Episode 195: Alaska Airlines Flight 261

those pesky screwjacks are at it again maya's gofundme: https://www.gofundme.com/f/help-two-trans-women-get-a-fresh-start?attribution_id=sl:24e8b4ab-495b-4d1d-88a0-560dc51fa4dd&lang=en_US&ts=1773434182and maya's internet webzone: https://mayawalkwith.me/ Our Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/wtyppod/ Send us stuff! our address:Well There's Your Podcasting CompanyPO Box 26929 Philadelphia, PA 19134DO NOT SEND US LETTER BOMBS thanks in advance in the commercial: Local Forecast - Elevator Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

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

• 0:00November Kelly?

  You're weak or whatever.

• 0:01Speaker 01

  It's like, it's crazy. Well, this weekend I get to go to the Snoqualmie Railroad Museum because they, I posted so good, they invited me.

• 0:08November Kelly?

  Oh, big thing to happen.

• 0:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, because I was on the show and I was like, oh yeah, I love them. They're awesome. Somebody reached out and was like, hey, you want to come check out the wrecked Algo dining car? And I was like, holy shit.

• 0:19November Kelly?

  That's cool.

• 0:20Justin Roczniak?

  Hey, you know the guy who wrecked that?

• 0:25Speaker 01

  Um, and then, uh, and then the next weekend is a friend's wedding and then the weekend after that, I get on an airplane and fly to Glasgow.

• 0:35November Kelly?

  Yes, yes, I'm so excited. I'm so hyped. It's gonna be so good to see you.

• 0:39Justin Roczniak?

  How do I, oh, right.

• 0:41Liam McAnderson?

  I gotta pause my torrent, sorry.

• 0:44November Kelly?

  And we got, damn it. And we gotta, we gotta sync up the audio as well. That's the other thing we gotta do with like five of us. I'm so sorry, Devon.

• 0:52Justin Roczniak?

  Ah, okay.

• 0:53Speaker 01

  We will keep adding transsexuals to the podcast until morale improves.

• 0:57Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, we're gonna become, Liam and I are gonna become a minority. I mean, we are a minority.

• 1:02Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah, I was going to say, yeah.

• 1:05Liam McAnderson?

  Hold the fort.

• 1:08Justin Roczniak?

  We're being oppressed.

• 1:10Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah, that's us, dude.

• 1:10Justin Roczniak?

  The most oppressed person.

• 1:14Liam McAnderson?

  Making, making, making all the money and, uh, not having a real job.

• 1:19November Kelly?

  You have a real job, just in addition to this.

• 1:22Liam McAnderson?

  That's true.

• 1:22Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 1:23Liam McAnderson?

  Oh, does Vicky want to clap her hand?

• 1:25November Kelly?

  I also, I, I, I'm just, I, I'm, I'm, I'm in solemn prayer right now that we'll learn how to count backwards from three.

• 1:32Liam McAnderson?

  All right, I'm ready.

• 1:34Justin Roczniak?

  I'm gonna do three, two, one, mark. Everyone clap. That's three, two, one, mark. Okay, good enough. Uh, I guess we're gonna, we're gonna go do a podcast now. Okay.

• 1:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:45November Kelly?

  I guess so.

• 1:46Speaker 01

  Uh, today, uh.

• 1:48Liam McAnderson?

  You don't introduce it. What are you doing?

• 1:51Speaker 01

  Shit.

• 1:52Justin Roczniak?

  Seizing the control.

• 1:54Liam McAnderson?

  Back in your hovel.

• 1:56Speaker 01

  I've been doing my own podcast and I keep forgetting. This is, I'm just, yeah, go ahead.

• 2:02Liam McAnderson?

  My, my, my favorite bit of, well, there's your problem. Uh, yeah. So this is when we have one that's like used to show running. Uh, and they just like, like they tried to field command and you could watch, you could hear the annoyance of Roz's voice, bro and bro.

• 2:18Justin Roczniak?

  Well, I, I wanted to mention this because this is one of my favorite parts of the podcast is, is, is when, uh, I mentioned this in the chat, but I'm going to mention it on the recording too. Is, uh, when, when November suggests something extremely outlandish, which turns out to be real.

• 2:34November Kelly?

  Yeah, yeah. I love when that happens and it keeps happening and it's never on purpose. People think that I'm, I'm like scripting this bit. I'm not, I just think the things and then the lathe of heaven, you know?

• 2:44Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. And, and, and Liam and I went to go visit the NS Savannah over the weekend, the nuclear ship. It's amazing. It looks, it looks like it just came off of sea trials. Everything is there.

• 2:57Liam McAnderson?

  It fucks. It, it was so, it was so cool.

• 3:00Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 3:00Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah. If you're in Baltimore, uh, or around Baltimore, anywhere on the east coast, the Savannah's website is up to date, uh, for dates that they're open, highly, highly, highly suggest you check it out.

• 3:13November Kelly?

  Go get irradiated.

• 3:14Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. Yeah. Oh, you have to go to the, the radiation measuring machine. You have to stick your hand in the box like in Dune.

• 3:23Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah.

• 3:26Justin Roczniak?

  And, and, uh, and, and, and so anyway, one of the things November mentioned in our episode on NS Savannah was, uh, oh, you know, I assume the, the egg fryer is hooked up to the secondary steam loop from the reactor. Guess what?

• 3:45November Kelly?

  Oh my fucking God.

• 3:48Justin Roczniak?

  A whole damn kitchen runs on the secondary steam loop.

• 3:55November Kelly?

  They don't even do that on submarines. That's diabolical.

• 4:00Liam McAnderson?

  They had a Braithion made microwave. That was really cool. The radar range.

• 4:07November Kelly?

  Oh my god, just thinking about eating grits or something that make you feel like you've got a filling in like just everything comes out tasting kind of like metal. Yeah, no, this is, that's, that's real cuisine.

• 4:22Justin Roczniak?

  I took all those pictures and I'm like, I should have put like a little grain over all of them, you know? Freak people out.

• 4:29November Kelly?

  Yeah, it's like I went, I went to see the NS Savannah and it killed three digital cameras.

• 4:33Justin Roczniak?

  Yes.

• 4:37Justin Roczniak?

  Alright, anyway, yeah, go see NS Savannah while you still can. They're about to finally decommission the reactor properly and then no one knows what's gonna happen to it.

• 4:45November Kelly?

  World's most expensive way of making a microwave not work anymore.

• 4:51Liam McAnderson?

  We were talking to the guy, uh, we were talking to the guy and he's like, yeah, I have no idea what I'm doing.

• 4:56Justin Roczniak?

  Radiation safety officer.

• 4:58Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah, the radiation safety officer was just like, I don't know what to do after this. Hopefully I retire to sunny South Florida and like, don't die of radiation exposure.

• 5:05November Kelly?

  I don't, a radiation safety officer, beginning really any sentence with, I don't know what I'm doing.

• 5:11Justin Roczniak?

  He, he's, no, he's the only guy who made a lot of money off the government shutdown and is really mad about it.

• 5:19Justin Roczniak?

  Cause he, he was planning to retire and, and then the government shut down, then they had to delay decommissioning the reactor, which meant he had to, he had to sit there for an extra couple of months to make, make sure no one brought anything radioactive into the reactor. Cause that's the stage they're at right now is, uh, there's no radiation in there, but there is a chance that someone brings radioactive material in there. In which case there's a lot of paperwork that has to happen.

• 5:46November Kelly?

  Had to, had to microwave my burrito.

• 5:48Liam McAnderson?

  Reverse Dirty Bob.

• 5:52November Kelly?

  Listen, sometimes you get hungry, you know?

• 5:55Liam McAnderson?

  Was I not supposed to eat the cesium?

• 5:58Justin Roczniak?

  Alright, I, I, I, I, sorry, I forgot my pockets were full of Brazil nuts.

• 6:04Justin Roczniak?

  So anyway, um, 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.

• 6:19November Kelly?

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

• 6:24Liam McAnderson?

  Yay, Liam. Hi, I'm Liam McAnderson. My pronouns are he and him. Victoria, go.

• 6:28Speaker 01

  Hi, my name is Victoria Scott. Uh, I'm the person who's talking right now. My pronouns are she and her. Uh, we have a guest.

• 6:34Justin Roczniak?

  We have a guest.

• 6:35Speaker 01

  Another guest.

• 6:36Liam McAnderson?

  Hello. Uh, my name is Maya Ventura. Uh, my pronouns are it and she. You probably know me from being on here previously. That's the only thing I have to introduce myself.

• 6:44Justin Roczniak?

  Yes. And what we see on the screen in front of us is Denzel Washington.

• 6:50November Kelly?

  You give me a bugger. In, in the movie Flight, which is a great movie, which unironically makes the suggestion that drinking makes you a better pilot.

• 7:00Speaker 01

  This, yeah.

• 7:01Liam McAnderson?

  Narrows the world and you can focus better or whatever.

• 7:04November Kelly?

  Yeah.

• 7:05Speaker 01

  He's more chill. Like the, the whole plot of it is like, actually the plane crashed would have gone worse if he wasn't so limber.

• 7:10November Kelly?

  Mm hmm.

• 7:11Speaker 01

  Um, it actually does tie into one of my most deeply seated beliefs, which is that if you let me have like two drinks, I would turn a significantly faster lap time in a race car.

• 7:23November Kelly?

  I think you should be allowed to test this under like controlled conditions.

• 7:27Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah, Mythbusters can do. Surely we have the pull of Mythbusters.

• 7:30Speaker 01

  So when I was, when I was still working as an auto journalist, uh, I went to the Honda warehouse facility outside of the Indianapolis 500 where they have the enormous $2 million sim rig.

• 7:43November Kelly?

  Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Hold on, hold the fuck on. You're telling me that Honda has a parallel version of the warehouse from Raiders of the Lost Ark?

• 7:50Speaker 01

  Yes, yes.

• 7:53November Kelly?

  They have God Civic in there?

• 7:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, I've driven the number, the first, uh, CBCC they made in America, or they sold in America, rather.

• 8:02Liam McAnderson?

  That is so.

• 8:03November Kelly?

  The Nazis like do a bunch of incantations, open the door of the Camry and their faces start melting off.

• 8:09Speaker 01

  Camry is Toyota.

• 8:10November Kelly?

  I was gonna say.

• 8:11Speaker 01

  Camry got rid of all of, they, Toyota got rid of all their, uh, heritage cars because they're in Plano, Texas, and they, there were good things go to die.

• 8:19Liam McAnderson?

  And they made the Texas edition of the Tacoma yee-haw whip crack noise.

• 8:22November Kelly?

  They, they can't see this, but I can see this. I like to get car things wrong because you get a little twitch.

• 8:28Speaker 01

  Me? I don't, I don't know what you're talking about.

• 8:32Speaker 01

  Um, in any case, uh, yeah.

• 8:34November Kelly?

  The M BMW stands for Mercedes.

• 8:37Liam McAnderson?

  I fucking got you. For variant Mercedes works, of course.

• 8:43Liam McAnderson?

  Oh, an oxymoron Mercedes works.

• 8:45November Kelly?

  At a certain point, this becomes workplace bullying.

• 8:50Speaker 01

  Um, yeah, well, you already went on the car show to talk about cars.

• 8:53Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah, yeah, I did.

• 8:54Speaker 01

  We're doing the flight show. No, but in any case, they've got the warehouse with the, with the, the big Indy car sim in it. And I want them to let me have two beers and then drive it.

• 9:04Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah. Oh, I think that's a reasonable thing that anybody.

• 9:07November Kelly?

  I think the ideal thing is you A B C test this and you do like two beers, four beers, six beers, eight beers, 10 beers. You know, until they're like decanting you out of it.

• 9:15Speaker 01

  What's the ball more peak of turning, turning a qualifying lap at the Indy 500?

• 9:21Justin Roczniak?

  I recently saw the film Bad Lieutenant, Port of Call, New Orleans.

• 9:28Liam McAnderson?

  Oh, shit, yeah.

• 9:29Justin Roczniak?

  And it learned, it taught me a lesson, which is do a lot of drugs.

• 9:34Liam McAnderson?

  That's generally good advice, I've found.

• 9:36Justin Roczniak?

  It will improve your life.

• 9:38Liam McAnderson?

  Uh, yeah, man. Yeah.

• 9:41November Kelly?

  I had somebody. Rosal, have you played Disco Elysium?

• 9:44Justin Roczniak?

  I have not, no.

• 9:45November Kelly?

  I feel like you really should. Like, I think you'd enjoy it.

• 9:49Liam McAnderson?

  That would take away precious workers and resources Soviet Republic time.

• 9:53November Kelly?

  That's.

• 9:53Justin Roczniak?

  That's a good point.

• 9:54November Kelly?

  That's, I, I deeply respect anyone who's like, I have one video game that I play. I'm back on fucking Snow Runner lately, which is news you should greet sort of roughly analogously to me saying I've started doing heroin again.

• 10:10November Kelly?

  Just really bad idea. Like, I like to play it for a few hours and get like suicidally frustrated. Um, just, you know, I, I love to like roll a truck down into a quarry and just think about different ways I could end things. Um, and that's relaxing to me. That's good. And I invest a lot of time in that. So, yeah, you know, I, I think this is.

• 10:31Speaker 01

  Have you tried having a beer first? Does it make you more effective at driving the trucks?

• 10:35November Kelly?

  I have, and it makes me have a better time, but a worse driver.

• 10:40Liam McAnderson?

  Hmm. Uh, yeah, yeah.

• 10:42Speaker 01

  Well, you're not like Denzel Washington in the 2012 film Flight, then.

• 10:46November Kelly?

  No, that's true. This is very true. I don't have a relationship with the cool John Goodman drug dealer for one.

• 10:51Speaker 01

  That's true. So obviously, in the movie Flight, which has a really good opening scene, the rest of the movie is kind of like a Denzel Washington movie your dad watches.

• 11:02November Kelly?

  It's pretty good.

• 11:03Speaker 01

  It's a dad movie.

• 11:05November Kelly?

  It's a good movie to watch standing up with your hands clasped behind your back, saying that you're not gonna watch all of it, but you are.

• 11:11Liam McAnderson?

  A parade dress.

• 11:12Speaker 01

  Cable film. Yeah, it should be on TNT at 3:00 in the afternoon. You should be watching it with commercial breaks. But the initial crash scene is Denzel has a sudden issue with the control yoke of his, I forget what they call it in the movie. It's to- oh, it's like an MD-88 or something, or like an LD-88. It's like,

• 11:35November Kelly?

  Uh oh.

• 11:37Speaker 01

  You know.

• 11:39November Kelly?

  The gun licenses, you know?

• 11:41Speaker 01

  A like Donald mugless.

• 11:45Liam McAnderson?

  We can certainly put that on a t-shirt. They can't sue us over that.

• 11:51Speaker 01

  And the plane sinks towards the earth and he ends up having to fly it inverted and then he like clips a church and crashes and a couple of people die, but it's okay because he was drunk. So he was pretty good at landing the plane.

• 12:03November Kelly?

  Yeah.

• 12:04Speaker 01

  This scene is very loosely, and I mean really loosely, based on the real world crash of Alaska Airlines Flight 261, where everyone died and the pilots were sober.

• 12:17November Kelly?

  So, de-famatorally based on it, yes.

• 12:22Liam McAnderson?

  Did not hit any churches, though, so that's.

• 12:24November Kelly?

  Well, in Alaska, you've got a lot of ground to cover. And if you do, decent chance it's like a Russian stave church built in like the sort of early 19th century.

• 12:32Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, yeah, something devastatingly historic.

• 12:35Speaker 01

  Part of why I wanted to do this episode was because obviously like Maya knows about airplanes. So that'd be fun to do an episode with her. But also Alaska Airlines is more or less the state carrier for like the nascent Cascadian Republic, because they're based out of Sea-Tac and everybody here is more ride or die for this airline than you've ever encountered in your life. I booked travel on it literally yesterday while.

• 12:59Liam McAnderson?

  Finishing this slideshow, actually.

• 13:01Justin Roczniak?

  I mean, it's really great. There's, there's like a cool, like, guy on the tail.

• 13:06Liam McAnderson?

  The guy on the plane, yeah.

• 13:07Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 13:07November Kelly?

  I don't, I don't care for that guy. I don't care for that guy. I don't like the guy. Yeah, they should. I don't like the color scheme either.

• 13:14Speaker 01

  That's horrifying. No, they, well, they, the thing is, is they also just acquired-

• 13:17Liam McAnderson?

  What are you talking about?

• 13:18November Kelly?

  I, listen, I, I've long accepted that, like, I'm gonna be guillotined by the entirely transgender Cascadian People's Republic for, like, one or another of my many microaggressions, but I'd like to get ahead of the line, you know?

• 13:34Speaker 01

  Well, if you don't like the guy, they bought Hawaiian Airlines, so they got planes with girls.

• 13:37November Kelly?

  Okay, well, I do like girls.

• 13:39Liam McAnderson?

  They also have planes with nothing, which is-

• 13:41November Kelly?

  No, I like nothing. I like nothing a lot better, I think. Nothing is my preference.

• 13:45Speaker 01

  The, the new-

• 13:46November Kelly?

  Me when I roll the truck into a quarry and say, "It's my run."

• 13:51Speaker 01

  The new livery is kind of useless, I think, but I think they should have made the Hawaiian girl and the Alaskan guy kiss, but that's just me.

• 13:58November Kelly?

  Hmm.

• 13:58Liam McAnderson?

  Native solidarity, yeah, hell yeah.

• 14:00Speaker 01

  That's the new, it should be the new-

• 14:02Justin Roczniak?

  That's a, that's a, that's a straight cis thing, I thought.

• 14:05Liam McAnderson?

  Hmm, yeah. Kiss it?

• 14:06Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 14:07Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah, yeah. It's true.

• 14:09Speaker 01

  Uh, in any case, that's, yeah, that's, that's what we're gonna talk about today. So it's, it's a me and Maya episode. She, she did a lot, she did a lot of the work, let's be real here.

• 14:18Liam McAnderson?

  You, you like to give me credit, but you also did a lot of the work.

• 14:20Speaker 01

  Oh, my god.

• 14:21Liam McAnderson?

  We had a very good working process.

• 14:23Justin Roczniak?

  All I did was put the safety third in.

• 14:25November Kelly?

  Well done.

• 14:25Justin Roczniak?

  I didn't even do-

• 14:26November Kelly?

  Hey, but you get to introduce the news.

• 14:28Justin Roczniak?

  The first thing we do, which is the goddamn news.

• 14:31Liam McAnderson?

  Oh, yeah. Fifteen, sixteen seconds in, oh, yeah.

• 14:36November Kelly?

  No, I had to talk about the truck game I don't like. Um, so-

• 14:40Liam McAnderson?

  Great. That's a great, uh, Chyron.

• 14:42November Kelly?

  Yeah, so, uh, I'm making a liar out of Justin, because you know, in the ad, you say that the only ad that they're gonna hear on the podcast is the ads?

• 14:51Justin Roczniak?

  Yes.

• 14:51November Kelly?

  Well, that's not true anymore. There's also this ad, which is-

• 14:55Justin Roczniak?

  It's a new ad.

• 14:55November Kelly?

  There's a new ad. It's just this one time, I have started a fifth podcast because I have lost control of my life. It is called Be Gay Solve Crimes. It's me, former guest Mia Mulder. And Lucy from Scotland, we talk about a different piece of detective fiction every week. We talk about why it's transgender, why detective is kind of a transgender thing to be. It's really fun. We are gonna have the first bonus episode out probably end of this week, but the first free episode, which is a 1945 Sherlock Holmes movie, which is just really inexplicably weird, is already out. You can find it wherever podcasts are sold,

• 15:37November Kelly?

  or begaysolvecrimes.com. Thank you for your attention to this.

• 15:43Liam McAnderson?

  Wow, look at you registering a domain for your podcast.

• 15:45November Kelly?

  Yeah.

• 15:46Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, not like, not like four years after the fact, yeah.

• 15:50Liam McAnderson?

  Buddy, buddy.

• 15:51November Kelly?

  Can I just draw your attention to like how good that art is that we have though? That's my wife. My wife did that and it's

• 15:58Liam McAnderson?

  It's very good.

• 15:58November Kelly?

  The little Polaroid. So yeah, check out the podcast. I have a lot of fun making it. I hope you're gonna have a lot of fun listening to it.

• 16:05Liam McAnderson?

  I'm very excited.

• 16:05November Kelly?

  We have a Patreon as well, which is great because like, you know, everyone needs money because the economy is bad. So, you know, please consider this, or any one of the other infinite podcasts that I do, like No Gods, No Mayors, or Trash Future, or Kill James Bond, or I'm probably missing one at this point.

• 16:24Liam McAnderson?

  You're not.

• 16:25November Kelly?

  Okay, good. Well, thank you. Thank you. Thank you very much. That's the, that's the item, item.

• 16:31Liam McAnderson?

  Right. I have a, I have an ad as well.

• 16:33November Kelly?

  Oh, sure.

• 16:34Justin Roczniak?

  Oh, shit.

• 16:34Liam McAnderson?

  ViceNews.com, next.

• 16:37November Kelly?

  You should listen to Victoria's podcast, Tran Galismo, because I was on it. It was a great time. I ruined it by talking for an hour about which cars were in the Epstein files.

• 16:48Speaker 01

  No, that was not ruined. This, this, this past week's episode, we did like literally an hour of me explaining what shadow banking was.

• 16:56November Kelly?

  Sick.

• 16:57Speaker 01

  Somebody called it, somebody called it gay John Oliver, which I thought was just John Oliver, but like, you know.

• 17:04November Kelly?

  That's horrifying.

• 17:06Justin Roczniak?

  What was the, what was the, the luxury car Epstein wanted to import but couldn't?

• 17:10Liam McAnderson?

  Toyota Century.

• 17:11Speaker 01

  Toyota Century.

• 17:12Justin Roczniak?

  The Toyota Century, that was, that was a damn good looking car, yeah.

• 17:15November Kelly?

  Yeah, he kind of had taste in cars, like I

• 17:19Liam McAnderson?

  We should clarify immediately.

• 17:22Justin Roczniak?

  Well, yeah, he couldn't, he couldn't import it on a

• 17:25Liam McAnderson?

  It's the most under-stressed engine they've ever built, anyone's ever built, ever.

• 17:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 17:29Justin Roczniak?

  He couldn't have imported it as an antique. It would have been too old for him.

• 17:34Speaker 01

  Jesus Christ.

• 17:35Liam McAnderson?

  God's damn.

• 17:40Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 17:41November Kelly?

  Secretly Jeffrey Epstein car guy depressing.

• 17:44Liam McAnderson?

  It's not really surprising if you know like most car guys, I think.

• 17:48Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, you know, other news.

• 17:53November Kelly?

  Yeah, so.

• 17:56November Kelly?

  You like that one, huh?

• 18:00November Kelly?

  So, um, yeah, shit is popping off in. Okay, okay, settle down. It's your own time you're wasting. So the most wanted drug lord in Mexico has been killed again. This is this is Nemesio Osagora Cervantes, El Mencho, who is head of the Jalisco New Generation Cartel. The the Mexican army arrested him and then almost certainly like murdered him in custody. Nobody cares that much because like he was a piece of shit.

• 18:34Liam McAnderson?

  He was transported to Mexico City, right? Yeah.

• 18:37November Kelly?

  Yeah, yeah. And though, you know, I think the Americans like tried to take credit for it, which meant that Shinbam had to be like, no, this was us. We just had like.

• 18:48Liam McAnderson?

  Just intelligence sharing, yeah.

• 18:50November Kelly?

  Yeah, but obviously.

• 18:53Justin Roczniak?

  No, I did the extrajudicial killing.

• 18:56Liam McAnderson?

  Fuck you.

• 18:56November Kelly?

  Yeah.

• 18:57Liam McAnderson?

  I could do it too, dad.

• 18:59November Kelly?

  Yeah, so the kind of institutional response from the cartels when you like kill or arrest a big cartel guys to try and just do as much domestic terrorism as possible is a kind of like protest.

• 19:14November Kelly?

  Which meant like a lot of like stuff being set on fire, right?

• 19:18Liam McAnderson?

  I saw something incredibly funny on Twitter or Blue Sky or whichever. That was a guy in the Marriott Bonvoy subreddit getting really bad because it put a lot by a lot of, I think I'm saying correctly.

• 19:30November Kelly?

  Puerto Vallarta, see.

• 19:31Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah, they wouldn't give him late checkout. He's like, no one else is checking in. The city is under lockdown. I can't leave. Give me late checkout.

• 19:40November Kelly?

  It is kind of fucked up that Marriott did just like kick a bunch of people out into a war zone. Even if admittedly like it fucks up a bunch of Americans vacations is not the sort of most salient consequence of this.

• 19:55Liam McAnderson?

  I saw a Reddit post from somebody who was at an Airbnb in Puerto Vallarta. And the landlord Airbnb owner was refusing to let them extend that stay because it had been booked for the next day.

• 20:09November Kelly?

  And so they were You have to go out. Yeah, go out in the sort of cartel.

• 20:14Liam McAnderson?

  Yes, Airbnb basically told him to go fuck himself, which was the, which was the most in character part of the whole thing, I think.

• 20:21November Kelly?

  Yeah, yeah. So like, um, they so far so much of stuff. I think they like injured a few like soldiers and stuff. Um, and like this has been across like eight states. And the weird thing is that it's it's sort of like extending into the tourist areas like Puerto Vallarta. And Guadalajara, most notably, which is where they're going to be holding part of the world.

• 20:43Liam McAnderson?

  World Cup. Yeah.

• 20:44Justin Roczniak?

  Oh, God.

• 20:45November Kelly?

  So, yeah.

• 20:46Liam McAnderson?

  The city as large as we are, Austin, Philadelphia.

• 20:50November Kelly?

  Yeah, Mexican Philadelphia or Guadalajara. Yeah.

• 20:53Liam McAnderson?

  Oh, yeah. I want a cheesesteak burrito and I assume tummy hurt and I'll just. I I fucking love Mexico.

• 21:01November Kelly?

  The one

• 21:02Liam McAnderson?

  Every time I've been in Mexico. Oh, go ahead. Go ahead. Go ahead.

• 21:04November Kelly?

  No, it's fine. I mean, the one thing I will say is you've never fucking trust an OSINT account, especially about Mexico ever. Right? Because you are gonna see a bunch of cartel hype videos where it's guys in like airsoft vests with admittedly very expensive American traffic guns. Being like, we are the fucking, you know, Jalisco cartel special forces and we have like anti-tank missiles. It's like, no, you don't. There's no evidence. But you see the same like five or six videos get posted again, again, again, again, again, right? Um, and it's it's all bullshit. It's actively gonna like disinform.

• 21:41Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah, I though I did read an article, I cannot remember where, uh, that a lot of Mexican cartel ammunition came from the United, like a United 50 cal. Came from a government

• 21:54November Kelly?

  Lake City.

• 21:54Liam McAnderson?

  Plant. Yeah.

• 21:55November Kelly?

  Lake City, home of the Quiet Pills. Yeah, absolutely.

• 21:59November Kelly?

  No, I mean, um, thi- this is absolutely true, right? I, I think there's, there's sort of like a lot of, a lot of interest here and like, how much this is sort of Shinbaum's hand being forced to do the heavy-handed thing. Um, and, you know, it, it sort of remains an open question and God only knows what this means in the sort of longer term, or who's going to replace this guy, what this means for the other cartels. I think the guy replacing him is like fucking codename zero three, because they all started giving themselves army-style codenames after Los Cetas. Um, basically, it's, it's all bad. Um, and I think the thing is, you're allowed to laugh at the guy who can't get late check out at the Marriott.

• 22:38Justin Roczniak?

  Yes. What was the cartel called?

• 22:40November Kelly?

  Uh, the Cartel Jalisco Nueva Generación.

• 22:44Justin Roczniak?

  Okay, yeah, I was about to say, because it does seem like the violence has been sort of a little more stayed, a little more tamped down, as evidenced by the next generation as opposed to Jalisco, the original series. Um, you know.

• 22:58November Kelly?

  God damn it.

• 22:59Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 22:59November Kelly?

  I'm waiting for Jalisco Voyager.

• 23:03Liam McAnderson?

  Deep Space Jalisco.

• 23:04Justin Roczniak?

  Uh, Deep, Deep Space Jalisco is, uh, you know, that, that's on like an offshore platform.

• 23:11Liam McAnderson?

  I, I am interested to see and, and, uh, you know, where, because basically when the cartel's, like, if they splinter Earth, there's going to be sort of like a five families type of organization where like leadership is clearly defined and we don't have a power struggle.

• 23:25November Kelly?

  Oh, they tried. I mean, they, they have absolutely tried. That's what, um, Miguel Angel Felix Gallardo was doing. Um, and yeah, with sort of like a lot of higher level corruption. I mean, basically, like, who's to say? That's, that's my official conclusion from this is who knows what the fuck.

• 23:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, that, I, I assume, I don't really know enough about like Mexico's politics, even though I probably should know more. Um, the main thing is I assume anything that bad happens is just because of America, just as like a roundabout, you know, kind of like.

• 23:53November Kelly?

  That's not a bad kind of.

• 23:55Speaker 01

  I saw a lot of people who I trust being like, I bet America was pushing for this. Um, so I'll trust them. I could be wrong, though.

• 24:02Justin Roczniak?

  Sounds about right.

• 24:03Speaker 01

  But it does, it does, it does kind of like agree with my priors that like, oh, something has caused instability. In a country south of America, I bet we had something to do with that.

• 24:13November Kelly?

  Oh, yeah, I mean, they're definitely pushing for it. I mean, one thing I will say is I kind of respect being a cop or a troop more in Mexico than the US on the basis that not that you're not a fascist or that you're not corrupt, but at least you're playing with the difficulty turned up, you know, at least people are shooting back sometime. But yeah, that's, that's, that's my conclusion from this.

• 24:33Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, I mean, they had, they have more things to worry about than snowballs.

• 24:37November Kelly?

  Um, Jesus Christ. Mamam, down here, you're gonna ban snowball fights?

• 24:43Liam McAnderson?

  Oh, we, we didn't make it to, it didn't make it to, uh, the goddamn news, but I did want to talk about that speedboat getting hosed in Cuba.

• 24:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, that happened like an hour before we started recording.

• 24:52November Kelly?

  Yeah.

• 24:53Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 24:53November Kelly?

  I don't know, Marco Rubio is gonna personally parachute in and do Just Cause 2 on Cuba after this. I have no idea.

• 24:59Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah.

• 24:59Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, yeah, exactly.

• 25:01Liam McAnderson?

  All right, cool. We got, uh,

• 25:02Justin Roczniak?

  Speaking of boats and other news.

• 25:10November Kelly?

  Oh, boy. Um, okay.

• 25:12Justin Roczniak?

  So there's a poop problem on the Gerald R. Ford.

• 25:16November Kelly?

  There is, there is. Um, this is all part of a sort of broader, like, edging campaign that, uh, Donald Trump is doing to the various neocons, uh, over the prospect of war in Iran, like war with Iran, right?

• 25:33Justin Roczniak?

  Very much a will they, won't they situation.

• 25:35November Kelly?

  Yeah, some kind of sustained bombing campaign, um, which would be so disastrous an idea, like John McCain is looking up from hell is like, well pleased with this, right? But like in general.

• 25:47Liam McAnderson?

  Cold and blood lust or whatever.

• 25:49November Kelly?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Very, very funny to be the guy who like got John Bolton arrested and is also giving him the birthday present he's always wanted. But like, the, the deal is here that they're gonna try and like, force regime change, maybe. Like with air policing, essentially, an idea that, you know, never really died in the twenties like people thought it did. And I, this is so transparently a bad idea that different parts of the White House and the Pentagon are all leaking. Reasons why it's a terrible idea, uh, not least the fact that if they actually do it, it's gonna deplete all the munitions they want to use against China if they ever want to do that.

• 26:31Justin Roczniak?

  But so they could probably just wait and regime change will happen.

• 26:35November Kelly?

  Yeah, decent chance.

• 26:36Justin Roczniak?

  You know, this is like, you know, sometimes the best option is to do nothing. But this is not, not how America works.

• 26:43November Kelly?

  And because what they want to do is so flagrantly illegal that like, uh, the US's European allies have refused to allow them to like base it in, for instance, the UK. You have a lot of like, really strange hesitant and like, um, sort of, uh, Byzantine military movements, right? Where you have like, sort of every tanker that you could possibly have in theater parked bumper to bumper in Portugal, um, on the basis that you only have so many of them that are actually going to be like airworthy. Um, this is exposing some real strain in like US power projection for no reason, um, of which the funniest example is the Ford, um, having a massive problem with its

• 27:28November Kelly?

  toilets. Um, it's got like, uh, like 60 of them and all of them are fucked now.

• 27:36Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, that's, that's, uh, that's a pretty bad situation to be in, you know, uh, if, if, I mean, talk about like Byzantine military problems, uh, it's, um, dysentery is definitely something of that era. I assume the next thing they're gonna do is go in there and put up some Theodesian walls.

• 27:57November Kelly?

  Well, the reason why this is happening is also quite Byzantine, which is like, Trump sent them to the Caribbean to support the Maduro thing and then sent them to the Mediterranean and then the Gulf, right? To do this, which means everybody on board has having their tour extended by months. They're all miserable. The toilets are busted. Um, I, I, I said in the, the notes that this photo we've got here is, uh, taken from the closest possible distance you could approach the Ford without being overwhelmed by sewage stench.

• 28:27Justin Roczniak?

  Yes.

• 28:27November Kelly?

  Right? Um, this is, this is not going well for the actual people who have to do any of this stuff. Um, and I, you know, I'm sort of, I don't think that will stop them from getting it done, whatever it is, but like, this is showing some like, serious dying empire strains that it really, that no one needed to know about, you know?

• 28:48Speaker 01

  I, I have a question for everybody aboard this ship. Have you ever seen the battleship Potemkin?

• 28:56November Kelly?

  Just drive it right up the Potomac, you know?

• 28:59Justin Roczniak?

  I, I am, I'm kinda like, I, I like the one quote from the guy in engineering on the boat who's like, "Yeah, these, these fucking enlisted sailors keep fucking up my plumbing. They're like flushing t-shirts and garbage."

• 29:13November Kelly?

  It's like Navy recruitment's either gotten sort of way worse, or that's a kind of like actual protest. And you're like, "I'm gonna make my living conditions way worse by fucking up all of the toilets."

• 29:23Speaker 01

  You know, they keep kicking out all the queer people from the Navy, and I assume that that leaves you with like the bottom of the barrel.

• 29:30Justin Roczniak?

  The hygiene standards go way down.

• 29:32November Kelly?

  We kicked out the only people in the Navy who knew how to use a flush toilet, because they were all gay.

• 29:37Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah.

• 29:38Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, you want, yeah.

• 29:39Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah.

• 29:40Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. You want a straight Navy, you're gonna have to install a traditional ship's head.

• 29:49November Kelly?

  This is, this is all downstream of Pete Hegseth's relentless yet futile quest for heterosexuality.

• 29:56Speaker 04

  Oh my god.

• 29:57Justin Roczniak?

  This is, uh, this is, uh, we need, we need better hygiene standards, and we can't, we can't accomplish that with straight people. It's unfortunate, but it's something that-

• 30:06Liam McAnderson?

  We need a competent Navy, yeah.

• 30:08November Kelly?

  Something we will say, right, is that having a few beers may make you, may get you a better lap time, makes you a way worse Secretary of Defense.

• 30:16Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, that does seem to be the case.

• 30:20Speaker 04

  I mean, the problem is, he's bad enough at baseline, that like, how do you tell which direction the beers are influencing him?

• 30:26Speaker 01

  I also do not think that Pete Hegseth has had two beers, ever.

• 30:30Speaker 04

  Well, okay.

• 30:31Speaker 01

  That is not a two beers thought kinda guy.

• 30:34Liam McAnderson?

  Two beers, it's just two Modellos as like mouth reds.

• 30:37Justin Roczniak?

  Two, two, two, two beers is with breakfast, yeah.

• 30:40Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 30:41Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah, it's, he's, my guy is doing the New Orleans diet, just absolutely, listen, I, I will reach across the aisle for the New Orleans diet, right? But, but, we gotta, sorry, Dev, we gotta, we gotta guarantee this guy.

• 30:56November Kelly?

  The last time he had a Secretary of Defense who had a New Orleans diet, he was, he was working for the Confederacy, right? Like, and that's partially why it didn't work out.

• 31:04Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 31:05Speaker 01

  I, yeah, I mean, I mean-

• 31:07Speaker 04

  I, I will say, among, among the Trump guys, Pete Hegseth is probably one of the ones I would most want to see decapitated in a public square.

• 31:16November Kelly?

  Oh yeah, for sure, a hundred percent.

• 31:18Speaker 04

  I don't know what it is about him that makes him so much less palatable, palatable than the rest of them, because they're all- Equally bad, maybe he's just louder about it.

• 31:26November Kelly?

  It's the American flag pocket square for me.

• 31:29Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, it's that, it's the weird tattoo, it's the, it's the, there's a lot of annoying things about that guy.

• 31:36November Kelly?

  Dave's fault tattoo or some same shit.

• 31:38Justin Roczniak?

  He does, yeah.

• 31:39Speaker 04

  Yeah, there was.

• 31:41Justin Roczniak?

  That's also Byzantine.

• 31:43November Kelly?

  True, yeah.

• 31:44Speaker 01

  I just, I think he's, he seems like the most gleefully, almost like the most gleefully white supremacist person with a, a large platform in the admin. Cause obviously there are people who are more like gleefully white supremacist, but they are not like cabinet level officials who are constantly doing media oppressors. I think that's sort of what makes me hate his fucking guts.

• 32:02November Kelly?

  Him and Kristi Noem, I guess.

• 32:05Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 32:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, but like, Chris, they already are chanting like actionable threats against Kristi Noem, so you know.

• 32:12Speaker 04

  What's like I am, to be clear.

• 32:16November Kelly?

  Yeah, no, I, I, I don't know where this is all leading with Iran either. It sort of remains to be seen, I think, because basically it's, it's all ready to go, like American sort of like power projection always has this like long fucking telegraph lead up to it. And it's waiting on Donald Trump of all people just deciding like go or no go, which he is, I guess, gonna do at some point this week, end of this week, maybe. So, great.

• 32:42Speaker 01

  I saw, I saw a lot of people. I saw a lot of people, and again, take this for what it's, take this with a grain of salt because it's people on the internet. And I, again, this is not my, I do, I'm not an OSN type, I don't know. Uh, but they did say that a lot of it kind of is reminiscent of like, right before Russia invaded Ukraine where they're like, they won't do this, they're just moving a lot of stuff. And then they did.

• 33:03November Kelly?

  It's, it's, it's very much like, just go fuck up this country for like, sort of senility reasons as much as anything. And, yeah.

• 33:13Speaker 01

  I think it kind of sucks that every major power is more or less either currently or turning into an oligarchic death cult of like, people over the age of 70, but what do I know?

• 33:25November Kelly?

  It's the old man apocalypse jerk off session, it's going great, you know, I remember hearing.

• 33:30Justin Roczniak?

  We gotta go get all that oil that the petroleum companies don't really want. On.

• 33:35November Kelly?

  I just as a kind of multipolarity exercise, I remember hearing that it was from Trump of all people. That when he was talking to Xi about Taiwan, she started like heavy breathing. So it's all libidinal for these guys and it's gonna maybe like doom all of us.

• 33:57Speaker 01

  Cool.

• 33:58November Kelly?

  It's real bad, real, real bad. Also, just like my dick doesn't work anymore. I can only get hard from death.

• 34:05Liam McAnderson?

  From bombing a rat. Yeah. Which we pulled out now like, now they're like, oh, we're a week away from them having fucking weapons graduated, which no, they're not. And then also we had like the path to build a bomb was halted with the JCPOA, which we then pulled out of because we are a country run by goddamn moron.

• 34:23November Kelly?

  Yeah.

• 34:24Liam McAnderson?

  We just, I just, I, I, I, uh, it makes me so mad. It just makes me so mad.

• 34:29Speaker 04

  The, the, the mention of the weapons with mass destruction was interesting because like they haven't tried to manufacture the same consent as 25 years ago.

• 34:37November Kelly?

  No, they don't give a fuck, which is more.

• 34:40Speaker 04

  Yeah. Which is why, why bringing up the pretense was actually slightly interesting because like they haven't needed it so far.

• 34:46Speaker 01

  American industry is so washed. We don't even manufacture consent here anymore.

• 34:50Liam McAnderson?

  Goddamn right.

• 34:52Justin Roczniak?

  Imported from China. Yeah.

• 34:56Justin Roczniak?

  Well, another, and perhaps the most important is.

• 35:02Justin Roczniak?

  Something's happening at Amtrak and we don't know what it is.

• 35:07November Kelly?

  Every Trump cabinet secretary is gonna fuck up something, you know?

• 35:11Justin Roczniak?

  Yes.

• 35:11Speaker 04

  I haven't seen what this is yet, so I'm actually mortified for the next sentence.

• 35:15Speaker 01

  Why is there a Genesis hauling two Talgo train sets?

• 35:19Justin Roczniak?

  Oh, these are going to our friend Scooter to be scrapped.

• 35:23Speaker 01

  God damn it.

• 35:25Justin Roczniak?

  I don't know who put this image in here, but.

• 35:27November Kelly?

  I did, I did. I, I, this was the like first result for Amtrak restructuring and I guess they're gonna restructure those Talgos into scrap?

• 35:35Justin Roczniak?

  Yes.

• 35:37November Kelly?

  Yeah, I've often thought about Amtrak. Like, what if it was like, British?

• 35:41Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, so there is something coming down the pipeline right now where Sean Duffy, the Secretary of Transportation, wants to restructure Amtrak so that it's a holding company. And then below that holding company is going to be a company that does train operations, a company that owns and maintains the trains, you know, a rolling stock operator, whatever Rosco stands for. And then a separate company that owns and maintains the infrastructure.

• 36:16November Kelly?

  We have invented Great British Railways, brackets, American.

• 36:21Justin Roczniak?

  Yes. Yes, they're doing British Rail privatization to Amtrak.

• 36:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 36:26Justin Roczniak?

  Except without the privatization part.

• 36:27Speaker 01

  Because they barely even own anything.

• 36:29Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 36:30Speaker 04

  God. This is, they did basically this to Greyhound like three years ago in terms of structuring. And all it led to was selling off everything that had any value to it.

• 36:40Speaker 01

  Don't you mean Flixbus?

• 36:41Speaker 04

  I do, I do mean.

• 36:42Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 36:43November Kelly?

  Flixbus?

• 36:43Speaker 04

  Yeah, I was gonna say, I can't muster the German accent right now.

• 36:46November Kelly?

  It's with the bus. It's, yeah, Flixbus.

• 36:49Speaker 04

  The Flixbus.

• 36:50November Kelly?

  Flixbus.

• 36:50Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, this is, this is a little bit confusing because they're doing like a privatization scheme, but keeping the whole thing owned by the government. So it's just like, I don't know, there's going to be like internal rents being paid from Amtrak to Amtrak. You know, it's.

• 37:05November Kelly?

  Amtrak's always been very weird about that. But again, this feels so spiritually British. You're doing like PFI to yourself.

• 37:11Justin Roczniak?

  There's some theories out there that like, okay, this is a way to do backdoor privatization. We're going to be able to auction off certain services to, you know, different, different bidders. There's theories that, you know, this is.

• 37:24Speaker 01

  This is America. We can just do front door privatization.

• 37:27Speaker 04

  Yeah, these guys are smart enough to plot something like that.

• 37:30Liam McAnderson?

  Get it done.

• 37:31Justin Roczniak?

  My personal theories.

• 37:33Liam McAnderson?

  Don't literally get it done, but like, come on, you idiots.

• 37:36Justin Roczniak?

  They're doing this as an accounting gimmick so Trump can say, look, I made Amtrak profitable.

• 37:40Liam McAnderson?

  No, you didn't.

• 37:41Speaker 04

  That one I could believe.

• 37:43Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah, I'll buy that.

• 37:44Speaker 04

  If you told me that, that's the only motivation that makes sense. I hadn't thought about it like that.

• 37:49Justin Roczniak?

  It's very, it's very confusing. You know, I don't know what's going on because it seems very obvious from the information that's come out. It's they don't know what's going on either. They don't know what they're doing. They're just doing it.

• 38:01Liam McAnderson?

  That's everything these days. Real world, Boston doesn't know how to run a railroad. Are you sure?

• 38:06Speaker 01

  I'm setting a record and I'm going to be right back before the actual episode has begun. I apologize.

• 38:11Liam McAnderson?

  Oh, my God. That's fine. No, that's fine.

• 38:15Justin Roczniak?

  This is sort of, uh, what you would call it, um, bringing the M tracks organization sort of into line with how like European state railways operate with open access and all that sort of stuff. But, but also like the, the situation is so different. I don't understand how you get a private operator onto M track because all the tracks are owned by the freight railroads, you know, and they're gonna, you know, what happens when Deutsche Bahn or, you know, Trent Italia or something comes in is like, well, we'd like to run a service that goes over CSX or Union Pacific. They're just gonna say, fuck you, fucking gay Europeans.

• 38:59November Kelly?

  Yeah, rolling my sort of bright green homosexual European Flix train up to like the CSX offices and being like, hello, you know, we would, we would like to sort of run some passengers.

• 39:13Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. And they just immediately smash it with hammers.

• 39:16Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah. You could go full hedge file on it.

• 39:18Justin Roczniak?

  You know, I don't.

• 39:19Liam McAnderson?

  This is so baffling, dude, just because like, I, I don't understand the, the, like, I, like what my I would say, like, just front door private or Victoria, just front door privatize it. They don't actually literally do it, but like, why are we doing the scheme? Like you Nazis can't do fucking anything right.

• 39:36Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, I don't, I don't understand the scheme at all. I mean, the, the only thing that like makes sense is like, either it's an accounting gimmick that involves a really stupid restructuring, which also adds a bunch of adversarial relationships where, I mean, okay, let's, let's get real, the track department, the operating department and the rolling stock department all hate each other. But now we're formalizing those relationships.

• 40:01Speaker 04

  Here's the thing, like Donald Trump is our most culturally culturally European president. So like I can see some of the motivations on his part, but I don't know about the secretary.

• 40:13Speaker 04

  Sean Duffy, that's his name.

• 40:14Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, Sean Duffy, the log rolling guy.

• 40:18Speaker 04

  I only I only ever see his name whenever he gets mad about Gateway Tunnel, which is like every week now, to be fair.

• 40:24Justin Roczniak?

  This is true. But yeah, I don't know what's going on. They don't know what's going on. Probably by the time this episode comes out, we'll know what's going on and

• 40:32Speaker 04

  Oh, no.

• 40:33Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, maybe not, though. Yeah. Who knows?

• 40:37Speaker 04

  Delightful.

• 40:38Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. So that was goddamn news.

• 40:43November Kelly?

  That was that was a lean news cycle, you know?

• 40:46Justin Roczniak?

  Oh, yeah.

• 40:47Speaker 01

  All right. Well, I'm gonna I'm gonna walk us through the the history of.

• 40:51November Kelly?

  Jet the gay 90s way?

• 40:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 40:53November Kelly?

  I'm sorry. I felt like I was having a stroke for a second there. I couldn't make sense of that. I.

• 40:59Speaker 01

  You know, the gay 1890s.

• 41:01Justin Roczniak?

  The 1890s, yeah.

• 41:03November Kelly?

  Okay, sure. When I when I associate a decade with powered flight, it's the 1890s.

• 41:08Justin Roczniak?

  Yes.

• 41:09Speaker 04

  Yeah, balloons that are going one way, buddy.

• 41:13Speaker 01

  Well, you know, the gold rush, et cetera, even though that took place in the Yukon and not in Alaska, they're next door. So they're it's the same thing. We have a little museum for it in downtown Seattle.

• 41:23Justin Roczniak?

  Boes as fast as a gold dredge, which is one of the stupidest machines I can think of.

• 41:28Speaker 04

  Golden Nugget Jets. Okay, all right.

• 41:31November Kelly?

  Undulled me. What is a gold? Is a gold dredge? Or is it just like panning for gold on a big mechanized scale?

• 41:36Justin Roczniak?

  No, no, it's weirder than that. So the way a gold dredge works is you have all these sort of like permafrost sort of swampy areas of Alaska. They're very, very flat. They're very, very

• 41:48November Kelly?

  Muskog.

• 41:48Justin Roczniak?

  Right? Yeah, yeah, that horrible stuff. And the gold dredge, essentially, it's a boat. It's a dredge that digs a lake in front of it and then fills it in behind it. And then there's onboard equipment to, you know, pan the gold out.

• 42:04November Kelly?

  Oh, my God. That rules. That's so stupid.

• 42:07Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 42:08November Kelly?

  I'm a huge fan of this immediately.

• 42:10Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, it's cool.

• 42:13Speaker 01

  So this is here because to understand the 2012 Denzel Washington movie Flight, first we must ask, what is Alaska Airlines? It's it's America's weirdest main carrier. Would you agree with that characterization, Maya?

• 42:27Speaker 04

  Yeah, it sounds about right. I mean, they were it was a regional carrier up until like recently ish, so.

• 42:33Speaker 01

  Yeah. In in 1932, a man named Linus Mac McGee, who a guy who moved to Alaska in the late 20s as a stowaway.

• 42:44Speaker 04

  Wow.

• 42:45Speaker 01

  Founded his own aviation company, McGee Airways, which is a, you know,

• 42:50November Kelly?

  It should still be called that. I think it should be like very legal to change your name for a person, illegal for a business.

• 42:56Liam McAnderson?

  They call me Airways McGee.

• 43:01Speaker 01

  It was based out of Anchorage and they had a fleet that consisted of initially a single three-seat Stinson airplane.

• 43:08November Kelly?

  This is a lot like the Mark Wahlberg movie Flight Race.

• 43:14Speaker 01

  The the service originally was just paid pilots on a commission basis to work as more or less a charter company. They flew hunters and fishermen and like gold miners and such out to the middle of nowhere. And they also were commissioned to do air ambulance services for native Alaskans who lived in reservations who didn't have access to hospitals. They're in the summers, they would put pontoons on the airplane so they could land on lakes and rivers. And in the winter, they just switched out the pontoons for skis. So they didn't have any runways or any like formal infrastructure whatsoever.

• 43:48November Kelly?

  Nice.

• 43:49Speaker 01

  Bush pilots are insane. I dated somebody who used to do exactly this, flying medevac flights like that.

• 43:56November Kelly?

  Yeah, I was I was gonna say you you put in the notes, Bush pilots are insane. I should know. And I'm like, that's a considerably darker bit than I think most people realize, like.

• 44:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, I mean, I when I lived in rural Idaho, it was for a pilot who flew the, you know, single pilot air ambulance services and did a lot of bush flying and it was cool, but also you have to have a specific kind of deathlust to to do that job.

• 44:26Liam McAnderson?

  When I when I go, I have a male stripper, I I'm gonna botch this joke, but they call me the Bush pilot.

• 44:37Liam McAnderson?

  Thank you.

• 44:40Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah, yeah, okay.

• 44:42November Kelly?

  I'm gonna be right back because I'm gonna get on a plane. I'm gonna come to your house and then I'm gonna like unplug cables from your computer at random. I will be right back.

• 44:50Liam McAnderson?

  I have redundancy.

• 44:55Speaker 04

  And his hard drives are probably secure.

• 44:57Liam McAnderson?

  Uh, there are, there is no spinning rust in here, Maya. It's all SSDs.

• 45:01Speaker 04

  I, I'm just, I'm glad you made those purchases before this year.

• 45:05Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah, I was talking to a coworker, Vine, who has recently got into hosting a media server.

• 45:11Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah, no.

• 45:12Liam McAnderson?

  Gave him a torrent leech invite. And he was like, hey, thanks again. Like, any tips on how to set it up? And he's just like, do you like, like coming to me? Because he's a social worker, so we have no money between us. And he's just like, do you know, like, how much I paid for a hard drive? That's now like $800. I was like, yeah, you, you caught the last, the last chopper out of Nam, dude.

• 45:32Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 45:34Speaker 04

  I, I see my, my media server is all SSDs, but it's entirely thanks to, I have a very nice girlfriend who has a stack of SSDs that she doesn't know what to do with, so I just kind of steal them as I need them.

• 45:44Liam McAnderson?

  Are we talking, how, how many terabytes you have on this?

• 45:47Speaker 04

  Two, two terabytes each. I have two SSDs in the flex server.

• 45:51Liam McAnderson?

  Oh, okay. We're on different orders of magnitude.

• 45:54Speaker 04

  Oh, I don't do, I don't run them. I do not run a mass thing. I don't have the internet bandwidth.

• 45:58Liam McAnderson?

  Okay, so, okay, so we're on two different, two different levels.

• 46:00Speaker 04

  If I needed 16 terabyte drives right now, I would myself.

• 46:04Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah, yeah, Maya, Maya, I thought I had caught the last chopper out of Nam. And then my, and then I just downloaded 46 seasons of Saturday Night Live, which was a two and a half terabyte torrent, because I'm gonna get that ratio if it kills me. And, uh, and I, I, I love you 100 terabyte media server.

• 46:19November Kelly?

  All right, the beer has hit my hand like Mjolnir. Uh, how, how are we doing?

• 46:25Speaker 04

  Do you have a flex server?

• 46:27Justin Roczniak?

  Hey, you got any hard drives?

• 46:30Liam McAnderson?

  Ross needs. The more than Nova does.

• 46:32November Kelly?

  I have a lot of loose hard drives. No, I, I, I don't have a Plex server.

• 46:36Liam McAnderson?

  Do not kick that computer. Do not kick it.

• 46:39November Kelly?

  Ah, ah, no, I, I, I hate you too, buddy. No, I, I, I don't personally have a Plex server, but I'm in a Polycure, which means I have access to like, at this point, 20?

• 46:52Liam McAnderson?

  Okay.

• 46:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 46:53Liam McAnderson?

  All right. So we redundant, Roz, remind me to A, bring you a hard drive and B, uh, uh, which is.

• 46:59November Kelly?

  No, fuck, you give me access to your Plex server as well.

• 47:01Liam McAnderson?

  Uh, I thought you had it. Uh, yeah, I'll do that tonight.

• 47:06November Kelly?

  But you probably gave it to me and then I forgot because I have ADHD.

• 47:09Liam McAnderson?

  I'll just drop a, an invite, like a general invite, like in the Discord. That's fine.

• 47:12November Kelly?

  Sick.

• 47:13Justin Roczniak?

  All right. Good idea.

• 47:14Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah. Uh, cause Roz, I need you to set it up too, cause I got Freakazoid back on there for you.

• 47:19November Kelly?

  Ooh.

• 47:19Speaker 01

  Oh, fuck.

• 47:20Liam McAnderson?

  All right. Back to your regularly scheduled non Plex server program.

• 47:23Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 47:23Liam McAnderson?

  No, I will not use Jellyfin. No, I will not use Jellyfin. I paid for Plex past forever. Leave me alone.

• 47:32Speaker 01

  I don't, yes. Uh huh. I, I have no idea. I don't touch computers. I don't like them. I don't.

• 47:38Liam McAnderson?

  You have, you have a CS degree.

• 47:41Speaker 01

  I know. And that's why I know well enough to stay the fuck away from it.

• 47:44November Kelly?

  I have a political science degree and know not to touch anything in real world American politics. I have a criminology degree. I've never done any crimes.

• 47:52Liam McAnderson?

  Roz?

• 47:53Justin Roczniak?

  I touch bridges frequently.

• 47:59Speaker 01

  I was just gonna say, uh, it's really funny that the FAA makes you have a clean bill of mental health to fly an airplane. And everybody who's ever flown Bush, uh, backcountry piloting is suicidal to like the closest you can get without just opening up.

• 48:15Liam McAnderson?

  I mean, like pilots. You have to be, right? Yeah.

• 48:19Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 48:20November Kelly?

  Pilots, pilots' attitude to mental health, I assume, mirrors their attitude to physical health, which I assume mirrors for all mankind, Ed Baldwin, season one through like five. Uh, of just like, I'm not gonna tell a flight surgeon shit. I will tell a flight surgeon less than a police detective.

• 48:36Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 48:37Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 48:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 48:38Speaker 04

  Commercial aviation had to pretend to care about pilots' mental health after the two times in the 2010s that pilots killed a bunch of other people as well as themselves. But.

• 48:50Speaker 01

  You're flying singles, you're flying single pilot.

• 48:52Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah. Nobody ever gave a shit about that.

• 48:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 48:55Speaker 04

  But nobody gives a shit about it for commercial pilots either. So, you know, it's kind of a, it's only really regulated because the FAA pretends it is.

• 49:00Speaker 01

  Yeah. Don't worry, Sean Duffy's on it. Anyway, next slide, please. In, in 1932, in Anchorage, Alaska, rival airline Star Air Services founded. There are now three airlines in Anchorage, Alaska. You might say, that doesn't sound so bad. It's, you know, pre, it's pre-war. There's like, it's all like tiny little planes.

• 49:22November Kelly?

  Yeah, and like Alaska's like, you know, you don't have good like ship traffic most of the year, you know, like.

• 49:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, you know, it's snowy.

• 49:29Speaker 04

  You gotta fly shit out. Highway is, is, I assume, not even a twinkle in Ross's eye yet.

• 49:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, you know, but as a reminder, during the 1930 census of Anchorage, they found 2,277 people there. So, we have an airline for every 800 people, you know, settlers living in Anchorage.

• 49:48November Kelly?

  The key words there are, "they found." The guy was a stowaway. Who knows who else is stowing away in Alaska at this point?

• 49:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, and then the depression happened, so they could not sustain the demand for three airlines for a town of fewer than, that's smaller than the town in Idaho I used to live in. It only had one charter service, and even then, just barely.

• 50:06Speaker 04

  It's smaller than where I live currently.

• 50:08Speaker 01

  So, our, our hero McGee sells McGee Airways to Star Air Service in 1934 on the condition that if they don't pay him back in time, he could come back to manage the airline himself. Because I guess he just loved doing that shit. They failed to pay him back basically immediately. And so by 1936, he is running the airline again.

• 50:30November Kelly?

  2:36 a.m., back for more airline.

• 50:34Speaker 01

  I tried to figure out how he did this, but apparently by like 1937 or eight, he was making a profit of $190,000 a year, which is like four and a half million dollars today. There weren't 3,000 people in Anchorage by the end of the 30s. How was he doing this?

• 50:52November Kelly?

  If I've learned anything about Alaska in my time on Earth, it's that nothing there makes sense, right? There is a decent chance that he convinced every person in Anchorage to like nominally buy a million bottles of whiskey a year by grabbing one of them as an example, freezing their hand to the side of a moose and calling that Alaska law.

• 51:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's honestly, that seems reasonable. I don't know. It just was crazy to me. Uh, next slide, please.

• 51:24Justin Roczniak?

  Yes.

• 51:26Speaker 01

  In 1937, McGee sells his company again to an old pilot friend of his, who then merges it with even more Alaskan air carriers. And at this point, they finally start scheduling service. They are no longer.

• 51:38November Kelly?

  It's like slowly evolving to become a crab, you know?

• 51:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 51:44November Kelly?

  And this is the thing, like Alaskans need, um, like planes to not just fly, you know, the sort of like obligatory million bottles of whiskey and but also to like fly out to the middle of nowhere to hunt things, to, uh, fly out to the middle of nowhere to do serial killings, uh, to fly out to the middle of nowhere to do the plus of the Mark Wahlberg vehicle Flight Risk.

• 52:06Justin Roczniak?

  To fly out to the middle of nowhere and get eaten by a bear.

• 52:10November Kelly?

  Yeah, absolutely.

• 52:11Speaker 04

  That happened to the congressman once quite famously.

• 52:14Speaker 01

  Well, in any case, they start scheduling actual flights.

• 52:18November Kelly?

  Sorry, respectful pause for the bear devoured congressman.

• 52:24Justin Roczniak?

  It could happen to any of us.

• 52:25November Kelly?

  At any time.

• 52:27Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 52:27Speaker 01

  By 1943, they have acquired their first twin-engine airplane. They go through three rounds of name changes over the course of the Second World War, making them potentially honorary transgender.

• 52:40Speaker 04

  God damn it.

• 52:43Speaker 04

  The problem with the problem with this being a majority transgender podcast is that every joke I have queued up is gonna be going to be stolen from me by the other two transgender women.

• 52:52Speaker 01

  This is the thing with also all of us being fans of Nova's podcasts for a very long time is that we've all converged crab-like on the same sense of humor as well.

• 53:01November Kelly?

  That was that was a bit on the recording of BGA Solve Crimes we did today where all three of us reached for the same self-deprecating joke. So yeah, no, I just I've created my own prison here. I mean, the thing is, I the Second World War, really the making of Alaska, because the federal government went went, wait, we've got a what?

• 53:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 53:23November Kelly?

  And where? Sorry? What? I mean, I guess it's kind of next to Japan, relatively speaking, and Russia. Why don't we just like throw some money at it, you know?

• 53:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. Well, then, you know, they they needed supplies and such. So, you know, the World War Two was actually great for Alaska Airlines. In 1944, they changed name to Alaska Airlines, which they stay as for a while. They are Alaska Airlines now. And they use all of their money from the war to expand very aggressively. They buy more airplanes, including this DC-3 pictured here.

• 53:54November Kelly?

  That is gorgeous. I I I

• 53:56Speaker 01

  Think it's beautiful.

• 53:57November Kelly?

  I reached to call it a Dakota. But yeah, it is. It is gorgeous.

• 54:01Speaker 01

  I I I have seen a couple of these in person, and it makes you realize why people get so romantic about early air travel. Because like, I know that the safety record was absolutely terrible and, you know, a seat on a plane costs $20,000 or whatever. But that's a gorgeous coffin right there.

• 54:19November Kelly?

  I am, yeah, my least my least respectful joke. World War Two paratroopers gay as hell for jumping out of a plane this beautiful.

• 54:28Speaker 01

  I mean, like, I think I, you know, my most my most my most problematic belief is that I could have been a really good, like, golden jet age flight attendant. Because they would have been like, wow, look at that tall Greek woman.

• 54:43Speaker 01

  No more thoughts. I could have rocked the miniskirt really well. Anyway.

• 54:48November Kelly?

  In in in the age of like really heavily like national-based carriers, we need a like trans 1960s airline.

• 54:57November Kelly?

  That, okay, that, there's, there's your next photo book concept.

• 55:00Justin Roczniak?

  Oh, yeah. I mean, you just bring back TWA.

• 55:04November Kelly?

  Oh, yeah.

• 55:06Liam McAnderson?

  God fucking damn it.

• 55:07Speaker 04

  That's, that's also a joke I wrote for later in this podcast, unfortunately.

• 55:11November Kelly?

  Damn it.

• 55:15Speaker 01

  So after World War II, actually, they, they flew humanitarian aid missions for the Berlin airlift and Operation Magic Carpet.

• 55:23November Kelly?

  Just, you, you are about to receive a sort of like sharp blow to the head from the rest of the century as you starving German child are like struck and killed by a crate of pineapples kicked out the back of an Alaskan Dakota.

• 55:39Speaker 04

  It's to teach Germans about Alaska.

• 55:42November Kelly?

  Oh, they're gonna learn.

• 55:42Speaker 04

  No.

• 55:43Speaker 01

  They, they learned about Texas and got really into it. So I assume they'd like Alaska.

• 55:47November Kelly?

  Yeah. And then, and then we got, you know, Hitler, who was really into his cowboy novel. So God only knows what this is gonna ring. Wrought. I, I was gonna go, what this will present, but like future tense of wrought, I guess. And I couldn't think of it. So.

• 56:01Speaker 01

  Yeah. What's the AFD's opinion about Alaska?

• 56:04November Kelly?

  Um, weirdly expansionist.

• 56:09Speaker 01

  Yeah. Anyway, so they, by 1949, Alaska is the largest charter airline in the world. And then the feds shut them down because they've had too many safety violations.

• 56:17Speaker 04

  Hell, yeah.

• 56:19Speaker 04

  As you do.

• 56:20Speaker 01

  They opened back up after like, we promised we'll stop violating laws. Uh, and by 1951, the Civil Aeronautics Board, which at this, you know, in the post-war era, was kind of like the federal agency that was combination, uh, FAA and competition regulation because airlines.

• 56:40November Kelly?

  We, we talked about their role in sort of regulating airline sandwiches at one point on this podcast.

• 56:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 56:45November Kelly?

  Fuckers.

• 56:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, they, they, uh, they basically dictated, you know, where you could fly and, you know, what kind of, uh, schedules you could operate on. They would even, they regulated mergers, all that kind of thing. But, uh, they, the CAB approved scheduled flights to Seattle and Portland. Um, and that was a major turning point for them because there are actually people in Seattle and Portland. Next slide, please. This is just one of the prettiest airplanes I've ever seen in my life.

• 57:12Justin Roczniak?

  Oh, yeah.

• 57:13Speaker 01

  This, this whole, this whole intro section was more or less like, yeah, this is an excuse to put pretty pictures of planes in the, in the slideshow. Um, in the 1950s, Alaska buys their first pressurized plane, a DC-6, so they could actually fly over weather instead of through it, because again, we're in the early jet age and this is a novelty. They also aboard the DC-6, uh, offer the Golden Nugget service that, um, Liam had seen earlier, where the planes feature a honky-tonk saloon with a piano aboard.

• 57:44Liam McAnderson?

  That is so fucking cool. Do you have any photos of that?

• 57:48Speaker 01

  Uh, we'll get there. Yeah.

• 57:49Justin Roczniak?

  You're like a nervous there. Was there gambling?

• 57:53Liam McAnderson?

  I, you know, yes, there should have been.

• 57:56November Kelly?

  I just love the idea of like, you're a nervous flyer, you're sweating, you're having PTSD to like the Battle of the Coral Sea or some shit and the fucking honky-tonk piano stuff.

• 58:08Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah, just some guy absolutely ripping a nice, yeah.

• 58:12November Kelly?

  You're having flashbacks to your, your time backseating in like a Corsair. Does the Corsair even have a backseat? Whatever. Either way.

• 58:20Justin Roczniak?

  No one has anxiety because they're all smoking.

• 58:23Speaker 04

  Oh.

• 58:25Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 58:26Speaker 04

  Fuck. Yeah, you're so right.

• 58:28Justin Roczniak?

  This problem had been solved. That was why the planes could fly through the weather, because no one cared about turbulence.

• 58:36November Kelly?

  Does smoking make you a better pilot?

• 58:37Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 58:38Justin Roczniak?

  Almost certainly.

• 58:39Speaker 01

  Smoking unfortunately does make you better at everything.

• 58:42Speaker 04

  Smoking makes you such a better pilot that China did not ban smoking on flight decks until 2019.

• 58:49Justin Roczniak?

  That was another thing about the NS Savannah was all of the ashtrays.

• 58:56Justin Roczniak?

  And you, you would think it was, it, it sounded like a bit we would do, the places there were ashtrays. Reactor control room, full of them. Engine room, full of them. Like, I don't, I, I didn't see any in the reactor itself, but I wasn't looking hard enough at that point. You know, uh, but it must've been half a dozen on the bridge. Yeah, no, it was, you, you, we used to have freedom.

• 59:24November Kelly?

  And we can date this, China used to have freedom until 2019.

• 59:28Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, this is where it's gonna go downhill.

• 59:31November Kelly?

  It's like, there are, there are a few things that make me not a kind of campist, you know, that like, obviously I believe in kind of like self determination for anyone, and that therefore includes Taiwan. Obviously, I'm not thrilled about some of the LGBT repression. You know, the forced labor and Xinjiang and Tibet is obviously terrible. And most of all, stopping pilots from smoking, as is their sort of god given birthright, you know?

• 59:55Liam McAnderson?

  Can I introduce you to the concept of buy snus.com?

• 59:59November Kelly?

  I don't, Chinese pilot snooze?

• 1:00:02Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 1:00:04Liam McAnderson?

  What we do is, what we do is we take west coast turnarounds, right, trucker pills, we grind that up, right? And then we, we put that in some fermenting tobacco, right? We put it in your mouth, and then you're having a bad time.

• 1:00:15November Kelly?

  China, after China wins the war and occupies America, because America fired all of its missiles at Iran for no reason. We will make good money under the occupation authorities, selling their pilot snooze.

• 1:00:28Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. Over there, they got, they got zins now, but it's with an X instead of a Z.

• 1:00:36Speaker 04

  I, I, I will say, I did look into this, and they did, it was banned in January 2019. But they actually had built in a grace period, but pilots got extremely mad about it and started flying planes rather dangerously, because they were suffering from nicotine withdrawal.

• 1:00:54November Kelly?

  Have you seen the packaging on Chinese cigarettes? Smoking one of those in the fucking sky?

• 1:01:00Speaker 01

  They're flavored ones there, too.

• 1:01:03November Kelly?

  They're like neon blue cigarette pack with the like, you know, gigantic golden horse on it, and, and you're just like in the sky lighting one of those, oh my god.

• 1:01:13Liam McAnderson?

  My favorite thing is that where I work, we have a sizable Albanian population that comes into my center. And they'll run my, uh, my coworkers, uh, what I assume to be bootleg Albanian cigarettes.

• 1:01:27Liam McAnderson?

  Uh, and that is those, those smell, oh.

• 1:01:33November Kelly?

  Toast or respect to the nation of Albania.

• 1:01:35Justin Roczniak?

  All the stuff on Twitter going viral about Chinese technology, you know, maglevs and stuff like that. It's like, no, let's talk about their cigarette technology.

• 1:01:44Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:44November Kelly?

  Yo, for real.

• 1:01:45Liam McAnderson?

  Nine years ahead of us.

• 1:01:46Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:47Speaker 04

  Back in the day, you used to be able to buy for a non-US cigarettes from eBay as long as they were classified as like collectibles.

• 1:01:54Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah, you used to do that with booze too.

• 1:01:55November Kelly?

  I'm collecting all the smoke in my fucking lungs.

• 1:01:59Speaker 04

  You could do that with Chinese cigarettes and you could do it with North Korean market cigarettes through the imported through the Chinese gray market. And I'm only, I'm only mad that they stopped before I started smoking.

• 1:02:11Justin Roczniak?

  China is going to invent the cigarette that's good for you.

• 1:02:15Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah, I hope so.

• 1:02:16Speaker 04

  Chairman Xi, please, please liberate my people.

• 1:02:19Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, and then Cuba will invent the cigar that's good for you.

• 1:02:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, they're called cigars.

• 1:02:25Speaker 04

  I was gonna say.

• 1:02:28Speaker 04

  Hey, based on Castro's survival rate, that's just the cigar.

• 1:02:31Justin Roczniak?

  Actually, true, yeah.

• 1:02:32Speaker 01

  Anyway, uh, the airplane, this, this is their first jet. This is Alaska Airlines' first jet, a Convair 880. Presumably they were blasting cigs while they were flying this thing because it looks cool as hell.

• 1:02:45Speaker 04

  The, the smoke trail implies that the plane is also blasting cigs importantly.

• 1:02:49Speaker 01

  At this point in Alaska's history, they start to get weird. Stewardesses start dressing in themed outfits, usually paired with like the gold rush or something like that. Uh, that billboard from earlier in the episode was genuinely a flight attendant outfit. That was their gay nineties fly the golden nugget theme.

• 1:03:06November Kelly?

  Getting served drinks and like American cigarettes, brackets, not Chinese yet, from a woman in a pioneer skirt and a fringed leather jacket.

• 1:03:16Liam McAnderson?

  I have feelings about this lady.

• 1:03:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, see, I'm telling you, I could have killed in this era.

• 1:03:22Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah, I'm gonna, uh, I'm gonna hang up. Examine that. I will see y'all later.

• 1:03:31Speaker 01

  Skill issue. I would be totally into that. I'll fully admit that. That sounds awesome. Also, they began to deliver their safety presentations in rhymes.

• 1:03:41Liam McAnderson?

  No, they don't.

• 1:03:41Speaker 01

  I did actually find one.

• 1:03:43November Kelly?

  This is too fucking hokey. I'm sorry. I'm trying to like shoot the piano player out of the pressurized door, you know?

• 1:03:49Speaker 01

  A life vest neat is beneath each seat. They're stored so we won't lose them. Now fix your eyes on the stewardies. They'll show you how to use them.

• 1:03:58Liam McAnderson?

  Love you on the fucking plane.

• 1:04:00November Kelly?

  Authentic country gibberish.

• 1:04:04Justin Roczniak?

  That's right, folks. Punch, punch brothers, punch with care, punch in the presence of the passenger.

• 1:04:13Speaker 01

  Uh, next slide, please.

• 1:04:14November Kelly?

  Do you remember that like couple of years where like every airline safety briefing was done in the style of like Nanette or whatever?

• 1:04:20Speaker 04

  Well, that's they still they still do that in the US because they try to get people to pay attention to them and nobody does now that you can use your phone from gate to gate.

• 1:04:27Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, the the United Airlines like international safety briefing has so much hokey shit in there. You can't fucking tell what the safety stuff is.

• 1:04:37Speaker 04

  The American, the American.

• 1:04:39November Kelly?

  One right now was just an ad. They should scare the shit out of you every time. They should make you watch the first scene of flight.

• 1:04:46Liam McAnderson?

  Lose your spinal column because we'll fucking show you.

• 1:04:48Justin Roczniak?

  We're we're gonna make you watch a mentor pilot episode about the exact aircraft you're in.

• 1:04:55November Kelly?

  1080p mega mix of the one shot in flight with a stewardess like bonks her entire spine off the ceiling of the plane and shatters it. Like, yeah, just run that a bunch of times, then be like, did we get you? Did we get you? Are you paying attention? Where's your where's your fucking life jacket? Where is it? Where is it? How do you inflate it?

• 1:05:13Justin Roczniak?

  Are you gonna bring your belongings with you in the event of an emergency evacuation?

• 1:05:17November Kelly?

  Are you? Are you a piece of shit?

• 1:05:19Justin Roczniak?

  You piece of shit? You want these people around you to die?

• 1:05:23Liam McAnderson?

  What do you mean? Also, although I will say with the barricade. Thing that, cause I live in Philadelphia, so I fly America.

• 1:05:28November Kelly?

  I'm sorry.

• 1:05:29Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah, me too. Uh, is, is the fucking like, oh, no smokeless tobacco in the left. Shut the fuck up. Shut the fuck up.

• 1:05:38November Kelly?

  You're, you're just in there seething with your zen and being like, this would never have happened to me if I was a Chinese pilot.

• 1:05:46Liam McAnderson?

  What harm is it doing? What harm is it doing? What am I doing? I, what? I can't pack my lips like a, like a little chipmunk? Full of dipping tobacco and spitting it on the floor next to me. I thought we were in the saloon time.

• 1:05:57November Kelly?

  Mental pilot episode about an accident where one person died and it was the guy with a lip in. It just like shot back into his esophagus the second they like hit turbulence.

• 1:06:09Liam McAnderson?

  Like making the like dip gone sexy.

• 1:06:12November Kelly?

  It's like, it's like the dip like shoots back in your throat, chokes you. They're like, is there a doctor on board? And nobody wants to do it because they don't want to like fish out your dip. So all of the doctors are like, no, no, my bad. Sorry. I'm not.

• 1:06:25Liam McAnderson?

  You can gut. It's not that big a deal.

• 1:06:28November Kelly?

  Oh, God. In a pressurized environment as well.

• 1:06:34Liam McAnderson?

  A man's got a gut where a man's got a gut.

• 1:06:38November Kelly?

  It's the official, the official motto of the US Marine Corps. Anyone who tells you it's Semper Fidelis is lying.

• 1:06:46Speaker 01

  I, I, this, this is gonna get more interesting.

• 1:06:49November Kelly?

  Generation killed. The motto of the Marine Corps is a man's got a gut where a man's got a gut, but it's in Dominican Spanish.

• 1:06:56Speaker 01

  Next slide, please.

• 1:06:59Liam McAnderson?

  Oh.

• 1:07:00November Kelly?

  Wow.

• 1:07:01Liam McAnderson?

  Salt snail.

• 1:07:03Speaker 01

  In the 1970s, Alaska Airlines becomes the sole charter company that can fly direct to the Soviet Union. They offer flights to Siberia.

• 1:07:14November Kelly?

  With the Samovar.

• 1:07:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. In honor of this, they offer what they were calling the Golden Samovar Service. This is a picture with the, one of the weird, I think it was DC 9, I don't remember which.

• 1:07:29Speaker 04

  7, 707, 727.

• 1:07:31November Kelly?

  All of this airline shit, right? Like, the CAB actually was an example of big governments stifling private innovation, because the second they got out of the airline regulating business, every airline did some shit that was suggested by Don Draper in one of his more like psychological episodes.

• 1:07:47Speaker 01

  This is still pre deregulation. This is like 1970.

• 1:07:52November Kelly?

  They showed this to the, like, Board of Mormons in charge of all air travel, every one of whom believed that, like, a plane is a kind of cursed animal. And when we want to do, like, a big tea urn, and those guys went, "Yeah, sure."

• 1:08:05Speaker 01

  Well, that's the thing, right? They mostly do, like, this kind of, like, weird, cutesy stuff, because it's like, they, they fly to Seattle, and they've lost the Portland flight at this point. And so they're like, "Okay, we'll do something to, like, advertise the fact that we can fly you to Siberia," which I think they flew, like, seven total flights ever to the Soviet Union.

• 1:08:26November Kelly?

  Did you know how heavy a Samovar is?

• 1:08:30Justin Roczniak?

  I like the wallpaper.

• 1:08:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, they would serve you.

• 1:08:31Justin Roczniak?

  Check out the wallpaper.

• 1:08:32November Kelly?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:08:33Speaker 01

  They would serve you cocktails, orders, king crab, fresh salad, veal, and pecan pie, followed up with fresh fruit and cordials, and all of the flight attendants wore Cossack outfits.

• 1:08:47November Kelly?

  Just being, being a man of this generation, realizing you have to theme your sexual harassment of the flight attendant to the fucking hokey outfit, being like, "Oh, fuck, I didn't have a line for if she was wearing a big Cossack hat."

• 1:09:01Justin Roczniak?

  Once, "Hey, how would you like to lick my Cossack? Easy peasy."

• 1:09:05Speaker 01

  Oh, my god.

• 1:09:06November Kelly?

  He's good.

• 1:09:07Justin Roczniak?

  Once they cross the international dateline, though, the service is just straight vodka.

• 1:09:13Speaker 04

  And cigarettes. As it should be on any flight ever.

• 1:09:17November Kelly?

  They unbolt all of the seats, you've just got to squat on your heels.

• 1:09:22Liam McAnderson?

  It's the vomit comet, but involuntarily.

• 1:09:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, they, they, they, notably, this isn't really required to understand, like, the plane crash that the episode is nominally about. I just really wanted to work this in because it's funny as hell.

• 1:09:36November Kelly?

  Yeah, well, well done.

• 1:09:37Speaker 01

  The main thing that you do have to know is that, like, the airline is financially struggling because they can fly, they have a bunch of flights in Alaska, which don't make very much money, and then they fly to Seattle.

• 1:09:45November Kelly?

  Yeah, and plus they did a bunch of CapEx on Samovars.

• 1:09:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, and, and the Civil Aeronautics Board won't let them enter new markets, uh, until, uh, next slide, please. Again, just continuing the theme of showing off really gorgeous airlines.

• 1:09:59Justin Roczniak?

  They put the guy on the tail.

• 1:10:00Speaker 04

  The guy, the guy is here, yes.

• 1:10:02November Kelly?

  Thumbs down.

• 1:10:03Speaker 01

  No, it's a guy plus Helvetica. What else do you want?

• 1:10:07Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, that's very nice.

• 1:10:08November Kelly?

  There's one airline that gets to use Helvetica. It's Swissair. Swissair doesn't even exist anymore.

• 1:10:13Speaker 04

  Well, so what's the Army of Alaska doing it?

• 1:10:16Speaker 01

  Lufthansa still uses Helvetica, don't they?

• 1:10:18Speaker 04

  They fucked up their livery too, so they don't get to use anything.

• 1:10:21Speaker 01

  Oh, goddammit. They, they need, I need that to get on a Lufthansa flight before they stop flying the 747. Because I've never been on one, and if they retire them before I get to fly on one, I'm gonna be really sad.

• 1:10:31Liam McAnderson?

  I know, I didn't just, I know, I didn't just hear you, Justin Robson, talk about how I need to get on a flight to fly the 747. I know, I, man who would not stop complaining about domestic air travel.

• 1:10:40Justin Roczniak?

  Oh, I hate flying. I just want to go on a 747.

• 1:10:43Speaker 04

  Yeah, same, ultimately. See, the thing is, right, the good news is that they're, they're only replacing them once they get the triple seven Xs, so they will have them until the end time.

• 1:10:52November Kelly?

  I've, I've, I've flown on a 747 because I'm old and I remember it as...

• 1:10:57Speaker 04

  You're also European.

• 1:10:58November Kelly?

  And, yeah, it was an Air India flight between London and Newark, I want to say, and, uh, I, yeah, I, I mostly remember it as like a kind of football stadium's, like, size of seats that just went on forever. Um, it, it was very, very confusing. It was like the back rooms.

• 1:11:19Speaker 01

  Well, so in the 70s, they started floating the idea of the Airline Deregulation Act and the abolishment of the Civil Aeronautics Board. And Alaska is one of three airlines out of like the dozens and dozens and dozens operating the American market to actually support this because they did correctly surmise that, hey, we could probably make more money if we were allowed to fly to places other than a bunch of small Alaskan cities and Seattle. So when they finally abolished the CAB in 1978, Alaska begins aggressively expanding. They reopen flights to Portland, then San Francisco, then Burbank, Palm Springs, Nome, which I can't believe they didn't have to begin with because that's in Alaska.

• 1:12:01Speaker 04

  Yeah, that is weird, actually.

• 1:12:02Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, they still kept the dog sled, you know, for tradition.

• 1:12:07November Kelly?

  Nostalgia purposes, sure.

• 1:12:08Speaker 01

  Do they take it that is the same connection or like?

• 1:12:12Justin Roczniak?

  I don't know.

• 1:12:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'm landing in Fairbanks and then I've got to lay over and then I pick up the dog sled.

• 1:12:19November Kelly?

  Yeah, there's a little icon on the planning thing and it just says self-transfer, but there's a dog there.

• 1:12:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, and then they add airports in Idaho, I think Boise, I couldn't figure out exactly which one. It's Idaho, there's only one major airport.

• 1:12:33November Kelly?

  Flying to Nome and then making all of the stewardesses wear puppy girl hoods.

• 1:12:38Speaker 01

  That's, we're saving that for the trans air carrier.

• 1:12:41November Kelly?

  That's true. Yeah, that's a TWA thing.

• 1:12:43Speaker 04

  Well, they don't have to wait for Nome to do that.

• 1:12:45Speaker 01

  What?

• 1:12:46Speaker 04

  They don't have to wait to Nome to switch into the puppy girl hoods.

• 1:12:50Speaker 01

  I suppose. I'm sorry, I'm doing my best to keep up with the humor here, but I am, we are, I'm still trying, I'm trying.

• 1:12:58Speaker 04

  Sorry.

• 1:12:59November Kelly?

  Yeah, we're on slide 11 of 27.

• 1:13:03Speaker 04

  Most of them are mine.

• 1:13:05Speaker 01

  Anyway, they also buy regional carrier Horizon Air. They offer short hop service around the Pacific Northwest. Crucially through this time, as they are expanding aggressively, they went through a machinist strike, which they beat back with scab labor and instituted a very unfair two-tier pay structure to undercut the people they had to hire back when the strike ended. They are bas- Basically, just like, how much can we cut costs to make more money mode? This is relevant later, as you might expect. And yeah, they started offering service to Canada and Mexico. They do really well, for the most part. Like, Alaska profits incredibly well from the Airline Regulation Act. One of the very few airlines to do so. Next slide, please.

• 1:13:49November Kelly?

  Okay, I like this one apart from the guy.

• 1:13:52Speaker 04

  There's nothing, the font is like, they have the font, yeah, but the guy is like 90% of it.

• 1:13:57Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, yeah, I'm always happy. When I was a kid, I was always happy to see the guy at the airport, you know?

• 1:14:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think this is great. Like, I think they should go back to this font, actually. This is a much better font.

• 1:14:08Speaker 04

  When I was a kid, Alaska was one of the airlines that did a deal with Matchbox for the little diecast plane. So I'm very familiar with like every livery they had in like 2005.

• 1:14:20Speaker 01

  In 1990, Alaska starts structuring their new airplane lease deals so they can use preferred stock to finance the planes that they're buying, which are all 737s. Alaska very famously had an all Boeing fleet until they acquired Hawaiian, and now they've got Airbus's. And

• 1:14:38Speaker 04

  Well, they had an all, sorry. Yeah, I was gonna say, they acquired Virgin America and got Airbus's, realized they hated them and sold them within a year. And then bought another airline with Airbus's.

• 1:14:49Speaker 01

  But they're probably keeping them this time because Boeing can't build airplanes anymore.

• 1:14:52Speaker 04

  Correct.

• 1:14:53Speaker 01

  Anyway, so they, they, they, they give the conversion rights to common stock for this financing deal to management employees. So they have a direct motivation to do stock prices. And they also begin stock buybacks in 1990. Shockingly, they post a loss of $121 million in 1992. They blame their expansion for this, but I think I know what I'm going to blame. I'm, I'm blaming this, this lack of profitability and the subsequent fatalities from it solely at the feet of stock buybacks.

• 1:15:26November Kelly?

  Yeah, well, I mean-

• 1:15:27Justin Roczniak?

  Shouldn't have re-legalized those.

• 1:15:29November Kelly?

  What if we, what if we financialized the airline? And then, as the thing continues nose diving, you're like, what if, what if, like, I, I don't know, I don't understand. We cut everything, like, that we're not spending any money on anything. Why are we losing money?

• 1:15:43Speaker 01

  Well, this is kind of like, I mean, I maintain that, like, the, the good timeline that we could have, like, had in America that somehow sort of wasn't as hellishly evil. That died with the Patco strike failing. When Reagan broke the, the airdrop controller strike, that was kind of the end of any chance that America could ever become anything better than what it is. Uh, and like, a lot of this is a very similar kind of story, because like Reagan was, who allowed stock buybacks. And, you know, a lot of the story of the eighties and nineties for Alaska is, they broke strikes very aggressively.

• 1:16:19Speaker 01

  Both with their machinists and with their flight attendants. They do another one in the nineties, uh, as part of their campaign to cut costs as much as possible. They also, crucially, canceled building two planned maintenance facilities. Um, because if you are maintaining an airplane, you can't be flying it. So that costs money. But never maintain, just keep the planes in the air. That's how you make more money.

• 1:16:40Justin Roczniak?

  Just keep the engines turning, nothing bad will happen.

• 1:16:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:16:44November Kelly?

  Like me never shutting down my computer.

• 1:16:47Justin Roczniak?

  Yes.

• 1:16:48Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 1:16:49November Kelly?

  Oh, it's fine.

• 1:16:51Speaker 04

  It, it, it, it isn't, though.

• 1:16:53Speaker 01

  Well, let's see, this is the thing. It's fucked up. Is it like, in the same way that November's computer is still working? Um, Alaska begins to make a ton of money again, uh, through the nineties, after doing a bunch of strike breaking and not building facilities to fix the fucking airplanes. Short term, this is awesome. Um, and at this point-

• 1:17:11Justin Roczniak?

  Engine hasn't been shut off in 500 days.

• 1:17:14Speaker 01

  At this point, I will be, I will be, uh, announcing to my-

• 1:17:17Speaker 04

  Engine hours just have frowdy faces on them?

• 1:17:21Speaker 01

  At this point, I'll be announcing to my co-pilot, Maya, that I am hands off the controls and confirming that she is ready to take the yoke.

• 1:17:27Speaker 04

  Uh, yeah, that's fine. I could be first officer for this at least since I've, I don't know. I don't know. Uh, so in order-

• 1:17:34Justin Roczniak?

  The rest of us are just in the jump seats.

• 1:17:36Speaker 04

  It's a lot of jump seats.

• 1:17:38Speaker 01

  No, it's like one of those old school, uh, plans. They got like five different, they got like the flight engineers also, also up front. We got like nine engines.

• 1:17:44Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, we got radio operator, we got bomb.

• 1:17:46November Kelly?

  You can be in the jump seat. I'm in the like rest cabin for crew, just like snuggling under like 50 blankets. This is great.

• 1:17:54Liam McAnderson?

  Where Roz and I in this scenario?

• 1:17:56November Kelly?

  I don't know. I mean- You're sort of battering feverishly on the like door.

• 1:18:02Liam McAnderson?

  Trying to cram a lip in, trying to cram, trying, trying, trying to figure out how I could dip with a, with a, one of those, uh, oxygen masks.

• 1:18:11November Kelly?

  Stewardess, stewardess, I saw a podcaster with a lip in on the wing.

• 1:18:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, Alaska, they, they made a bunch of money by breaking up, the real crucial part of this, I didn't need to tell you that Linus McGee founded it. I just thought that was funny. I'm sorry. Uh, the real crucial bit that you, you need to know here is that they made a lot of money by not doing maintenance. A thing that has never come back to haunt anyone ever, actually.

• 1:18:43Justin Roczniak?

  That usually works.

• 1:18:45Speaker 04

  This was, this was the style of the time, actually, of eighties and nineties aviation. Uh, this is just one of the many examples of it. It's just one of the more, one of the ones we know a little bit more about ultimately.

• 1:18:54Speaker 01

  Well, yeah, cause it's a Washington flying plane.

• 1:18:57Justin Roczniak?

  Hey, it's cause everyone had to switch from cigarettes to cocaine.

• 1:19:01November Kelly?

  Yeah. And, and like consequently, everything was being run by the like Weyland-Yutani guy from Aliens or like, uh, any of the executives from Robocop or Robocop two.

• 1:19:13Speaker 04

  Okay. So, uh, next slide, I think is where I pick up.

• 1:19:16Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:19:17Justin Roczniak?

  Drop the landing gear. You have five seconds to comply.

• 1:19:24Speaker 04

  The first question we have, we must ask before we get to this specific accident is what are elevators and vertical stabilizers?

• 1:19:31Justin Roczniak?

  Hey, I've seen this diagram before.

• 1:19:33November Kelly?

  Yeah, the wiggly bits that make the plane stay in the thing.

• 1:19:37Speaker 04

  Yeah, that's, that's basically about it. Actually, I'm writing this.

• 1:19:39Speaker 01

  Isn't it a horizontal stabilizer, not a vertical stabilizer?

• 1:19:42Speaker 04

  So the horizontal stabilizer is, unless I got them backwards. Let me make sure I didn't real quick. The horizontal stabilizer, please don't tell me I got this backwards. I did get it backwards. Son of a bitch. The horizontal stabilizer, the vertical stabilizer is the tail.

• 1:19:55November Kelly?

  Just hearing this on an open mic from the cockpit as the plane slowly starts to pitch into a dive.

• 1:20:01Speaker 04

  You'll also notice that the diagram says horizontal stabilizer on it, sorry.

• 1:20:05Justin Roczniak?

  Smashing a chair against the door at this point.

• 1:20:10Speaker 04

  All of the notes say horizontal stabilizers. I just fucked it up the one time and threw myself off. The long and short of it is that they decide what makes the plane go up and down. You trim the horizontal stabilizer, which is the very large part of it at the front. And then there's the elevators at the back of it, which is what you are actually controlling in order to, from the cockpit in order to determine pitch. You know, pull up and the elevator makes the plane go.

• 1:20:34November Kelly?

  I was always confused as a kid playing like Flight Simulator that flaps were something different from this because these are all flaps, right? Like mechanically you are changing some flaps here, but these aren't the flaps that are called flaps.

• 1:20:47Speaker 04

  Yeah, these, these, these Transworld Airlines DC9s visible here. You can see how this one, the one in the front has been trimmed because the paint on the, the, the red paint stripe on the back doesn't line up slightly because it's been pitched downwards. Trimmed downwards, I should say. This is basically just the way you keep the plane stable in flight whenever you're not putting control inputs on a stable and level and pointing in the direction you want it to, at the angle you want it to rather. I've included a very friendly diagram. It's basically you have one end of it attached to a pivot point. And the other end is attached to a jack screw, which is controlled by a motor that makes it go up or down. You can control that either by buttons on the yoke.

• 1:21:30Speaker 04

  They call it a pickle switch because it's underneath where your thumb sits naturally, which made, I had to Google what that meant and which led, made me even more confused because of course that means the thing that you drop bomb with.

• 1:21:41November Kelly?

  Okay, sure. Back when, back when all pilots were like ex-bomber pilots.

• 1:21:47Speaker 04

  Yeah, and actually are.

• 1:21:49Justin Roczniak?

  Or like now.

• 1:21:50Speaker 04

  I was gonna say, our two, the two crew we are, we're dealing with today are in fact ex-bomber pilots.

• 1:21:56Speaker 01

  Wait, why, why do they call, it doesn't help me understand why they call it a pickle switch.

• 1:22:00Speaker 04

  So I actually don't know why it's called, why they called it the pickle switch originally. They just called it that in commercial aviation because it sits under your thumb on the yoke. And that's whenever you were holding the trigger to drop the bomb, you held it under your thumb.

• 1:22:14Speaker 01

  Oh, okay.

• 1:22:15Speaker 04

  They got it from there. I don't know what the relevance of the pickle part is. I just included it because I was also very confused.

• 1:22:20Justin Roczniak?

  Okay. Is the bomb the pickle?

• 1:22:22Speaker 04

  That might actually, that's the, that might be the answer, actually.

• 1:22:25Liam McAnderson?

  When I want to engage in sexual intercourse with my wife, I say drop bomb and I mean my pickle.

• 1:22:31November Kelly?

  Apparently, apparently it derives from a like sort of claim of the accuracy of the Norden bomb site that it could drop a bomb from 20,000 feet into a pickle barrel.

• 1:22:44Speaker 04

  Fascinating.

• 1:22:44November Kelly?

  The Norden, the Norden bomb site is gonna be an episode in its own right.

• 1:22:49Justin Roczniak?

  I have a feeling that didn't work as well as advertised.

• 1:22:53November Kelly?

  No, no, it did not, but I have, I have. I have here in front of me a picture of a bomb going into a pickle barrel trophy awarded to a general for like commanding the strategic bombing campaigns.

• 1:23:08Speaker 04

  Was it full of pickles at least whenever he got it?

• 1:23:10November Kelly?

  God, I hope so.

• 1:23:11Speaker 04

  Yeah, what would be the point otherwise? So.

• 1:23:14Justin Roczniak?

  Dill or kosher?

• 1:23:15Speaker 04

  That's also good. Bread and butter pickles. Uh, you, you control it via either the pickle switch, which is under the, under your thumb on the yoke on Boeing and McDonnell Douglas aircraft, obviously not Airbus aircraft. Um, or you control it with big chunky manual handles down at the center console where the throttle, not center console, that's a car part. Down, down where the throttles are, I guess it's kind of where a center console would be on a plane, but a big.

• 1:23:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, check the owner's manual real quick, would you? I'm not sure, I'm not sure to pitch this plane.

• 1:23:46Speaker 04

  I have the owner's manual for this aircraft and did look at it for the slideshow. Yeah, so on the DC nine and its many children, which includes the MD eighty relevant for today. Uh, this was a design that was built, it was built in, sorry, created in the 1960s. Uh, because, and then McDonnell Douglas just sort of built derivatives of it until, uh, well, until I got bought by Boeing and then Boeing built derivatives of it until 2006. Uh, the horizontal stabilizer is attached to the jack screw by virtue of three nuts. Uh, the two retaining nuts that are at the end of the jack screw and the actual, uh, load bearing acme nut. That actually moves the thing that's responsible for making you go up and down.

• 1:24:26November Kelly?

  I'm so proud of us for making it through load bearing nut with Naria smile.

• 1:24:31Speaker 01

  I was gonna say, I, I, no, I was rotating in my mind, a, a callback to three ball Anderson, but I couldn't figure it out fast enough.

• 1:24:38November Kelly?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:38Liam McAnderson?

  The walks, baby, the walks, baby.

• 1:24:43Justin Roczniak?

  The thing here about the jack screw, of course, is that, you know, this is a sort of very high precision, uh, adjustment, uh, method, you know, it, it, it, because you, you get so little motion from the horizontal stabilizer per rotation of the jack screw. It makes it very good for these, you know, set and forget tiny adjustments like trim. You know, which, uh, ultimately have like very large effects. A very small motion of the horizontal stabilizer is going to have a large effect on the aerodynamics of the aircraft.

• 1:25:19November Kelly?

  And, and you have to most rise this because it's under like a ton of force because you're moving like a heavy mechanical part. That's like under stress from like, you know, air moving over it very quickly.

• 1:25:30Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, it, it just all depends on the conditions of the air you're flying in and the conditions you are flying the plane at. It just all, it, it all depends. There's no constant to it. So it gets adjusted constantly. Just little, little tiny bits, but it gets adjusted and that tends to put stress on things, which we will get to later. For now, next slide.

• 1:25:49November Kelly?

  I, I, I like the guy less in black and white because he looks like Che Guevara.

• 1:25:56Justin Roczniak?

  Is that Inuit Che Guevara?

• 1:26:00Speaker 04

  Uh, here's the exact plane in question. This is N nine, five, three, A S. A McDonnell Douglas MD eighty three first delivered brand new to Alaska Airlines on May 27th, 1992, which was seven years to the day before I was born. Uh, at some point in the mid nineties.

• 1:26:17Liam McAnderson?

  Ninety nine, I'm. I was about to say, you know, I'm also.

• 1:26:25Speaker 04

  Sorry.

• 1:26:26Speaker 01

  You should be.

• 1:26:27Liam McAnderson?

  Get these hoes off my podcast.

• 1:26:28November Kelly?

  I'm just, I'm, I'm just chilling here. Born in 1990, motherfucking one.

• 1:26:33Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah, you and I both, sister. You're not special.

• 1:26:36Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. You ever, you ever, you ever been to a pre nine 11 airport where you just walk around and look at all the planes?

• 1:26:41Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah, I would know what that's like, because she was a funeral.

• 1:26:44Justin Roczniak?

  And you could see the guy on the tail and you're like, I know that guy.

• 1:26:49Speaker 04

  Well, for a while, for a while Pittsburgh had it so you could go through and look at the planes whenever you didn't have a ticket, but and walk around, but you did have to go through TSA, which was.

• 1:26:58Liam McAnderson?

  Philly has that, I believe.

• 1:27:00Speaker 04

  I think a lot of, no C-TAC does, which is interesting because that's a really bad airport.

• 1:27:05Justin Roczniak?

  Uh, Dulles, they let you, they, they used to let you go all the way into like the outfield terminals. Uh, and then, uh, now they don't let you do that anymore.

• 1:27:13November Kelly?

  And British airports, they used to let you just walk into the cockpit and like press stuff, you know?

• 1:27:18Speaker 01

  C-TAC is bad, but they do have woke bathrooms, which I really appreciate.

• 1:27:21Speaker 04

  That much, that much is nice.

• 1:27:22Speaker 01

  They're like the one airport in America that's like, yeah, it turns out that actually men and women's rooms don't really need to exist. We'll just make the doors go to the floor and then you can just do your business. It's great.

• 1:27:33Speaker 04

  It is great. Unfortunately, as I'm only ever, whenever I'm in the airport, half the time I'm flying, I'm, I've just flown into there and the airplane also has woke bathrooms, so I don't need it as much.

• 1:27:45Speaker 04

  But alas, at some point in the mid nineties, Alaska added the sticker, uh, to make the guy say thanks. So I don't know why they did that. I couldn't find any reasoning for it. I just thought it was funny. So I put a picture of it here.

• 1:27:57November Kelly?

  Funny is to imagine that plane crashing, like with the thanks on there.

• 1:28:00Speaker 04

  It, uh, it might have. I don't actually know for sure.

• 1:28:04November Kelly?

  Just like augers in and the last thing to hit dirt is the thanks guy.

• 1:28:11Liam McAnderson?

  That's one piece of the wreckage they recover intact. This is a god going back.

• 1:28:16November Kelly?

  That's all, folks.

• 1:28:18Liam McAnderson?

  What an insulting way to die. My dad had a shirt with the atom bomb on it, uh, that just said, that's all folks, which is apparently an anti-nuclear shirt that he just got.

• 1:28:27November Kelly?

  It sounds like thrown nuclear. He sounds like a sadist now.

• 1:28:32Liam McAnderson?

  He was like, that's all folks. I was like, doesn't that kind of endorse the atom bomb? And he was like, no, no, because it's about total destruction. That's bad. And I was like, are you sure? And he goes, I don't know.

• 1:28:46Speaker 01

  I love the idea of going to one store that's like all atom bomb theme and they they mix up the racks between the pro and anti atom bomb merch. So you walk out like a committed anti nuke activist wearing your like, hell yeah, I thought Hiroshima was great.

• 1:29:01November Kelly?

  This is, this is the world building of the Fallout TV series.

• 1:29:08Liam McAnderson?

  All right, Jeff Bezos, you space pervert, give us 10 billion dollars. They gave, they gave the Kelsey brothers 100 million for what? Give us 100 million. I can, I can find ways to jerk off with 100 million dollars. Fuck off.

• 1:29:23Speaker 04

  This plane was delivered with Alaska's then new livery picture here, but also the new interior, which also looks insane, although in a much different way. I couldn't fit it on the slide, but I put a link in the notes. If you click that.

• 1:29:35November Kelly?

  Oh, yeah. Let me see this shit. Oh, sick. This rules.

• 1:29:37Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:29:38November Kelly?

  It's, it's like woven like blankets and stuff. It's like, um, very like, uh, so like Nathan inspired like embroidery.

• 1:29:47Speaker 04

  Yeah. Apparently this is, you could still find these on some of the very old, uh, 737 700s.

• 1:29:53November Kelly?

  Slaps. This is sick.

• 1:29:54Justin Roczniak?

  Oh, this is, this is very good. Yeah, I like this.

• 1:29:57Speaker 04

  So I couldn't find a higher resolution picture. This is from a magazine scan promoting the new interiors. Good to know they're still out there, I guess.

• 1:30:04Speaker 01

  I'd be so psyched if I got that. The, the modern interior, Alaska interiors are so dripless.

• 1:30:09Speaker 04

  Yes. I've never flown Alaska. I will in a week from tomorrow, but you know.

• 1:30:12Speaker 01

  You've never flown Alaska?

• 1:30:14Speaker 04

  I've lived on the East Coast as of this moment in time.

• 1:30:17Speaker 01

  Dating like six women here.

• 1:30:19Speaker 04

  Yeah, and I've always flown Delta because it's cheaper.

• 1:30:22Speaker 01

  Once you move here, you become an Alaska Airlines like supremacist.

• 1:30:26Speaker 04

  I'm, I, I'd look forward to that, but.

• 1:30:29Speaker 01

  I really, I swore I only flew Delta before I moved to Seattle and I was like, I'll never fly anybody else. And then I flew Alaska a bunch and now I'm like, actually they're pretty great. And I think it's something in the water. Like, it really is kind of concerning because I, I genuinely was pretty militantly pro Delta and now I'm like, well, to be fair, they do also run a hub in a state I'm not allowed to piss in. So that does make me like them less, but you know.

• 1:30:50Speaker 04

  Well, and also they're based out of Atlanta, which is an inherent negative factor for any company. Uh, but to be fair, it's better than Dallas, which is where America's based out of.

• 1:30:59Justin Roczniak?

  I fly United because I want security that if someone misbehaves, they will break that guy's arm.

• 1:31:09Liam McAnderson?

  So I had never flown out of Dallas before. I was in Austin last weekend, last weekend, in Austin, no, two weekends ago, uh, with Jay, Megan and Ren. And, uh, and we flew to Dallas and the rental car situation there is fucking insane where they're just like, all right. So what we're gonna do, right, is put you in like a brown field and 900 miles away from the fucking airport and put you on a shuttle bus and just hope you make your flight. And I was just like, you're fucking international hub dipshits, like fucking get a trip, get a tram, get a fucking tram and put me on it. I want a seat. I want to fucking sit down. I want to stand on a bus. I want to fucking sit down on a train. This is not an unreasonable demand.

• 1:31:49November Kelly?

  You're gonna, you're gonna hate it when you come here. Um, but yeah, I don't know.

• 1:31:53Speaker 01

  I've been to the Glasgow airport and it is nowhere near as hateful as DFW. Dallas is a pit from which no joy has ever escaped.

• 1:32:00November Kelly?

  Consider, consider Glasgow airport, but if it was like 50 degrees hotter.

• 1:32:05Liam McAnderson?

  I wanted to go to the Cowboys lounge so bad and just be like, oh, have you guys been relevant since the mid 90s? Everyone in this bar should commit like mass ritual suicide right now.

• 1:32:13Justin Roczniak?

  I liked the Edinburgh.

• 1:32:15Speaker 01

  The Jerry Jones Town massacre.

• 1:32:21Justin Roczniak?

  I liked the Edinburgh airport because it looked like the Top Gear Technology Center.

• 1:32:27November Kelly?

  Everything in this country is a metal shed now. Yeah.

• 1:32:30Liam McAnderson?

  Yes.

• 1:32:31Speaker 04

  Oh my God. Um, well, we're talking, we're talking about Alaska Airlines, right?

• 1:32:35Justin Roczniak?

  Yes.

• 1:32:37Speaker 04

  Um, see, I flew Delta because they're basic, they're like cheap, basic tickets were good, but now they watered them down and made them useless. So you're probably right about the Alaska thing. Um, in any case, by the day of the accident, this aircraft had accumulated 26,584 flight hours. This will be a relevant number later. You don't, you don't need to remember the exact number of ballpark is fine.

• 1:32:56Liam McAnderson?

  Yes, you do. No, this will be on the test.

• 1:32:58November Kelly?

  No, I barely remember where my life jacket is. I barely remember that.

• 1:33:02Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah. Were you paying attention to the why earlier?

• 1:33:02November Kelly?

  I'm gonna take all my belongings with me. Um.

• 1:33:05Justin Roczniak?

  Don't do that.

• 1:33:07November Kelly?

  Do not do this. I'm gonna do, I'm, I'm sitting in an exit row and I'm not paying attention to how.

• 1:33:11Justin Roczniak?

  I'm not willing to assist.

• 1:33:13Liam McAnderson?

  If you're, if you're going, just staring at the flight attendant, like you can fucking make me, I paid for this ticket.

• 1:33:17November Kelly?

  I'm doing civil disobedience in the exit row.

• 1:33:21Liam McAnderson?

  Uh, if.

• 1:33:22November Kelly?

  You're going back for your possessions. Can you give me my titty dip? I'm in the exit row. I've got my arms folded and I'm saying to the flight attendant that Marcus Aurelius said that things in themselves have no power to demand an opinion from me.

• 1:33:35Speaker 01

  I always assist if I'm in the exit row unless I'm on a Southwest flight and then I assume I'm taking out a large chunk of the Republican donor base. If I impede the emergency evacuation.

• 1:33:47November Kelly?

  Just like, just like hands up, like face guarding. In the exit row.

• 1:33:55November Kelly?

  Hand down, man down, Vicky, we can do this.

• 1:33:58Justin Roczniak?

  Last time I was in the exit row, when the flight attendant asked if I was willing to assist in an emergency, I was like surprisingly emphatically, I would love to.

• 1:34:11November Kelly?

  You're just like flying domestic. You hate it. You're just like praying God you get an emergency so that you have, you can get off the plane faster.

• 1:34:18Justin Roczniak?

  Right. Yeah, exactly. I want to, I want to, I want to throw that door out of, you know, existence.

• 1:34:25Speaker 04

  At what point, while assisting passengers, can you put in, could you, can you put in some lip?

• 1:34:30November Kelly?

  And the thing is, when you're doing that, you also get to start calling yourself a plane crash survivor, like I always say you should do when your plane's delayed. Oh, yes. This is fantastic.

• 1:34:41Speaker 01

  No, I think, I think I told you this week, Nova, I was like, you know, obviously, you know, there are lots of, you know, horrible ways to die young, but I feel like a top pick for me would be as the subject of a well, there's your problem episode.

• 1:34:53November Kelly?

  I, that goes through my head.

• 1:34:55Speaker 01

  Because by cost cutting in a variable, but like.

• 1:34:57November Kelly?

  Anytime I use any method of transport or anything happens is I go, they're gonna have to make an episode about how I die when it happens.

• 1:35:07Speaker 01

  Yeah. If your, if your fellow podcaster falls, pick up their mic and keep charging.

• 1:35:12November Kelly?

  Yeah. And like the, the most recent time I almost died, I almost got hit by a speeding car and it's just like, you would have to do like a, like multiple hour episode about like, I don't know, like car centric cities or something. Yeah.

• 1:35:25Speaker 01

  Oh, I'm so ready.

• 1:35:25November Kelly?

  Like me getting wiped the fuck out by like somebody's SUV.

• 1:35:30Speaker 01

  Okay, well, please don't die.

• 1:35:31Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah, try not to.

• 1:35:32November Kelly?

  I'm doing my best.

• 1:35:33Liam McAnderson?

  I will say that if you die, I am releasing the poison pill episode. No Patreon money for anyone.

• 1:35:38November Kelly?

  That's, that's fine. That's allowed. Yeah.

• 1:35:40Speaker 01

  You're releasing the what episode?

• 1:35:41Liam McAnderson?

  The poison pill episode.

• 1:35:42November Kelly?

  We, we released a kind of mutual, we, we didn't release it. We have a series of kind of like mutual blackmail episodes with all of our most like cancelable opinions.

• 1:35:50Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:35:51November Kelly?

  They're just like ready to go at any time.

• 1:35:54Justin Roczniak?

  The lost cause, Israel is good, actually.

• 1:35:58November Kelly?

  Devon, please bleep all of these, but that also means that you are now in on the blackmail material. So, you know, all the best.

• 1:36:05Speaker 01

  I'd like it noted that I'm a perfect sweetie who only has perfect opinions. Nobody can get mad at me.

• 1:36:09November Kelly?

  No, that is true. That's 100% true.

• 1:36:10Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah, absolutely accurate.

• 1:36:13Speaker 01

  Nobody even got mad at me for the fact that I hate NATO. So like, I feel kind of unkillable after that. I'm not gonna lie.

• 1:36:19Liam McAnderson?

  Oh, Soul was very critical of you on the, well, there's your problem Twitter account today.

• 1:36:23Speaker 01

  Well, they're still on fucking Twitter, so I don't give a shit.

• 1:36:26Liam McAnderson?

  They, they, they, they said you regurgitated US Department of State propaganda. That may have been for me. I don't know.

• 1:36:31Speaker 01

  About what?

• 1:36:32Liam McAnderson?

  I don't know. I think it was probably for me.

• 1:36:34Speaker 01

  What the hell am I regurgitating for the US Department of State?

• 1:36:38November Kelly?

  You regurgitated the State Department propaganda that if you're sitting in an exit row, you have to assist with the evacuation. Like, wake up, sheeple.

• 1:36:47Speaker 01

  Free thinkers.

• 1:36:53November Kelly?

  Marco Rubio thinking, my child will assist with an evacuation when they're seated in an emergency exit row.

• 1:37:01Justin Roczniak?

  This is our ultimate, our ultimate cancelable situation is when we do our pivot to open source intelligence.

• 1:37:10November Kelly?

  Oh, God, yeah.

• 1:37:12Liam McAnderson?

  Everyone dead, frowny face.

• 1:37:14November Kelly?

  I won't assist with the emergency evacuation until I finish this land acknowledgement.

• 1:37:21Justin Roczniak?

  Wouldn't it be a, well, I guess no, you'd be landed. It wouldn't be, I was thinking of sky acknowledgement.

• 1:37:25November Kelly?

  We're, we're about to hit the unceded lands of such and such a people, you know? Guys, our bad.

• 1:37:32Justin Roczniak?

  Problem if there were like a bunch of tribes in like close proximity.

• 1:37:35Liam McAnderson?

  Just trying to, just trying to run it out.

• 1:37:38November Kelly?

  That should be, listen, woke, woke too. I want that as a tab on the like seat back thing is like, Oh, yeah, absolutely. In-flight entertainment, you've got the map and then you've also got the map with the land acknowledgements.

• 1:37:51Speaker 04

  It can say in the top bar that's always there with like the time and the flight time on it, which.

• 1:37:55November Kelly?

  Yeah. Absolutely.

• 1:37:57Liam McAnderson?

  Rotate, yeah.

• 1:38:00Speaker 04

  Yeah, okay, I'm done with that slide. Next slide, please.

• 1:38:05November Kelly?

  Okay, good, good.

• 1:38:12Justin Roczniak?

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

• 1:38:55Justin Roczniak?

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

• 1:39:15Speaker 04

  I, I, I kept to keep track of where I am and I'm doing it with a piece of paper in front of me because of how often we get side checked.

• 1:39:21Liam McAnderson?

  You are a brave soul, Bia.

• 1:39:25Speaker 04

  I try to come prepared to these things, which is weird because it's more prepared than I was for.

• 1:39:29Justin Roczniak?

  Like an exit road.

• 1:39:30Speaker 04

  More prepared than I was for four and a half years of college, but never mind.

• 1:39:33November Kelly?

  Well, because this has consequences.

• 1:39:35Speaker 01

  I feel like, I feel like I, when I first started doing episodes on here, I was like very prepared and I feel like I've gotten less prepared every single time.

• 1:39:43November Kelly?

  This is what we do. We, we drag you down to our level and that's why the people love us.

• 1:39:48Speaker 01

  I'm trying to just like, I try to maximize the number of weird guys I can talk about per episode. That's kind of my goal here.

• 1:39:55Liam McAnderson?

  It's a good bit. Uh, she doesn't want me to stoop to their level. But what she doesn't know is I've been stupid my whole life.

• 1:40:05Speaker 04

  So on January 31st, 2000, Alaska Airlines Flight 261, scheduled to fly from Licenciado Gustavo Diaz Ordaz International Airport in Puerto Vallarta, Jalisco, Mexico.

• 1:40:17Justin Roczniak?

  Is that the next generation or original series?

• 1:40:20November Kelly?

  I I I I note here that Gustavo Diaz Ordaz Bolaños, considered one of the most unpopular and controversial modern Mexican presidents. So flying out of Donald Trump International Airport in Palm Beach, Florida.

• 1:40:34Speaker 04

  Well, I mean, this is good. That's good. That's what National is going to be called in a few months. So.

• 1:40:39Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, I thought he wanted to rename Dulles.

• 1:40:42Speaker 04

  Yeah, I always get the two confused because I hate them both.

• 1:40:44Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, I I don't know that a airport named after Alan Dulles is much better.

• 1:40:51November Kelly?

  No.

• 1:40:52Speaker 04

  Uh, from Puerto Vallarta in Mexico to Seattle Tacoma International Airport.

• 1:40:58Liam McAnderson?

  Woo.

• 1:41:00Speaker 04

  Uh, with a stopover in San Francisco, carrying 83 passengers and five crew under the command of Captain Ted Thompson and First Officer William Tansky. Uh, departed Puerto Vallarta at 1:37 PM Pacific Standard Time. Sorry, I'm trying to do Spanish pronunciation in the same sentence as English pronunciation. It's not coming out too.

• 1:41:21Liam McAnderson?

  Oh, yeah, it's a brain cooker.

• 1:41:23Speaker 04

  I'd like to apologize to my dear girlfriend, Emma, who was probably in pain right now, but never mind. Never mind. Uh, the scheduled flight time for Puerto Vallarta to San Francisco was a little under four hours. Uh, sometime before 3:49 PM. Uh, we don't know when because cockpit voice recorders at this point in time only recorded up to about a half an hour.

• 1:41:42Speaker 01

  That's insane.

• 1:41:42November Kelly?

  Taping over my cockpit voice recorder.

• 1:41:45Speaker 01

  Sitting in the cabin.

• 1:41:46November Kelly?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:47Speaker 01

  Store two.

• 1:41:47Liam McAnderson?

  What? Really? When did this? When did? When was that changed?

• 1:41:51Speaker 04

  Uh.

• 1:41:52Liam McAnderson?

  Was that a result of this or?

• 1:41:53Speaker 04

  It so it probably was. So I I don't know for sure. I'm guessing I I probably should have phrased this better. It only you. Most times the aircraft is only subject to the standards when it was built. So this would only be stand be subject to the standards from 1992, which admittedly not that far before this. And still pretty damn low ultimately. Um, actually, what is it right now? Never mind. I don't have time to Google that.

• 1:42:17Liam McAnderson?

  No, that's fine. I'll Google. That's nuts. Thank you.

• 1:42:20Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, whenever they're recording to magnetic tape in a big box that tends to that they need to insulate pretty well. I could kind of understand it from a practical standpoint.

• 1:42:29Liam McAnderson?

  Tape drives are cheap, man.

• 1:42:31Speaker 04

  Well, they weren't at the time, but you know.

• 1:42:35Liam McAnderson?

  I'm sorry for interrupting.

• 1:42:36Speaker 04

  No, it's okay. I I realized I should have written that better whenever whenever you ask that because.

• 1:42:41Speaker 01

  Maya, you do so much prep for these. You have the best written slides I've ever seen on this show.

• 1:42:47Speaker 04

  Thank you.

• 1:42:48Liam McAnderson?

  Roz is sitting right there crying himself.

• 1:42:50Speaker 01

  Okay, but like Roz knows everything. So it's like, there's, there's like, there's like, two thirds of a Roz episode is like in his head. There's, there's notes are kind of prompting.

• 1:43:01Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah, it's uniform. Yeah, I know what you're saying.

• 1:43:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, Maya's are like actually like written in a way that if we did this.

• 1:43:07November Kelly?

  They extended it from half an hour to two hours in nineteen ninety five.

• 1:43:12Speaker 04

  Okay, that makes sense. Thank you.

• 1:43:14Speaker 01

  Oh, in celebration of my birthday.

• 1:43:16Liam McAnderson?

  Stop it.

• 1:43:17November Kelly?

  You're so young, Jesus.

• 1:43:20Speaker 04

  It's a right now in the US, it's going to become twenty five hours in a cup in sometime later this year. So that's an idea of how that technology has progressed. It's been twenty five hours in Europe.

• 1:43:31Speaker 01

  They were gonna do it until the hard drives can't get them anymore. Now they're like, no, we're going back to an hour.

• 1:43:37Justin Roczniak?

  Gonna gonna double the price of the airplane.

• 1:43:43Speaker 04

  At some point before three forty nine, the cockpit crew noticed that the horizontal stabilizer was jammed, was jammed in the nose downward position. I know a little why I'm gesturing as if people can see, never mind. As they proceeded to open a radio link with Alaska Airlines Dispatch and maintenance facilities in Seattle and Alaska operations and maintenance in Los Angeles where they were considering diverting to because they were relatively close to it at this point and were just sort of crossing into American airspace from Mexican airspace. After spending a fair amount of time. Messing about with the switches, both the one, the suitcase handles and the pickle switches, running through their checklist and generally figuring out that there's not

• 1:44:23Speaker 04

  much that they could do to fix it. They start trying to plan out a diversion to Los Angeles, given that the aircraft is still controllable, albeit requiring full manual control. And they also have to put a significant amount of body weight into actually pulling, pulling the control column backwards.

• 1:44:39November Kelly?

  Oh, yeah. No, this is like heavy work.

• 1:44:43Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 1:44:44November Kelly?

  It's wrestling this thing.

• 1:44:45Justin Roczniak?

  This is the whole, the whole point of trim is that you don't have to put continuous force on the control yoke. But now, of course, they're working against it. So they do have to do that.

• 1:44:57November Kelly?

  It's, it's like.

• 1:44:58Speaker 01

  Thank you, Ross, for proving my point. And you somehow inexplicably know everything.

• 1:45:02November Kelly?

  It's like you think you're just doing a regular, like, four-hour run from Puerto Vallarta to Seattle. And now you have been enlisted in like Pete Hegseth's TikTok pull-up challenge.

• 1:45:12Justin Roczniak?

  Yes.

• 1:45:14November Kelly?

  In jeans.

• 1:45:15Speaker 01

  This is two podcasts this week.

• 1:45:19November Kelly?

  Probably doing it like pressed slacks, you know?

• 1:45:22Speaker 01

  This is two podcasts this week that have referred to RFK Jr.'s jeans that I've been on.

• 1:45:27Justin Roczniak?

  I'm sorry.

• 1:45:28Speaker 01

  Me too.

• 1:45:29Justin Roczniak?

  They should have like a, they should have like a wedge for this situation, this kind of situation. You can just, you know, shove it in there.

• 1:45:36November Kelly?

  Just rigging it up with a bunch of like bungee cords, like an elastic band on an Xbox controller when you're trying to get a difficult achievement.

• 1:45:44Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, you can probably MacGyver this, you know?

• 1:45:46November Kelly?

  Is there a MacGyver on the plane? Sorry, hold on, let me, I can, I can actually do this with my, with my, with my gimmick mic. Is there a MacGyver on the plane? If anyone on board is a MacGyver, please like make yourself known to the flight attendants.

• 1:46:04Justin Roczniak?

  Passengers, this is the purser. I would just like to ask if there's anyone well-versed in MacGyver tactics onboard the plane.

• 1:46:17November Kelly?

  Oh my god.

• 1:46:20Speaker 01

  You got very distant there.

• 1:46:21November Kelly?

  Sorry, sorry.

• 1:46:21Speaker 01

  Is the plane going down? Nova?

• 1:46:24November Kelly?

  I was, I was like, excuse me, stewardess, I'm a member of the A-team. And it's like, yeah, sure. And I've got a PhD. It's like, it doesn't really count when we said doctor, you know?

• 1:46:32Justin Roczniak?

  Oh, that's, that's, that's a really good sign if you're a member of the A-team. That means whatever happens, no one dies.

• 1:46:40November Kelly?

  Everyone rolls clear of the accident.

• 1:46:42Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:43November Kelly?

  It's like dusting themselves off. It's like, oh, damn. I love it when a plane comes apart.

• 1:46:55Speaker 04

  Uh, okay, next slide, please. Uh, this one's a bunch of text on, on a screen, so I apologize. But, uh, Alaska Airlines dispatch in Seattle were, uh, very opinionated about how this would disrupt their flight operations. Uh, telling them, oh, there was a flow, there was a flow control program in effect at San Francisco, and it would be an hour or more before they could depart again after landing, generally sort of pushing them in the direction of continuing to fly to San Francisco.

• 1:47:19November Kelly?

  This is, this is an interesting example of sort of like, I don't know what you would call this, kind of interference, right? But like, um, on the transcript, it's, dispatch tells them like, uh, if you want to land in LA, of course, for safety reasons, we will do that. Uh, we'll tell you, though, that if you land in LA, we'll be looking at like an hour to an hour and a half, to which they respond, uh, well, um, you are, uh, boy, you put me in a spot here, huh?

• 1:47:47Speaker 04

  Yeah, and, um, the, the, the, the crew were not particularly happy about this. As you can see 10 minutes later, they're still talking about it.

• 1:47:55Speaker 01

  The thing that's funny here is that the response, I really didn't want to hear about the flow being the reason you're calling us, because I'm concerned about overflying suitable airports. That's the maddest that guy was ever in his whole life.

• 1:48:04November Kelly?

  Oh, yeah, in the Chuck Yeager voice, just like full pilot, just like, what the fuck did you just say to me about the white zone being for loading and unloading?

• 1:48:14Speaker 01

  That's like somebody from Minnesota telling you like, hey, I think that you're being a little rude here. They wanna kill you with their bare hands.

• 1:48:20November Kelly?

  I really didn't wanna hear about this.

• 1:48:23Justin Roczniak?

  Reference here of flow control program is basically air traffic control, you know, saying, okay, there's too many fucking planes trying to take off and land. We gotta do something about this.

• 1:48:38November Kelly?

  Yeah, the separation.

• 1:48:39Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, you gotta mess with, you gotta mess with, you know, the airport capacity. You gotta mess with landing slots.

• 1:48:45Speaker 04

  Yeah, if, if, if you get stuck at your departure airport for an extended period of time on the ground, but not moving, and there, there's no adverse weather conditions or anything, it's usually because of this.

• 1:48:57November Kelly?

  Yeah, it's, it's a great example of like, hey, technically, man, you're pilot in command of the aircraft and you get to do whatever you want for safety reasons. We're just saying that it's gonna be really fucking annoying.

• 1:49:09Speaker 04

  Yeah, he says, we just wanna make sure you have all of the, all the info.

• 1:49:13Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, it's really annoying. Put the plane down, please.

• 1:49:16November Kelly?

  I just want you to know that like, if you exercise your kind of like absolute sort of responsibility and discretion and, and control of the aircraft, then you are gonna kind of like piss in my cornflakes.

• 1:49:27Speaker 04

  Also notable is that San Francisco had much more significant windy conditions at this specific point in time, whilst Los Angeles had basically none. And whenever you have to control the aircraft by putting your full body weight on the column, you tend to want the least adverse set of conditions as possible.

• 1:49:44November Kelly?

  Yeah, like, I, I'm gonna, I'm gonna be sort of like landing this aircraft with me and my copilot hanging off the yokes like pull-up bars is, that's an interesting, that's an interesting condition.

• 1:49:56Justin Roczniak?

  That's bad, right?

• 1:49:57November Kelly?

  Yeah, that's not great. It's not great.

• 1:49:59Speaker 04

  Yeah, as, as he says here at the end, it was a 90-degree crosswind at, at 10 knots.

• 1:50:04November Kelly?

  Fuck that. No, thank you. That's the kind of shit that brings out guys with like long lenses now to like take video and kind of hopes that you eat shit.

• 1:50:14November Kelly?

  They don't say it. They're always like, oh, we just wanna like celebrate how good the pilots are and we do like a nice little round of applause when every time they make it. But it's like, no, you want to be there in case one of them eats shit.

• 1:50:24Speaker 01

  It's like watching NASCAR, you know?

• 1:50:28Justin Roczniak?

  I wanna see a tire blowout.

• 1:50:30November Kelly?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:50:31Justin Roczniak?

  I wanna see pizzas.

• 1:50:35Speaker 04

  By 3:57, they've made the decision to divert to Los Angeles and start preparing for that, although while still trying to get in touch with a flight instructor as a last resort for shit that they can do to actually get the stabilizer to move.

• 1:50:47November Kelly?

  Climb out on the wing, you know, put a lip in, climb out on the back and like hit it with a hammer, you know?

• 1:50:52Speaker 04

  The whole time, they're basically, they're trying to get it unstuck by, well, I want to say whatever they can, but whatever they can is just the two switches that they've already tried. Uh, but they, they, they keep, they do keep at it for quite a while. Notably in excess of what the checklists told them to do. Uh, and this will come up later as something, as uh, something that we have learned as a result of this accident, which is to not do more than the checklist says.

• 1:51:20Speaker 04

  Uh, but of course that could easily be blamed on the fact that Seattle was like, hey, would you like to not land this aircraft and continue flying it actually?

• 1:51:27November Kelly?

  Yeah. Can I invite you to please not do the thing?

• 1:51:29Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 1:51:30Justin Roczniak?

  Go away. I don't want to see you.

• 1:51:32November Kelly?

  You suck. I haven't avoided an attachment style.

• 1:51:36Speaker 01

  Again, as we, as we learned earlier in this episode, if you have to do maintenance on the plane, you're losing money. Keep the plane in the fucking air. That's where the money is.

• 1:51:45Justin Roczniak?

  Plane only makes money when it's moving.

• 1:51:49Speaker 04

  4:07, which is 10 minutes after they start preparing to divert into Los Angeles. They start running through the situation with Alaska's other maintenance department in Los Angeles, including uh, being asked if they had tried the switches to adjust the trim. You know, the thing they have been doing for, we don't, literally, we don't know how long.

• 1:52:07November Kelly?

  Okay. But in defense of any kind of remote tech support, you gotta, you gotta do it programmatically because how many times does it happen that you're like, the person swears up and down that they've done the thing, they've been doing the thing for hours, and then you tell them to do the thing and they do the thing and it works, you know?

• 1:52:24Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:52:24Speaker 01

  Have you tried turning it off and back on again?

• 1:52:27Justin Roczniak?

  I, I was on a plane where they did that. Not, not, not in the air, but on the tarmac.

• 1:52:35Speaker 04

  I've also been on a plane where they've done that on the tarmac, actually. Then I, and then it didn't work, so we had to get off the plane that we had just boarded. That was really annoying.

• 1:52:44Justin Roczniak?

  In my case, it worked.

• 1:52:45Speaker 04

  Yeah, it didn't for me.

• 1:52:45Speaker 01

  They love, they love rebooting the Seattle Link Line trains, the tram things. Because when they, after a sporting event and people take public transit, they get so full, they get too heavy and they can't go. So they have to reboot the trains, because we're a serious city that has a real transit agency. I'm sorry, I shouldn't shit talk them. Again, I am so excited for the Cross Lake Connection. We're gonna have a train on a floating bridge. But.

• 1:53:11Justin Roczniak?

  Hell, yeah.

• 1:53:11Speaker 01

  It is pretty funny to be on the train and the operator comes on, it's like, "Yeah, sorry, I gotta reboot the train, so it's gonna be really dark and quiet in here for a few minutes."

• 1:53:19Speaker 04

  I will say.

• 1:53:20Justin Roczniak?

  They do that on Septa now, whenever you go on the trolley tunnel while they're checking the trolley pole.

• 1:53:26Speaker 04

  My understanding of Septa was that they, was that they do anything to make the trains not move.

• 1:53:31Justin Roczniak?

  Uh, no, they, they, uh, they, they, well, it depends.

• 1:53:40Speaker 04

  Uh, okay, at 409 and 14 seconds, they decided to try both the suitcase handle and the pickle switch at the same time.

• 1:53:49November Kelly?

  Oh, the plane takes a screenshot. Also, I'm not thrilled that seconds are making an appearance now. Once you start measuring shit in, in seconds on a, on a cockpit voice recorder, it's bad.

• 1:53:59Speaker 04

  Uh, so it, at 40916, the cockpit voice recorder records, quote, brackets, "Sound of clunk," close brackets.

• 1:54:09November Kelly?

  Oh, no. I don't want to hear clunk ever.

• 1:54:14Speaker 04

  Uh, at 409 and 17 seconds, the CVR, uh, records, quote, brackets, "Sound similar to horizontal stabilizer in motion audible tone," close brackets.

• 1:54:24November Kelly?

  Oh, so it's working? They fixed it?

• 1:54:25Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 1:54:25November Kelly?

  Did your screenshot work?

• 1:54:27Speaker 04

  Yes. Uh, however, it immediately moves into the extreme down position.

• 1:54:31Justin Roczniak?

  I went the wrong way.

• 1:54:33November Kelly?

  Oh, 737 maxing. Okay, sure.

• 1:54:37Speaker 04

  Yes, actually, we will get to that, probably get to that eventually, I imagine. But it is indeed doing the thing where it's forcing the, where it's forcing the plane down. You don't really know why.

• 1:54:47November Kelly?

  Yeah, just, just like, what, what if I went into the ground right now? What if I die? What if we died? You want to meet up and die? Let's die.

• 1:54:53Speaker 04

  Yeah. Uh, next slide, please. So over the span of about a minute and 20 seconds, the aircraft is in an uncontrolled dive.

• 1:55:01November Kelly?

  I, I love this screenshot here. 16 hours, 10, 33 seconds. Uh, left seat, yeah, we got it back under control here. 16, 10, 34 seconds, right seat, no, we don't, okay?

• 1:55:18Speaker 04

  This sucks.

• 1:55:19November Kelly?

  I, I, I hope when I die, there's a record, I guess that's what this is as well. But like, I guess, I hope when I die, there's a like pertinent record of my comedic timing.

• 1:55:30Speaker 04

  I, I, I included this in the slideshow whenever I was writing it. And then Victoria messaged me this later the same evening to be like, hey, you included that quote, right? And I was like, yeah, it's on, it's on this slide at this number.

• 1:55:43Speaker 01

  Again, I can't emphasize how much more thorough she is than I am.

• 1:55:47Justin Roczniak?

  The fact, the fact that it's all in lowercase, it looks like it's from bash.org.

• 1:55:53November Kelly?

  Oh, that's going back a bit, but yeah.

• 1:55:55Speaker 04

  Oh, good lord.

• 1:56:00Speaker 04

  So the aircraft.

• 1:56:01November Kelly?

  It's telling me that the plane's password is hunter12?

• 1:56:04Speaker 04

  Oh, my God. Uh, the aircraft is in an uncontrolled dive for about a minute and 20 seconds. Uh, try not to think about what it was like in the camera at that point, but moving on.

• 1:56:12November Kelly?

  Yeah, I'm, I'm, there's Samovars going past me, I'm like.

• 1:56:18November Kelly?

  My dip is falling out of my lip and I'm just like desperately like, nah, nah, nah, nah, nah, nah, nah, nah. I'm sort of becoming more and more aware that it may be required for me to assist in an evacuation if I'm in the exit row. So I've got some good news. You're not gonna have to do that. Like, oh, thank God.

• 1:56:34Speaker 04

  Uh, the cockpit crew physically fight this by applying about 135 pounds of force to the control column.

• 1:56:40November Kelly?

  Uh, fucking excuse me?

• 1:56:42Speaker 04

  That's, that's what the, that's what the NTSB report said.

• 1:56:44November Kelly?

  Really heavy doctor aboard?

• 1:56:48Speaker 01

  And of course, the plane is falling, so they're not using like their body weight either.

• 1:56:52Speaker 04

  Hmm.

• 1:56:53Speaker 01

  Because it's an uncontrolled dive. Presumably, they're actually, that means that, that means this pilot was fucking jacked.

• 1:56:58November Kelly?

  That's all arm strength. Yeah. I mean, to be fair, at least you've got the like adrenaline spike of like the plane going. We're going down. You're gonna die. You're gonna die.

• 1:57:07Speaker 01

  Yeah. I will say, I, I usually make less fun of the people who are dying, but I would like it noted for the record that so far, all of, well, we've decided is these pilots had great comedic timing and they were strong as hell. So I feel like it's fair.

• 1:57:19Speaker 04

  To, to be clear, to be clear with the, the adrenaline comment, this, uh, this isn't in the slideshow, but it's, uh, six, it, um, 1611. Uh, the pilot says, I, uh, copilot asked him how hard it was to pull the control column back and the pilot just responds, I don't know. My adrenaline's going.

• 1:57:35November Kelly?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:57:37Speaker 04

  So, uh, they, they apply all that force to the control column. They do other things to mitigate it. They deploy speed brakes. Uh, everything that they could conceivably think of in the span of a minute and 20 seconds. Uh, they made us to mostly get the aircraft stabilized at about 24,000 feet where it dropped 31,000. You can see the graph of how that went there on the left. Uh, for the entire remainder of the flight, to the best of my understanding, both crew members will be putting their full bodily force onto the control column in order to keep the plane level, mostly level, I should say. Uh, they have to let up a little bit in order to let it go down a little more. So whenever they're trying to actually get it closer to the ground or whatever they want to do that. But otherwise they, they have to put their entire body weight into making sure the aircraft doesn't go nose down again.

• 1:58:20November Kelly?

  You're, you're, you're controlled descent of very slightly lowering from a pull up.

• 1:58:25Speaker 04

  Hmm.

• 1:58:25Justin Roczniak?

  Is this, this is one of those situations where you understand why, you know, the Airbus has the joystick.

• 1:58:33Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah. This is live by wire.

• 1:58:36Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 1:58:37Speaker 04

  Well.

• 1:58:38November Kelly?

  We'll get to that. We will. When we, when we do the Air France, what was it, 447? That's been, that's a nightmare that's been on my mind for a long, long time.

• 1:58:47Speaker 04

  Me too, actually, because I remember when that happened.

• 1:58:50November Kelly?

  Mm hmm. Same, yeah.

• 1:58:52Speaker 04

  At this point, the captain, now that the plane is like level and not pitching down towards the ether. Uh, the captain requests to be given a block altitude in order to do whatever he could possibly need to land at Los Angeles. Uh, he hopes to descend to about 10,000 or so and figure out if the aircraft is actually controllable. Uh, he specifies that he wants to do it over the bay instead of a populated land area for reasons that are unstated, but reasonably evident.

• 1:59:16November Kelly?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:59:17Speaker 04

  Uh, Los Angeles, to be clear, he's already out over, in, over water at this specific moment in time. He just wanted to do all of the preparation work in the area that he was in. They briefly speak to Alaska Airlines Maintenance in Los Angeles again, whose response, which is at the lower right here, uh, is, includes, um, sentences like, okay, uh, ellipses, geez, full stop.

• 1:59:41November Kelly?

  Oh, that's rough, buddy. Um, anyway, see ya.

• 1:59:43Speaker 04

  Mm hmm.

• 1:59:44November Kelly?

  Good luck.

• 1:59:45Speaker 04

  Yeah, it, uh, yeah, uh, it ends with, um, they end with, if you want to try it, that's okay with me. If not, that's fine. We'll see you at the gate. Full, full stop.

• 1:59:54November Kelly?

  How, helpful, helpful.

• 1:59:56Speaker 04

  Mm hmm.

• 1:59:56Speaker 01

  That's like a trans woman trying to like make dinner plans.

• 2:00:00Speaker 04

  Excellent.

• 2:00:03Speaker 01

  Uh, sure, that sounds good, but like, if you don't want to do that, that's totally fine. Don't worry about it. Like, whatever, whatever works.

• 2:00:09Speaker 04

  Hmm. Don't, don't, don't, God.

• 2:00:13Speaker 01

  I love targeting two, three, three fifths of the podcast hosts at the same time, also, also injuring myself.

• 2:00:21November Kelly?

  At sixteen, sixteen, twelve and forty-two seconds, does left seat tell them, and now we're in a fucking pinch, so we're holding, uh, we're worse than we were?

• 2:00:30Speaker 04

  The star is an expletive. It's an, obviously it's unspecified which, but that's just how it's released.

• 2:00:34November Kelly?

  Yeah.

• 2:00:35Speaker 04

  Uh, there's actually, there's actually a fair number of the, the asterisks throughout this cockpit worst recorder log.

• 2:00:41November Kelly?

  Say.

• 2:00:42Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:00:43November Kelly?

  I mean, the thing is, I like these guys. It's, it's a shame what's happening.

• 2:00:46Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 2:00:47November Kelly?

  I feel bad.

• 2:00:47Speaker 04

  Yeah, too. Yeah, I, I, yeah, I, I, I will get to this at the end, but these, these guys didn't do anything wrong. Uh, I'll go into more details of why that is later, but.

• 2:00:56November Kelly?

  This is a, this is a kind of existential nightmare into which you can be plunged. I mean, really, at any time, but like especially flying.

• 2:01:02Speaker 04

  Yes. At 419 and 36 seconds, the cockpit voice recorder records, quote, "open brackets, "sound of extremely loud noise, close brackets, open brackets, sound similar to loose articles "moving around in cockpit, close brackets."

• 2:01:18November Kelly?

  Yeah, I fell out of the bed in the relief cabin, sorry.

• 2:01:20Speaker 04

  The vertical stabilizer, which was actually, which was still stuck at full nose down and was only being countered by the crew pulling back on the control column. It was only really being held in that position by the retaining nut at the end of the jack screw. That is not a load-bearing nut.

• 2:01:36November Kelly?

  No, you tried to make a, a non-load-bearing nut bear loads.

• 2:01:40Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 2:01:40November Kelly?

  Yes. And it won't do it.

• 2:01:42Speaker 04

  And it has refused this particular load.

• 2:01:45November Kelly?

  Hmm, yeah.

• 2:01:46Speaker 04

  And has completely broken free.

• 2:01:49November Kelly?

  There is, there is a more efficient way of destroying the jack screw, which is, as we've talked about, rolling an MRAP into it, but like, um, instead of that, they've just sort of done it piece by piece.

• 2:02:01Speaker 04

  Mm-hmm. So with the, the retaining done and that gone, uh, the jack screw is completely out of the assembly, so there's nothing holding it in place, and the aircraft is now not particularly aerodynamic, not particularly compatible with continuing to fly.

• 2:02:16November Kelly?

  It wants to go down.

• 2:02:18Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 2:02:18November Kelly?

  Really, like maximally.

• 2:02:20Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, you'd imagine that the, the stabilizer, you know, it should be at a position like this. When it was at max down, it was like this, now it's probably like way down here.

• 2:02:30Speaker 04

  Uh, next slide, please. Uh, here you'll see the other half of the graph from the last page.

• 2:02:35November Kelly?

  Oh, boy. Okay, new anxiety, new fear just drops, new, new, new terror.

• 2:02:42Speaker 04

  So the aircraft rolls hard left immediately and completely inverts within a few seconds of that. Uh, both crew immediately start doing whatever they possibly could in order to recover the aircraft. Uh, they're running through the upright recovery maneuver, which is to say, doing the process to get the aircraft out of a stall condition by reducing thrust and pushing forwards, because whenever an aircraft is, you can't stall an aircraft at zero gravity. Basically, the end goal is to keep the aircraft, is to get the aircraft in line with the horizon by any means necessary.

• 2:03:12November Kelly?

  Yeah. Left, left seat says to the right seat, "Have you seen the Denzel Washington movie Flight?" And the right seat says, "Yeah, I was standing up for most of it, but it was pretty good." I like John Goodman.

• 2:03:23Speaker 04

  So they want to get the aircraft level with the horizon, right? And it doesn't, it doesn't necessarily depend on whether they do it right side up or upside down, which is great, which is theoretically good in this instance, because they are very much upside down. At four minutes, 20 seconds, four, sorry, 420 and 38 seconds, which is basically a full minute after they had started rolling over. The crew had actually largely succeeded at leveling the aircraft upside down, but commercial aircraft aren't designed to do that. So if they needed to, if they wanted, if they would have wanted to get out of this particular scenario, there wasn't necessarily much that they could do apart from pitching the aircraft not down,

• 2:04:04Speaker 04

  because it's already pitched down, pushing the control column forward to get the aircraft down and then out of the dive. So, you know, a lot of times people will say that they maybe could have done it if they had a lot more altitude. Ultimately, they did manage to slow the dive pretty significantly. So, you know, it's not like they were without justification in what they tried. It's just that it didn't really matter, especially because once the vertical stabilizer had failed and the aircraft started doing stuff it wasn't designed to, the elevators had torn off to the best of, to the best of our understanding. So, you know, they didn't really have any input.

• 2:04:39November Kelly?

  Kind of like this doomed heroic attempt to do something.

• 2:04:43Justin Roczniak?

  It's also a little bit confusing as to how you, you know, it's impressive when the pilots do those crosswind landings when they, you know, crab the aircraft at the last second and go straight. You know, if you're, I don't know if you can do a barrel roll at the last second onto the runway.

• 2:04:59November Kelly?

  Probably not, no, I like, I don't know. It's nice to have a kind of like mechanically heroic epitaph to be like, hey, we know what your like control inputs were till the last second.

• 2:05:11Speaker 01

  My, my main question is what the hell is it with Alaskan airplanes and doing barrel rolls?

• 2:05:17Speaker 04

  God.

• 2:05:19Justin Roczniak?

  It's from the bush pilot's spirit.

• 2:05:24November Kelly?

  Of course, when it's upside down, you can't read the guy saying, "Thanks" anymore.

• 2:05:28Speaker 04

  So basically, as soon as the aircraft had hit this particular dive, it was going to be, it was already doomed from that point.

• 2:05:36Speaker 04

  Cemented largely because, you know, there's not, there wasn't enough altitude physically in order to get the plane controllable again, but also then shortly afterwards, the elevators rip off. So given that the two things responsible for pitch are completely uncontrollable, you know, you're not really doing too much with that, I fear. At 420 and 49 seconds, the cockpit voice recorder captures the sound of both engine compressors stalling and spooling down, which means that they now have no thrust on top of everything else.

• 2:06:03November Kelly?

  Oh, the one other thing you could use to control pitch?

• 2:06:05Speaker 04

  Mm hmm.

• 2:06:06November Kelly?

  Cool.

• 2:06:06Justin Roczniak?

  Imagine, would imagine that has something to do with, uh, what's it? The, the, the, the fuel being gravity fed to some extent?

• 2:06:13Speaker 01

  I think so, yeah.

• 2:06:14Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:06:15Speaker 01

  It certainly is how it works in the Denzel Washington movie Flight 2012.

• 2:06:22Speaker 04

  Uh, 420 and 57 seconds, so eight seconds after the last thing, after the engines stalled out, Alaska Airlines 261 hits the Pacific Ocean at high speed, immediately killing all 88 occupants and disintegrating completely.

• 2:06:35November Kelly?

  Oh.

• 2:06:36Speaker 04

  Uh, the crash is witnessed and reported by multiple other airliners in the vicinity. So the recovery process starts pretty much immediately on that.

• 2:06:42November Kelly?

  And so like, even if you're counting from like, the thing pitching over inverted, that's still like a minute and change of like conscious action where you gotta be like around for that.

• 2:06:54Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 2:06:54November Kelly?

  That's not great. I'm not.

• 2:06:56Speaker 01

  This is like the Challenger disaster of commercial aviation crashes.

• 2:06:59November Kelly?

  I'm trying to think about like the worst minute I've had in my life, right? And I'm trying to like, sort of measure that up and like, it would have to be pretty fucking bad for this to be, you know, sort of even anywhere in the same ballpark, you know?

• 2:07:12Speaker 04

  Generally speaking, especially because it had been followed up by, you know, the same thing happening a few minutes, well, you didn't go upside down a few minutes earlier, but it wasn't particularly pleasant whenever it happened. You went nose down the first time, so.

• 2:07:23November Kelly?

  Yeah, you, you've presumably like, you know, seen the sort of, uh, flight attendant from the film Flight, like eat shit in the vertebrae and like, seen an entire Samovar dent itself inside out on the like roof bulkhead, right? Like.

• 2:07:36Speaker 04

  Yeah. I didn't include this in the slides, but actually it wasn't between the two out of control incidents at one point, the the cab, sorry, the pilot does go over the cabin public address system and says, we've had a flight control problem up here. We're working at what does he say? That's Los Angeles up to the right. That's where we're intending to go. We I don't anticipate any big problems. Once we get a couple of subsystems online. Don't really know what he meant by that.

• 2:08:05November Kelly?

  So don't worry about it.

• 2:08:07Speaker 04

  Yeah. It is comforting to know that captains are fully aware of their ability to lie to passengers.

• 2:08:16November Kelly?

  That's not comforting. That's the opposite of comforting. That's discomfiting.

• 2:08:19Speaker 01

  I want to be blissfully unaware the whole time. Are you kidding me?

• 2:08:22Speaker 04

  Exactly. They're gonna kill me. I mean, like.

• 2:08:24Speaker 01

  If yeah, if I'm in a be a well, there's your problem episode subject, I would like to not know until it is like the last six seconds of my life.

• 2:08:33November Kelly?

  Yes, I kind of I'm kind of like you Chuck Yeager motherfucker. Give me the like minute, you know, be like, you know, it's like.

• 2:08:40Speaker 01

  Why would you want to know?

• 2:08:42November Kelly?

  Ladies and gentlemen, it's now time for you to confront the inevitability of death.

• 2:08:46Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah. Hey, so we're gonna process these emotions real quick. Yo, we're on the we're on a strict time line.

• 2:08:51November Kelly?

  Yeah, we are kind of on the clock for this, but we'll aim we'll aim to get you to your to your destination within the next like minute, 10 seconds or so.

• 2:08:58Liam McAnderson?

  Final destination.

• 2:09:00November Kelly?

  Yeah.

• 2:09:01Justin Roczniak?

  I like the British Airways pilot who flew through the volcanic clouds.

• 2:09:06Speaker 04

  Oh, the Jakarta one. Yeah.

• 2:09:07Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, it happened to spot a bother up here. We lost all four engines. We're working hard to get them back online.

• 2:09:14November Kelly?

  Pretty good. I'm ordering another drink.

• 2:09:17Speaker 01

  That's the best part of it.

• 2:09:20November Kelly?

  You get these strange kind of like fluctuations of patriotism as a British person, you know?

• 2:09:25Speaker 01

  I think the thing is just like this is part of the pilot. Like this is part of the pilot sort of mindset, right? It's like you have to be kind of insane to do like bush piloting, but I think you also kind of need to have like a little bit of a hero complex thing going on because there is a moment in your life where you might actually get to save a plane full of people. And so like

• 2:09:46Justin Roczniak?

  You're sully, like, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:09:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, like, you gotta, gotta be ready to be like, okay, time for me to either, like, it's, it's in that moment, I guess, kind of like, you know, either I pull this off and I'm cool as hell, or I don't have to worry about it anymore. So I imagine that kind of focuses things really nicely for you.

• 2:10:03Speaker 04

  I did, I did look it up because I wanted to remember the exact quote from the British crew. Was we have a small problem. All four engines have stopped. We are doing our damnedest to get them going again. I trust you're in not too much distress.

• 2:10:15Justin Roczniak?

  Thanks, dude.

• 2:10:16November Kelly?

  You trust wrong, dude. Like, I, I'm in distress here.

• 2:10:20Speaker 04

  After, after the plane lands, the flight engineer gets off and kisses the, like, he gets on his knees and kisses the air stare. And he, the pilot asks why, and the flight engineer says the Pope does it, and the captain says he flies Alitalia.

• 2:10:38November Kelly?

  Okay, sorry, that, that, that one may be the sort of biggest dick move I've, I've heard of.

• 2:10:50Speaker 04

  So that, that's the end of this, of this aircraft and the people on board and the flight. So of course, you now have to come to the next questions, which are the how and the why. And you can go to the next slide. This is the Jackscrew, was recovered seven days after the crash in the course of the recovery process.

• 2:11:07November Kelly?

  Are the, are the things spiraling off of it what used to be the nuts?

• 2:11:12Speaker 04

  Further investigation, as well as the observation that whatever it was, was made out of steel, led to the conclusion that it was the threads from the inside of the Acme nut.

• 2:11:19November Kelly?

  God damn.

• 2:11:20Justin Roczniak?

  This looks like when I clean the drain of my shower.

• 2:11:24November Kelly?

  So, so like Yeah.

• 2:11:29November Kelly?

  Are like mated to, still mated to the thread of the Jackscrew, but it sheared it so hard, the outer surface of the nuts is just ripped off.

• 2:11:37Speaker 04

  Mm hmm. Yep.

• 2:11:38November Kelly?

  Fuck.

• 2:11:38Liam McAnderson?

  Me.

• 2:11:39Speaker 04

  Yeah, there was a, there was a very convenient diagram. There was a diagram I found that I didn't include in the slides for some reason. But yeah, the, the thread of the nut cheers off. It gets worn down over time and then what's left of it just sort of comes off inside, inside of the jack screw.

• 2:11:53November Kelly?

  Fuck that.

• 2:11:54Speaker 04

  Uh, the, the term that I used here was stripped clean, which is pretty much accurate. Uh, this was quite obviously the primary, uh, primary engineering point of failure on the aircraft. Uh, the nut had been stripped out and the stabilizer starting to subjected to forces that it couldn't withstand. And then it did what we saw here today, eventually with the retaining nut breaking off. Uh, so that answers, well, the first part of the, the first part of the how, the second part is how did this happen? So the National Transportation Safety Board in the process of this investigation. So am I.

• 2:12:30Speaker 04

  Uh, they consider five potential causes. The first one is the use of aeroshell 33 oil to lubricate the jack screw. Uh, the finish on the threading of the nut, foreign object damage. Uh, the nut having been installed correctly that led to a sort of load imbalance in a way that it wasn't designed to. Or insufficient lubrication and maintenance of the jack screw assembly.

• 2:12:49November Kelly?

  We're doing so good to keep a straight face through this. Also, I'm guessing MRAP is filed under C for foreign object damage.

• 2:12:59Speaker 04

  So, uh, we're going to go through these in order. Uh, the first one, the question of aeroshell 33 lubricating lawyer, oil, requires us to ask an important question. You'll go to the next slide. What is oil?

• 2:13:10November Kelly?

  God, fucking damn it. No, no.

• 2:13:14Justin Roczniak?

  It's an important one.

• 2:13:17Justin Roczniak?

  Listen, listen, sometimes we have to reinforce people's knowledge of oil so that they respect.

• 2:13:25Liam McAnderson?

  You shouldn't respect it. What?

• 2:13:27November Kelly?

  This is the worst thing that regularly happens to me. This is my sleep paralysis oil well.

• 2:13:36Justin Roczniak?

  Just sitting on you.

• 2:13:40Speaker 04

  If I told you this was the first idea for the slideshow that I had, I presume you would believe me.

• 2:13:43November Kelly?

  Yeah, yeah, I do. Just sort of building out of this kind of sadistic urge to like psychologically torture me.

• 2:13:50Justin Roczniak?

  One of the things is we gotta actually go out there and see it.

• 2:13:53Speaker 01

  You have created.

• 2:13:54November Kelly?

  I know.

• 2:13:55Speaker 01

  You made a bunch of trans men who listened to you think that you had a good sense of humor and then we all came back and we were like, hey, check out the sense of humor we learned from this podcast.

• 2:14:04Liam McAnderson?

  I hate this community.

• 2:14:06Justin Roczniak?

  You've created the podopticon.

• 2:14:08November Kelly?

  Congratulations.

• 2:14:11Speaker 04

  So we actually don't need to go over what is oil, but the the long and short of it.

• 2:14:14November Kelly?

  No, you just needed to do this to me. This is what it is.

• 2:14:18Justin Roczniak?

  Don't look at it anymore. Don't, don't look at it.

• 2:14:20November Kelly?

  This is punishment for my hubris in telling Victoria that BMW stands for Bavarian Mercedes Works, like.

• 2:14:30November Kelly?

  Not, not knowing what a, what a Camry is, like.

• 2:14:37Liam McAnderson?

  Oh, good. The delirium I said it. This is like when Ruth in a Gidsberg died.

• 2:14:41November Kelly?

  I was gonna say. Triggering a Mercedes guy by telling him that BMW stands for better Mercedes would be.

• 2:14:53Speaker 04

  So Alaska had in December 1997, they had switched to the mobile, from the Mobile Grease 28 lubricating oil that McDonnell Douglas slash Boeing prescribed to lubricate the assembly to the cheaper Aeroshell 33, which is a substitution McDonnell Douglas signed off on.

• 2:15:10November Kelly?

  It's like water based or silicone or.

• 2:15:14Justin Roczniak?

  That, that's, that's gotta be oil.

• 2:15:18Speaker 04

  So that was.

• 2:15:18Justin Roczniak?

  I used to know what the numbers meant, but I don't anymore. I believe it is related to viscosity.

• 2:15:24Speaker 04

  Well, to be fair, keeping the nut in place with a more viscous oil probably would have helped. But ultimately, the NTSB tested it, figured out that this was not actually the root cause. So we move on to the next one. We can go to the next slide.

• 2:15:37November Kelly?

  It's, it's a lithium based thing. And I find on Reddit aviation maintenance that it's a pain in the dick to wash off of your skin.

• 2:15:48Speaker 04

  That I can believe.

• 2:15:50November Kelly?

  I get the couch treatment for at least two nights if I come home stinking of it.

• 2:15:56Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, but it does help stabilize your mood. So, you know, it's.

• 2:16:02Speaker 01

  This is why the FAA doesn't have to check and see if they've got any mental issues because they're already like getting their their daily required dose of lithium.

• 2:16:10November Kelly?

  Unpopular opinion, but I love the smell of 33. Everyone at my work thinks I'm crazy.

• 2:16:19Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, no, I I love the smell of like solvents. It's great. Um, I I love all of them. Yeah, you should probably get that checked out, bud.

• 2:16:29Speaker 04

  Now I'm gonna have to go check out r/aviationmaintenance after we're done here. They're trying to fuck the plane, Mike.

• 2:16:37Speaker 04

  The pilots want to fuck the plane.

• 2:16:38Speaker 01

  Everybody wants to fuck the plane.

• 2:16:40Speaker 04

  That's true. That's the reason I'm here, certainly.

• 2:16:44Justin Roczniak?

  I just want to huff the chemicals, okay? This is not a sex thing.

• 2:16:50November Kelly?

  My white pilot shirt says it doesn't ever come off fully. It doesn't matter what you use. It permanently stains white.

• 2:17:00November Kelly?

  Uh, I have seen I have seen a guy wash sealant off his hands and then reach for a sandwich out of his lunch bag and eat it.

• 2:17:12Justin Roczniak?

  What kind of sandwich?

• 2:17:14Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:17:15November Kelly?

  Does not specify.

• 2:17:16Speaker 04

  That that guy has an immune immune system stronger than God. Or the or that's or he's where COVID came from, one of the two.

• 2:17:26Speaker 04

  The second factor that the NTSB considers is the surface finish on the Acme nut. Uh, McDonnell Douglas had investigated reports from airlines previously that the Acme nuts on their brand new shiny MD11s, uh, famous from the last time I was on this show, were wearing out far quicker than they were supposed to. Uh, and in 1998, this had led to a trim system failure that didn't have adverse consequences like this time, but still wasn't very good. Uh, they did a they they did a metallurgic analysis, I think I pronounced that right, of the the recovered assembly and the the nut on this one was fine. Well, it wasn't fine, but it was made up of the right materials at least. Uh, so the next one that they considered was a foreign debris debris had caused the excessive wear. In the course of looking at other aircraft for the purpose of this investigation,

• 2:18:10Speaker 04

  they found two DC9s from Hawaiian Airlines, uh, that had they had they discovered that they had slightly higher amounts of wear than usual and were accompanied by a quote, pink sand-like material inside of the assembly.

• 2:18:23November Kelly?

  Tasty.

• 2:18:24Speaker 04

  Um, they they found out this was-

• 2:18:25November Kelly?

  Yeah, I saw a guy wash that off of his hands and then reach into his lunch bag for a sandwich.

• 2:18:32Speaker 04

  It's like the stuff you get out of the dispenser at truck stops. It's really gritty. Further investigation revealed that this was the sandblasting material that Hawaiian had used to remove corrosion and wasn't present on the aircraft itself, although the fact that it was accompanied by extra wear meant that it probably was good that they had discovered it when they did. The next possibility was that the nut had been installed in such a way that applied abnormal loads on the jack screw. This partially came out of a report of a different Alaska MD 83 from later in 2000. That there that crew had discovered a quote wobble in the jack screw system. And I don't know what that means, but to be fair, if I was an Alaska pilot after this and felt the stabilizer do literally anything I didn't think I'd expect it to, I would call everybody and probably point a gun at it.

• 2:19:15Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 2:19:15November Kelly?

  Yep. I was gonna say you break out the sort of like flight deck gun and shoot yourself in the cockpit.

• 2:19:22Justin Roczniak?

  Immediately landing this aircraft at whatever airfield is nearby.

• 2:19:27November Kelly?

  Or not an airfield, who knows? That was, that was like every MAX pilot apart from like one flight.

• 2:19:36Speaker 04

  They, they investigated that and found out that it was actually with, that that was actually within the spec and that that was fine. I'm not really sure what to think about that, but in any case, that, that one happened on election day 2000. I wrote that down as a note for some reason, but you know, at least somebody had a worse day than those, than the pilot who noticed that and that somebody was all of the United States.

• 2:19:57Justin Roczniak?

  Yes.

• 2:19:59Speaker 04

  If you go to the next slide.

• 2:20:00Speaker 01

  The guy driving the rider truck full of weird ballots.

• 2:20:05Speaker 01

  The last thing. You can't laugh at that. You were like one.

• 2:20:09Speaker 04

  I've watched a lot of documentaries about it.

• 2:20:12Speaker 01

  Oh my god.

• 2:20:12Speaker 04

  I learned about it in history class.

• 2:20:13November Kelly?

  It was so old. It was so fucking old.

• 2:20:18Speaker 04

  That one is completely false, but I thought it would be, I thought it would get old.

• 2:20:21November Kelly?

  Oh god damn it. You say this.

• 2:20:25Speaker 04

  The last thing that they examined was insufficient lubrication of the jack screw assembly. The opening sentence of this section of the NTSB report is included here. Seems like something of a tone setter.

• 2:20:35November Kelly?

  Yeah, paragraph two, subsection three, sub subsection six, insufficient lubrication of the jack screw assembly, brackets, lol, close brackets. It is generally understood that a lack of lubrication of moving parts significantly increases wear. And I'm going in with my Wikipedia edits to be like citation needed.

• 2:20:57Justin Roczniak?

  That's right, folks. You know, the thing is that when parts are adequately lubricated, not only does it, you know, move more easily, it increases the surface area upon which a load is applied. As such, you are not having like stress concentrations as you would with an unlubricated part. Also, I think the computer just did something weird. Let me check.

• 2:21:25November Kelly?

  Yeah. Lesson is lubricate everything at all times.

• 2:21:29Justin Roczniak?

  I have completely run out of hard drive space.

• 2:21:31Liam McAnderson?

  I'm gonna fucking kill you. I'm gonna fucking kill you. I'm gonna fucking kill you.

• 2:21:38Justin Roczniak?

  No, I, I checked. I checked. I checked before this. I had 42 gigabytes.

• 2:21:45Liam McAnderson?

  I'm gonna [bleep] you [bleep] with a gun and I'm gonna have to bury my best friend and I'll feel real bad about it, but I am going to fucking [bleep] you.

• 2:21:53Justin Roczniak?

  I checked before this because I was having problems earlier. I had 42 gigabytes.

• 2:21:59Liam McAnderson?

  Oh my god.

• 2:22:00Justin Roczniak?

  Give me one second. I, alright.

• 2:22:03Liam McAnderson?

  Just close our DAS, dude. Just close our DAS and we'll just run it. Oh my god.

• 2:22:10Speaker 01

  I'm applying 135 pounds of force to the podcasting column. Tim's gonna just really pull back up.

• 2:22:18Liam McAnderson?

  This is the worst thing of my life.

• 2:22:19Speaker 01

  All I can see in front of me is the earth.

• 2:22:23Justin Roczniak?

  I, I.

• 2:22:26Justin Roczniak?

  Ross.

• 2:22:33Justin Roczniak?

  Alright, I just freed up 21 gigabytes?

• 2:22:37Speaker 04

  We gotta wrap this shit up then?

• 2:22:38November Kelly?

  Yeah, should be good for another like half hour.

• 2:22:41Liam McAnderson?

  Oh, so we're doing recording in half hour bursts now?

• 2:22:50Justin Roczniak?

  And we're back.

• 2:22:52Speaker 04

  I think. So the, so the NTSB tests this and confirms that an unlubricated jack screw assembly deteriorated about 10 times faster than a properly lubricated one. And the damage looked pretty much the same as what they, what we were seeing from parts they had recovered from the aircraft.

• 2:23:07November Kelly?

  The dry jack screw?

• 2:23:10Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, don't do that.

• 2:23:11Speaker 04

  No.

• 2:23:12November Kelly?

  It's bad idea.

• 2:23:12November Kelly?

  Technically counts as a plane dry jacking.

• 2:23:17Speaker 04

  So more concerning was that when the NTSB recovered it, they found no evidence there was any lubrication on it at the time of the accident, actually. They did acknowledge that it was possible that such lubrication had been washed off by seawater and Alaska Airlines representatives that were there whenever they recovered the jack screw claimed that they saw and felt lubrication on the jack screw whenever it was recovered.

• 2:23:39November Kelly?

  Oh, yeah, sure, buddy.

• 2:23:40Speaker 04

  Yeah, of course.

• 2:23:41November Kelly?

  Uh huh. Of course you did.

• 2:23:43Speaker 04

  The NTSB then goes into a relatively lengthy explanation of how they were relatively certain that seawater did do this. They clarified that they never washed it with anything more than, quote, "a hose similar to a garden hose."

• 2:23:54November Kelly?

  I love bad language.

• 2:23:57Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, and I, I mean, a jack screw is a relatively high friction assembly. You know, this is not, not something that, you know, you are, you are causing physical trauma to this nut constantly if you're not lubricating it.

• 2:24:14Speaker 04

  And they want to be, they obviously want to be very certain of this, so they commissioned the Aerospace Materials Laboratory of the United States Navy to immerse an object.

• 2:24:22November Kelly?

  We, we got the Navy's biggest nerds to replicate these conditions because we're pretty sure you're just lying.

• 2:24:30Speaker 04

  I love the idea of calling at the United States Navy and be like, "No, no, no, dude."

• 2:24:36Speaker 04

  They immersed an object of similar metallic composition in water, in water, similar to what the jack screw was recovered from, for the same amount of time the jack screw was in the Pacific, which was seven and a half days. When the tests showed that seawater didn't remove grease from an object like this, it seemed fairly evident that there wasn't any. Later on, they would recover other parts of the plane that were still lubricated and had been underwater for even longer. And in 2002, another MD-80, China Northern Airlines Flight 6136, which crashed for reasons not related to this at all, in-flight arson specifically.

• 2:25:11November Kelly?

  In-flight arson?

• 2:25:14November Kelly?

  This is why they banned smoking, I guess.

• 2:25:16Speaker 04

  Yeah, well, this guy had a lot of had a lot of insurance policies and like five cans of petrol. My understanding.

• 2:25:23Justin Roczniak?

  They don't let you bring cool stuff on planes anymore.

• 2:25:25November Kelly?

  Beast mode, to be quite honest.

• 2:25:29November Kelly?

  Listen, it's like the thing about like, you know, if you owe the bank a billion dollars, the bank has a problem. You know, if I have six cans of petrol and I'm on a plane, the insurance company has a problem.

• 2:25:40Justin Roczniak?

  Yes.

• 2:25:42Speaker 04

  In any case, they were able to recover a jack screw from the water because it also crashed on approach to, I believe, Dalon. I'm not sure. It had been submerged in seawater for an extended period of time, not as much time, only five days. But basically that still had lubrication on it. Putting this simply, there wasn't any lubrication on the jack screw.

• 2:26:02Speaker 01

  I do love, I do love the idea of being like, oh, so you have a girlfriend in Canada, you say? Well, I've commissioned the aerospace material laboratory from the US Navy to investigate that claim.

• 2:26:15November Kelly?

  According to security camera recordings, the guy who set the China Northern Airlines plane on fire had spent several hours smoking cigarettes in the waiting hall of Beijing Airport.

• 2:26:27November Kelly?

  Dude's rock. I'm sorry.

• 2:26:29Speaker 01

  My, my favorite thing is that I, obviously I used to smoke. I don't anymore because I'm trying to live past the age of 35. But, but I still smoked. It was when they still had the smoking rooms at the Atlanta airport, which did make it a top tier airport to connect through. And I got stuck there overnight once. And so I just slept on the floor and I'd wake up with my back killing me. I'd walk down the hall and I'd just blast cigs in like the air conditioned ventilation room in the middle of the airport. It kept, it was great, honestly.

• 2:26:59Speaker 04

  If you, it used to be if you walked past it while connecting to another flight, the automatic doors would open and would blast you with secondhand smoke.

• 2:27:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, as you should. You should always be contracting a little bit more cancer every time you step into an airport.

• 2:27:11Speaker 04

  I'm always saying this. This happened, I'm saying this because this happened to me when I was, I believe, eight years old. So that's.

• 2:27:16Speaker 01

  Oh, my God.

• 2:27:17Justin Roczniak?

  Oh, Jesus.

• 2:27:21Speaker 01

  I feel so old now.

• 2:27:24November Kelly?

  I, I, I got blasted in the face with cigarette smoke by, you know, at the age of eight, by my grandparents, as God intended.

• 2:27:31Speaker 04

  Yeah, I also, to be clear, this was also happening to me. It was just weird to have it happen at a public airport. I was running through because my flight from fucking Akron had been stuck on the tarmac for two hours.

• 2:27:41Justin Roczniak?

  Oh, God.

• 2:27:42November Kelly?

  But so Alaska Airlines did not have a girlfriend in Canada.

• 2:27:46Speaker 04

  Yes. Uh, uh, and, and on top of that, they, they also found that the passage way for the jack screw to be fitted, uh, for it to be lubricated was full of a dry congealed, quote, clay-like substance. Consistent with degraded lubrication.

• 2:28:01November Kelly?

  So what, like, nobody lubed it in, like, 20 years or whatever and it just dried out in there?

• 2:28:05Speaker 04

  Well, it had supposedly been lubricated in September 1999, which, you know, that was only a few months before this. Also a few months after I was born to continue that pattern. Uh, it should have contained completely normal semi-liquid lubricating oil. Uh, and they looked at other parts of the tail assembly that should have been lubricated at the same time as part of the same procedure and found that they also had functionally no lubrication going on. Uh, the NTSB goes and obviously immediately interviews the technician who had done the lubrication job. This was at San Francisco specifically. Um, they, they realize within very short order that he has no idea how to lubricate this aircraft.

• 2:28:42Speaker 04

  Uh, he was, the, the job that he was, the job that he was doing.

• 2:28:45November Kelly?

  This is a kind of anxiety nightmare as the Fed show up to see if you know what you're doing at work?

• 2:28:51Justin Roczniak?

  No.

• 2:28:51November Kelly?

  No. I don't.

• 2:28:54Speaker 04

  Well, the Fed show up to, to figure out if you know how to podcast. That's a big problem. Yeah.

• 2:28:58Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 2:29:01November Kelly?

  Yeah, the thing is, I, I, I do like four plus hours of work for what should be a one hour job.

• 2:29:07Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, actually, yeah, that would be a FCC, I, I, I, I assume would show up.

• 2:29:13Speaker 04

  Uh, yeah, so this was supposed to be a one hour, uh, for, over four hour job. Uh, Alaska was signing off on work that he had done that took about an hour. Uh, so, yeah, that wasn't really good. The NTSB discovered that there were two other-

• 2:29:28November Kelly?

  Tops will really be like, "Oh yeah, no, it's lubed. Trust me."

• 2:29:35Speaker 04

  The NTSB discovers that two other Alaska MD-83s had more wear than expected on that assembly. The same maintenance technician had been responsible for one of those, but only the one and not the other, which does bring us to the systemic questions.

• 2:29:49Liam McAnderson?

  Why are you not lubing your shaft?

• 2:29:51November Kelly?

  Yeah, and the answer is because that's not how we do things here, right? Like, there's a cultural issue at play.

• 2:29:59Justin Roczniak?

  It takes a long time. I don't want to deal with it.

• 2:30:02November Kelly?

  Yeah.

• 2:30:04Liam McAnderson?

  If the guy in front of you drops his lube-

• 2:30:08November Kelly?

  You pick up the lube and go home.

• 2:30:11Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 2:30:11Speaker 04

  So, the next thing the NTSB observed was that the amount of wear that was experienced between the last scheduled lubrication, and I have quotes around that, which was September 99, and the accident, which was January 2000, was not nearly enough time to have caused that much wear, indicating that it had been done wrong before that as well. So, we have a pretty big hint as to why, straight off, and we can go to the next slide. So, the first people we have to look at are Alaska Airlines themselves. The NTSB found that Alaska had, number one, designed custom tools for checking jack screw and nut wear that tended to indicate there was less wear than in actuality.

• 2:30:52November Kelly?

  Just a big thumbs up on a stick.

• 2:30:54Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:30:55Liam McAnderson?

  Smiley face.

• 2:30:55Justin Roczniak?

  Looks good.

• 2:30:57Speaker 04

  This was apparently, this was seemingly a genuine fault on Alaska's part. Not like they were trying to tamper with maintenance procedures by doing this, and I mentioned this for a specific reason, but they were just trying to cut costs by fabricating their own tools instead of getting the normal ones.

• 2:31:10Speaker 01

  I remember the time I did that on my Toyota Supra, and I almost became, "Well, there's your problem."

• 2:31:16Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean-

• 2:31:17Speaker 01

  Don't ever use washers as spacers for anything that might vibrate.

• 2:31:21Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 2:31:24Speaker 01

  I'm sure Roz would have known that, but I didn't. I was like 23 years old and really suicidal, and I wanted big Mercedes-Benz brakes on my Toyota.

• 2:31:33November Kelly?

  So Mercedes works.

• 2:31:38Speaker 04

  The second thing that they had done to contribute to this, and this was the main one, was that they had extended maintenance intervals quite a bit. So when Alaska had started their MD-80 maintenance program in 1985, they had initially designated that the process that included lubricate in the Jacksprey was to take place every 5,000 flight hours. By 1988, they had switched this to a calendar time-based process rather than flight hours. So the process was now supposed to happen every 26 months. Now, based on the typical aircraft usage, this would have been about 6,400 flight hours, up from 5,000. The extension of that-

• 2:32:11November Kelly?

  Yeah, I was gonna say, we switched to a sort of a calendar time-based process. So you could do it more regularly, right?

• 2:32:17Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 2:32:18November Kelly?

  Right? Yes.

• 2:32:19Speaker 04

  But also around the time Alaska started drastically increasing frequency and using aircraft utilization.

• 2:32:25November Kelly?

  Yeah.

• 2:32:26Speaker 04

  Now, this extension was significant enough that it should have required FAA approval, which Alaska Airlines did not seek. In 1996, they extended this to 30 months, meaning that the procedure would now be carried out every 9,550 flight hours based on typical aircraft utilization. So the 30-month time period was technically within spec from McDonnell Douglas. It was at the very top end of it, but it was within their specifications for calendar-based maintenance schedules. However, the 9,550 flight hours was not, and of course, if they were using a calendar-based schedule, they also should have done a whichever comes first.

• 2:33:02November Kelly?

  Yeah, right. Like, that's the reason why you would do that, is to do it more often rather than less, ideally.

• 2:33:09Speaker 04

  Yeah. The maximum number of flight hours that McDonnell Douglas recommended was either 7,200 or 7,000, depending on which set of guidelines were used, so-

• 2:33:17November Kelly?

  To be clear, McDonnell Douglas is a corporation that, and you can buy their shirt from us. We'll kill you. They love to do it, right? And, and yet, even they were like, "Okay, but you're pushing it."

• 2:33:29Speaker 04

  I have to remember to buy one of those. I've read like eight months overdue on that.

• 2:33:33November Kelly?

  In the description.

• 2:33:36Speaker 04

  Saw somebody with it in public once and I was like, oh, that's from my episode. That's horrifying to see in real life. Uh, so yeah, the, the typical practice was to have the whichever comes first. Alaska just kind of didn't and was technically, very technically considered compliant with McDonnell Douglas guidelines because they did not specify that you had to do the whichever comes first. It was not written in ink.

• 2:33:58Speaker 01

  So it's these assholes why every time I fucking update my phone, I've gotta scroll through 350 pages of.

• 2:34:04November Kelly?

  Yeah.

• 2:34:04Speaker 01

  This is what words mean.

• 2:34:06Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 2:34:07Speaker 01

  Whereas.

• 2:34:09November Kelly?

  But it did ultimately.

• 2:34:10Liam McAnderson?

  Kill you stone dead frowdy face.

• 2:34:14November Kelly?

  And then it's like a crayon drawing of McDonnell Douglas, like an F4 bombing the shit out of you. And the F4 has a smiley face on it.

• 2:34:26Speaker 04

  Uh, but it did ultimately mean that both man hours and maintenance costs themselves had been significantly cut in a, a process that was generally seen by the public as successful up until this, by the public at least.

• 2:34:39Speaker 01

  By shareholders.

• 2:34:40Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 2:34:41November Kelly?

  The last time. They were still making a loss.

• 2:34:44Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 2:34:44Speaker 01

  No, they were making, they were making profit by this point.

• 2:34:47November Kelly?

  Oh, okay. Well, nevermind.

• 2:34:48Speaker 01

  They made, they made a huge loss in 92 and then they turned it around real quick when they canceled all the maintenance facilities and they, they struck, broke the, um, stewardesses and they like did a bunch of other.

• 2:34:59Speaker 04

  Increasing aircraft utilization.

• 2:35:01November Kelly?

  It's, it's nice to know that like.

• 2:35:03Speaker 01

  If the airplane is flying, you save money.

• 2:35:05November Kelly?

  It's, it's nice to know that like all of the money they saved went directly into some rich guy's pocket so that he could buy like more time on Jeffrey Epstein's island.

• 2:35:13Speaker 01

  Yeah. And then they could kill 90 people.

• 2:35:15Speaker 04

  Yeah. So the last time the aircraft has undergone the full-fledged, uh, maintenance procedure that included the jack screw was September of 1997. Uh, it would have received another one in March of 2000. In the time between September of 97 and January of 2000, it had accumulated about 9,000 flight hours. So.

• 2:35:32November Kelly?

  Right.

• 2:35:33Speaker 04

  It was indeed.

• 2:35:34November Kelly?

  President, lube up the plane.

• 2:35:37Speaker 04

  It was, it was still under the recommended flight hours window for Alaska. So that's something to consider. The NTSB actually recommended that the 7,000 slash 7,200 flight hours that McDonnell Douglas gave was actually also too long, given the likelihood that the lubrication process was going to be done wrong. They felt it more reasonable to check that at shorter frequencies. Obviously, this meant that Alaska's 9550 hours was ridiculous and was the biggest contributing factor overall to this entire accident. Yeah, that's basically it for Alaska Airlines. They extended their maintenance programs and killed a bunch of people in the process in order to cut costs.

• 2:36:15Speaker 01

  It's so fucked up because it really is like the most direct line for any recent aviation disaster I can think of between, oh yeah, we wanted to save money and we killed a bunch of people. Like it's usually you have to like actually like sift through the systemic factors here. But really this one is just like, oh my God, they cut costs and nine years later, like to the day they killed a ton of people.

• 2:36:37November Kelly?

  Headline is like sort of several minutes of terror kill almost 100 people because capitalism.

• 2:36:44Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, like this could have been a five minute episode.

• 2:36:47Speaker 04

  Yeah, sorry.

• 2:36:49November Kelly?

  Then we wouldn't have figured out like which airline liveries we like the best or talks about like sort of refusing loads.

• 2:36:55Speaker 01

  I'm the one who was like, hey, check out, yeah, check out the golden samovar service. I think it had absolutely no bearing whatsoever on this disaster.

• 2:37:03Justin Roczniak?

  Check out the universally beloved guy on the tape.

• 2:37:06Speaker 04

  Yeah, apparently not universally beloved.

• 2:37:09November Kelly?

  No, not by me. And I will go to my grave, you know, ideally not inverted in a sort of like pitch dive, but I will go to my grave not liking the guy.

• 2:37:18Speaker 04

  And hopefully we survive this episode with our spinal columns intact.

• 2:37:22November Kelly?

  Fingers crossed. I mean, mine feels a little bit like, ow, yeah, I still can't raise my arm that high.

• 2:37:27Speaker 04

  You sound like my dad. Jesus, web.

• 2:37:29November Kelly?

  I, listen, I, I don't know.

• 2:37:35Speaker 04

  I got a, I got a new chair like two days ago from the thrift store and it's much better than my old one. So I'm actually quite happy.

• 2:37:40November Kelly?

  Cool.

• 2:37:42Speaker 04

  So, so.

• 2:37:43Liam McAnderson?

  Maya.

• 2:37:43Speaker 01

  No problem. Also like so much younger than all of us that you can't even have.

• 2:37:49November Kelly?

  I will say, I will say this to all of you children, you infant, 35 hits like the nut shearing off the jack screw.

• 2:38:00November Kelly?

  You don't know what pain is. And I know in the comments that there are people laughing at me in their 40s, right? So I, I know it's gonna happen.

• 2:38:09Liam McAnderson?

  Until the injury.

• 2:38:11November Kelly?

  The injury. Yeah.

• 2:38:13Speaker 04

  You put that comment on that, Nova?

• 2:38:15November Kelly?

  Oh, sorry. The, yeah, we can, we can do that for sure.

• 2:38:18Speaker 04

  So the, the second person we need to point out is a podcast fan favorite McDonnell Douglas slash Boeing at this point.

• 2:38:24Liam McAnderson?

  Boo.

• 2:38:26November Kelly?

  Both.

• 2:38:27Liam McAnderson?

  Our words are available.

• 2:38:28November Kelly?

  Classic, classic shirt. You are McDonnell Douglas gonna like slide into the ocean at like 500 miles an hour.

• 2:38:36Liam McAnderson?

  McDonnell Douglas will kill you.

• 2:38:41Speaker 04

  Boeing engineers during the hearings over the course of this investigation said that they had not considered ACBE nutware as a likely single source of failure and that it required multiple things going wrong in order to cause catastrophic loss. So they didn't need to put more fail safes into the aircraft design. Worth remembering, of course, this is a design from the 1960s on top of that.

• 2:39:01November Kelly?

  Yeah, but to be clear, they're, they're going, well, we didn't expect anyone to just not bother lubricating it for like five years.

• 2:39:08Speaker 04

  Mm hmm. And indeed, the FAA agreed and approved that the aircraft design when it was built in the 1980s. And of course they did so again in the 1990s, whenever they were building the MD 95. So McDonnell Douglas not implementing fail safe procedures to account for airlines not maintaining their planes good enough was cited as a potential, as a cause, as one of the factors that caused this accident. But of course, ultimately, at the end of the day, we're still pointing at Alaska Airlines for not lubricating planes hard enough. So, you know, kind of a catch 22 here that should have been designed better, but they should have maintained it better.

• 2:39:47Speaker 04

  Ultimately, uh, once the, once the report was issued, the Alaska and Boeing sort of immediately were like, okay, let's, uh, let's take care of this now. And settled out of court with all the victims' families en masse. Uh, Alaska took steps to improve their maintenance program. I don't have any concrete numbers on that, which scares me, but, uh, they haven't killed anybody since then. They had the thing pop out of the aircraft a couple of years ago. That was Boeing. That one was Boeing's fault. Door plug. That's the word I was looking for.

• 2:40:12Justin Roczniak?

  Yes.

• 2:40:13Speaker 01

  You're telling me that Boeing planes have unexpected issues?

• 2:40:16November Kelly?

  Yeah, sometimes the emergency exit row decides to assist with its own evacuation, you know?

• 2:40:22Justin Roczniak?

  No, this was not an emergency exit row. That was a door plug because certain versions of the 737 MAX had a door that was not required for certain seating configurations. So it was simply plugged up.

• 2:40:38Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 2:40:38Justin Roczniak?

  Right? But, uh, yeah, the door plug went, uh, because it was not plugged up correctly.

• 2:40:45Speaker 04

  Yes. I'm, I'm flying on an Alaska MAX 737 MAX 9 a week from tomorrow, so I'm looking forward to that.

• 2:40:52Justin Roczniak?

  Wear your seatbelt.

• 2:40:53Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 2:40:56Speaker 04

  So Boeing didn't really implement any changes to the, to the DC-9 or derivative designs. Uh, they simply just kind of mandated the carriers actually do the proper maintenance on it. Uh, the MD-80 didn't have any more fatal accidents caused by this before being retired from mainstream airlines in like the late 2010s. Um, you can still find them in some places, mainly the place, places where plane parts are expensive. I think Venezuela has the most of them. Uh, although the Boeing 717, which used to be the McDonnell Douglas MD-95, uh, does have the same design and is still in active service. And it's a plane I quite like flying on because it's a little dumb.

• 2:41:34Justin Roczniak?

  Hmm.

• 2:41:35Speaker 04

  I presume the Chinese clone of the MD-90 also has the same problem. I don't know. I didn't look into that.

• 2:41:40November Kelly?

  Sort of they're like, this is a kind of lower priority issue. Once we can start getting like economy class to stop self-immolating?

• 2:41:47Speaker 04

  Mm-hmm. That, that would, God, the, the MD, the Chinese MD-90 clone is such a fascinating thing, but that's not, not for right now. So.

• 2:41:55Justin Roczniak?

  Well, presumably their maintenance guys, uh, you know, will spend the full four hours doing the lubrication.

• 2:42:01Speaker 04

  Hopefully.

• 2:42:02Justin Roczniak?

  Because otherwise they won't get their smoke break.

• 2:42:06Speaker 04

  So I have one, I have one quick addendum, which is on the next slide. So the one last twist came shortly after this crash happened. When it became public that Alaska Airlines' maintenance program had been under federal scrutiny since 1998, when a mechanic by the name, by a mechanic lead, sorry, by the name of John Leateen filed a whistleblower complaint with the FAA that Alaska had been approving maintenance records that they did not have legal authority to approve, as well as records that indicated the maintenance that happened when it actually happened. The FAA had been conducting a federal investigation at the time and had gone as far as to raid Alaska's maintenance records in December 1998, but that investigation was still ongoing.

• 2:42:44November Kelly?

  Oh, so the guy on the radio with them who's like, oh no, seems rough, might have already seen the feds raid their offices like the year before?

• 2:42:55Speaker 04

  Alaska put this guy on paid leave in 1999 because they kind of, they presumably figured him out. He sued them for libel in 2000 after this happened. After the crash had happened, he went back into his personal maintenance records that he had taken copies of for the sake of the feds. I think it actually didn't indicate which. He had discovered that in 1997, he had recommended a full jackstrew replacement for N963 AS due to an excessive amount of wear on it. He had done this shortly before the end of a shift day. He had gone home and the person that came into work after him had overridden that suggestion and put the aircraft back into service.

• 2:43:29November Kelly?

  Incredible, just like, he wrote down on a file, like, hey, can you not do Alaska Flight 261? And, and they like crossed that out and they're like, do Alaska.

• 2:43:40Justin Roczniak?

  No, no, we're gonna, we're gonna, we're gonna crash this plane. It's gonna be good for business.

• 2:43:44November Kelly?

  Do not spiral into the ocean. And it's like, hmm.

• 2:43:48Justin Roczniak?

  I don't know, that sounds expensive.

• 2:43:50Speaker 04

  So that was all that I had. The, the next slide was one of Victoria's, so I'll hand that back to her.

• 2:43:56Speaker 01

  Oh yeah, nobody, nobody went to jail, by the way. That was something that nobody ever got charged, nobody went to jail. And which is, I think fewer consequences than there even were in Denzel Washington's flight 2012, because didn't they get mad at him for being drunk while he was flying? I don't remember this dad part of the movie, I only watched the plane crash part.

• 2:44:14November Kelly?

  I'm gonna, I'm gonna mount a defense of the back half of Flight. I think it's good. It's like kind of soul searching. It's not like-

• 2:44:21Speaker 01

  I mean, here's the thing, right? It's like, there are two Denzel Washington, well, there's your problem episodes. And of the two, Unstoppable is a better movie.

• 2:44:30November Kelly?

  I agree-

• 2:44:31Justin Roczniak?

  The size of the Chrysler Building.

• 2:44:35November Kelly?

  I, I, I like the back half of Flight because the airline is 100% like, let's fucking go. Let's get John Goodman drug dealer in here. We are gonna like liquor you up before the hearing and you're not gonna tell them shit, you know? Like, they are ready to go.

• 2:44:50Speaker 04

  I, actually, sorry, hang on. I want to clarify one more thing real quick that I forgot to. Um, you, if you look into this online, you will see some people that like, that blame the crew for not immediately diverting and instead go- Doing all the extra tests and things, uh, before deciding to put the aircraft down.

• 2:45:06November Kelly?

  I can't believe this, these pilots did it by the book, the thing that they're supposed to do.

• 2:45:12Speaker 04

  Do not do this. These two guys did the best that they possibly could and there's absolutely no reason to find faults in anything that they did.

• 2:45:19November Kelly?

  Yeah, like, there's nothing to say that if, e- even if they were like, okay, let's put it on the ground now, right? We, we find the nearest, like, I don't know, flat strip of land or whatever. There's nothing to say that like, trying to do that wouldn't have sheared off the thing just the same. Because like, it did that when they were trying to maneuver, right? Like, as soon as they tried to like, put the thing into, into like a turn.

• 2:45:39Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 2:45:39Speaker 01

  Yeah. No, they, didn't they win a medal too?

• 2:45:42Speaker 04

  Um, I don't know off the top of my head, but they probably-

• 2:45:44Speaker 01

  I'm, I'm pretty sure the pilots got like an-

• 2:45:46Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 2:45:47Speaker 01

  International recognition from like the, some international-

• 2:45:49Speaker 04

  Yes, they got, yes, they were, they were posthumous, posthumously awarded the Airline Pilots Association Gold Medal for heroism, which is completely reasonable.

• 2:45:59Speaker 01

  They brought the plane the whole way down.

• 2:46:01Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:46:01Speaker 01

  King shit.

• 2:46:01Speaker 04

  Yep. No, I, I just wanted to take a moment and say that because I keep, I keep seeing people on comment sections online trying to blame it on them and it pisses me off.

• 2:46:09November Kelly?

  The airline pilots organization.

• 2:46:11Speaker 01

  Entirely the corporation's fault again. It's the most straightforward.

• 2:46:13November Kelly?

  Titanium metal for upper body strength.

• 2:46:17Speaker 01

  It's the most straightforward, well, there's your problem episode of all time. Everybody aboard who was actually doing things was like, oh yeah, we did a great job. But they were still fucked over by the indifference of capitalism and shareholder buybacks.

• 2:46:30Speaker 01

  This is all like, literally, it's all Ronald Reagan's fault. The episode.

• 2:46:35Liam McAnderson?

  Yes.

• 2:46:36Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 2:46:37Speaker 01

  Anyway, I just wanted the one, the, the thing that really did actually kind of drive me crazy about the, the flight. Crash scene is that they have him dump fuel and you can't dump fuel in an MD 83. Or 88 or any of them. They didn't have the fuel dump capacity. So like for, for them to be like, oh yeah, well, let's just, let's walk through this disaster exactly as it happened, which was a pretty action packed disaster. And then to be like, we're going to add in a fuel dump. It sounds.

• 2:47:03November Kelly?

  I, I, I also like that he's, I also like that he's dumping fuel inverted at like 50 feet over a settee. Just like, why does everything taste of cancer?

• 2:47:12Speaker 01

  They do, they do clip a church right after this scene, um, which I think is kind of funny.

• 2:47:17November Kelly?

  The inverted nine 11?

• 2:47:20Justin Roczniak?

  Is the fuel dumping valve? Well, I guess if it doesn't have a fuel dumping valve, it's irrelevant, but you know, isn't it gravity fed? You know, it wouldn't work if the plane's upside down.

• 2:47:30Speaker 01

  I think they dumped the fuel before they inverted. I think they actually, I, from what I remember, because I watched it a few weeks ago and then I forgot to like write it down more. Again, Maya and I have very different podcasting philosophies.

• 2:47:42Speaker 04

  Sorry.

• 2:47:42Speaker 01

  But I'm pretty sure the plane jerks down. No, I don't apologize. The plane jerks down and then he's like, whoa, it's just like Alaska 261. And then they, they're, they're like level it out and then it jerks down again. And then I'm pretty sure they dump fuel as the plane is accelerating toward the earth, which again, you can't do on this kind of plane.

• 2:47:58November Kelly?

  He's listening to, well, there's your problem as he does it, uh, as with all of our listeners drunk at work. Yeah.

• 2:48:04Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah. How long have I been muted?

• 2:48:07November Kelly?

  I don't remember.

• 2:48:08Speaker 04

  This happened a long time. Time I was on this part.

• 2:48:10Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah, dude, we do this a lot.

• 2:48:12Justin Roczniak?

  For a while.

• 2:48:13Liam McAnderson?

  Well, I threatened to kill you because you ran out of hard drive space.

• 2:48:16November Kelly?

  It's the last thing I remember. I don't know.

• 2:48:17Liam McAnderson?

  Well, I very much remember that as well.

• 2:48:19November Kelly?

  That was that. That was that. That went in. Yeah.

• 2:48:21Speaker 01

  The only note that I had is like Alaska is the only American carrier to have not declared bankruptcy in the post deregulation era. Because, you know, deep post deregulation aviation is obviously not a problem at all. It's not an issue whatsoever to like force competition in a field that like has massive upfront capital expenditures and a ton of maintenance. That you have every incentive in the world to cut. Anyway, Alaska is probably going to go bankrupt anyway because they bought Hawaii and now the US economy is collapsing.

• 2:48:51Speaker 04

  Yeah. The good news is that we are slowly marching towards a one airline economy in this country, and I don't know what airline it will be.

• 2:48:57Liam McAnderson?

  I hope it's not American.

• 2:48:58Speaker 01

  Carrier.

• 2:48:59Justin Roczniak?

  Pan Am.

• 2:49:00Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah, TWA. Fuck it. Back from the dead, baby.

• 2:49:03November Kelly?

  TWA. I hope so.

• 2:49:04Justin Roczniak?

  Eastern Airlines.

• 2:49:06November Kelly?

  TWA give us all jobs as flight attendants.

• 2:49:09Speaker 04

  That's true.

• 2:49:09November Kelly?

  Yeah, absolutely.

• 2:49:10Justin Roczniak?

  Trans woman airlines.

• 2:49:13November Kelly?

  We can't have trans woman airlines because we would select the planes based on what we individually thought was most beautiful. We would be the only airline in the world simultaneously flying Embraer's, Bombardier's and Tupolev's.

• 2:49:25Justin Roczniak?

  Way too many Lockheed L-1011s.

• 2:49:29Liam McAnderson?

  Great plan.

• 2:49:31Speaker 04

  You got my ass.

• 2:49:32Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 2:49:34November Kelly?

  It's a good plane. Sorry, sorry. You're here for the the charter flight? Yeah, get in the back of the MiG-15.

• 2:49:42November Kelly?

  But I can see daylight through the floor. It's fine. Don't worry about it.

• 2:49:44Liam McAnderson?

  It's fine.

• 2:49:45Justin Roczniak?

  Don't worry about it.

• 2:49:46Liam McAnderson?

  Don't be that Russian machine that'll break.

• 2:49:50Speaker 01

  I want to throw out a quote from the former CEO of American Airlines, Robert Crandall. In June 2008, in the middle of the financial collapse, from Don't Do The Financial Collapse, he said, "The consequences of deregulation have been very adverse. Our airlines, once world leaders, are no laggards in every category, including fleet age, service quality, and international reputation. Fewer and fewer flights are on time. Airport congestion has become a staple of late night comedy shows. An even higher percentage of bags are lost or misplaced. Last minute seats are harder and harder to find. Passenger complaints have skyrocketed. Airline service by any standard has become unacceptable." He also blamed this for why you can't get a halfway decent flight out of a small city, which as somebody who was blown out of two small city airports,

• 2:50:32Speaker 01

  both Missoula and Idaho Falls. Yeah.

• 2:50:37Justin Roczniak?

  Yep.

• 2:50:37Speaker 01

  Hub and spoke is great if you live in a fucking hub.

• 2:50:40Liam McAnderson?

  I sure do.

• 2:50:41Speaker 01

  Your life sucks. Well, that's the thing, right? That's why I fly Alaska all the time is because I have one carrier option because I live in Seattle.

• 2:50:49Speaker 04

  I I live where it was a hub until it wasn't a hub anymore. And that's a that's a particularly interesting experience.

• 2:50:55Liam McAnderson?

  Oh.

• 2:50:55Speaker 01

  Yeah. Um, the the lesson here is that like this is the, well, there's your problem episode that will beat you to death with its unsubtlety. Capitalism directly killed a bunch of people.

• 2:51:05Liam McAnderson?

  Yes.

• 2:51:06Justin Roczniak?

  Yes.

• 2:51:06Liam McAnderson?

  It's fine.

• 2:51:07Speaker 01

  Also, if you're a pilot, you're probably like a little crazy, but sometimes you do really cool stuff. So, you know.

• 2:51:12November Kelly?

  Don't date another pilot. Don't do that to yourself.

• 2:51:15Speaker 01

  I'm not dating any more pilots. Trust me, I'm done with that part of my, I put in my time.

• 2:51:20Justin Roczniak?

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

• 2:51:28Justin Roczniak?

  Attention, train perverts.

• 2:51:30Liam McAnderson?

  Yep.

• 2:51:30November Kelly?

  Hey.

• 2:51:31Speaker 04

  What's up?

• 2:51:32Justin Roczniak?

  Readings from an airplane pervert.

• 2:51:34Speaker 04

  Oh, God.

• 2:51:35Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 2:51:36November Kelly?

  I don't just have much in common.

• 2:51:37Speaker 04

  Countrymen, thank God.

• 2:51:39Liam McAnderson?

  I told you to stop fucking the planes.

• 2:51:42Justin Roczniak?

  Our vehicular interests may from the outside appear totally different, but our aviation and railroad transportation have many things in common. There are long metal boxes with people and stuff inside. There's autism and a healthy terror of collisions.

• 2:51:56November Kelly?

  Yeah, they're they're they're two subcultures divided by a common language and united by the desire to fuck the machine.

• 2:52:02Justin Roczniak?

  Yes.

• 2:52:02Liam McAnderson?

  Yes.

• 2:52:03Justin Roczniak?

  No, I just want to sniff the solvus.

• 2:52:05Liam McAnderson?

  No, he doesn't.

• 2:52:08Justin Roczniak?

  This incident involves my time as a regional airline FO. What's an FO?

• 2:52:14Speaker 04

  First officer.

• 2:52:14Justin Roczniak?

  First officer, okay. And at one of our common stops, Philadelphia International Airport. Here on the screen.

• 2:52:24November Kelly?

  I I like that you can see the proximity to the nearest Wawa. That's important.

• 2:52:28Justin Roczniak?

  Oh, yeah, there's a Wawa here.

• 2:52:29Speaker 04

  There is a Wawa here. So I have also, I've also been to this Wawa.

• 2:52:33Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, there's the oil refinery used to be up here. Um, Fort Mifflin is here. It's cool.

• 2:52:39Liam McAnderson?

  Fort Mifflin's really cool, yeah.

• 2:52:40Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, it's really cool. Uh, what else is, uh, you can see the fainting goat bar and restaurant up here. I haven't been there. I don't know what's there. Anyway, KPHL earned a reputation among flight crews as a real headache to fly through. The airspace is crowded, the ground controllers seem to think everyone is familiar with the unwritten procedures, that their overworked brains cooked up themselves, and the airport signage sucks. Many a time I have been told to taxi from intersection spot six, which is a big dot on the taxiway intersection that says six on it, along the taxiway and report when I reach intersection spot 11, only to be laughed at for calling up too early because the spots

• 2:53:24Justin Roczniak?

  are numbered six, seven, eight, nine, 10, 10A, and then 11.

• 2:53:29Speaker 04

  Excellent.

• 2:53:31November Kelly?

  I love Philadelphia, greatest city in the world.

• 2:53:34Justin Roczniak?

  I can only assume it's like this to specifically set up good and noble first officers to be laughed at by the ground control hyenas.

• 2:53:43November Kelly?

  Yes, yes, I imagine so.

• 2:53:45Justin Roczniak?

  These are mere annoyances to what KPHL's real problem is. It is a 10-gallon airport in a five-gallon bag. It has three runways when it really needs six, but there's no room because the river is blocking off the expansion it really needs to accommodate the busy hub it operates as. This gorilla in a phone booth setup leads us to the incident which I write to you about today. We were flying our CRJ 200 into KPHL, and after half an hour of futzing around, holding and vectoring, we were numbered two to land on runway 27R.

• 2:54:24Justin Roczniak?

  27, I assume it's one of these two. Anyway, behind an American Airlines 737, runway 27R is perpendicularly intersected by runway 35, which is, uh, this one. Okay, so yeah, yeah, we're talking about this guy here.

• 2:54:47Speaker 04

  What the fuck?

• 2:54:48Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, yeah. When they land on this one, I can hear them coming over my house really loud. They only do that in like crosswinds.

• 2:54:56Speaker 04

  That's a tiny little runway.

• 2:54:58Justin Roczniak?

  Oh yeah, and it's not a big one. I've been on a flight that, you know, we did a go around on one of the big runways.

• 2:55:05November Kelly?

  Really easy for a layer to like satellite, to like vector a satellite over your house again. Hi, Ayla.

• 2:55:11Justin Roczniak?

  It was like a, it was like a bad, bad thunderstorm. And we had to do a go around on one of the big runways and circle around and go to the smaller runway. And I was like, you know, you could just drop me off here. My house is right here. I'll just get off. TV cooing at 500.

• 2:55:26November Kelly?

  Punch out the door plug and parachute out. Yeah.

• 2:55:28Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, exactly. Right in my backyard. Yeah.

• 2:55:35Justin Roczniak?

  Anyway, runway 27R is perpendicularly intersected by runway 35, which was also accepting arrivals at the time because KPHL is always busy.

• 2:55:46November Kelly?

  That sounds bad.

• 2:55:46Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. Finally, we were cleared to switch to the tower frequency, but instead of being cleared to land like we were expected, Tower told us to execute a series S turns along the approach path to give crossing landing traffic time to land.

• 2:56:02November Kelly?

  What?

• 2:56:02Justin Roczniak?

  My captain and I looked at each other in surprise because neither of us had done this as a time making maneuver before, and certainly not at this altitude.

• 2:56:11November Kelly?

  On the radio in the broadest like Philadelphia accent you can. Yeah, just like fuck around up there for a minute. So this John can get off the runway.

• 2:56:19Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. You can use make some S turns.

• 2:56:26Justin Roczniak?

  My captain and I looked at each other in surprise because neither of us had done this as a time making maneuver before, certainly not at this altitude, but the tower said to, and avoiding traffic is always a good idea. We wiggled our 26 ton aluminum booty for a minute as we screened over the naval yard. When the tower asked if we saw the traffic we were to avoid, we answered, nah, do you want more S turns?

• 2:56:52Justin Roczniak?

  The tower said, "They were sure we were fine. They couldn't see the traffic anymore either."

• 2:57:00Justin Roczniak?

  Okay.

• 2:57:03Justin Roczniak?

  And we were cleared to land on 27R. Less than 10 seconds later, as we are on short final to land, a King Air light turbojet appears to the left of our flight path. Motors left to right across the runway we were about to land on and planted itself on runway 35. "Okay, now you're clear of traffic," Tower said.

• 2:57:28November Kelly?

  You can't say they don't have a sense of comedy there.

• 2:57:33Justin Roczniak?

  "Kids, the moral here is that even air traffic control gets overwhelmed, and you never need an excuse to hit the takeoff go around buttons and punch it out of there. If the vibes suck, hit the bricks. Maybe you won't wake up in the middle of the night with the memory of making eye contact with a passenger in another airplane."

• 2:57:54Liam McAnderson?

  Fuck me!

• 2:57:57November Kelly?

  Oh, just another, another beautiful day in commercial aviation.

• 2:58:02Justin Roczniak?

  "I love the show. It has kept my spirits up when the times have been dark, and yay Liam."

• 2:58:07Liam McAnderson?

  Yay.

• 2:58:08November Kelly?

  Yay Liam.

• 2:58:08Liam McAnderson?

  Thank you.

• 2:58:09Justin Roczniak?

  Signed, a potential future episode subject. Brackets, please, for the love of God, do not post anything that might identify me. Close brackets.

• 2:58:19November Kelly?

  Listen, I just, if you feel like it's going that way, you're gonna just get on your phone, start blasting the episode for the benefit of the cockpit voice recorder.

• 2:58:30Justin Roczniak?

  Well.

• 2:58:30Liam McAnderson?

  Amazing.

• 2:58:31Justin Roczniak?

  That was Safety Third.

• 2:58:37Justin Roczniak?

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

• 2:58:41November Kelly?

  Be Gay Solve Crimes dot com, Tran Girlismo, Third Thing. Talk your shit.

• 2:58:47Speaker 01

  Trend girlismo, that's it. I have a Patreon.

• 2:58:49November Kelly?

  If the people want more Maya, where can they find more Maya?

• 2:58:51Speaker 04

  Uh, I'm going to plug two things. I'm gonna plug my website, which is a good place to always find me. Uh, it's literally just mayawalkwith.me. That's a dot me is the T L D. It's a good web domain. I've gotten compliments on it before. Um, assuming this is okay, I'm also going to plug, I have a GoFundMe running so I could get moved to Seattle, Washington.

• 2:59:11Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, of course.

• 2:59:12Speaker 04

  Because I, uh, because I, because, uh, conditions in rural America have gotten quite bad and, uh, it is time to become an internally displaced refugee.

• 2:59:21Speaker 01

  Woo!

• 2:59:21Justin Roczniak?

  Woo! Yeah, you should go donate.

• 2:59:24Speaker 01

  I love being internally displaced refugees. Transamit are always doing this.

• 2:59:27Justin Roczniak?

  You should go donate to that GoFundMe. There'll be a link in the description.

• 2:59:31Speaker 04

  A lot of people already have, and I'm very thankful.

• 2:59:33Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. I donated, I donated to it when I accidentally said it as anonymous. I don't want to be anonymous. I donated to it.

• 2:59:45November Kelly?

  I can say in the Bible, let, yeah, let your left hand know what your right hand is doing.

• 2:59:50Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 2:59:50November Kelly?

  At all times.

• 2:59:52Justin Roczniak?

  Hmm.

• 2:59:53Speaker 04

  All right. End this.

• 2:59:54Justin Roczniak?

  All right, that was the episode.

• 2:59:55Speaker 04

  Bye, everybody. Wonderful. Thank you so much. Bye, everyone.

• 2:59:58Speaker 01

  Goodbye.

• 2:59:59Speaker 04

  Goodbye.