Disaster!
Apparently Roku Live TV has a DISASTER CHANNEL and half the time it’s showing episodes from my “Mayday” YouTube channel that I love so much (the one about the airline disasters).
Anyway, today I caught the end of an episode about a 1985 accident involving a British Airways plane. There was a fire on it before it even took off and the big question surrounding the whole thing was that while the fire was major, it was not major enough to cause as many casualties as there were. So why were there so many casualties?
The documentary went into a very interesting discussion about human psychology, human factors, and the effect of panic when trying to exit a plane in an emergency. Helen Muir, basically the expert on airplane and airplane passenger human factors and psychology, talked about how they tried to reenact everyone getting off the plane to try and determine why so many died. This reenactment resulted in some major changes to plane cabins (track lighting to find exits in the dark/smoke, wider entryways to help prevent bottlenecking at exits) to make them safer.
I highly recommend watching this.
Badding Break
It’s summer, so for whatever reason, that means I’m back into watching my aviation documentaries.
It’s a tradition, yo.
Anyway, today I watched a video about the 1986 mid-air collision of Aeromexico Flight 498 and a small aircraft over California, and I was immediately reminded of the similarities between its story and the mid-air collision depicted in (*looks it up*) season 2 of Breaking Bad. The one where the air traffic controller is distressed over the loss of his daughter and makes an error, causing two planes to collide and the debris to fall on Walter White’s town.
Like…watch the documentary. If you remember the scenario in Breaking Bad, they are freakishly similar. The actual air traffic controller’s name was Walter White.
Believe it or not, though, it sounds like the creator of Breaking Bad didn’t know about this incident. I don’t know if I completely buy it. I notice in my own life that there are a lot of things I think of or create seemingly out of the blue and then later, upon reflection, realize how many little bits and pieces are actually derivatives of things I’ve seen in the past.
So maybe that’s it. It’s almost too big of a coincidence to NOT be that.
Google Knows
Google ALWAYS knows.
It’s fire season and I’m terrified of it, so guess what YouTube recommended for me?
Yup.
Scare
Kind of going off from yesterday’s post (kind of), I’ve been super into reading about (and watching videos/documentaries on) disasters. Especially structural collapse disasters, but we’re not limited to that.
So if you like to be horrified like I do, here are some fun YouTube channels that cover all sorts of disasters.
He does a good job objectively describing what leads up to an event, the event itself, and the aftermath.
They have a good number of non-disaster documentaries, but their disaster ones are good. The “Mayday” series will make you never want to fly again.
HAVE FUN!
Eigenblogger 