The BEST episodes written by Gary Lang
#1 - Fire on Board (Swissair, Flight 111)
Mayday - Season 1 - Episode 6
Swissair Flight 111 (SR-111, SWR-111) was a Swissair McDonnell Douglas MD-11 on a scheduled airline flight from John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York City, United States to Cointrin International Airport in Geneva, Switzerland. This flight was also a codeshare flight with Delta Air Lines. On September 2, 1998 the aircraft used for the flight, registered HB-IWF, crashed into the Atlantic Ocean southwest of Halifax International Airport at the entrance to St. Margarets Bay, Nova Scotia. The crash site was 8 km from shore, roughly equidistant between the tiny fishing and tourist communities of Peggys Cove and Bayswater. All 229 people on board were killed. The resulting investigation by the Transportation Safety Board of Canada (TSB) took over four years and cost US$39 million (CAD$57 million). Their main conclusion was that flammable material used in the aircraft's structure allowed a fire to spread beyond the control of the crew, resulting in the loss of control and crash of the aircraft Flight: Swissair Flight 111 AKA: Fire in the Sky
#2 - Flying Blind (Aeroperu, Flight 603)
Mayday - Season 1 - Episode 3
AeroPeru Flight 603 was a scheduled flight from Jorge Chávez International Airport in Lima(LIM), to Comodoro Arturo Merino Benítez International Airport in Santiago, which crashed on October 2, 1996. The flight originated in Miami, Florida. On October 2, 1996, just past midnight, the Boeing 757 airliner crew, shortly after takeoff, reported receiving contradictory emergency messages, such as rudder ratio, overspeed, underspeed and flying too low, from the onboard computer; asked for an emergency to be declared and decided to return to base. Faced with the contradictory warnings, the pilot decided to descend. It was only when one wing touched water, almost an hour after emergency declaration, that the pilots realized how confused and disoriented they were. All nine crew members and sixty-one passengers died. Flight: AeroPeru Flight 603
#3 - Raising the Kursk
Discovery Channel Documentaries - Season 2002 - Episode 14
K-141 Kursk was an Oscar-II class nuclear-powered cruise missile submarine of the Russian Navy, lost with all 118 hands when it sank in the Barents Sea on August 12, 2000. At 154m long and four stories high it was the largest attack submarine ever built. Our film reenacts the explosion and actual footage portrays the raising of the submarine. (By CineNova for Worldwide Discovery Channel, with NBC’s ‘Dateline’.)