:53:02November Kelly?

  No, no.

• 1:53:03Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, no, they, they, they, they figured that out. That's all hexavalent chromium in those, in the water. Next to like, I don't know, the Disney Cruise Island. Um.

• 1:53:14Liam McAnderson?

  I'm not good. I'm not going on the Wiki for people who disappeared mysteriously at sea. Thank you.

• 1:53:20November Kelly?

  Dumping hexavalent chromium into the like fake canals in the Venetian and Venice and in Vegas.

• 1:53:26Liam McAnderson?

  Vegas.

• 1:53:26Justin Roczniak?

  There you go.

• 1:53:27November Kelly?

  Keeps, keeps it nice and clean.

• 1:53:29Justin Roczniak?

  The Venetian in Venice. They had to build a.

• 1:53:31November Kelly?

  Venetian in Venice. Many such cases.

• 1:53:33Liam McAnderson?

  And this.

• 1:53:33Justin Roczniak?

  You could, you.

• 1:53:34Liam McAnderson?

  I'm hungry and I want dinner.

• 1:53:36Justin Roczniak?

  That's, that's for the tour, you know, they have, that was safety third.

• 1:53:39Liam McAnderson?

  Good, good, good night, everybody.

• 1:53:41November Kelly?

  Uh, uh, this one.

• 1:53:47November Kelly?

  I mean, thank Christ, because the one I almost hit was.

• 1:53:52Justin Roczniak?

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

• 1:53:57Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah, donate to Lutheran Sullivan House and the Danceathon for DV.

• 1:54:02November Kelly?

  And the GoFundMe.

• 1:54:02Justin Roczniak?

  Yes, and the GoFundMe. And, uh, yeah, subscribe to the Patreon, uh, because we have to fix the jack screw and, uh, Clipper, uh, problem. Yeah, that, that was.

• 1:54:16November Kelly?

  Buy a luxury car, you know, you, you, you get it cheap and then you get way more in maintenance costs.

• 1:54:22Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, this is gonna be, um, I think if we got like 90 or like 150,000 more Patreons.

• 1:54:30Liam McAnderson?

  We could do it.

• 1:54:31Justin Roczniak?

  We could probably get this done in the next five years or so.

• 1:54:35November Kelly?

  Fingers crossed. Still wouldn't get us a gold plaque, though.

• 1:54:38Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, well, ah, we'll, we'll, we'll, we'll, we'll burn that bridge when we get to it. All right. Well, that was the podcast.

• 1:54:46November Kelly?

  Beautiful.

• 1:54:46Justin Roczniak?

  Good night, everyone.

• 1:54:47November Kelly?

  Bye.