Episodes usually start In Medias Res while the disaster is underway, following them with a sequence of the disaster and the following investigation, and at the end a re-enaction of how the disaster occurred and of how measures were taken to prevent the disaster from happening again.

Episode order is unrelated to chronological order, except that there is a certain amount of time from the time of the accident to the time of the episode, so some later episodes cover then-recent accidents which occur after the series started.

General trope examples:

• Artistic License – History
• Chekhov's Gun
• Cutting Corners
• Didn't Think This Through
• Failsafe Failure
• Failed a Spot Check
• Outliving One's Offspring
• Poor Communication Kills
• Too Dumb to Live

This series provides examples of:

• Accidental Suicide: In several of the discussed incidents, mistakes made by the pilots caused several deaths, including one or both pilots.
• Ace Pilot: Some accidents like United Airlines Flight 173 and Flash Airlines Flight 604 show how having an ace pilot can be a liability instead of an asset. Flight crews are trained to work together as a team, to prevent accidents like these.
• Aesop Amnesia: Unfortunately, there are many lessons to be learned from one or more accidents that aren't learned, are forgotten, or are ignored which then leads to another accident, maybe worse than the last.
  • Pilots engaged in conversations not relevant to the flight at inappropriate times (preparing for take-off or landing) have contributed to a mid-air collision (PSA Flight 182), two takeoffs with retracted flaps resulting in crashes (Delta Air Lines Flight 1141 and LAPA Flight 3142), a plane taking off on the wrong runway (Comair Flight 5191), an unrecoverable stall on approach (Colgan Air Flight 3407) and a demonstration flight crashing into a mountain (the 2012 Mount Salak Sukhoi Superjet crash).
  • Pilots skipping, rushing, or not reviewing flight checklists during important moments in the flight have also contributed to two takeoffs with retracted flaps (Spanair Flight 5022 and Northwest Airlines Flight 255), a plane crashing into a mountain (Santa Barbara Airlines Flight 518), a stall as a result of skipping deicing that lead to the plane crashing into the Potomac river (Air Florida Flight 90) and a landing with no spoilers during bad weather (American Airlines Flight 1420).
  • Target fixation, poor situational awareness and poor crew resource management with the rest of the crew have been contributing factors to two improper landing approaches ending with the plane crashing into terrain (Korean Air Flight 801 and First Air Flight 6560), two instances where fixation with a minor fault lead to a crash (Eastern Air Lines Flight 401 and United Airlines Flight 173), a non-stabilised approach and resulting hard landing on a runway (Garuda Indonesia Flight 200), an unrecoverable bank to the left after taking off (Korean Air Cargo Flight 8509), a plane crashing into construction equipment on a closed runway (Singapore Airlines Flight 006), a failure to evacuate a burning plane after landing (Saudia Flight 163), and the infamous Tenerife Disaster (KLM Flight 4805 and Pan Am Flight 1736).
  • Problems with maintenance staff or other ground crew making mistakes due to improper or inadequate training, overwork (sometimes causing them to try and take shortcuts just to not fall behind), technical difficulty in doing things the proper way, or just plain poor oversight have contributed to an engine falling off during takeoff (American Airlines Flight 191), a plane running out of fuel during flight (Air Transat Flight 236 and Air Canada Flight 143), two instances of covered pitot/static tubes which lead to malfunctioning flight instruments (Aeroperu Flight 603 and Birgenair Flight 301), an improperly adjusted elevator control cable (Air Midwest Flight 5481), a rear cargo door falling off causing an explosive decompression (the 1975 US Air Force C-5 Galaxy crash), a missing row of screws causing an elevator to break off mid flight (Continental Express Flight 2574), a missing cotter pin causing the right side elevator to get jammed into the climb position (Emery Worldwide Flight 17), an onboard cargo fire caused by mislabeled cargo (ValuJet Flight 592), an airline using illegal aircraft parts (Partnair Flight 394), a takeoff with an improper stabiliser trim setting and back heavy cargo (Fine Air Flight 101), two instances of improper repair of damage from a tailstrike (Japan Airlines Flight 123 and China Airlines Flight 611), an entire wing falling off a seaplane (Chalks Ocean Airways Flight 101), a cockpit windscreen blowing off mid-flight (British Airways Flight 5390), a bolt in a slat mechanism coming loose and puncturing a fuel tank (China Airlines Flight 120), ailerons being crossed due to mis-rigging (Air Astana Flight 1388), a tube that was increasingly too short causing flammable de-icing fluid to leak in a place full of potential sources of ignition (Pilgrim Airlines Flight 458), and the cables controlling the stabilizer trim being crossed (Colgan Air Flight 9446).
  • Airlines putting safety standards second to another objective (such as cost-cutting or keeping schedules) have contributed to an elevator jackscrew assembly failing during flight (Alaska Airlines Flight 261), underinflated tires starting a catastrophic fire during takeoff (Nigeria Airways Flight 2120), and a plane running out of fuel at the edge of its flight range because the airline was too cheap to plan a proper flight plan (LaMia Flight 2933).
  • Manufacturers not thinking aircraft designs through has contributed to cargo doors not being closed properly and blowing open during flight (American Airlines Flight 96, Turkish Airlines Flight 981), mere temperature differences causing rudder hardovers (United Airlines Flight 585, USAir Flight 427, Eastwind Airlines Flight 517), landing gear wires that could easily be crossed by mistake causing the anti-skid system to fail (PenAir Flight 3296), fuel gauges being physically compatible with incompatible planes (Tuninter Flight 1153), thrust reversers deploying during flight (Lauda Air Flight 004), a malfunctioning automated system sending planes careening into the ground (Lion Air Flight 610, Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302), an automated safety system causing an emergency to escalate by interfering with the pilot's response (Scandinavian Airlines Flight 751), two different errors triggering the same alarm leading to a misdiagnosis as to what the problem is (Helios Flight 522), and no alarm to alert the crew that a thrust reverser had deployed (TAM Flight 402).
  • The two FedEx MD-11 crashes are another example. Land the plane too hard and let them bounce, and it might flip over because of the shift of gravity. Despite this being hypothesised in the first non-fatal accident's investigation, it happened again a few years later, and this time the crew of the MD-11 were not as lucky.
  • No fewer than seven accidents covered by the show involved substandard, inexperienced or badly trained pilots being employed by a rapidly growing airline or company. Derrick White with United Express Flight 6291 in 1994, Gustavo Weigel and Luis Etcheverry with LAPA Flight 3142 in 1999, Pavel Gruzin/Rastislav Kolesár with Crossair Flight 498 in 2000 and Hans Lutz with Crossair Flight 3597 in 2001, Martín Olíva/Álvaro Sánchez with Learjet XC-VMC in 2008, Jordi Lopez and Andrew Cantle for Manx2 Flight 7100 in 2011 and Liu Tze-chung with TransAsia Flight 235 in 2015. Respective death tolls are 5, 65, 10, 24, 9, 6, and 43 in that order.
  • A more specific example is the episode "Behind Closed Doors." American Airlines Flight 96 was a brand new DC-10 that had its cargo door blown out while climbing. Investigators found a significant flaw with the cargo door that enabled it to be closed but not locked. Rather than fix the underlying issue, McDonnell-Douglas took the easier and less expensive step of installing a peephole on all DC-10 cargo doors so that ground crews could verify that the door was locked. Problem solved, right? Wrong. Turkish Airlines Flight 981 crashed into a forest in France two years after the American Airlines incident, for the exact same reason, and killing 346 people in what was at the time the deadliest single aircraft accident. It then came out that the system was still flawed because it only worked if the baggage handlers knew they needed to check, and many of them didn't, for multiple reasons.^note There was a sign warning baggage handlers to check that the door was properly latched, but it was only in English and maybe the airline's local language, and many baggage handlers around the world didn't know English and, particularly for international flights, might not necessarily know the airline's language either (in this instance, Turkish), including the one who loaded the Turkish Airlines plane. Moreover, although not discussed in the episode, the baggage handler had been explicitly told that checking the door was not his responsibility; it was supposed to be done by the ground engineer, who was away for training and whose substitute never showed up. Only then did the FAA act, and by this time, the DC-10's reputation had gone down the gutter.
  • Man-versus-Machine: Pilots not being able to understand the actions of their aircraft in time due to complexities of modern aircraft equipment has led to a plane going off-course into a mountain (American 965), a crew not realizing their autopilot partially disengaged (Aeroflot 593), a demo flight crashing because the engines were set lower than they should have been (Air France 296), multiple incidents where pilots failed to realize their flight computer was in the wrong mode (Turkish 1951, Asiana 214, China Airlines 140), pilots failing to notice/correct dangerous attitudes (Adam Air 574, China Airlines 006), a transponder being accidentally switched off (2006 Brazilian mid-air collision), incorrect settings being entered (Air Inter 148, Varig 254), and a pilot accidentally disabling his own plane to silence a nuisance alarm (AirAsia 8501).
  • Explicitly mentioned in "Deadly Crossroads". The year before the Uberlingen disaster, two Japan Airlines planes came frighteningly close to colliding under nearly identical circumstances. This should have alerted the airline industry that a potentially serious problem existed and needed to be fixed, but no action was taken until the same problem occurred again over Uberlingen, and this time the people involved weren't so lucky.
  • Also mentioned in "Split Decision". The majority of the investigators of Arrow Air 1285 concluded that the plane was brought down by ice on the wings, but a vocal minority believed it was an act of terrorism and submitted their own contradictory report. This meant that the warnings regarding aircraft icing weren't taken as seriously, which resulted in more ice-related accidents.
  • There were four crashes before Germanwings Flight 9525 which were proved to be cases of pilot suicide. In two cases (specifically Egyptair Flight 990 and SilkAir Flight 185), half of the investigators disputed the conclusion due to Islamic taboos against suicide, while the other two crashes (specifically LAM Mozambique Flight 470 and Royal Air Maroc Flight 630) received little, if any, media attention due to happening in developing countries. Any one of them could've prevented the Germanwings crash and/or one or more of the later incidents.
  • Continental Flight 1713, Aloha Island Air Flight 1712, Scenic Air Tours Flight 22 and Flagship Airlines Flight 3379 are all planes involved an incompetent pilot that shouldn't have been flying the plane and airlines would have caught on if they had done proper background checks when they were hiring the pilots and while the NTSB made reccomendations, the FAA never made it a requirement to do so. It took until Flagship Airlines Flight 3379 for them to finally recommend that airlines do background checks of their pilots to make sure they were competent enough to do their jobs.
• All Part of the Show: The crash of First Air 6560 occurred just as the Canadian Forces were conducting a disaster response drill. One of the investigators says that when they were told about the crash, his first thought was that they'd changed the scenario for the exercise and that the information they were getting was the new scenario before he got confirmation that it was actually a real crash.
• Alliterative Title: A few episodes:
  • Deadly Detail
  • Deadly Delay
  • Deadly Distraction
  • Fire Fight
• Call-Back: There are instances where accidents that happened before the one being analyzed are referenced, either to show how a theory being analyzed had happened before or to explain something that had an influence on the current investigation.
• Call-Forward: In some cases, accidents are mentioned that don't (or didn't) have their own episode. (e.g. Season 1's episode on Aeroperu 603 mentioning Birgenair 301, which got its episode in Season 5) There have even been cases where episodes mention accidents that already had an episode about them but happened after the accident at the center of the episode. (e.g. The episode about the 1978 crash of United Airlines Flight 173 talking about the 2008 crash of British Airways Flight 38 as an example of how landing gear failure is a fairly minor problem.)
• Career-Ending Injury: It should be no surprise that this is the result of some airplane accidents.
• Clip Show: The "Science of Disaster" episodes can be counted as this, as it's usually half a recap of air disasters centering around a theme (ATC, bad weather, pilot errors, deferred maintenance, hidden defects, etc.) and half an explanation about the theme itself and how to prevent similar disasters in the future. Mayday: The Accident Files also served a similar purpose, though was a separate program.
• Cold Ham: Happens rather frequently in the re-enactments, usually when investigators make an alarming discovery that provides a major clue if not the biggest clue to the whole mystery.
• Culture Clash:
  • Since so many of the accidents involved American aircraft (mainly from Boeing or McDonnell Douglas) and/or an aircraft component that gets major attention from investigators is American-made (such as a flight recorder), then American investigators were often sent to assist investigations. These investigators often ran into problems in countries where the police force or military have greater powers over the investigation, or countries with an Obstructive Bureaucrat or two. Sometimes, they were more cooperative, like the in-flight breakup of China Airlines Flight 611.
  • A common theme in the series is the culture clash between military and civilian aviation. Many pilots are former military, and they take the military culture of strict hierarchies and well-defined roles into their civilian careers, while modern commercial aviation emphasizes crew resource management, in which members of the flight crew are encouraged to openly communicate to improve situational awareness, work together to avoid any one crew member having to handle too much at once, and question their captains if they notice mistakes.
• Dangerously Distracted: In several episodes, accidents turn out to be the result of both pilots being so focused on solving an issue that comes up that neither of them is keeping an eye on the other systems, causing a minor problem to (nearly) crash the plane.
• Dangerously Loaded Cargo: Mayday has covered several plane crashes caused by or impacted by loose cargo, and it's been brought up as a possibility in several more.
• Deadpan Snarker: Several of the investigators show a very dry sense of humor, specifically Bob Benzon. Regarding the Fine Air crash:
  Benzon: A lot of little things built up to have us believe that Fine Airlines wasn't living up to its name.
• Death of a Child: Not surprising, given that most flights—including the ones with no survivors—have children on board. Several episodes mention children who are either explicitly mentioned as dead or who were aboard flights with almost-to-none survivors.
• Death of a Thousand Cuts: An inanimate variation. Many of the accidents and incidents are the results of more than one cause, each of which was necessary to have that result. In fact, several episodes lampshade this by saying after one or more definite causes that thst alone should not have had that result, subsequently finding more causes.
• Deliberately Monochrome:
  • Done usually during flashbacks when the investigators are piecing together the events leading up to the incident.
  • One first-responder to an especially grisly crash of an airliner onto a suburb recounted that in his mind's eye he sees everything in muted brown shades (which his counselor told him was a coping mechanism). Shots from his perspective are rendered in sepia tones.
• Determinator: This trope is deconstructed in episodes like "Racing the Storm" and "Death of the President". When pilots insist on continuing to their destination despite dangerous conditions, it can lead to disaster. This is known in the aviation community as "get-there-itis".
• Disaster Dominoes: Some plane crashes are one long sequence of these. For example:
  • "Crash of the Century"/"Disaster at Tenerife", which covers the Tenerife runway collision between two Boeing 747s, has the dominoes from lack of ground radar, an overloaded airport (the result of the two planes being diverted from their destination by a bombing at that airport), bad communication, foggy weather and a captain too eager to take off.
  • Even when the cause of an accident seems straight-forward, it's often the case where it takes a sequence of bad luck and/or questionable actions to bring a plane down. Aeroflot Flight 593 is an excellent example, where it seems like the cause is limited solely to the pilot's son being on the controls, but in fact it's a whole slew of events, including but not limited to the lack of knowledge that the autopilot could partially disengage on the Airbus A310, that eventually brought the plane down. Also, the pilots regained control near the end, but over-corrected and put the plane into a stall. Compounding the error is the fact that if they had done nothing once the bad bank angle was corrected, the plane's automated systems would have prevented the crash.
  • A more limited example is Uni Air Flight 873, featured in "Explosive Touchdown". If either the leaking bottles of gasoline (providing an explosive air-fuel-mixture) or the unsecured motorcycle battery (providing the ignition spark) had not been on board, the explosion would never have occured. However, because both items were brought on board by unrelated passengers, the explosion occurred when the wires of the motorcycle battery touched each other and sparked during the hard landing, igniting the explosive gasoline vapors.
• Early-Installment Weirdness: The writing in the first season is noticeably different from seasons eight onwards, with the narration in the past tense^note (eg, "investigators soon recovered the black boxes" rather than "investigators soon recover the black boxes"), factors not apparent at the time often more prominent early in the episode, and the endings considerably bleaker.
• Eject... Eject... Eject...: Used frequently during the reenactments with standard alarms or, in more recent incidents, mechanical voice warnings of "PULL UP! PULL UP!"
• Everybody Lives: A major accident from which there are no fatalities is shown about once or twice a season. It's not as uncommon as one might think.
  • The fact that 309 people were able to evacuate from Air France Flight 358 (Season 4) before it was consumed by fire was all the more remarkable considering that similar accidents involving fire like British Airtours Flight 28M (Season 9) and Air Canada Flight 797 (Season 4), resulted in fatality rates of about 50%. The show on Flight 28M explains how safety improvements made after that event made such an improvement possible.
  • Despite successful ditching being considered notoriously difficult with most ditching efforts usually ending up disastrous with a lot of fatalities, US Airways 1549 managed to successfully ditch into the Hudson River and stay intact long enough for all 155 people on board to be rescued.
  • The Season 13 episode "Getting Out Alive" examines the factors that can help make this more likely, though only three of the five crashes mentioned in the episode qualify as this trope (one of the other two is very close — only three fatalities out of 307 occupants — but the other, Air Canada 797, suffers 50% fatalities).
  • Behind Closed Doors: American Airlines Flight 96 managed to land safely with no fatalities despite a hole being torn into the floor thanks to depressurization from the DC-10's cargo door being blown out since no one was seated in the rows sucked out of the plane. Sadly, the lessons learned from this accident wouldn't be taken seriously enough by McDonnell Douglas until Turkish Airlines Flight 981 suffered a similar but even worse blow-out that killed everyone.
  • Subverted in the cases of British Airtours 28M and Atlantic Southeast 529. In both of those accidents, the narration notes that there was a critical point in time where everyone was alive, but events still to come meant that both incidents ended with a significant number of fatalities (42% and 31% respectively).
  • In "Deadly Detail", every passenger and the crew was able to evacuate the doomed plane, though it certainly helped that the fire only began when the plane had already landed and the engines had been shut down.
  • The pilots of Loganair Flight 6780 mistakenly believed that the autopilot got disengaged by lightning and nearly sent the plane into an uncontrollable dive when they tried adjusting the trim, but they managed to right themselves and make an emergency landing in Aberdeen during stormy weather, saving everyone onboard.
  • The crew of Air Astana Flight 1388 successfully landed the plane not too long after realizing that the aileron controls were reversed, injuring one passenger upon landing but saving everyone nonetheless. It turns out that the aileron wires were crossed during maintenance and the engineers didn't check if the controls inside the plane matched the controls outside it while testing the ailerons.
  • Despite Trans-Air Service Flight 671 losing both engines on the left wing and catching fire when the pilots tried to land the plane, they still managed to do so without anyone onboard dying.
  • While FedEx Flight 705, being a cargo plane, only involved the three-man crew, it's still somewhat remarkable that all of them survived being repeatedly hit in the head with a hammer.
• Exhaustion-Induced Idiocy: A good chunk of the accidents profiled involve pilots making bad decisions due to suffering from fatigue.
• Fair-Play Whodunnit: Varies on an episode by episode basis. Knowledgeable viewers can sometimes pick up on details that would go on to cause an accident by carefully watching the re-enactment or investigation. In other episodes, typically where the cause would be too obvious, these details are deliberately hidden until later on to create added suspense.
• Foregone Conclusion:
  • If someone who was on the plane is interviewed, they survived whatever ordeal happened in the episode.
  • Similarly, if every single interview is with a friend or relative of a passenger rather than survivors themselves, it's likely that the incident in question left no survivors. (At most, there may be a Sole Survivor or a very small number of survivors, but it's not likely to be very many.)
  • If a friend or family member is interviewed, it's likely that the particular individual they're discussing did not survive. Averted a few times, usually related to older accidents, where the person survived the accident but died at some point before the episode was filmed, so a friend or relative recounts the person's story, but this only happens if the story is particularly significant. (For example, in the episode regarding the Munich disaster, the pilot's daughter tells how her father's name was dragged through the mud after the accident.)
  • Averted once in a while by deliberately not showing a particular interview until after the person's survival has been revealed. The first example of this usage involves Tim Lancaster in "Blowout".
  • If the aircraft involved is a Qantas jet airliner, you can be sure everyone survived, because Qantas has never had a jet airliner fatality.
• Foreshadowing: The CGI animations are always based on what happened, even before it's known exactly what happened. Eagle-eyed viewers can spot things such as El Al Flight 1862 missing its #3 and #4 engines in the opening animation, among others.
• Glasses Pull: A few investigators in the re-enactments have removed their glasses after confronting a major shocker in an investigation.
• Hell Is That Noise: Many of the verbal GPWS and TCAS warnings that tend to occur during an incident, partly because of the creepy, forceful text-to-speech voice, and partly because of what they portend — these are often among the last things the crew hears before impact:
• How We Got Here:
  • Nearly all episodes start with showing some of the crash sequence and/or aftermath.
• Impact Silhouette: In a mid-air collision where one of the planes is reconstructed, the outline of the other plane involved (or at least a part of the other plane) can be seen on the side of the reconstructed fuselage.
• Improbable Piloting Skills: Many episodes have pilots managing to keep their planes from crashing despite overwhelming odds.
• Inciting Incident: Frequently a factor in accidents, where two or more seemingly minor details come together to cause disaster.
  • "Desert Inferno": Some under-inflated tires on a DC-8 finally experience a sufficiently lengthy taxi at high enough temperatures to burst and ignite after lacking sufficient air pressure for several days, which leads directly to a horrific in-flight fire and death of all 261 onboard once the landing gear is retracted.
  • "Blowout": An incorrectly chosen set of windshield screws caused the windscreen to come loose, resulting in an Explosive Decompression that partially sucked the pilot out of the plane.
  • "Vanishing Act": An erroneous compass heading sends Varig Flight 254 off-course, resulting in the plane running out of fuel and crashing into the Amazon. The aircraft was supposed to fly a course slightly east of North (27.0 degrees) but due to confusion over the flight plan documentation and the compass settings in older versus newer jets (the former accept only integers while the latter could take increments of .1 degrees) led to the plane flying due west (270 degrees) instead. None of the flight crew noticed that they were flying directly into the sunset...
  • "Deadly Delay": A faulty electronic relay causes a temperature sensor to stop working, delaying takeoff. When the flight crew finally does take off, that same relay causes the take-off warning configuration alarm to not sound. Consequently, the plane takes off in an improper configuration and stalls.
  • "Edge of Disaster": The pilots of Atlantic Airways Flight 670 decide to make a straight-in landing at Stord Airport, where rain has caused the short, un-grooved, hilltop-mounted runway to collect water and become slick. The straight-in approach means the pilots are landing in a tailwind, and after touchdown, the spoilers fail to deploy. Noticing that the plane is slow to decelerate and fearing they won't be able to stop in time, the captain activates the emergency brake — which overrides the anti-lock brakes, causing the wheels to lock up and skid down the runway with enough force to heat the water on the runway to steam, creating a hydroplane effect and leading to the very outcome the captain had hoped to prevent. If he hadn't done that, the plane would have stopped in time.
  • "Deadly Silence": An improper checklist and the pilots' subsequent delay in donning their oxygen masks caused the eventual crash of the Learjet carrying pro golfer Payne Stewart, killing all on board.
  • "Deadly Detail": A missing washer allowed the slat downstop assembly to become loose, fall out, and puncture the fuel tank when the slats were retracted — causing fuel to leak and land right on the engine's hot tailpipe, starting a fire.
  • "Target Is Destroyed": The crew had initially set their autopilot to HDG (Heading Select) when they were cleared by ATC shortly after takeoff to fly directly to waypoint BETHEL, the second of ten waypoints that were listed in the flightplan route, with the intention of setting it back to INS mode to capture the waypoint, and each waypoint after, as they got close enough to pick up the radio beacon for BETHEL. For some reason, they neglected to switch it back to INS mode when the time came to do so. This led the aircraft to stray into Soviet airspace not once, but twice, which ultimately provoked a deadly response from their airforce.
  • "River Runway": Downplayed. While not an immediate cause of the accident, a single faulty cell in the plane's battery prevented the pilots from being able to start the APU after both engines flamed out and two attempts were made to restart them while the plane was in the storm. If the APU had been successfully started, the engines could've started running again once the plane left the storm clouds, and the accident would not have happened.
  • "Deadly Solution": A cracked soldering joint in the plane's rudder travel limiter unit caused it to send a series of alerts to the cockpit that the pilots responded to incorrectly, causing the plane to stall and fall into the ocean.
  • Double subverted in "Afghan Nightmare". The pilots discussing a broken fastener in the cargo hold gives the initial impression that a single broken fastener caused one of the MRAP vehicles in the cargo hold to break loose and smash through the bulkhead, crippling the plane and putting it into an unrecoverable stall. As it turned out, the airline's manual on installing fasteners didn't specify that the straps had to be tied at a specific angle to properly restrain the cargo. As a result, none of the fasteners were able to hold the vehicles in place; the single broken fastener was an ignored canary in the coal mine.
  • "Scratching The Surface": A tail strike incident with poorly-done repairs that were falsely reported as completed ultimately led to the aircraft tearing apart in mid-flight a little over 20 years later. From there, nicotine stains caused by smoking^note smoking was allowed on China Airlines flights until 1995 formed around the doubler plate used in the repair, and had any engineer noticed the stains during routine maintenance, it's quite likely that the in-flight breakup would've never happened.
  • In "The Plane That Flew Too High", the plane was on the verge of a stall, but the crew had already started descending to a lower altitude because of turbulence, and would have overcome the problem without ever realizing it was more than a few odd engine readings if not for a poorly timed gust of wind that altered the plane's attitude and pushed them past the stall threshold.
  • "Nowhere To Land": The engine's ability to handle water intake was only tested with the engines at full power. When the crew reduced power for landing, the engines could no longer handle the volume of water they'd taken in and both failed almost immediately.
  • "Fatal Climb": The captain collapsed at the exact moment when someone needed to be handling the throttles to counteract a known periodic malfunction. If he had collapsed at any other point in the flight, it probably wouldn't have resulted in a fatal crash.
  • Another positive example in "Impossible Landing": Dennis Fitch, a senior pilot and DC-10 flight instructor, just happened to be aboard United 232 when the engine blew out and severed the hydraulic lines, and was able to help the flight crew. Apart from the matter of experience (since all the pilots were quite experienced themselves), just having someone who could sit right in front of the throttle levers and do nothing but manipulate them was a huge help to the pilots, who would otherwise have had to manipulate the throttles from the sides and split their attention between that and other tasks. Taking that load off the pilots likely prevented an unsurvivable crash into some random field or, worse, building.
  • Yet another positive example in "Deadly Pitch". Fine Air Flight 101 skidded across a major roadway at rush hour, but by pure chance, the area the plane crashed through had red lights at both intersections at that exact moment, so the spot they hit was clear of traffic, and as a result, there was only one ground fatality. If one or both of those lights had been green at the time of impact, it's likely the death toll would have been much higher.
  • An investigation-related example happened in "Split Decision": Some members of the investigation team were sure that ice on the wings brought Arrow Air Flight 1285 down, while others felt equally certain it was an act of terrorism, resulting in a bitter controversy which ultimately spelled the end of the Canadian Aviation Safety Board. A cockpit voice recording, allowing investigators to get some level of detail on what the pilots were dealing with, would likely have preempted the dispute before it even started, but the CVR on Arrow Air 1285 was broken at the time of the accident, so there was no recording to settle the matter.
  • "Panic on the Runway": The captain of British Airtours Flight 28M, thinking he had burst a tyre, instructed his first officer to not apply full braking to avoid damaging his plane, and had decided to pull off the runway. When a fire warning activated, the crew were already mentally committed to this decision and complete the maneuver, not having any way to know that a crosswind was present that would make the fire much worse (this only being studied during the course of the investigation). If they had stopped on the runway, the fire would have been much less severe, probably giving everyone enough time to evacuate. Which in turn would have likely delayed the major safety improvements that came out of the accident for years...
  • "Choosing Sides": In the case of British Midland Flight 92, the captain and his first officer, after shutting down the wrong engine, had just started a review of their actions which may have led to them discovering the error. Unfortunately, ATC calls them at the worst possible moment, distracting them enough that they never completed the review.
  • "Blind Spot": A bit of static over the radio meant the controller heard a different syllable (ATC heard "passing", the crew actually said "passed" and was meant as an implied question). This minor detail might have caused the controller to think that the plane was now clear of traffic, when in fact it was not.
  • Another positive example: In "North Sea Nightmare", a random system glitch caused the autopilot to disengage and give the pilots total control over the plane allowing them to get the plane out of a dive with seconds to spare.
  • Yet another positive example in "Falling From the Sky." When the crew put on their oxygen masks, the first officer's was broken so Captain Moody made the decision to increase their rate of descent to a safer altitude for him to breathe. This caused the plane to descend out of the volcanic ash cloud that, unbeknownst to the crew, was responsible for shutting down their engines, allowing them to be restarted.
• Just Plane Wrong: Several examples, surprisingly enough:
  • In one episode, it is clear that the people making the show believe that any wide-body twin-jet in an American Airlines livery must be an A300. Averted in the episode about the crash of American Airlines Flight 587, which actually was an A300.
  • A common example in the series is Just ATC Wrong. In real life, a flight passes through several different controllers (Ground Control is responsible for the taxiways, Tower Control clears the flight for take-off, Approach & Terminal Control handles the ATC of a climbing aircraft within the airport's radar coverage, then various Area Control Centers handle the aircraft as it cruises from one area to another); in the series it's common to have one controller handling all the flight. A glaring example is in the Kegworth crash episode, where a bearded controller with a bespectacled colleague clears the flight to takeoff from Heathrow, then, when the crew declares an engine fire, the very same controller with the same colleague handles their emergency descent, even though they are now in the area of an entirely different airport, East Midlands.
  • While not a major example that could spoil the viewing experience for most, eagle-eyed aviation enthusiasts may point out that the layout of the cockpit set does not match the actual layouts of the real aircraft involved in the disasters featured. For instance, the cockpits of some of the older Boeing 747s, such as the ones operated by KLM and TWA, historically had "vertical tape"-style gauges (click here for reference) on the pilots' panel rather than the conventional round ones depicted in the show's cockpit set and seen on most 747s. Switches and levers also do not always match the exact shape of those seen in the real aircraft.
• Lost in Transmission: This is a critical cause of the Tenerife disaster. Critical warning messages from the ATC and the Pan American plane end up cancelling each other out, and neither is heard by the KLM plane. To make things worse, the KLM crew had announced they were taking off, and the ATC initially responds, "Okay-" before the interference occurs. This reinforces the KLM crew's belief that they had been given takeoff clearance.
• Ludicrous Gibs: In cases where there's almost nothing left of the airplane, any recovered human remains are extremely fragmented, assuming they haven't been buried deep underground or completely burned to ashes. In two episodes ("Out of Sight" and "Behind Closed Doors"), this was invoked by people interviewed. In "Out of Sight", a fireman who responded to the crash and a woman who lived in the area both said they didn't see any intact bodies. In "Behind Closed Doors", a journalist who went to the crash site shortly after it happened said you couldn't walk anywhere without the risk of stepping on what used to be part of a human being.
• Mass "Oh, Crap!": Any shot of the passenger cabin just before impact will usually lead to this.
• May It Never Happen Again: Any time an accident or near-accident occurs, an investigation is done in order to learn how to prevent future occurrences. While Aesop Amnesia does happen some times, these investigations and the recommendations which come from them are part of what makes air travel so safe.
• Mickey Mousing: The Air Disasters version of the opening ends with a clip from the Northwest Airlines Flight 255 episode, with a musical sting coinciding with the plane hitting the ground.
• Mid Air Collision: There's also runway collisions (e.g. "Crash of the Century").
• Military Alphabet: To be expected in a docudrama series about airplane accidents.
• A Million Is a Statistic: Zig-zagged between episodes. Some episodes go out of the way to make the audience cry at the loss of life; others focus solely on the investigation into the accident. And there are episodes that occupy the middle ground between the two.
• Million to One Chance: Several featured incidents involve a total loss of all three hydraulics systems on a plane. The odds of such an occurrence were calculated to be a billion to one against. However, this calculation was only meant to express the odds of all three hydraulics failing on their own and independently of one another. Generally, when such a thing happens, it's because all three were damaged by something else, like a rupturing fan disk or a missile attack.
• Misplaced Accent: The actors playing the Dutch pilots of KLM Flight 4805 in "Disaster at Tenerife" have thick accents that sound a little more German than Dutch.
• Model Planning: Occasionally, to help visualize the circumstances of the disaster in question, investigators use little toys to model the situation. One notable example is in "Dead of Winter," where an interviewee remarks that they had to buy more toy planes than usual to properly visualize how many planes were taking off and landing around Continental Flight 1713.
• My God, What Have I Done?:
  • The controllers in "Out of Sight" and "Cleared for Disaster" have similar reactions when they learn that their actions played a role in those episodes' accidents.
  • The captain of AirAsia Flight 8501 just after he pulls two circuit breakers to silence a annoying alarm and the plane instantly starts going out of control.
  • The captain of TransAsia Airways Flight 235 when he realizes he shut down the wrong engine.
  • The pilots of the Embraer Legacy 600 are devastated as they learn they have collided with a Boeing carrying 154 passengers. While the Embraer manages to land safely despite damages to its wing and tail, the Boeing crashes with no survivors.
• Naïve Newcomer: A number of times, the less-experienced co-pilots diagnose the emergency correctly, but either do not intervene out of respect for their captains, are overruled by them or are intimidated one way or another: Flash 604, Birgenair 301, TANS Peru 204, West Caribbean 708, First Air 6560, Crossair 3597, Alitalia 404, Korean Air 801 and 8509, and Air Algérie Flight 6289.
• No Antagonist: Most of the episodes have no antagonists, with most of the causes of the crash coming from pilot error, mechanical failure, or bad weather, although there are a few episodes which have antagonists such as hijackers.
• Non-Indicative Name: The cockpit voice recorder records all sounds, not just voices.
• Not Even Bothering with the Accent: This tends to be a common trend in re-enactments, particularly when portraying Scandinavians and New Zealanders.
  • A lot of generic radio traffic where there isn't a dedicated actor is voiced by the same person, regardless of where the episode is taking place. Perhaps particularly noticeable during the Qantas Flight 32 episode where the pilots speak to Singapore ATC and ground staff.
• Nothing Is Scarier: In episodes where the plane loses all engines in flight, the cessation of engine noise has this effect.
• Obvious Rule Patch: Whenever an investigation uncovers human error or faulty mechanics on a crash, rules are updated and enforced to prevent future accidents. But in some cases, nothing was ever done until another similar event happens, such as the case of Germanwings Flight 9525. In this case, pilot suicides happened at least four times before it became mandatory for two flight crews to be in the cockpit at all times.
• Oh, Crap!: Expressed by various pilots, passengers, and/or air traffic controllers just before and often while the bad stuff goes down. Perhaps seen most effectively in "Crash of the Century"/"Disaster at Tenerife", which cover the Tenerife disaster. The First Officer of the Pan-Am flight is positively horrified as he sees the KLM jumbo barreling down the runway towards his plane, as is the Dutch captain seeing the Pan-Am plane directly in front of him.
  Captain Grubbs: God damn, that son of a bitch is coming STRAIGHT AT US!
• Once More, with Clarity: The typical format is for key sections of the re-enactment to be replayed towards the end of an episode once the final causes are determined, with the narrator providing the added context and summary from the investigation's findings, such as pointing out precisely where in the sequence the critical failures or mistakes occurred that led to the accident.
• One-Word Title: The Mayday title, as it's a phrase signalling an emergency in an airplane, and the show is about air crash investigation.
• Ooh, Me Accent's Slipping: Some of the actors playing multiple and/or recurring roles in the reenactments fall into this as the series progresses.
  • Inverted with Jorge Molina, the actor who played the first officer of Birgenair Flight 301, the lead investigator into TANS Peru Flight 204, and the captain of Spanair Flight 5022.
• Painting the Medium: In an interview with expert Jeff Wise, the camera zooms in on his face as he explains that "[the] ability [of the crew of Singapore Airlines Flight 006] to deal with multiple streams of information is becoming narrower and narrower".
• Perfectly Cromulent Word: David Burke's airsickness bag note contained the word "ironical" - a real, but highly archaic, variant of 'ironic'.
• Period Piece: The investigators are shown using computers and screen devices that correspond to the time period where the investigation took place. For example, an investigation set in the late 1980's would show them using IBM PCs (or microcomputers) and projection screens.
• Personal Effects Reveal: As to be expected from a disaster docudrama series.
  • The wreck of Arrow Air Flight 1285 yielded T-shirts saying "I survived Gander, Newfoundland". Irony at its finest.
  • A notable inversion is in the case of Northwest Airlink Flight 5719. A singed wallet is found in what's left of the airplane with a woman's photo inside; it's later revealed to have belonged to the first officer.
• Playing Sick: In "Deadly Deception", one of the hijackers pretends to be airsick, then takes a stewardess hostage when she comes to investigate.
• Pointy-Haired Boss:
  • Nationair appointed project managers to support crews on charter projects, but as Nationair higher-up William Fowler notes, the project managers ended up unwittingly degrading the company's safety culture by putting excessive pressure on the pilots and mechanics, leading to urgent maintenance being neglected and planes being released in an unairworthy state. Among that urgent maintenance was replacing and later topping up tyres on the plane that would serve as the ill-fated Nigeria Airways Flight 2120, eventually resulting in that plane catching fire. To make matters worse, while this isn't covered in the episode proper, this Medium article points out that Nationair wasn't liable for the weather radar failure that caused the plane to be stuck in Ghana and wouldn't have been liable for further delays caused by the tyre change or any other essential maintenance, meaning that flight's project manager, Aldo Tetamenti, had misunderstood the contract with Nigeria Airways and thus got himself and 260 other people killed for no reason.
    Bill Taylor: (reading Aldo Tetamenti's internal personnel record after discovering the fax he sent to mechanics telling them to cancel maintenance on C-GMXQ) He's not a commercial pilot or a trained mechanic!
  • Similarly, TransAsia leadership opted to aggressively expand the airline's services around 2011, but failed to recruit additional pilots, and simply pushed their existing crews to work longer hours. While the airline stayed within legal regulations for duty hours, the multiple daily short-haul flights were exhausting for pilots, leading to errors; and the immense scheduling pressures led to pilots skipping checklists and essential safety measures in order to not fall behind. After the crash of Flight 222, then the subsequent crash of Flight 235 just seven months later, the airline was excoriated by investigators for its unsafe practices, leading it to shut down operations in 2016.
• Pop Culture Osmosis: The episode "Massacre Over the Mediterranean" ultimately agrees with the conclusion of the third and final technical investigation, which determined that a bomb brought down Aerolinee Itavia Flight 870. However, conspiracy theories about a NATO missile had become so widespread in Italy that the government and the public refused to consider these findings.
• Present-Day Past:
  • Count the number of times that they had episodes covering plane crashes in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s where you can see cars from the 2000s. One particularly egregious case is the Pan Am Flight 103 episode, as the opening segment documenting a German police bust on two terrorists working for the PFLP that happened two months before the Lockerbie bombing shows 21st century cars.
  • In the episode about the Tenerife jumbo jet collision, which takes place in 1977, the air traffic controllers have, of all things, a modern personal computer in their office.
    • Also one of the jets taxiing is a Cessna 525, while a plane shown taking off is a narrow-body with winglets - a 737 NextGen or an Embraer E-Jet. Cessna 525 first flew in 1991, 737 NextGen in 1997 and E-Jet in 2002. (This is in the regular ep, not the 90-minute special.)
  • In many episodes, the passengers tend to be shown in generic modern clothes and hair rather than in obvious contemporary fashions. May be somewhat justified in that given that this is an ongoing show with a limited budget that requires many actors and extras, they would not only need to provide a lot of period clothing but also do many contemporary hairstyles/wigs. Notably averted in a few episodes, such as "Munich Air Disaster" and "Grand Canyon Disaster", as the clothing is of the appropriate era (which is the 1950s).
  • A subtle one occurs in the Grand Canyon episode: in 1956, the controller uses a modern "taxi into position and hold" command. Moreover, the first officer repeats his command as he heard it; this was introduced after the Tenerife disaster. In the 1950s, the ATC commands were acknowledged with simply "OK" or "Roger". A more obvious one in the same episode is where, despite it being 1956, the ATC tower has a functional computer monitor in the tower, similar to the anachronism found in the Tenerife episode.
  • In the Garuda Flight 421 episode, during the waterborne evacuation, one of the cabin walls near the exit doors displays the Garuda Indonesia logo. However, the logo displayed is incorrect, since it is the current one, distinguishable by its unique font. In 2002 (the year Flight 421 actually crashed), Garuda Indonesia were using a different logo◊ that was adopted in the mid-1980s, and only transferred to the current logo in 2009 as part of a re-branding. This error also appears in the Garuda Flight 152 episode.
  • The same type of logo error happens in the Air Canada 797 episode, as although the plane is in the 1965-1993 livery, the logo on the headrest covers in the cabin are of the 2005-2017 variant.
  • A common anachronism in the series is the "airliner placeholder", where either defunct airlines or airlines that did not exist until later are used to fill out the background at airports.
    • In "Titanic in the Sky", when Qantas Flight 32 was backing away from the gate at Singapore Changi Airport, several aircraft can be seen parked at the gates around the Airbus A380. However, the aircraft parked range from airlines that fly to Changi in real life but with a completely wrong aircraft type (three Air France aircraft are seen in the scene, one of which is an Airbus A320; in reality, Air France operates only one flight to Singapore from Paris, not with an Airbus A320 but with a Boeing 777) and airlines that never flew from Singapore and went out of existence way before the date of the accident (multiple Pacific Southwest Airlines aircraft, mostly Boeing 737-200s are seen; FYI, PSA never even flew out of the continental United States during its operational life span and the airline went out of service in 1988.)
    • This also happens in "Speed Trap", where when Flight 706 is on the ground, out of the cockpit window you could see a plane's tail with the Air China logo on it. This is a very obvious anachronism since back in 1971 (a year the episode explicitly stated the accident occurred), Air China didn't even exist as it was founded in 1988.
    • Yet again, also appears in "Fatal Delay", as when Spanair 5022 was taxing on the apron, you can see a PSA 737 and a AirWest DC-9 in the background.
  • A minor anachronism, but many of the Boeing documentation in the past (such as repair manuals, logbooks, documents and such), especially in episodes set before 1997, display the post-1997 Boeing logo which included the sphere and ring logo of McDonnell Douglas after the latter merged with the former.
  • In the Swissair Flight 111 episode, a passenger is shown watching Tarzan on the in-flight entertainment system. The accident happened on September 2, 1998, while the movie wouldn't be released until the following year.
• Properly Paranoid:
  • The first officer of American Eagle Flight 4184 was said to have predicted his own fate on account of the problematic design of the ATR aircraft's de-icing system.
  • Sometimes, passengers can tell when disaster is imminent, such as Joe Stiley on Air Florida Flight 90 and Michael Quinlan on Garuda Indonesia Flight 200, and take a brace position before impact.
• Pun-Based Title: Often, eg, "Dead Tired", "Under Pressure", "Turning Point".
• Punctuated! For! Emphasis!: Happens in a handful of interviews:
  • The nephew of EgyptAir 990's relief first officer: "This! Is! A simple! Plane! Crash!"
  • Journalist Paul Eddy: "...if an Airworthiness Directive had been issued as it should have been after Windsor, Paris. Would not. Have happened; it was an entirely. Avoidable. Accident."
  • Aviation expert David Learmount: "Frank Taylor's team didn't. Reach. Any. Conclusions. Except... ones which were based on hard. Physical. Evidence."
• Readings Are Off the Scale:
  • In the fire-test for the oxygen generators in the ValuJet 592 episode, the resulting inferno becomes so hot, it ends up exceeding the facility's measuring equipment and in fact almost destroyed the facility itself as well.
  • In "Fight for Your Life", during a dive, the plane's air speed indicator maxed out.
  • In "Death Race", the g-force that the pilot of the Galloping Ghost experienced went off the chart of the telemetry data. The NTSB used videos of the crash sequence to calculate that the g-force was 17 Gs, more then enough to render anyone unconscious.
  • In "Runaway Train", the titular train's speedometer reaches and maxes out at 90 mph, but it keeps picking up speed down the mountain. The investigation indicates it reached speeds in excess of 100 mph before it hit the fateful curve and derailed (for reference, the train couldn't go faster than 40 mph around the curve without risking derailment).
• "The Reason You Suck" Speech: The captain of BEA Flight 548 chews out a younger pilot for supporting an approaching strike shortly before boarding his flight to Brussels, which investigators consider to be a possible factor in the eventual crash of the flight.
• Red Herring: On more than one occasion, something initially emphasized in the dramatization or the investigation turns out to not have had a real impact on what happened. For example, communication problems were initially thought to be a factor in the crash of Nigeria Airways Flight 2120, since the ATC mistakenly thought he was talking to a different plane, but the investigation later determined that the mix-up had no effect on the outcome.
• Repeated for Emphasis: Two survivors from First Air 6560:

  Gabrielle: This is my first plane crash.
  Nicole: Heh. Yeah. Me too, sweetie. Me too.

• Repeat to Confirm: Being standard in aviation as part of the aftermath of the Tenerife disaster, this occurs throughout the series.
• Retired Badass: Some of the pilots have pasts in various air forces.
• Retirony:
  • The pilots of Partnair Flight 394 were both a few months from retirement.
  • Subverted with David Cronin of United Airlines 811, who was also close to retirement, but survived.
  • Possibly invoked by the relief first officer of EgyptAir Flight 990, who was only months from retirement but on the verge of being terminated on return to Cairo.
  • Inverted with the junior flight attendant of American Eagle Flight 4184, who was killed on her first day on the job.
  • The flight engineer of El Al Flight 1862 was close to retirement.
  • The first officer of Colgan Air Flight 9446 had put his notice that he was going to leave the airline a week before he died in the crash.
• The Reveal: While most of the time viewers are provided with information as the events happened in the re-enactment or when the investigators discover it, sometimes the dramatization deliberately skips over sections that would give too much of a clue away too early such as a configuration mistake, and then reveals this "missing" detail in a flashback later on in the episode. This can also happen with the post-accident investigation where the investigators speculate on various causes and spend considerable time hypothesising, when in reality they would very quickly be able to determine what happened, typically due to a very obvious pilot error such as taking off without flaps extended.
• Right Man in the Wrong Place:
  • Dennis E. Fitch just happened to be on United Airlines Flight 232, which suffered a total loss of hydraulics after the tail engine ruptured. He had practiced flying a DC-10 using only engines in a simulator after reading about Japan Airlines Flight 123, and he was able to provide assistance to the flight crew in getting the plane under enough control to save over 60% of the people on board.
  • The flight crew of Air Canada Flight 143 were Captain Robert Pearson, an experienced glider pilot, and First Officer Maurice Quintal, who had been a training officer at the former RCAF Station Gimli. Also on board was passenger Rick Dion, an Air Canada maintenance engineer who could offer guidance.
• Roaring Rampage of Revenge: The final part of the Uberlingen episode sees the flight controller who accidentally caused the crash get stabbed to death by the father of a family on board. The man is arrested, but he ultimately gets only eight years and is later released and even given a medal.
• Runaway Train: The title of one Crash Scene Investigation episode, detailing the San Bernardino train wreck. A heavy freight train went down a steep downhill gradient with woefully inadequate brakes, causing it to lose control and derail into a sleepy neighborhood.
• Sanity Slippage: With the new residence policy for the pilots of Northwest Airlink, the captain of Flight 5719 grows increasingly aggravated and prone to outbursts, both verbally and even physically, which proves to be his undoing when his first officer is too intimidated to provide the altitude callouts for the approach into Hibbing.
• Scare Chord: Discordant strings, horns, and pianos, such as the music ten minutes into "Under Pressure".
• Self-Fulfilling Prophecy:
  • The difficulties faced by pilots landing at Congonhas Airport led the captain of TAM Airlines Flight 3054 to carry out an outdated landing procedure out of fear of not coming to a quick enough stop with the current procedure. With the stresses piled on top of him, he ended up making the same mistake that led to the old procedure being abandoned in the first place.
  • The pilot of Atlantic Airways Flight 670 pulled his emergency brake after a landing at Stord Airport during which his spoilers failed to deploy, because he was afraid they would overrun and go over the cliff at the end of the runway. This overrode the anti-lock brakes and caused the wheels to lock up, which created a hydroplane effect that prevented the plane from decelerating, causing it to go off the cliff. Investigators later determined that if he hadn't pulled the emergency brake, he would have just barely been able to come to a stop in time.
• Sentimental Music Cue: It usually plays this trope straight at emotional scenes (victim funerals, photos of the plane wreckages, the last few seconds when there's no hope, the first few seconds after the crash, etc).
• Separated by a Common Language: There are several incidents where flight crews and ATC are all communicating in English, but where it's a second language on one or both sides and strong accents, incorrect terminology, or weak proficiency in the language in general, hampers communication and contributes to accidents.
• Serendipitous Survival:
  • In some accidents, passengers change seats during the flight, which ends up saving their lives when the plane crashes.
  • Cerritos resident Teresa Estrada leaves for the grocery store, and returns to find her house destroyed by Aeromexico Flight 498 and her youngest son being the only survivor.
  • Also happens with two flight attendants on West Caribbean Airways 708, who had to stay in Panama City because there were too many passengers on board.
  • Deconstructed with Crossair Flight 3597; several passengers never showed up for the flight, causing a delay that ended up contributing to the accident taking place, as the pilots were not able to reach Zurich before the intended runway was shut down for the night. Reconstructed in the same episode; because there were so many empty seats on the plane, some passengers were able to change seats, which proved to be a lifesaver when the plane crashed.
  • Inverted with the captains of American Airlines Flight 191 and BEA Flight 548, who were scheduled to have the day off on their respective fatal flights.
  • With Air China Flight 129, a tour guide leaving his passport and baggage at the hotel, delaying their arrival at the airport due to having to go back and get them, saves nearly his entire tour group, since their late check-in meant they got shifted to the back, which ended up having a much higher survival rate than the seats he had initially tried to secure for them.
  • In the Tenerife airport disaster, one passenger chooses to stay behind at Tenerife instead of continuing on to Las Palmas because she lives in Tenerife anyway and wants to see her boyfriend; going to Las Palmas and then back would just be impractical and tiring given how badly the flight had been delayed due to a terrorist attack at her final destination. Despite being warned by a flight attendant that declining to re-board is against regulations, she decides to sneak out anyway when it came time to board. She ended up being the only passenger of KLM Flight 4805 to survive.
  • One journalist who was flying as a passenger on the Sukhoi 100 demonstration flight stayed behind to film the next takeoff. He never got to see the plane land.
  • In the crash of Korean Air 801, passenger Barry Smalls had taken his shoes off during the flight, and was bending down to put them on when the plane crashed on approach, essentially putting himself in an inadvertent brace position. One of his legs was also spared from injury by a carryon bag he'd placed under the seat in front of him, allowing him to escape the plane following the crash.
  • Two simultaneous red lights on a normally busy road prevent any traffic from being in the path of Fine Air Flight 101 when it crashes just after takeoff. In the show, the then Inspector General for the US Department of Transportation at the time of the crash called it an eerie coincidence.
  • There just so happened to be a few people on the street of the neighborhood that TAM 402 crashed into, resulting in only four ground fatalities. The plane also crashed within less than 60 feet of the nearby school, and it would've killed many children had they went to school much later. Additionally, one witness's parents would've been crushed by the plane's landing gear if they were asleep in their bedroom when it landed in there.
  • This was the case for all but one person aboard Philippine Airlines Flight 434 when a terrorist tried to blow the airliner out of the sky. The terrorist chose to plant a bomb under seat 26K because according to a schematic he'd looked at, seat 26K was directly above the fuel tank in this model of aircraft and he wanted to ensure the bomb would go off above the tank, as his plan relied on the explosion being propagated through the fuel tank for maximum destruction. However, it turned out that the plane had a slightly different configuration than the schematic, such that seat 26K was not over the fuel tank but was a couple of rows ahead of it. The explosion killed one person (the man who was unfortunate enough to be seated in seat 26K at the time), injured ten, and damaged the plane, but because it didn't go into the fuel tank, the damage was not catastrophic and the pilots were able to bring the plane in for an emergency landing with no further loss of life.
• Sesquipedalian Loquaciousness: A recurring interviewee on the show, aviation expert John Nance, has a tendency to use complex words when he speaks; this is most evident in his interview in the episode on Turkish Airlines Flight 1951.
• Shaped Like Itself: A surviving stewardess from Air Ontario Flight 1363 described the takeoff as "slow and sluggish like a slow, sluggish person running up a hill".
• Shout-Out:
  • The Metrojet episode has the air traffic controller discarding sunflower seed shells in an ashtray.
  • The captain of Qantas 72 drops one to Airplane! to cut some of the tension in the cockpit: "Looks like I picked a bad day to quit sniffing glue."
• Shown Their Work:
  • In "Deadly Crossroads", the Bashkirian pilots are shown looking toward their right side for the DHL, which is actually approaching from the left. In the uncensored version (you can see it in the censored version too, it's just less clear), it is clearly seen that all the heads in the cockpit turn when a flight crew member yells "There on the left!" The reason for this (which wasn't said in the episode) was that Peter Nielsen (the controller) had actually reported the position of the DHL mistakenly at the Bashkirian's 2 o'clock position when in reality it was at their 10 o'clock. It was probably omitted to keep the sympathy level for Nielsen higher among the viewers, as if him getting murdered by Vitaly Kaloyev, who was hailed as a hero in his hometown, wasn't enough. ^note  It's also important to point out that this mistake contributed little to the disaster anyway. The DHL's lights would have been visible to the Bashkirian pilots in the dark sky long before the collision, and while they couldn't have been able to judge the DHL's speed and altitude, they could judge its clock position.
  • In "A Wounded Bird", as the narrator mentions the flight attendant preparing the cabin for the emergency landing, the reenactment shows a moment where an exit row passenger says she doesn't want to be responsible for opening the door (or possibly feels she's unable to), and a man sitting further back offers to do it and switches seats with her. Though the incident isn't mentioned either by the narrators or any of the interviewees^note none of the individuals directly involved were interviewed; the flight attendant declined to appear, and both passengers were killed in the disaster, this is an accurate depiction of something that happened in the minutes leading up to the crash, as other accounts of the crash have described this interaction taking place. Unfortunately, it's subverted a few minutes later when the same woman is seen standing outside the plane in an embrace with a man after the crash, both with no visible injuries and even their clothing intact: in reality, the woman in question, Lucille Burton, was horribly burned exiting the crashed plane; she would not have been able to stand, to say nothing of how she would have looked^*reports later stated she was burned over 100% of her body, and she died within hours of the crash. Her husband Lonnie — who would presumably be who the man was meant to be — suffered a similar fate.
  • In "Taxiway Turmoil" a Lufthansa Boeing 737 is seen parked at the Detroit airport. While a German airline's mid-range aircraft seems out of place in central USA, this particular 737-500, D-ABIA was delivered to Lufthansa in December 1990, the month of the accident shown, so it's likely making a stopover on its delivery flight from Seattle to Germany.
• Skewed Priorities:
  • The investigation of the Tenerife crash discovered that the air traffic controllers were listening to a soccer match on the radio and may not have been paying full attention to what was going on. In fact, they had it turned up so loud that the sounds of the game can be heard on the transmissions from both planes.
  • A passenger on KLM Cityhopper 433 scolds her adult daughter for swearing in response to the aircraft suddenly rolling to the right.
• Smash to Black: Used in a few episodes, most notably 9/11: The Pentagon Attack with a shot of the passenger cabin just before impact.
• Snipe Hunt: Used to lock someone out of the cockpit.
  • It is suggested that SilkAir Flight 185's captain may have found an excuse to get his first officer out of the cockpit, then locked him out, disabled the flight recorders, and intentionally crashed his plane.
  • Implied in an almost identical playout with Germanwings Flight 9525. The first officer suggests that the captain take a bathroom break, which the captain proceeds to do. As soon as the cockpit door is sealed behind the captain, so is the plane's fate.
  • Same thing happened to LAM Mozambique Airlines Flight 470 where the copolit left the cockpit, leaving the captain alone in the cockpit who would later locked the door and input commands into the plane that causes it to crash.
• Sole Survivor:
  • In "Alarming Silence," Cecelia Cichan was only four years old when she became the Sole Survivor of Northwest Arilines Flight 255 which killed 156 people, which included her family.
  • In "Lokomotiv Hockey Team Disaster," Alexander Sizov, a flight mechanic that worked for YAK-Service, becomes the Sole Survivor of the YAK-Service Flight 9633 crash and while Alexander Galimov, one of the hockey players, survived the initial impact, he dies later of his injuries which led to a death toll of 44 people.
  • In "Altantic Ditching," Robert Decker was the Sole Survivor of the Cougar Flight 91 crash that killed 17 other people.
  • In "Tragic Takeoff," First Officer James Polehinke was the Sole Survivor of the Comair Flight 5191 crash that killed 49 other people.
  • In "Running on Empty," Captain Bruno Pichelli was the Sole Survivor of Air Tahoma Flight that killed his copilot.
  • In "Divided in Crisis," Youcef Djillali, who was unamed in the episode, was the Sole Survivor of the Air Algérie Flight 6289 crash that killed 102 people. He survived only because he forgot to put his seat belt on which was his salvation as he was thrown clear of the wreckage away from the fire, explosions and flying debris.
• Spoiler Title: Quite a few episodes give away key aspects of the accident through the title. You can probably figure out what happened in "Bomb on Board", in "Dead Weight", a large component is an overloaded aircraft, in "Frozen in Flight", icing of the wings downs the plane, in "Dead Tired", pilot fatigue is a massive factor, and so on. Needless to say, however, there's still a lot of extra details to go over to explain why these things happened to begin with.
• Stern Teacher: The Northwest Airlink 5719 captain is very demanding in regard to his first officers, and does not tolerate any mistakes or omissions, no matter how small. In and of itself, this is not bad - after all, there was a number of episodes showing how the tolerance of minor errors and complacency in a pilot's performance ended up in a tragedy (Crossair 3597 for example) - but in combination with his extreme Hair-Trigger Temper, this ends up fatal.
• Stiff Upper Lip:
  • British Airways Flight 38, a 777, is on final approach to Heathrow, when the engines stop providing necessary thrust. The aircraft, carrying 152 souls and a significant fuel reserve, is on the verge of stalling and crashing into the densely populated suburb, while flying low, which means essentially no margin for any emergency stall recovery procedure. Despite the extreme severity of the situation, the first officer sounds at best mildly annoyed about his plane's lack of proper response.
    Captain Peter Burkill: [Is the aircraft/approach] Stable?
    First Officer John Coward: Well, sort of. I can't get any power from the engines.
    (and later):
    First Officer: Looks like we have a double engine failure.
  • The BA38 crew, however, can't hold a candle to the crew of British Airways Flight 9.
    Captain Eric Moody: Ladies and gentlemen, this is your captain speaking. We have a small problem. All four engines have stopped. We are doing our damnedest to get them going again. I trust you are not in too much distress.
  • Subverted by Alastair Atchinson, first officer of British Airways Flight 5390. He keeps his nerves and his plane under control as his captain hangs halfway outside the windshield just a few feet away from him, and even has the presence of mind to use "please" and "thank you" while communicating with the ATC. But as soon as the plane is safe on the ground, he collapses into hysterical sobbing.
• Stopped Clock:
  • The clock stopped when the ferry sank in Express Samina.
  • Three watches were recovered from South African Airways Flight 295; one watch had stopped, while the other two were still running and set to Taiwan time. So, the investigators were able to extrapolate an approximate time of impact based on the assumption that a) the stopped watch was also on Taiwan time, and b) it stopped on impact.
  • The watches worn by the people on Dag Hammarskjold's flight to Ndola stopped when the plane crashed.
• Stupid Crooks: The hijackers of Ethiopian Airlines Flight 961 in "Ocean Landing", who thought their aircraft could make the trip to Australia since they read it in the in-flight magazines, and refused to believe the captain and ATC when they tell them repeatedly and bluntly they don't have enough fuel for the 10-hour flight.
• Suicide Is Shameful: This presented a massive problem in the EgyptAir Flight 990 and SilkAir Flight 185 cases, which happened with an Egyptian carrier and in Indonesia respectively, when it became clear these had been crashed on purpose. Both Egypt and Indonesia are predominantly Muslim, and The Qur'an itself explicitly forbids suicide, resulting in a major taboo against suicide that makes insinuations that someone took their own life, especially in the course of mass murder, gauche at best. This led to disputes with local investigators that resulted in unresolved cases because the NTSB was essentially accusing the EgyptAir copilot and the SilkAir pilot of a grave sin within a grave sin.
• Suspiciously Specific Denial: In "Alarming Silence," documenting Northwest Airlines Flight 255, one pilot demonstrated how to disable the MD-80's takeoff warning system by pulling a circuit breaker, without looking, though he claimed he'd never done it himself. Possibly averted in that the circuit breaker was mentioned to have been used routinely by a number of pilots, and was therefore covered in oil from fingerprints, making the breaker distinguishable by touch.
• Take This Job and Shove It: The pilot interviewed for the episode on Chalk's Ocean Airways Flight 101 quit his job due to the constantly increasing safety issues in the years leading up to the accident.
• Tempting Fate:
  • In "Free Fall", when the second officer returns from a bathroom break and asks the captain if there's anything he should know about:
    Captain: Altitude and airspeed's the same. Smooth sailing.
    (Warning alarm goes off)
    Captain: Oh, don't tell me I just jinxed us.
  • In "Desperate Escape", one passenger recalls that the woman sitting next to him expressing relief that the rough landing was over. "And as soon as she said that, all hell broke loose."
• This Cannot Be!: Said by the captain of Aeromexico 498 after the collision with the Piper Cherokee.
• This Is Wrong on So Many Levels!: Nearly everyone interviewed in the episode on Trans-Colorado Flight 2286 went out of the way to criticize the captain's cocaine usage at least once.
• Time Zone Troubles: The pilots of FedEx Express Flight 80 had crossed eight time zones in the 10 days leading up to the crash at Narita International Airport, a factor in which was the pilots being fatigued due to the resulting jet lag causing them to not use enough of their rest time to catch up on sleep.
• Tin-Can Telephone: Discussed in an interview in the episode on Northwest Airlines Flight 85 as an analogy for the sound quality of talking to flight operations while flying over the Behring Strait.
• Title Drop: Some episodes have the episode title spoken by either the narrator, in a re-enactment, or (very rarely) in an interview. Zig-zagged, as episode titles vary by region. And then there's the almost Once per Episode Title Drop of the series names, with the crew calling out "Mayday" once they realize the situation.
• Together in Death:
  • In the last moments of "Out of Control", an elderly couple reach out to each other and hold hands one last time before Japan Airlines Flight 123's inevitable crash on Mount Takamagahara.
  • In "Murder in the Skies", opera singer Maria Radner reaches out and holds hands with her husband, who is across the aisle, while holding their young son as they wait for the inevitable crash caused by the suicidial copilot.
  • In "Fatal Climb", Terri Chung, who liked making friends with fellow passengers in her travels, reaches out to another one seated across the aisle as TAROM Flight 371 nosedives into the ground.
• Too Clever by Half: Captain Falitz in "Killer Attitude" makes it clear that he thinks he knows everything in terms of procedure, reprimanding the first officer for minor mistakes. This backfires when he goes for an unorthodox landing approach, without fully explaining to the first officer what's going on. The first officer isn't sure what's expected of him, so he doesn't say anything for fear of angering the captain. This ends in a fatal crash when the captain descends too quickly.
• A Tragedy of Impulsiveness:
  • Nigeria Airways Flight 2120. The project manager had the opportunity to get the tires topped off if he wasn't so adamant that the flight remain on schedule and take off with the tires under-inflated.
  • Santa Barbara Airlines Flight 518. The whole accident would've been completely avoided if the pilots hadn't gotten caught up in their time in the terminal, and then rushed to get the plane in the air on schedule without properly setting up the flight computers.
  • What put the nail in the coffin in Tenerife. While many other factors piled up to set the scene, the KLM captain's impatient decision to begin the takeoff roll without any certainty about their clearance, knowing that the Pan Am plane had been behind them and with no confirmation that they were clear, was the final link in the chain.
• Trailers Always Spoil: In the Birgenair 301 episode, the crash sequence is played in an especially dramatic way, with the narrator stating that "the fate of the flight depends on the crew getting their answers right". This could have worked - many viewers watch the show without checking the info on the presented accident first and could not know whether the plane crashed or not - if not for the opening sequence, where an aviation expert states that "this was the first major crash of a 757" at sea.
• Translation Convention: In-cockpit discussion and passenger dialog is in English, even when it's not the persons' first language. Lampshaded in Season 12 episode "Death of the President". The cockpit crew has to use Russian in radio communication with the military airport (in civilian airline communication, English is the official language), and the first words are spoken in Russian. Then there's a moment of radio static and the language changes to English. The investigators examining a crash also talk and write all their notes in English, even when English is not their native language.
• Troubled Takeoff: Many aviation accidents happen at takeoff, with the deadliest one being the Tenerife Disaster because of a massive miscommunication between the pilots and ATC, along with thick fog reducing their visibility to zero in an overloaded runway.
• True Companions: In "Crash of the Century", the crew of Pan Am Flight 1736 are shown to be a pretty close bunch who clearly respect each other yet aren't afraid to throw jokes around in moments of levity and work well as a team. Contrast that to the crew of KLM Flight 4805, where Captain van Zanten is a harsh taskmaster toward his fellow crew members, giving them backhanded compliments at best.
• Turbine Blender:
  • In the episode on United Airlines Flight 811, it's mentioned that human remains were found in the right inboard engine.
  • Fear of this, and of subsequent engine damage, is the reason that the co-pilot of British Airways 5390 instructs the flight attendants not to let go of the "body" of the captain. Turns out to be a good thing they didn't for another reason.
  • The investigation after the Hudson River Miracle finds the remains of geese inside each engine, a flock having flown into the plane after it took off, leading to engine failure.
• Ultimate Job Security:
  • Captain Lutz was allowed to stay with Crossair despite multiple foul-ups on the job simply because they were expanding rapidly and needed all the manpower they could get.
  • Same story with the captain of TransAsia Flight 235.
  • And again with the captain of LAPA Flight 3142.
  • Subverted with EgyptAir Flight 990. First Officer Gameel Al-Batouti definitely enjoyed this on account of his seniority with the airline (he was the oldest first officer in the whole company at that) and was nearing retirement despite a known record of sexual misconduct. However, according to exiled EgyptAir captain Hamdi Hanafi Taha, this was about to be revoked with prejudice due to said actions finally catching up to him. Unfortunately for everyone, this would only take effect after the plane landed back in Cairo, so Al-Batouti had something to say about that.
• Understatement:
  • The captain of British Airways Flight 9 certainly qualifies.
    Eric Moody: Ladies and gentlemen, this is your captain speaking. We have a small problem. All four engines have stopped. We are doing our damnedest to get them going again. I trust you are not in too much distress.
  • Flight Attendant Deborah Neil, aboard Pacific Southwest Airlines 1771:
    Neil: (opens cockpit) We have a problem! (is shot in head)
  • Regarding the investigation of ASA Flight 529, the episode briefly discusses how the airline industry had tested an allegedly less flammable fuel by crashing an empty plane via remote control, and video is shown of said test. As the test plane explodes in a fireball, the narration notes that the experiment was "not a conspicuous success".
• Unfinished, Untested, Used Anyway: The Galloping Ghost was possibly the most heavily modified P-51 ever. The pilot flew the plane in the Reno Air Races without testing to see if the modifications were safe. Subverted, in that it wasn't the mods that led to the crash, but an ancient part that had been left on the aircraft for far longer than its design life, which ultimately suffered a fatigue failure.
• Ungrateful Bastard: The captain of BEA Flight 548 accuses a junior pilot of being such during his "The Reason You Suck" Speech to him just before boarding his flight to Brussels.
• Universal Driver's License: Averted in "Ghost Plane". The lone conscious flight attendant was licensed to fly light piston aircraft, but his training proves insufficient to operate a 737.
• Unluckily Lucky: Conversed when episodes touch on the subject of crash survival. Although crash survivors managed to make it out alive, they still had the misfortune of being in an accident in the first place.
• The Un-Reveal: In some cases:
  • It is known that South African Airways Flight 295, the subject of "Fanning the Flames", was brought down by an on-board fire. But whether it was accidental or the result of Apartheid Era espionage remains unknown.
  • Subverted with "Death and Denial", about Egypt-Air Flight 990. The episode presents the case that the plane was deliberately brought down by the First Officer, and that the Egyptian government's official explanation of mechanical failure was made because of suicide being extremely taboo in Arab culture. Therefore, the cause of the crash is known, yet cannot be officially determined because of the differing politics and social mores between the U.S. and Egypt.
  • Subverted again with "Pushed to the Limit", about SilkAir Flight 185. Like in "Death and Denial", this episode presents the case that the plane was deliberately brought down by a crew member (this time, the Captain), and that the Indonesian government's official explanation of mechanical failure was made because the entire Boeing 737 line, at the time of the incident, was susceptible to a mechanical issue with the rudder's control unit that had previously caused the crash of two other 737s (which themselves were profiled in the episode "Hidden Dangers"). Again, known cause of crash, no official determination. This explanation was offered because of a similar suicide taboo due to Indonesia's large Muslim population.
  • Averted in "Murder in the Skies"/"Crash in the Alps" about the Germanwings 9525 crash. Evidence pointed to the crash being caused deliberately by the copilot; this time, no one attempted to challenge this conclusion. Only after this accident (the only one out of five total crashes suspected to be cases of pilot suicide to be undisputed as a pilot suicide) were recommendations passed to mandate the presence of at least two crew members on the flight deck at all times during the flight.
  • "Massacre Over The Mediterranean"; the original report concludes that Aerolinee Itavia Flight 870 was shot down by a missile fired from an unknown second plane. Soon after, two of the investigators withdraw their names from the report. A few years later, another inquiry produces a second report which determines that the first conclusion was wrongly based on an assumption that there was a hole in the side of the plane near the front. The third and more complete investigation shows compelling forensic evidence for a bomb placed under the wash basin in the rear toilet, however the report is ignored by Italian authorities still pursuing the missile theory. The episode seems to side with the bomb theory, ending with the conclusion that the Italian legal system is not the best system for investigating crashes.
  • With the disappearance of Malaysian Airlines Flight 370 unresolved at the time of airing, the episode about this flight puts forth the theory that the plane was intentionally flown off-course (and that the Captain was in the best position to do so) but doesn't definitively say who did it.
  • Played with in "Deadly Mission". Investigators looking into the case decades after the fact are able to establish a likely scenario that fits the evidence, but with no flight recorders and one important piece of potentially contradictory evidence not available to investigators, they acknowledge there's no way to be sure.
  • "Deadly Silence": While the investigators know that the crash was caused by the plane losing cabin pressure, they are unable to determine how the depressurization happened, as the plane had no flight data recorder, the cockpit voice recorder only recorded the final 30 minutes of the flight, and the wreckage was too fragmented to provide any clues.
  • Also "Turning Point" with Northwest Airlines Flight 85. While the NTSB did determine that the cause of the rudder hard-over was the failure of an end-cap due to metal fatigue, they were never able to ascertain what caused the metal fatigue itself, which means they don't know what set off the sequence that lead to the lower rudder to get jammed to the left, forcing an emergency landing in Anchorage. (They were, however, able to prevent future incidents by addressing the direct cause and adding a safety mechanism.)
  • Similarly, "Fight For Control" and Reeve Aleutian Airways Flight 8. Though the plane managed to land with no fatalities, the broken propeller that caused the disaster fell into the ocean and could not be recovered, so investigators were never able to determine what caused it to break off.
  • Discussed in "Explosive Proof" about TWA 800; although the NTSB concluded that the accident was a fuel tank explosion, some continue to believe that the plane was shot down.
  • In "Free Fall", the investigators were never able to figure out why a line of sensor data was mislabeled by the flight system, causing Qantas Flight 72 to go into a nosedive twice.
• Unwanted Assistance: The actions of the crew aboard Air Astana Flight 1388, whom after figuring out that their plane's ailerons were crossed, switched their flight computer from NORMAL LAW to DIRECT LAW. This removed the flight envelope protections that NORMAL LAW provided, but gave the crew direct control of the ailerons, as well as decrease the chances of the flight spoilers deploying. The latter was crucial as while the ailerons were crossed, meaning the pilots had to, for example, turn the yoke left to roll right and vice-versa, the flight spoilers were electrically controlled and thus NOT crossed, meaning that if, for example, a bit too much yoke input to the left for a right roll was applied, the left wing's flight spoiler would deploy and negate the effects of the ailerons, causing an upset.
• Unwitting Instigator of Doom:
  • In the Charkhi Dadri mid-air collision, the radio operator of Kazakhstan Airlines Flight 1907 notices that the flight is below its assigned altitude and tells the captain to climb just moments before the collision. Had the Kazakh plane not climbed, they would've passed harmlessly under the Saudi plane.
  • Nigeria Airways Flight 2120:
    • Project manager Aldo Tetamenti simply didn't have training that would have positively influenced his judgment, yet Nationair gave him authority to override the decisions of people that did have that training. In his decisions regarding the underinflated tyres that he could never have understood the implications of, he unknowingly pressured maintenance crews into releasing an unsafe plane (that he was on) and not telling the flight crew about it for fear of causing a delay. The result was a horrific in-flight fire that killed everyone on board. Had he allowed the tyres to be topped up on the day, the flight would have made it to Sokoto safely, and Nationair wouldn't have collapsed two years later.
      Larry Vance: I don't believe that the people who were making the decisions had in their heads that this was a hazardous thing that they were doing.
    • The flight crew's routine action of retracting the landing gear doomed the flight ten seconds after they lifted off. Had they left the landing gear extended for a little bit longer and asked the tower to look at the gear, the controller might have been able to say something along the lines of "Nigerian 2120, do not retract your landing gear, you have flames on the left bogie", giving them a chance to get back on the ground and probably off the plane; as it stands, they only found out about the fire when it was too late.
      Larry Vance: So as soon as this aircraft took off and they retracted the landing gear, there was basically no surviving. The fire was going to spread; they... they were gonna crash.
      [...]
      Reenactment!Ron Coleman: It's all over ten seconds after they lift off.
      Ron Coleman: When the aircraft got airborne, "Positive rate," "Gear up," and the gear went into the wheel wells on fire.
  • Peter Nielsen for the Uberlingen disaster. If he had said nothing, the Russian pilots would almost certainly have obeyed their TCAS system and climbed to avoid the other plane. To make matters worse, even if the Russian crew hadn't listened to TCAS and had done nothing, the DHL plane, which was descending in accordance with their own TCAS, would have passed harmlessly underneath the passenger plane. In an attempt to prevent a collision, Nielsen inadvertently ordered the Russians to do the one thing that kept them in the cargo plane's flight path.
  • The pilots of Alaska Airlines 261 attempt to force their jammed stabilizer loose. Instead, this maneuver ends up shearing the threads off the screw, making the plane completely uncontrollable.
  • Tenerife airport disaster:
    • The reason the Pan Am and KLM flights were at Tenerife in the first place is because of a terrorist attack at Gran Canaria Airport earlier in the day by Canary Island separatists, who had planted a bomb there. The flights were diverted to Tenerife while the bomb threat at Gran Canaria could be assessed, as the phoned-in threat had specially mentioned bombs, meaning there could've been more than one. The terrorist group's single bomb injured just 8 people with no fatalities, but it indirectly set off the chain of events which led to the deadliest air accident in history.
    • Dutch lawmakers introduced regulations to limit duty time in order to ensure that pilots were well-rested. While this is a good idea if done right, these regulations were not; they made it a criminal offense to exceed duty time limits even for reasons beyond the crew's control, and a 1976 tightening made duty time difficult to calculate. The situation put the KLM crew in a Race Against the Clock with potential legal consequences, resulting in get-there-itis and the captain making a series of questionable-at-best decisions ending in the direct cause of the crash.
  • Les Filotas' dissenting report on Arrow Air Flight 1285—arguing that it was impossible for a thin layer of ice to bring down a plane and that the cause had to be an in-flight explosion, never mind the failure to find explosive residue or the aerodynamic implications of an uneven solid forming on what is supposed to be a smooth surface—prevented much-needed improvements to deicing procedures from being implemented, leading to the later crashes of Air Ontario Flight 1363 and USAir Flight 405. The internal issues exacerbated by Filotas's dissenting report also played a major part in people losing confidence in the Canadian Aviation Safety Board, leading to it being shut down and replaced by the Transportation Safety Board.
  • Some idiot at SabreTech thought "expired" meant "empty" and labelled a box of expired oxygen generators as empty oxygen canisters, leading to 144 cans of exothermic oxidizers being loaded onto ValuJet Flight 592, going off during taxi, and burning the plane down in midair.
  • A Helios technician performing a routine pressurisation test of the Boeing 737 that would fly as Helios Flight 522 the next day forgets to set the system from manual back to automatic after he was finished, resulting in Helios Flight 522 not pressurising and flying aimlessly around Athens until it ran out of fuel and crashed into mountains near Grammatiko, only avoiding crashing into Athens because of quick thinking by a flight attendant who managed to stay conscious and break into the cockpit.
  • In "A Wounded Bird", a technician couldn't find the cracks in the propeller blade that had been flagged as a concern, so, in accordance with his training, he polished the inside of the blade before sending it along for a more thorough inspection, which inadvertantly removed all visual evidence of the crack issue. The blade was put back into service and ended up failing in flight, bringing down the plane. The technician was interviewed for the episode and it's clear that he still carries a tremendous amount of guilt, even though he was doing exactly what he was supposed to.
• Very Fake Résumé: First Officer Aska of Atlas Air left a previous termination off his resume and indicated studying at college during those years, to obscure a long history of incompetence, failed tests, and training difficulties at multiple airlines. As of 2017 when Aska joined Atlas Air, there was no national database in the US to verify a pilot's history, so the airline simply took him at his word.
• Voiceover Translation: Used whenever a non-English speaker is interviewed so that the audience can understand what's being said.
• Wham Line:
  • One of the survivors of Air Canada 797 recalls that after the explosion, a flight attendant said she needed to "count the survivors", and he realized that the way she was saying it implied that there were people who had not survived.
  • As the flight crew of Nigeria Airways Flight 2120, as yet unaware that their plane is on fire, deals with the hydraulic problem, the controller giving them strange instructions because he's mistaken them for Saudia Flight 738, and the deluge of nonsensical warnings their plane is giving them, a flight attendant rushes in with a report that explains everything:
    Kay Smith: There's smoke in the back, real bad!
    William Allan: [takes a second to respond] Yeah, we're heading back. We've got a hydraulic problem, Kay.^note The real Allan actually mentioned the blown tyres at this point, but this was omitted in the reenactment to avoid spoiling what caused the fire
    Andrew McIntosh: So this is the first indication that the pilot has of anything going on in the back of the plane.
  • Captain Dubois of Air France Flight 447 has no idea what is causing his plane to behave erratically to the point of stalling until First Officer Bonin utters this line, which causes Dubois to realize exactly what is doing on:
    First Officer Bonin: But I've been at maximum nose-up for a while!
• What a Piece of Junk: What the captain of Santa Barbara Airlines Flight 518 says of his plane as he and his copilot are taxiing to the runway. True to the trope, the massive equipment malfunction that sent it into a mountain was caused by the pilots' rushed startup; all they had to do was wait 28 more seconds than they did before moving, and there would've been no problems with the flight.
• What a Senseless Waste of Human Life: While this can be said about most accidents which were inherently preventable, the disgust of the NTSB investigators in the remastered version of the Alaska Airlines Flight 261 crash ("Pacific Plunge") is pretty evident. 88 people died just because the company wanted to cut labor costs that would have been required to find and fix the problem, with the maintenance team ignoring an instruction to replace a dangerously worn part after one mechanic did their job diligently, by claiming it was just within limits. The rest is history.
  NTSB Investigator Jeff Guzzetti: I was sickened by what I listened on the CVR. This accident could have been prevented.
• Wilhelm Scream:
  • One is heard in the Proteus Airlines 706 episode.
  • Another is heard in the Northwest Airlink 5719 episode.
  • Yet another is heard in the Comair 3272 episode.
  • Several are heard in the TWA 800 episode.
• Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds: Vitaly Kaloyev, grief-stricken by the loss of his wife and two children in the Überlingen accident, would go on to murder Peter Nielsen, the man he held responsible for the catastrophe.
• Writers Cannot Do Math: The American version of "Death of the President" makes a fundamental error regarding the comparison of altitudes achieved by the aircraft, claiming that 300 feet (the aircraft's minimum descent altitude for the trial approach) is "more than 10 times [the] height" of 36 feet (the height of the first tree clipped by the aircraft). The obvious math error is obvious.
• Wrong Line of Work: Several crashes feature pilots with a long, documented history of training difficulties, who had often been not only retained at their jobs, but promoted. When this occurs, it can be connected to an airline struggling to retain competent staff, or due to the pilot having personal connections to help keep him employed - though in that case of Atlas Air 3591, First Officer Aska also had a Very Fake Résumé.
• Xanatos Gambit: Implied with David Burke by the fact that he shot Ray Thomson first. Even if he didn't succeed in storming the cockpit of PSA 1771, he still got his primary target picked off.
• You Answered Your Own Question: Inverted in the TAM 402 episode. The Brazilian investigator's first reaction to seeing the FDR's evidence of a reverser deploying in flight is "This shouldn't even be possible!". Later, when he looks into why the pilots were confused by the aircraft's safety system to prevent a deployed reverser from causing a crash, he discovers that the extreme unlikelihood of a reverser deploying in flight led to the associated training being deemed unnecessary by the manufacturer.
• You Are Already Dead: In many cases, the point beyond which a crash is inevitable is several minutes before impact.
  • The fate of everyone aboard Swissair Flight 111 had been sealed the very moment that a short circuit within the wiring harness for the in-flight entertainment system ignited the mylar surrounding the overhead wiring bundle's thermal insulation. Even if the flight crew had diverted towards Halifax at the first sign of smoke from the A/C vent in the cockpit, or even if they had done so at the very moment of ignition, they would not have made it safely down on the ground due to how quickly the fire was burning through crucial electrical components.
  • After the elevator trim jackscrew assembly on Alaska Airlines Flight 261 peeled apart due to the assembly's acme nut becoming de-threaded, the pilots kept it flying for about 10 minutes before the jackscrew's end nut, which was constantly slamming into the acme nut from the jackscrew simply moving up and down uncontrollably, gave up entirely and snapped off.
  • By the time the pilots of Nigeria Airways Flight 2120 realized they needed to return to Jeddah, they were already too far from the airport to make it back in the time they had left. In fact, investigators ultimately concluded that the crash became inevitable almost immediately after the plane became airborne when the pilots, unaware that wheels had caught fire, retracted the landing gear.
    Ron Coleman: It's all over ten seconds after they lift off.
  • By the time the pilots of ValuJet Flight 592 realized there was a fire on board, they were only three minutes away from crashing.
  • El Al Flight 1862 was able to remain airborne for eight minutes after the engines on the right wing fell off, but only because it was flying at a speed too high for a safe landing.
• You Didn't Ask: Why the tower at Denver International didn't give wind gust information to pilots of Continental Airlines Flight 1404. Standard operating procedure at Denver International prior to the crash was if the pilots don't ask for wind gust information, you don't give it.
• You Have GOT to Be Kidding Me!:
  • The Northwest Airlink 5719 captain's reaction to the airline's new residence policy.
  • Imagine what it must have been like for the pilots of TWA 800. They were waiting for a missing passenger whose bags were in the cargo hold, and after an hour, they get a message from the tower that the missing passenger was on board the whole time. Their reaction fell under this trope.
  • The crew of Pan Am 1736 when they learn that even though the airport's reopened, they're still unable to get going because the KLM is refueling. The first officer and flight engineer outright go outside and measure the distance between the planes' wingtips just to see if they can just squeeze past the KLM and go already, but unfortunately it's too small to be safe.
  • Investigators occasionally have this reaction to particularly bizarre or egregious behavior from pilots.
• You Have to Believe Me!: One survivor of Air Inter Flight 148 went out in search of help and ran into two journalists looking for the plane, who didn't believe he was a survivor until they followed him back to the crash site, bringing the rest of the rescuers back with them.