Pilot Nick - 8 min read

Thirty seconds.

That’s roughly how long it took a Boeing 767 over New Jersey to go from a textbook approach to clipping a light pole on a highway. At 500 feet, by the crew’s own account, the airplane was on speed and on profile. By the time it reached the airport boundary, it was about six feet off the ground — over a turnpike that sits short of the runway, where a stabilized approach would have it crossing the actual threshold near fifty feet.

That’s the whole story, and it’s worth understanding exactly how thirty good seconds became thirty dangerous ones.

I’ve now read the NTSB’s preliminary report on the May 3rd United approach into Newark a few times. I want to do something different with this one. Not reassure you — teach you. I’m going to put on my analyst hat and walk through this approach the way I’d debrief it in a training department, line by line.

Two things before I start.

1. One: the report is preliminary. The NTSB has not published a probable cause, and won’t for a while. Nothing below is an official finding. It’s my read of the published flight-data and cockpit-voice information, as a pilot who has flown this exact kind of approach hundreds of times.

2. Two: this is not a pile-on. Every honest pilot reading this report feels the same cold flicker of there but for the grace of God. The value here isn’t blame. It’s the lesson — because the lesson is one that keeps the rest of us alive.

First, the thing my regulars already know: what “stable” actually means

If you’ve read my earlier pieces on the stabilized approach, you can skip this. For everyone else, here’s the spine of the whole thing, because you cannot understand this incident without it. You can read below my article on approach stabilization:

Long before the runway, every airline approach has to pass through a gate, a specific altitude, usually 1,000 feet in cloud or 500 feet in visual conditions. At that gate, the approach must be stable, which means all of these are true at once:

• On path — on the correct vertical glidepath and lined up on centerline.

• On speed — at the target approach speed, not fast, not slow.

• Configured — gear down, flaps set for landing, nothing left to change.

• Controlled descent — a normal rate down, not a dive.

• Thrust set — engines spooled to a sensible power, not idle.

• Briefed and checked — every checklist complete, both pilots on the same page.

Here’s the part that matters most: if the approach is not stable at that gate, the rule isn’t “try to fix it.” The rule is go around. Climb away, sort it out, come back and try again.

A stabilized approach is not bureaucracy. It is the single most reliable predictor of a safe landing in all of aviation. Unstable approaches are behind a huge share of landing accidents — and almost every one of them had a go-around available that wasn’t taken.

Hold that thought. We’ll need it.

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The approach that was working

Now the flight. And I want to be fair to this crew, because the front half of this approach was normal.

It was a gusty afternoon — wind from the west at 19 knots, gusting 30, enough to give them what the captain described as moderate turbulence. Their landing runway had been changed three times during the descent, finally settling on runway 29, a runway with no precision electronic glidepath, where you fly the last segment visually using the runway’s approach lights.

At 500 feet, the first officer reported they were on speed and on profile. The captain answered the automated five-hundred-foot callout with one word: stable. By the book, that’s the gate passed.

So far, so normal. Gusty, busy, but normal.

Then came the choice that, in my read, set the trap.

The duck-under and what really happened…

It's a technique nearly every pilot has used and gotten away with. Below, I'll show you exactly what he did, the thirty seconds it came apart, and the one option that sat on the table the whole way down to six feet.

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🕒 9 min read · Black Box Series · Episode 03 · Pilot Nick

You’re in seat 9F.

It’s a routine afternoon — Denver to Chicago, drinks served, descent still an hour away. The sun is hitting the wing through the window. You’re maybe halfway through your magazine.

Then a bang you feel in your ribs.

Not a clunk. A bang. The whole airplane lurches sideways. Your tray slides. Somewhere behind you, a glass breaks. The engines — you can’t quite put your finger on what’s different, but something is off.

The seatbelt sign comes on. The captain’s voice comes over the PA, calmer than it has any right to be.

“Ladies and gentlemen, we’ve had a problem with our number two engine. We are diverting to Sioux City.”

That’s the polite version.

Up at FL370, the cockpit just lost the airplane.

If you’re new here Black Box is the series where I take a real aviation incident and break it down the way a pilot actually thinks about it.

Not the news version. Not the dramatized version.

The version from the left seat.

What the crew saw. What they decided. Why. And most importantly for the nervous flyers reading this what changed afterwards, so that you never have to.

Here’s what almost nobody — passenger or pilot — fully understood about wide-body airliners on July 19, 1989.

A DC-10 has three hydraulic systems. Three. Each one independent, each one rated to fly the airplane on its own. You can lose one. You can lose two. The third one will still move the rudder, the elevators, the ailerons, the flaps, and the landing gear.

The design philosophy was simple: no single failure should be able to take all three. The probability of losing all three hydraulic systems on a DC-10 was calculated at roughly one in a billion flight hours.

Then a fan disk in engine number two — the one mounted in the tail — failed.

Not a crack the airline missed. A microscopic metallurgical defect, present in the titanium since the disk was forged 18 years earlier, that finally let go after 41,000 cycles of heating and cooling and spinning at 8,000 rpm.

The disk burst.

Shrapnel sprayed through the tail at hundreds of miles per hour and severed the lines of all three hydraulic systems — every one of which, for design reasons that made sense in 1968, happened to pass within a few feet of each other right behind that engine.

In about two seconds, the crew of United 232 had a DC-10 with no working flight controls.

No rudder. No elevators. No ailerons. No flaps. No spoilers. No nose-wheel steering. Nothing.

And the good news — yes, there is some — is what they did next.

Captain Al Haynes had been flying for 33 years. 30,000 hours. He’d never seen anything like this. Nobody had.

His first instinct, the one drilled into every airline pilot, was to grab the checklist. Loss of all hydraulics. He looked. There was no procedure.

There was no procedure because the situation wasn’t supposed to be possible.

The airplane was now in a slow right roll, pitching gently up and down in a long, lazy oscillation pilots call a phugoid — the natural rhythm an airplane settles into when nobody is flying it. Nose up, slow down. Nose down, speed up. Sixty seconds per cycle. Beautiful, almost, except they were 37,000 feet over Iowa with 296 people behind them.

First Officer William Record was on the controls and feeling nothing. The yoke moved freely. None of it did anything.

In the cabin behind them was a man named Dennis Fitch an off-duty United Check Airman who happened to be deadheading home. A DC-10 instructor. He’d actually trained for a hydraulic-loss scenario in a simulator, just out of curiosity, and discovered something interesting: you could sort of steer an airplane with the throttles.

Push the left engine forward, the airplane yaws and rolls right. Push the right engine, it rolls left. Add thrust to both, the nose comes up. Pull both back, the nose drops.

Fitch walked into the cockpit, introduced himself, and offered to help.

Haynes pointed at the center pedestal.

For the next 44 minutes, Fitch knelt on the floor between the captain and first officer, his hands on two thrust levers, flying the airplane the way nobody had ever flown an airplane before. Haynes ran the radios and the cabin. Record held the useless yoke. Second Officer Dudley Dvorak worked the system pages, looking for anything that could be saved.

Four pilots. Two engines. Zero flight controls. One runway in Iowa.

This is the part nobody trains for. So here’s what they did instead.

The 5 things the crew did right — without a checklist

These weren’t steps in a procedure. They’re what airline pilots now study as the textbook for “no procedure exists.”

1. They flew the airplane first.

Before anything else — before the radios, before the cabin, before the diversion — they flew.

In that order, always. The temptation when something catastrophic happens is to start talking, start asking, start fixing. The crew of 232 did none of that for the first 90 seconds. They figured out what the airplane was doing, then what it would do next, then what it might let them do.

2. They accepted the airplane they had.

Haynes never tried to get back the airplane they’d taken off in. He worked with the one he had. No working controls? Fine. What does work? Two throttles. Okay. We fly with two throttles.

3. They put the right person on the right job — immediately.

Fitch was a passenger. Fitch was also the only person on board who’d ever thought about flying a DC-10 with throttles alone. Haynes didn’t care about rank, schedule, or who was supposed to be where. He looked at the problem and put the most-qualified hand on it within two minutes of Fitch walking through the cockpit door.

4. They told the truth, fast.

Haynes got on the radio with Sioux City approach and told them, plainly: “We have almost no controllability.” Not “we have a problem.” Not “we’re declaring an emergency.” A specific, factual description that let the ground know exactly what was about to land on them and gave them 40 minutes to position every fire truck, ambulance, and Air National Guard medic in the county.

5. They kept their sense of humor.

This is the one that gets quoted most. When the approach controller cleared them to any runway, Haynes laughed and said, “You want to be particular and make it a runway, huh?” That isn’t gallows humor. That’s a crew whose stress was so far past the red line that the only way to keep working was to acknowledge it. Pilots call this winding the clock — doing something small and human to keep your nervous system below the threshold where it stops thinking.

This is the part the public never sees. The crew of 232 didn’t survive because they were braver. They survived because they had a system — and when the system ran out of procedures, they had each other.

“Could this happen on my flight today?”

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🕒 12 min read · Black Box Series · Episode 02 · Pilot Nick

July 23, 1983. A Saturday evening in central Canada.

A brand-new Boeing 767, just five months old, is cruising at 41,000 feet over a place called Red Lake, Ontario.

Sixty-one passengers. Eight crew. A standard domestic flight from Montreal to Edmonton.

In the cockpit Captain Robert “Bob” Pearson, 48 years old, 15,000 hours of flight time. Beside him First Officer Maurice Quintal, 36, ex-Royal Canadian Air Force.

It’s a quiet flight. The kind of evening sector pilots love. Smooth air. Clear sky. The sun is going down over the Canadian shield.

Then a single chime fills the cockpit.

Four notes. Soft. Almost polite.

Both pilots glance at the warning panel.

It says the aircraft has a fuel pressure problem on the left side.

Pearson and Quintal exchange a look the look pilots give each other when something on the panel doesn’t quite make sense. Because according to the fuel quantity readout in front of them, they have plenty of fuel.

Plenty.

Ninety seconds later, the left engine flames out.

Thirty seconds after that, the right one follows.

And the world’s most modern airliner a brand-new, twin-engine, computerized 767 becomes the largest glider in commercial aviation history.

What happens in the next 17 minutes is taught in every airline training program on Earth.

If you’re new here Black Box is the series where I take a real aviation incident and break it down the way a pilot actually thinks about it.

Not the news version. Not the dramatized version.

The version from the left seat.

What the crew saw. What they decided. Why. And most importantly for the nervous flyers reading this what changed afterwards, so that you never have to.

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🕒 12 min read · Black Box Series · Episode 01 · Pilot Nick

At 37,000 feet over the Indian Ocean, on a clear June night in 1982, 247 passengers were finishing dinner.

Then the windows began to glow.

Not the soft glow of a sunset. A strange, electric blue shimmer dancing along the leading edge of the wings. Inside the cabin, a smoky haze began drifting down the aisles. It smelled oddly like sulfur.

Captain Eric Moody was in the cockpit of British Airways Flight 009, a Boeing 747 en route from Kuala Lumpur to Perth. He’d been flying for decades. He had never seen anything like this.

And in the next 90 seconds, every single one of his four engines would quietly shut down.

One. By. One.

You voted for it, so here it is.

Black Box is a new series inside Lessons From The Flight Deck where I take real aviation incidents, the ones that made history and break them down the way a pilot actually thinks about them.

Not the dramatized version. Not the Wikipedia summary.

The cockpit view.

What the crew saw. What they decided. What they felt. And most importantly what it teaches us about how modern aviation became one of the safest things you can do on this planet.

We’re starting with BA009. Because if you’ve ever worried about something going wrong at cruise altitude, this story will change how you think about it forever.

Let’s go back to that night.

The Strangest Warning in Aviation

The first clue something was wrong wasn’t an alarm.

It was the smell.

The flight engineer, Barry Townley-Freeman, noticed it first — that faint, sharp, sulfuric scent. Then the haze. Then a passenger sitting near the window looked out and saw something impossible: the engines were glowing.

Not on fire. Glowing.

Long streams of luminous blue-white light were streaming backward from all four engine cowlings, like the plane was flying through a thunderstorm made of stars. The leading edges of the wings shimmered with the same eerie light.

This is a phenomenon called St. Elmo’s Fire, an electrical discharge that happens when an aircraft flies through particles that build up a static charge on the airframe. Pilots see it occasionally in thunderstorms. It’s harmless.

But there were no thunderstorms that night. The radar was clean. The sky was clear.

So what were they flying through?

At 13:42 UTC, they got their answer.

4️⃣ Engine four flamed out.

Moody and his first officer, Roger Greaves, ran the shutdown drill. A single engine failure on a 747 is serious, but manageable. The aircraft can fly comfortably on three.

Then, less than a minute later:

2️⃣ Engine two flamed out.

Then almost simultaneously:

1️⃣ + 3️⃣ Engines one and three.

All four. Gone.

The most powerful commercial jet in the world had just become the world’s largest, heaviest, and least aerodynamic glider — 180 tons of metal, 247 souls on board, 37,000 feet above the black Indian Ocean.

“Ladies and Gentlemen, This Is Your Captain Speaking...”

What Captain Moody said next became one of the most famous PAs in aviation history.

He keyed the mic. His voice was calm. Almost casual.

“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.”

Read that again.

A small problem.

That line is studied in pilot training to this day not because it was clever, but because it reveals something fundamental about how pilots are trained to think in a crisis.

Here’s what most people don’t understand about that moment:

What Was Actually Happening Behind the Scenes

While passengers stared at glowing wings and wondered if they were about to die, the flight deck was a masterclass in disciplined problem-solving.

Moody and his crew were doing three things at once, all from memory:

1. Flying the aircraft. This sounds obvious, but it’s the first rule drilled into every pilot: Aviate. Navigate then Communicate.In that order. Always. No matter what’s on fire, screaming, or failing, fly the plane first. Moody trimmed the 747 for its best glide speed, a figure he knew cold: roughly 250 knots, giving them a glide ratio of about 15:1. For every foot they descended, they’d travel 15 feet forward.

2. Running the restart drill. The 747’s engines can be relit in flight — but only within a specific envelope of altitude and airspeed. Too high and the air is too thin for combustion. Too slow and the windmilling turbines won’t spin fast enough. The crew had to descend into the restart window while still trying to clear whatever mountains lay between them and Jakarta.

3. Solving a mystery. Nothing about this made sense. Four simultaneous engine failures on a modern jet is statistically almost impossible. The checklists didn’t have an answer. The weather radar showed clear skies. Whatever had caused this, they were still flying through it.

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The next part is where this story becomes extraordinary and where it stops being just a historical curiosity and starts being something that genuinely changed how modern aviation protects you every time you fly.

What the crew of BA009 discovered in the next 14 minutes rewrote the safety rules of the entire industry. It’s the reason a threat that was invisible to pilots in 1982 is now tracked by satellites, monitored by nine dedicated centers around the world, and briefed to every captain before every flight.

But to understand why, you have to understand what Moody did next and the single decision that saved 247 lives.

🔒 The rest of this story is for paid subscribers.

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Pilot Nick (8mn read)

Ten minutes.

That’s how long it took for a fully loaded widebody, with an engine coming apart and fire trailing behind it, to get safely back on the ground.

No injuries. No panic. No chaos.

Just ten minutes.

Here’s exactly what happened on Delta 104 and why, from the cockpit, the outcome was never really in doubt.

THE MOMENT

Now step into the cabin for a second.

You’ve just settled into your seat on a long-haul flight from São Paulo to Atlanta — eight-plus hours ahead of you. Dinner service is coming. You’ve got your movie picked out. It’s close to midnight.

Then, seconds after the wheels leave the runway—

You hear it.

A loud bang. Then another.

And when you look out the window… you see fire.

Let me walk you through it. Not the headline version. The real version.

Here is a cabin view of the failure just after take-off from São Paulo yesterday:

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WHAT ACTUALLY HAPPENED

The aircraft was a 19-year-old Airbus A330-300 registered as N813NW — a workhorse originally built for Northwest Airlines, later absorbed into the Delta fleet after their 2009 merger. It’s powered by two Pratt & Whitney PW4168A engines, each producing around 68,000 pounds of thrust.

Seconds after rotation — that’s the moment the nose lifts off the runway — the left engine suffered what aviation investigators call an uncontained engine failure. That’s the technical term for what happened when the engine didn’t just malfunction quietly. It came apart. Incandescent debris was ejected from the engine, fell onto the grass beside the runway, and ignited a brush fire inside the airport perimeter. Metallic fragments were later found scattered on the runway surface itself.

Witnesses on the ground reported multiple explosions followed by sustained flames trailing behind the aircraft as it climbed away. Air traffic control, watching from the tower, immediately got on the radio.

Ten minutes. From explosion to safe landing. That’s the number I want you to hold onto.

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MY PERSONAL READ — WHAT I THINK HAPPENED

The official investigation is only just beginning, and I’ll be clear: we don’t know the root cause yet. But after 28+ years in the cockpit, when I look at the sequence, the loud bang at rotation, the immediate flames, the debris trail my gut says :

PILOT NICK’S TAKE

A compressor stall happens when the smooth, high-speed airflow through the engine’s compression stages suddenly breaks down, the engine momentarily “chokes,” and unburned fuel and hot gases backfire forward out of the engine instead of flowing through cleanly. That backfire is what produces the dramatic flash of fire from the front or sides of the engine, and the cannon-shot bang that passengers hear and feel in their chest.

What causes it? That part I honestly can’t tell you yet and neither can anyone else right now. It could be FOD, foreign object debris, something ingested into the fan at the worst possible moment. It could be a bird strike. It could be an internal mechanical issue in the compressor stages themselves. The investigators will work through that methodically. But whatever triggered it, the result was unmistakable and from the cabin, I can only imagine how impressive that looked.

Here’s what I want you to know, though: this is precisely the scenario we train for in the simulator, regularly, every six months without exception. The sounds, the warnings, the fire handle, the checklist — none of it was new to that crew. When it happened for real over São Paulo, they’d already “seen” it dozens of times.

The bang, the fire, the ten-minute return — you now understand what happened over São Paulo better than most passengers ever will.

But here’s the part almost no one outside the cockpit ever sees:

What actually happens in those first seconds up front.
How the crew decides whether to continue or come back.
And the one detail about that runway that made this situation far more complex than it looked.

On the other side, I’ll walk you through the exact cockpit sequence — step by step — and show you three things to watch on your very next flight that will instantly tell you everything is under control.

→ “If you’ve ever felt uneasy during takeoff, this next part will change the way you experience it.”

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Sunday night, 11:45 PM. Runway 4 at LaGuardia. Mist. Fog. A CRJ-900 on short final, carrying 72 passengers home from Montreal.

In the cockpit, First Officer Mackenzie Gunther was flying the approach. Everything was routine. The plane was cleared to land. At a thousand feet, five hundred, a hundred — the standard altitude callouts ticked down, one by one, the way they do on every flight I’ve ever worked.

The wheels touched the runway. Two seconds later, Captain Antoine Forest took the controls. He had four seconds.

Let me explain what that means — because the news coverage is oversimplifying it.

In airline operations, pilots alternate roles on each leg — one is the Pilot Flying, the other is the Pilot Monitoring. On this leg, First Officer Gunther was flying and Captain Forest was monitoring. That's completely normal.

The NTSB confirmed that the plane touched down eight seconds before the end of the cockpit recording, and Forest took the controls six seconds before the end — meaning two seconds after landing.

Here’s why that matters: normally, after the first officer lands, they complete the rollout and hand control to the captain below 30 knots — because the tiller, the device that steers the nose wheel on the ground, is only on the captain’s side in the CRJ-900. That’s a calm, routine handoff at taxi speed.

This wasn’t that. Two seconds after touchdown, the aircraft was still rolling at close to a hundred miles per hour. That’s not a tiller handoff.

Something made Forest take the controls almost immediately.

The most likely explanation: the crew saw the fire truck on the runway just after touchdown, and the first officer handed control to the captain — because he’s the only one who can steer at low speed.

Forest had four seconds to try to avoid a head-on collision.

Only the investigation will tell us exactly what happened in those final moments.

Passengers reported heavy braking just before impact. The aircraft struck the truck dead center — not the wing, not the fuel cells, not the engines. An aviation safety analyst said that if the point of impact had been forty feet in either direction, the outcome could have been catastrophically worse. Whether Forest managed to steer in those final seconds, we don’t know yet. The NTSB will be looking closely at the flight data to reconstruct exactly what happened between touchdown and impact.

✈ I write this newsletter because I believe the gap between what pilots know and what passengers feel shouldn’t be this wide. Every edition is built to close that gap — honestly, from the left seat, without sugarcoating.

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Here’s what the last 25 seconds looked like, based on the NTSB’s preliminary CVR timeline:

The runway safety system at LaGuardia — designed to prevent exactly this — didn’t alert. The fire truck had no transponder. On the controller’s screen, it showed up as what investigators called a vague “blob.”

The controller saw something was wrong but too late…

Nine seconds out: “Stop. Stop. Stop. Truck One, stop. Truck One, STOP.”

Four seconds out, again. The recording ends there.

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What It's Like to Land at LaGuardia

I’m a pilot. I’ve landed at LaGuardia more times than I can count. And what I need you to understand is this: the airplane did everything right. The pilots did everything right. What failed was the ground — the coordination, the technology, the infrastructure that’s supposed to keep a fire truck and a landing aircraft from ever being in the same place.

What Actually Failed

LaGuardia has a system called ASDE-X — Airport Surface Detection Equipment. It tracks aircraft and vehicles on the ground and alerts controllers if something is about to cross an active runway. Thirty-five US airports have it. It’s the safety net for exactly this scenario.

Sunday night, it didn’t make a sound.

The system reads transponder signals. If a vehicle doesn’t have one, it relies on radar returns — bouncing signals off the metal body and trying to create a track. The fire truck had no transponder. There were multiple vehicles near the runway. The system couldn’t distinguish a clear target from the noise. So it stayed silent.

The NTSB chair told reporters: “This is 2026.” She called the system “old” and said none of the fire trucks responding that night had transponders.

Here’s what matters for you as a passenger: this wasn’t a mechanical failure. The airplane didn’t malfunction. No turbulence, no wind shear, no emergency in the air. The CRJ-900 flew a textbook approach. What broke was the choreography on the ground. And that’s fixable — transponders aren’t expensive, and upgrading the system is well within the FAA’s capability. This is an infrastructure problem, not an aviation safety problem. There’s a meaningful difference.

What It’s Like to Land at LaGuardia KLGA

I want to give you something no news report can: what it feels like to fly into LGA.

LaGuardia is tight. Short runways. Taxiways that run close to the runways. Vehicles constantly crossing active movement areas — tugs, de-icing trucks, fire and rescue. The coordination between the tower and ground control is nonstop.

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At 11:40 PM on a foggy night, with a United flight reporting an onboard odor and fire trucks responding across the field, the workload in that tower was high. Two controllers were on duty — standard for the midnight shift. But “standard” and “sufficient” aren’t always the same thing.

When you’re on short final into LaGuardia at night, your world is a wall of light. Runway edge lights, centerline lights, approach lights, taxiway lights — all of it bleeding together in mist. Behind that, the glow of Queens, the Bronx, the city reflecting off low clouds. In marginal weather, picking out a single vehicle on the runway — or even a line of fire trucks staged near a crossing point — is close to impossible. Everything blends. Your eyes are locked on the runway environment, the PAPI, the threshold. You trust — you have to trust — that the ground is clear. That the safety system is watching what you can’t see.

The controller cleared the fire truck to cross twenty seconds before the jet landed. Then realized the conflict and called for it to stop. The NTSB revealed that a critical radio transmission was “stepped on” by another — meaning the call may have been blocked. We don’t know if the firefighters ever heard it.

The plane struck the fire truck nearly head-on. The cockpit was destroyed. Both pilots were killed. A flight attendant was thrown from the aircraft, still strapped to her seat, and survived. Forty-one passengers were hospitalized. Most have been released.

One passenger, Rebecca Liquori, said she felt the pilots brake hard before impact.

She told reporters: “Those pilots saved our lives.”

✈ If someone you know is nervous about flying right now — they need to read this.

After LaGuardia, after the shutdown, after everything — there are people in your life who are quietly dreading their next flight. Forward them this piece. It's the context and the calm that the news cycle isn't giving them.

The Bigger Picture

This crash didn’t happen in a vacuum. Twelve months ago, a midair collision near Reagan Airport killed 67 people. The NTSB found that combined controller positions in the tower were a contributing factor. The FAA launched a hiring surge. New funding passed. But the underlying problem — too few controllers, aging technology — hasn’t been fully solved. LaGuardia has 33 certified controllers against a target of 37.

Then came the 43-day government shutdown. Controllers working without pay. The FAA ordering a 10% flight reduction at 40 airports. Runway incursions have been on Canada’s Transportation Safety Board watchlist since 2010. The FAA has tracked a rising trend of near-misses for years.

Sunday’s crash wasn’t a near-miss. It was the real thing.

What This Means for Your Next Flight

If you have a flight coming up and you’re nervous, I want to talk to you directly.

The airplane is still the safest way to travel. What happened at LaGuardia was a ground incident — a vehicle on the runway. It was not a failure of the aircraft, the engines, the wings, or anything you typically worry about during a flight.

What failed are systems that can be fixed. Transponders on every airport vehicle. An upgraded ASDE-X. Better controller staffing on overnight shifts. Tighter procedures for clearing vehicles across active runways. These are not unsolvable problems. They require funding and urgency — both of which this crash just provided.

And what the pilots did in those final seconds likely saved lives. Antoine Forest was 30 years old. Mackenzie Gunther had just graduated from flight school. They were at the start of their careers, flying a routine approach on a foggy night. And in the last seconds of their lives, they appear to have done everything in their power to protect the 72 people behind them.

I think about that every time I sit in the left seat.

“Two pilots lost their lives Sunday night at LaGuardia. They were young. They were at the start of their careers. And they did nothing wrong”

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A fire truck at a major US airport didn’t have a transponder.

In 2026. The NTSB chair looked into the cameras and said “this is 2026” as if she couldn’t quite believe she had to say it.

The plane worked. The pilots worked. What failed was everything on the ground that was supposed to make sure they’d never need to be heroes.

They shouldn’t have needed to be heroes. If you agree, share this piece.

Fly Safe,

Pilot Nick

✈ If this piece changed how you think about what happened — or how you’ll feel on your next flight — stay on the jumpseat.

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Lessons From The Flight Deck ✈ is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

And if you know someone who needs to read this before their next flight — forward it. That’s how this newsletter grows.

Few things focus the mind quite like the words “ENGINE FIRE.”

It’s one of the most critical emergencies we train for in the cockpit and one where the procedural discipline we build over years of training has to work flawlessly in a matter of seconds.

Today I want to walk you through exactly how we handle an engine fire on board: how we know it’s happening, how we make sure it’s real, and how we put it out.

If you’ve ever wondered what happens behind the cockpit door when things go wrong, this is it.

🚨 The Alert

Modern jet engines are incredibly reliable, but they’re also spinning at tens of thousands of RPM, managing fuel, oil, and bleed air at extreme temperatures. When something goes wrong, the aircraft tells us loudly.

An engine fire is typically annunciated by a combination of a master warning light, an aural warning (a bell or chime, depending on aircraft type), and the engine fire handle illuminating. Behind the scenes, fire detection loops heat-sensitive wires that run through the engine nacelle have sensed a rapid temperature rise that exceeds normal parameters. On most modern aircraft, there are two detection loops per engine. This redundancy matters, and we’ll come back to it.

The moment that warning triggers, the flight deck changes. Everything else takes a back seat. Aviate, navigate, communicate — in that order. But before we reach for anything, we do something that might surprise people outside aviation.

We confirm.

The Confirmation

Here’s the thing about emergencies: acting fast on a false indication can be just as dangerous as acting slow on a real one. Shutting down a perfectly good engine especially on a twin-engine aircraft is not something you can easily undo. So before we pull any handles, we verify.

Confirmation typically involves cross-checking multiple sources of information. We’re looking at engine instruments: is there an abnormal EGT (Exhaust Gas Temperature) rise? Oil pressure dropping? N1 or N2 fluctuations? We check if the fire warning corresponds to what we’re seeing on the engine indications. On many aircraft types, the dual-loop detection system helps here: if both loops detect fire, our confidence is high. A single-loop detection may still be a genuine fire, but it’s also where we apply extra scrutiny.

We also use the “touch drill” or “identify” step physically touching (but not pulling) the fire handle of the affected engine. This is a deliberate, crew-coordinated action.

The Pilot Monitoring points to the correct engine fire handle and confirms, verbally: “Number [X] engine.” The Pilot Flying confirms.

This verbal crosscheck exists because in the stress of the moment. History has shown us what happens when the wrong engine gets shut down. We’ve learned those lessons the hard way, and they’re baked into every procedure now.

🧠 Does knowing what happens in the cockpit during an emergency make you feel calmer about flying or does it make it worse?

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That’s why we don’t rely on instinct.
We rely on structure.

And here’s the part most people never see.

What actually happens when the fire handle is pulled.

Not in movies.
Not in headlines.
In a real cockpit procedure.

🔒 Paid subscribers continue below where we walk step-by-step through the exact shutdown and extinguishing sequence, plus a simulator video showing how a Boeing 737 MAX crew handles it in real time.

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The Moment Everything Changed

It is 18:24, local time. August 12, 1985. You are the captain of Japan Airlines Flight 123, a Boeing 747SR-46, twelve minutes out of Tokyo’s Haneda Airport, climbing through 24,000 feet on a routine evening sector to Osaka. Five hundred and twenty-four souls on board. The summer sky is clear. The aircraft is behaving normally.

Then it isn’t.

A sharp, concussive bang from the rear of the aircraft. Your first officer flinches. The controls go strange in your hands, not fully dead, not fully alive, just wrong in a way that takes a half-second to register. A sound like tearing. The autopilot disconnects. The aircraft pitches upward, then begins to roll.

You reach for what you know. You have trained for this. But what the aircraft is telling you in the next few seconds is something no training syllabus had yet imagined: every hydraulic system is gone. All four. Simultaneously. The airplane a 747, one of the most redundant aircraft ever built has just become, in the most fundamental sense, unflying.

That was the reality faced by Captain Masami Takahama, First Officer Yutaka Sasaki, and Flight Engineer Hiroshi Fukuda on what should have been an unremarkable Monday evening flight over central Japan. What followed was thirty-two minutes that aviation professionals still study, argue about, and learn from forty years later.

How We Got There: The Repair That Wasn’t

To understand the accident, you have to go back seven years to June 2, 1978. On that day, the same aircraft, registered JA8119, was on approach to Osaka’s Itami Airport when the tail struck the runway on landing. It was a tailstrike incident, not uncommon in heavy aircraft operations, and typically manageable with proper inspection and repair.

The damage to the aft pressure bulkhead was significant. This is the curved structural dome at the rear of the pressurized fuselage, the wall that holds back the roughly 8 psi differential between the cabin and the outside atmosphere at cruise altitude. Think of it as the bottom of a pressure vessel. Its structural integrity is not optional.

Boeing dispatched a repair team. The repair was performed. The aircraft was returned to service.

But the repair was wrong.

The approved procedure for patching a cracked pressure bulkhead called for a continuous doubler plate, a single piece of reinforcing metal fastened across the repaired area with two rows of rivets. What Boeing technicians actually installed was a two-piece doubler with only a single row of rivets spanning the splice between the two pieces. The investigation would later confirm this reduced the fatigue life of the repair to approximately one-quarter of the design value.

For seven years, JA8119 flew approximately 12,319 pressurization cycles. Each takeoff, each climb, each descent was a pressure cycle the bulkhead flexing, loading, unloading. Each cycle degraded the improper repair a little more. The metal was telling a story no one was reading.

On August 12, 1985, the story ended.

What failed next wasn’t supposed to be possible…

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At 178 knots (roughly 330 km/h) a Boeing 777 captain made a decision pilots train for, but almost never execute.

He rejected the takeoff.

The nose wheel was already off the ground.

Sunday evening at São Paulo–Guarulhos, LATAM flight LA8146 was supposed to be climbing westbound over the Atlantic, bound for Lisbon on an overnight crossing. Instead, it ended up on a parallel taxiway, surrounded by fire trucks, its brakes glowing red in the dark, its tires deflated on the concrete and 410 passengers trying to understand what had just happened.

Nobody died.

The aircraft stopped.

But what unfolded in those few seconds and in the hours that followed will almost certainly be studied in simulator training rooms for years.

Runway 10L, Guarulhos, 19h00 local time. That flash of light is 300 tonnes of Boeing 777 trying to stop from 330 km/h after the nose had already lifted off. Filmed by a spotter.

The Architecture of a Takeoff

Most passengers experience takeoff as a single, seamless event. The engines roar, the world blurs past the windows, and then you’re airborne. What they don’t see is that the crew is mentally and procedurally dividing that runway roll into distinct decision zones, calculated fresh before every single departure.

Below 100 knots, the calculus is simple: if something feels wrong, you stop.

A suspicious instrument reading, a door warning light, an instinct. You have time, energy is manageable, and the runway ahead is long. Reject.

Above 100 knots, the physics start working against you. The aircraft weighs hundreds of thousands of pounds and is moving fast. The brakes already warm from taxiing must now absorb enormous kinetic energy in a very short time. They will heat dramatically. They may catch fire. The rubber of the tires will eventually burn too. And those brakes sit directly beneath the wing fuel tanks.

This is why, at most major carriers, the list of acceptable reasons to reject above 100 knots is short and unambiguous:

🔥 Engine fire

🚧 Engine failure

🎯 Loss of directional control

❌ or a condition so catastrophic the aircraft is genuinely unsafe to fly.

A hydraulic problem? Take it airborne. An electrical fault? Take it airborne. The sky is actually a safer place to manage most failures than a runway disappearing beneath you at 160 knots.

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V1: The Most Consequential Number Calculated Before Every Flight

V1 is not a fixed number. It is computed fresh before every departure, based on the aircraft’s weight, the outside temperature, the runway length, its surface condition, and obstacle clearance requirements. It represents the last moment at which the crew can initiate a stop and mathematically guarantee the aircraft will not depart the paved surface.

Past V1, the only option is to fly.

The ritual that marks this moment is subtle but deliberate: when the pilot monitoring calls “V1,” the pilot flying moves their hand from the thrust levers. Not because the rules say so, though they do but because the hand on the throttles is the hand that rejects. Removing it is a physical commitment. We are going flying.

On Sunday evening at Guarulhos, the nose of the 777 was already beginning to rotate upward the nose gear visibly lifting off the runway when the crew apparently initiated the abort. At the speed required to begin rotation on a heavy widebody like the 777, V1 had already passed. The crew had entered the narrow window between Vr, the rotation speed, and V2, the minimum safe climb speed. In standard procedure, that window has only one exit: upward.

They chose the runway instead.

So How Did They Stop?

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By now you’ve probably seen the footage. Monday night, British Airways flight BA274 departing Las Vegas for London. Sparks flying from the right main gear during rotation. Then, as the landing gear retracts, a wheel breaks free and tumbles back to the runway.

Dramatic? Absolutely. Dangerous? Let me explain why the answer is: not really.

I’ve spent decades in the cockpit, and incidents like this are exactly where aviation’s obsession with redundancy proves its worth. The crew made the right call continuing to London. Let me walk you through why, whether you’re an avgeek who wants the technical details or a nervous flyer who needs reassurance before your next flight.

First, Let’s Talk Numbers

The Airbus A350-1000 isn’t your typical widebody. It’s the stretched, heavy-lift variant of the A350 family, designed to carry up to 350 passengers across oceans. To handle a maximum takeoff weight of 322 tonnes (that’s 710,000 pounds), Airbus equipped it with a six-wheel bogie on each main landing gear twelve main wheels total, plus two on the nose gear. That’s fourteen wheels touching the ground.

The wheel that departed BA274 was the rear-most, outside wheel on the right main landing gear. One wheel out of twelve on the mains. One wheel out of fourteen total.

This is not a coincidence. This is engineering.

Aviation’s Golden Rule: Redundancy, Redundancy, Redundancy

If there’s one principle that defines modern aviation safety, it’s this: critical systems must have backups. And the backups need backups.

The A350’s landing gear is a perfect example. Those six wheels per main gear aren’t there because Airbus couldn’t figure out how to use four (the smaller A350-900 manages just fine with four-wheel bogies). They’re there because the -1000’s higher weight demands better load distribution and because spreading that weight across more wheels means losing one isn’t catastrophic.

Think about it this way: if you’re carrying a heavy load across a frozen lake, would you rather concentrate all that weight on four points or spread it across twelve? Same principle. Each wheel shares the burden, and losing one simply redistributes the load among the remaining five on that leg.

Why Didn’t They Turn Back? 🧐

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The preliminary report on Air India Flight 171's tragic crash went public on Friday. Over the weekend, speculation ran wild. In the past few hours, countless hypotheses have emerged all because we have virtually no information beyond one stark technical fact.

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The report answers one key question, but raises many more.

What happened is clear: On June 12, 2025, just seconds after takeoff from Ahmedabad, both fuel control switches in the Boeing 787's cockpit moved from "RUN" to "CUTOFF" within one second of each other. The engines starved of fuel, the aircraft lost power, and despite attempts to restore the switches to "RUN," there wasn't enough time for engine restart. 241 of 242 people aboard died, along with 19 on the ground.

Timeline of the Final Moments

According to the preliminary report, here's what happened in those critical seconds:

• 08:07:33 GMT: Aircraft cleared for takeoff from runway 23

• 08:08:42: Aircraft reaches maximum speed of 180 knots; both engine fuel switches abruptly move to "CUTOFF"

• 08:08:47: Engines lose power; Ram Air Turbine (RAT) deploys for emergency hydraulics

• 08:08:52: Engine 1 fuel switch returned to "RUN"

• 08:08:54: APU inlet door begins to open (auto-start initiates)

• 08:08:56: Engine 2 fuel switch also moved to "RUN"

• 08:09:05: Pilot transmits "MAYDAY MAYDAY MAYDAY"

• 08:09:11: Final data recorded; aircraft hits the ground

Just 29 seconds from fuel cutoff to impact. Despite the crew's efforts to restore power, there simply wasn't enough time or altitude for engine restart.

What remains deeply confusing: Why those switches moved?

The cockpit voice recorder captured one pilot asking the other, "Why did he cut off ?" The response: "I didn't do it." This exchange is haunting and tells us almost nothing definitive. See below how the fuel control switches works on the Boeing B787:

What We Can Rule Out

The report does allow us to eliminate some early theories. Initial speculation after seeing the Ram Air Turbine (RAT) deploy immediately after liftoff suggested possible flap retraction issues, but the timeline shows the RAT deployed in direct response to engine power loss, not aerodynamic problems.

The report found no evidence of fuel contamination, and notably, provides no recommendations to Boeing or GE (the engine manufacturer). This absence of manufacturer advisories suggests investigators haven't identified systemic aircraft or engine defects at this stage.

What We Don't Know (Almost Everything)

The preliminary report is doing exactly what it's supposed to do—establish basic facts about what happened mechanically. But it provides virtually no insight into the crucial question of causation.

We don't know if this was mechanical failure, human error, intentional action, or something else entirely. The report doesn't explore motivations, doesn't analyze the sequence of events leading to the switch activation, and doesn't provide context about crew actions or aircraft behavior in the moments before.

This isn't a criticism, preliminary reports are meant to be factual, not investigative. But it means we're left with a stark technical fact (fuel switches moved to "CUTOFF") and almost no understanding of why.

The haunting cockpit exchange ("Why did he cut off the fuel?" / "I didn't do it") tells us the pilots themselves were confused, but even that fragment raises more questions than answers.

At this stage, speculation isn't just premature, it's meaningless. We simply lack the investigative depth, technical analysis, and contextual information needed to understand what really happened in that cockpit.

The final report, due within 12 months, will hopefully provide answers. Until then, families mourn, investigators dig deeper, and the aviation world grapples with a tragedy that, for now, defies simple explanation.

What are your thoughts?

What do you make of it? Does this preliminary data point you toward a possible explanation or raise even more questions? I’d love to hear your thoughts. Was it a technical glitch, accidental switch movement, or something more deliberate? Hit reply, share your theory, or ask a question—I read every message. Let’s try to make sense of this together.

For those interested in digging into the technical details, here is the link to the full preliminary report.

Pilot Nick

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What Happened: The Basic Facts

Air India Flight 171, a Boeing 787-8 Dreamliner, was carrying 242 people from Ahmedabad, India to London Gatwick on June 12, 2025. Shortly after takeoff within about 50 seconds, the aircraft experienced a catastrophic emergency and crashed into a medical college building. Tragically, only one person survived.

This was the first time a Boeing 787 Dreamliner has been completely lost in an accident, which is significant given that this aircraft type has been flying since 2011 and has an excellent safety record.

What Investigators Are Finding: The Technical Picture

The investigation is still in its early stages, but several important clues have emerged that help us understand what likely went wrong. However, it's crucial to note that there have been false reports circulating online, including AI-generated content from sources like ChatGPT claiming electrical system failures that are not supported by actual evidence. As we discuss the facts below, please be aware that misinformation can spread quickly after major aviation incidents, and it's important to rely on official investigative sources.

The Ram Air Turbine Deployment

One of the most telling pieces of evidence is that the aircraft's "Ram Air Turbine" (RAT) was deployed during the flight. Think of the RAT as an emergency backup generator, it's a small propeller that pops out of the aircraft when both engines fail or when there's a major loss of electrical and hydraulic power. The RAT only deploys in truly serious emergencies, so seeing it tells investigators this was likely a dual engine failure or major systems failure.

More on RAT here 👉 ✈️ Hidden Heroes of the Sky: The 5 Backup Systems That Keep You Safe on Every Flight

The MAYDAY Call and Cockpit Voice Recorder

The crew issued a MAYDAY call reporting "thrust failure," which confirms they were dealing with engine problems. This wasn't a silent emergency the pilots were aware of the problem and trying to manage it.

Importantly, investigators have recovered the Cockpit Voice Recorder (CVR) one of the two "black boxes" and it's reported to be in good condition. This device records all conversations and sounds in the cockpit during the flight, giving investigators a clear picture of what the crew experienced and how they responded to the emergency. Early indications suggest the pilots worked diligently to try to save the aircraft and manage the crisis they were facing.

As a pilot myself, I can tell you that when you experience a thrust failure immediately after takeoff, the first instinctive reaction, pure muscle memory from countless hours of training is to slam those power levers full forward together with your co-pilot. It's an automatic response drilled into every commercial pilot: maximum power, now.

This follows what we call the quick PPAA sequence that every pilot learns from their very first days in small aircraft training:

• Power (apply maximum available power)

• Performance (assess if the aircraft is climbing, maintaining altitude, or descending, retract the landing gear and later Slats/Flaps)

• Analyse (determine what's wrong and what options you have)

• Action (execute the appropriate emergency procedures). These are the absolute basics of aviation emergency management, trained into us until they become second nature.

The fact that even with maximum power applied, this aircraft couldn't maintain its climb tells us just how severe this emergency was.

Flight Pattern Analysis

Video footage and flight data show the aircraft stopped climbing about 50 seconds after takeoff and began descending. The landing gear appeared to still be down when it would normally be retracted, which creates additional drag and makes it nearly impossible for an aircraft to climb effectively.

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What Could Have Caused This?

Investigators are examining several possibilities, and it's important to understand that modern aviation investigations look at multiple potential causes:

1. Dual Engine Failure

This appears to be the leading theory based on the RAT deployment and MAYDAY call. Dual engine failures are extremely rare—we're talking about odds of less than one in a billion flight hours. When they do occur, it's usually due to:

• Fuel system problems affecting both engines

• Ingestion of foreign objects (like birds) into both engines

• Extremely rare manufacturing defects

• Vapor lock in jet engines (though rare) could happen if fuel turns into vapor before reaching the engine, instead of staying as liquid. This can block fuel flow or reduce pressure, starving the engine of fuel and causing a loss of power. It might occur due to extreme heat or sudden pressure changes in the fuel system.

2. Aircraft Configuration Issues

Investigators are looking at whether the flaps (wing surfaces that help with lift during takeoff) were set correctly, and why the landing gear wasn't retracted normally as always just after take-off and a positive climb is achieved.

3. Environmental Factors

The temperature in Ahmedabad was about 40°C (104°F) that day. Hot weather reduces air density, which affects engine performance and the aircraft's ability to climb. However, airlines and pilots routinely operate in these conditions with proper procedures.

4. System or Software Issues

Modern aircraft like the 787 have sophisticated computer systems that manage engine thrust. Investigators are examining whether any of these systems may have malfunctioned.

What This Means for You as a Nervous Flyer

I understand that reading about aircraft accidents can be deeply unsettling, especially when you're already anxious about flying. Here's what I want you to know:

This Was an Extremely Rare Event

The Boeing 787 has flown millions of flights safely since entering service. This is the first hull loss (complete destruction) of a 787 in commercial service. The aircraft type has an exceptional safety record.

Multiple Systems Failed Simultaneously

What appears to have happened to Flight 171 required multiple, simultaneous failures something aviation systems are specifically designed to prevent. Commercial aircraft have redundant systems precisely so that single failures don't lead to accidents.

The Investigation Process Works

The thorough investigation now underway will identify exactly what went wrong and lead to improvements that make flying even safer. Both black boxes have been recovered, giving investigators excellent data to work with. We should hear more in the next few days…

Airlines Are Taking Immediate Action

India's aviation authority has ordered enhanced inspections of all Boeing 787s in the Indian fleet. When the aviation industry identifies potential risks, it acts quickly to address them.

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The Broader Context: Why Flying Remains Remarkably Safe

It's natural to focus on this tragedy, but it's important to maintain perspective:

• Commercial aviation is safer than it has ever been. Fatal accidents have declined dramatically over the past decades despite massive increases in air traffic.

• Every accident leads to improvements. The aviation industry's commitment to learning from every incident, no matter how rare, is what makes flying so safe.

• Pilots train extensively for emergencies. The cockpit voice recorder, which is in excellent condition, indicates that the crew of Flight 171 worked tirelessly to manage the emergency and appeared to have attempted to steer away from populated areas, potentially saving additional lives even in their final moments. Their professionalism under extreme pressure exemplifies the caliber of training commercial pilots receive.

• Modern aircraft are incredibly robust. The fact that this is the first 787 hull loss after millions of flights demonstrates the remarkable engineering that goes into modern aircraft.

What Happens Next

The investigation will likely take 12-18 months to complete fully, but preliminary findings may emerge within a few months. Based on what investigators learn:

• Aircraft manufacturers may issue service bulletins or modifications

• Airlines may update their procedures

• Training programs may be enhanced

• Regulatory authorities may issue new requirements

This is how aviation safety continuously improves, each rare event teaches the entire industry how to be safer.

For the latest verified developments on this investigation: The Aviation Herald a trusted source for factual aviation incident reporting.

A Personal Note

I know that as nervous flyers, you might be wondering whether you should change your travel plans or avoid flying altogether. As someone who understands flight anxiety, I want to be completely honest with you: this accident, while tragic, doesn't change the fundamental safety of commercial aviation.

The Boeing 787 remains one of the world's safest aircraft. The investigation will make it even safer. Your upcoming flights are statistically as safe as they were before this accident occurred.

If you're feeling particularly anxious about flying right now, that's completely understandable and normal. Consider:

• Talking to a mental health professional who specializes in flight anxiety

• Get my Ebook 📱 "Fly Calm" to lower your anxiety

• Reviewing the actual statistics on aviation safety

• Remembering that millions of flights operate safely every single day

Looking Forward

I'll continue to follow this investigation and provide updates as meaningful new information becomes available. The aviation industry's transparency in investigating accidents is one of its greatest strengths, we will learn exactly what happened and how to prevent it from happening again.

In the meantime, remember that every flight you take benefits from lessons learned from incidents like these. The dedication of investigators, engineers, pilots, and safety professionals to continuous improvement is what makes commercial aviation the safest form of travel humans have ever devised.

Stay safe, and remember your fear is understandable, but the skies remain remarkably safe.

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If you found this analysis helpful, please share it with others who might benefit from understanding this incident in context. And as always, if you have specific questions about flight safety or managing flight anxiety, don't hesitate to reach out.

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Pilot Nick

Sources and Further Reading:

• Aircraft Accident Investigation Bureau (India)

• U.S. National Transportation Safety Board reports

• Aviation safety databases and analysis

• Boeing 787 safety and operational data

• For the latest verified developments on this investigation: The Aviation Herald - a trusted source for factual aviation incident reporting