Original subtitles

First Officer: We should be at Agram at 10:20.

We'll report back then.

Controller: I'm looking for LAM 470.

Narrator: A jet plummets from the sky in Namibia,

killing everyone on board.

Investigator: I have never seen an airplane this destroyed.

Narrator: The wreckage gives investigators

their first big clue.

Investigator: Definitely made by the engines.

Man: There were two depressions at the very beginning

of the debris trail.

Investigator: The plane was level.

Maybe they were trying to land.

Narrator: But when investigators

listen to the cockpit voice recorder...

Man: Something's going on in that cockpit. Turn it up.

Narrator:...some strange sounds

point to a disturbing possibility.

[Clicking]

Man: What the hell?

[Clicking]

Flight Attendant: Ladies and gentlemen,

we are starting our approach.

Pilot: We lost both engines!

Flight Attendant: Put the mask over your nose.

Emergency descent.

Pilot: Mayday, mayday!

Flight Attendant: Brace for impact!

Controller: I think I lost one.

Man:...investigation starting into this tragedy...

Man: He's gonna crash!

♪

Narrator: Maputo International Airport in Mozambique.

Herminio dos santos Fernandes: Autobrakes set to T-R-O?

First Officer: Autobrakes are set.

Fernandes: Confirm takeoff configuration.

First Officer: Takeoff configuration okay.

Fernandes: Ready for takeoff.

First Officer: LAM 470 ready for takeoff.

Controller: LAM 470, you are cleared for takeoff.

First Officer: Roger, Maputo tower. LAM 470.

Fernandes: Here we go.

[Engines Whirring]

♪

First Officer: Positive rate.

Fernandes: Gear up?

First Officer: Gear up.

Narrator: 49-year-old captain Herminio dos Santos Fernandes

commands LAM Mozambique Airlines flight 470.

He's one of the airline's most experienced pilots.

Fernandes: Flaps set to zero.

First Officer: Flaps set to zero.

Narrator: The first officer is 24

and at the beginning of his career.

Tom Anthony: This crew pairing,

with an experienced middle-aged Mozambican captain

and a younger co-pilot,

this is an average, normal pairing.

Fernandes: Autopilot on.

First Officer: Autopilot on.

Narrator: It takes 20 minutes for the flight to level off

at its cruising altitude of 38,000 feet.

It's bound for Luanda in Angola

and will fly over South Africa and Botswana to get there.

The flight will take four hours.

Tom Kok: LAM Mozambique has been in existence

for quite some years, actually.

The late thirties, 1930s, it started operations,

so it's a well-established airline.

It flies mostly within Africa

with a fairly small fleet of around six, seven aircraft.

Narrator: The direct flight from Mozambique to Angola

is a crucial connection for many passengers.

Kok: Those two countries are both Portuguese speaking,

and they have lots of business links.

There's a great mix of tourists, of business people

traveling between the two countries,

specifically because of this Portuguese link.

Narrator: The workload should be fairly light for the cabin crew.

Today's flight is undersold.

Most seats are empty.

The pilots are flying a recent addition to the airline's fleet.

It's an Embraer 190, purchased just over a year ago.

The twin-engine jet is in use all around the world,

largely on low-volume routes.

Anthony: The Embraer 190 is a modern aircraft,

very successful.

It's considered a regional jet.

It is a good aircraft to fly.

First Officer: Gaborone Area Control, LAM 470.

Narrator: 45 minutes after takeoff...

...the jet crosses into the airspace over Botswana.

The pilots check in with the Gaborone Area Control Center.

Todd Curtis: Whether you're flying across a country

or across several countries,

you have to go through several jurisdictions,

so on a typical long-distance flight,

you may have three or four different distinct

air traffic control areas

where the airplane has to communicate with them.

Controller: Lam 470, Gaborone.

Report your estimated time to Agram.

Fernandes: In about an hour.

First Officer: Gaborone, Lam 470. Copy that.

We should be at Agram at 10:20. We'll report back then.

Narrator: The pilots confirm that they will check in

when they reach a navigational point

that marks the boundary between Botswana and Angola.

♪

It's been an hour since the controller in Gaborone

last communicated with Lam 470.

The flight should be approaching Angola,

so he gives the crew their next instructions.

Controller: Lam 470, Gaborone.

Please continue with Luanda control, frequency 88-88.

Lam 470, do you copy?

♪

Narrator: But there's no reply.

♪

Five minutes later, the Gaborone controller

Contacts Luanda control in Angola

to find out if they've heard from the crew.

Controller: I'm looking for LAM 470.

Are you in contact?

Anthony: It was intended to be handed off to Angola, to Luanda.

The handoff never happened.

Luanda called back and said, "The airplane's not here."

Narrator: Five minutes before its expected arrival time,

LAM 470 has still not contacted Luanda control.

Controller: You haven't heard anything?

Narrator: Neither controller knows where LAM 470 is.

It has disappeared.

There are no distress calls

or any signal from the plane's emergency locator transmitter.

Investigative agencies from the three countries

where the plane could be are notified...

Botswana, Angola, and Namibia.

Investigator: Last contact was at 9:19 a.m.

Let's start there.

Narrator: Investigators from each country

Check their recorded radar signals

to see if they can trace the missing Embraer 190.

It's the Namibians who find its track.

Investigator: There it is.

Narrator: Members of Namibia's Directorate

of Aircraft Accident Investigation, or DAAI,

review its recorded signal.

Anthony: The Namibians had the radar information

that showed them at cruise and then all the way

till he disappeared off of the signal, off of the radar.

Investigator: Okay, here we go. It's starting to descend.

Narrator: The data shows that Flight 470 was cruising normally

at 38,000 feet.

Then it began to plunge towards the ground

at a breathtaking speed.

Investigator: It's traveling really fast.

Narrator: They watch the signal for six minutes.

It shows the plane falling more than 30,000 feet.

Investigator: They're dropping

at over twice the normal descent rate.

That's it. It's gone.

Curtis: It was clear that the aircraft was at cruise

and disappeared from radar some thousands of feet above ground,

consistent with the aircraft either attempting to land

or the aircraft having some other issue where it crashed.

Narrator: The radar track disappears

once the plane drops below 6,600 feet,

but it does show that just a few miles

from the border between Botswana and Namibia,

LAM 470 was rapidly heading toward the ground.

Investigator: Yeah, yeah.

We're checking for airstrips in the area now.

I don't see any airports near their last known location.

Narrator: Investigators hope the pilots were able to land

at an airfield.

Curtis: This aircraft had an emergency

where they were unable to communicate

with the outside world or they were too busy

keeping the airplane in the sky to communicate,

and they were maybe trying to land

Either at an airstrip in the area or, worst case,

an emergency landing away from an airport.

Narrator: The six minutes that passed

from the time LAM 470 began its descent

to the time it disappeared from radar

should have been enough time for pilots to call in an emergency.

The question is, why didn't they?

Search and rescue aircraft

deploy to try and find Mozambique Airlines flight 470.

♪

But it's park rangers

in Namibia's remote Bwabwata National Park

who first come across a tangle of wreckage.

It's clearly Mozambique Airlines flight 470.

[Camera Shutter Clicks]

All 27 passengers and the flight crew are dead.

Kok: The area where the aircraft wreckage was found in the end

is a very remote area.

It's sparsely populated, and it's a very open area.

Narrator: The site is in a roughly

280-mile strip of Namibia

straddling Botswana and Angola,

putting the investigators from Namibia's DAAI in charge.

Investigator: Okay. We've got a lot of ground to cover.

Let's find the point of impact.

Curtis: This was the biggest investigation they've ever had.

It was the first one involving a fatality

on a large jet transport.

It was an aircraft that was from outside the country

with passengers on board from several other countries,

so they were under the extra pressure

of having an international spotlight.

Investigator: I have never seen an airplane this destroyed.

Narrator: The team combs through the debris for any clues

that could help explain the crash.

Anthony: The debris can tell us a lot.

Just the way that the debris is reflected on the ground

is very important.

Narrator: The last radar plot of the flight

showed the plane was in an unusually steep descent

Moments before the crash,

but the crash site adds important details.

Investigator: Okay, so the plane came down there

and was headed in this direction, towards Luanda.

Narrator: Flight 470 was headed

in the direction of its destination.

It was not off course.

Investigators look for other wreckage patterns

to see what else they can learn.

Investigator: Right aileron. Take note.

Curtis: One of the things

that the investigators are looking for

is to see if very specific parts of the aircraft

are in or near the major debris field,

such as the tip of the wings,

the nose of the aircraft, the tail of the aircraft.

Investigator: Left flap.

Curtis: These parts of the aircraft

tend to come off the airplane first

if there's an in-flight breakup.

They did find all those parts of the airplane.

The aircraft was completely intact when it hit the ground.

Narrator: At the point of initial impact,

investigators find two nearly identical pits.

Investigator: Let's get a measurement.

Curtis: There were two depressions

at the very beginning of the debris trail.

♪

Investigator: 32 feet.

♪

That's the distance between the two engines.

Curtis: They had a distance between them that was roughly

the distance between the engines of the aircraft.

Investigator: They're identical, so the plane was level.

Curtis: That implied to the investigators

that the aircraft was relatively wings-level.

Narrator: It's an important lead that shows the investigators

the way in which the plane hit the ground.

[Crash]

Investigators study the actual shape of the crash site.

Investigator: Okay, we're 487 meters

from the first point of impact.

Narrator: The wreckage pattern is long and narrow.

Curtis: When I see a wreckage trail that's that long

and the aircraft is that disintegrated,

it says that there was both a high vertical speed

as it hit the ground

and a high forward speed to allow the wreckage

to spread over such a wide area.

And that usually indicates that there was a very high speed,

not necessarily an out-of-control high-speed impact

with the ground.

Narrator: The extensive trail of debris leads to one possibility.

Investigator: Maybe they were trying to land.

Narrator: To answer that question,

the team examines the landing gear.

Investigator: The tires aren't blown.

There's no damage to the treads.

No puncture marks.

They were retracted.

This wasn't an emergency landing.

Narrator: It's the first tangible clue

about what the pilots may have been doing.

Curtis: The crew decided not to deploy the landing gear,

either because they were unwilling to do so

or unable to do so.

Investigator: If they weren't trying to land,

why were they coming in so fast?

[Crash]

Narrator: A day after the crash, there is still no evidence

why LAM 470 flew into the ground in Namibia.

The hope is the plane's black boxes

will help solve that mystery.

Anthony: The handling of the flight recorders

has to be painstaking, methodical,

and, uh, it has to be done with experience

because you don't want to do anything

that will either ruin or damage the data itself.

Narrator: The black boxes on board flight 470

were damaged at impact.

They're sent away for analysis.

Soon after, the American NTSB,

or National Transportation Safety Board,

joins the investigation.

Dennis Jones: Anything missing?

Investigator: Don't think so.

Narrator: They send veteran investigator Dennis Jones

to Namibia.

Investigator: There weren't many large pieces left.

It's mostly all these small pieces

that we found scattered all over the crash site.

Narrator: He's been investigating air accidents

throughout Africa since 1996.

Jones: And they weren't trying to land?

Investigator: No. There was no evidence

of an emergency landing.

Jones: Show me what else you've got.

I was very impressed with the, uh, the Namibian investigators.

They had set up the scene very, very well.

Many crash sites I get to are very chaotic.

Investigator: They came in at a low angle,

so we think that the pilot had control.

Jones: Any signs of in-flight fire?

Investigator: No.

The soot patterns indicate that the fire was post-crash.

Jones: It seemed like whatever fire damage

was associated with the impact

and not anything that was in-flight related.

Narrator: Jones has worked dozens of plane crashes,

but even he's baffled by the evidence from the crash site.

Jones: Almost no crater at all?

There was no big crater in the ground,

so that suggested to me

that there was some sense of controllability.

Narrator: This is a puzzling clue.

If the pilots had control of the Embraer, why did it crash?

Jones: We were not ruling anything out.

It's just that, okay, what should we rule in?

We may have missed something. Maybe we overlooked something.

♪

Narrator: The wreckage and the radar data tell investigators

of the LAM flight 470 crash the same story.

Jones: It became quite apparent

that it was a high-energy impact because the aircraft

had essentially disintegrated on impact.

Narrator: With such a rapid descent,

investigators wonder if engine failure was to blame.

When a jet engine is running,

the rotors spin as they draw in air.

Jones: The way that these turbine blades are damaged,

they were definitely spinning on impact.

When you take an engine that's rotating

at thousands of revolutions per minute

and come to a sudden stop,

it tends to have a certain kind of signature

that we call corn-cobbing,

where the rotors themselves will get stripped,

and it causes the blades to just separate and flatten.

It looks like a corncob.

And when I looked at both engines,

The evidence was very strong

that they were operating fully at the time of impact.

Narrator: One week after the crash of flight 470,

investigators have learned all they can from the crash site.

They now need to turn their focus elsewhere for answers.

Jones: So, what have we missed?

When I left the scene,

I said, okay, we have some answers with the machine.

We don't have them all. We may have missed something.

Investigator: Let's look at the maintenance records.

Jones: Maybe it was a mechanical issue that was kinda subtle

and perhaps not very obvious at the time.

♪

Narrator: The investigation moves from the field

to DAAI offices in Windhoek, Namibia.

Jones: Is this the last inspection?

Investigator: It looks like it.

Narrator: They begin looking into the way Mozambique Airlines

was maintaining the plane.

Jones: November 28th.

Investigator: The day before the accident.

Jones: Everything seems to be done by the book.

Narrator: The Embraer 190,

purchased brand-new just a year ago, has a spotless record.

Kok: The maintenance records of this aircraft were excellent.

It was well-maintained by LAM Mozambique.

Investigator: Yeah. There was nothing wrong with the aircraft.

Curtis: There were no major system failures

that had been repaired recently, no deferred maintenance

that would have affected any major system.

It, in fact, had a fairly intense inspection

roughly a day before the event.

Fernandes: Here we go.

Curtis: Nothing that said that the airplane itself

was anything other than in top shape when it took off.

Narrator: With no evidence of a mechanical problem,

the team turns its attention to outside factors.

They review meteorological reports

from the day of the crash.

Investigator: All right, Dennis,

The data from Maun weather station is in.

Narrator: Did bad weather bring down flight 470?

Jones: Great. Why don't we start from the takeoff in Maputo?

Anthony: Africa is the home

to some of the most fiercest and strongest thunderstorms.

A thunderstorm has every hazard you can imagine along with it.

It has electrical discharge in lightning.

That can affect your navigational systems.

It has severe turbulence that can compromise

the integrity of the aircraft.

It has hail. It has rain.

Narrator: The team scrolls through a series

of satellite images spanning the duration of the flight.

Jones: Just some scattered clouds

3,000 feet throughout the flight.

Nowhere near their cruising altitude.

There wasn't anything in the weather that we became aware of

that would explain why this airplane was down on the ground.

What was the wind like?

Investigator: Nothing stronger than 11 knots,

So no problem there.

Curtis: When the environment

doesn't have anything that was unusual,

when the machine itself seems to be in operation,

the area that investigators tend to go to

is the operation of the aircraft,

that is, were the captain and the first officer

working appropriately to execute procedures

in the right sequence?

Narrator: With both the machine and the environment ruled out,

investigators have only one more avenue to pursue.

Investigator: Okay. Let's look into the pilot records.

♪

Narrator: Were the pilots responsible for the crash

of flight 470?

♪

Investigators consider if the pilots of LAM 470

played a role in causing the crash.

Jones: Captain Herminio dos Santos Fernandes.

Investigator: Born in Mozambique.

49 years old.

Fernandes: Here we go.

Narrator: How familiar was Captain Fernandes

with the Embraer 190?

♪

First Officer: Positive rate.

Fernandes: Gear up.

First Officer: Gear up.

♪

Narrator: The team scrutinizes his pilot records.

Jones: You're trying to see anything that might show

degradation of the performance of the, the pilot.

Narrator: Captain Fernandes was not only well-trained...

Investigator: 2,500 on the Embraer 190.

Jones: 9,000 flight hours total.

Narrator:...he was a very experienced airman.

Malcolm Brenner, an expert in pilot psychology,

consulted on the investigation.

Malcolm Brenner: The captain had an unblemished record,

no accidents, no incidents.

He was medically qualified.

All his records were up to date.

Jones: The first officer was young

but had over 1,000 flight hours.

The two were a good match.

Investigator: Yeah.

Fernandes: Flaps set to zero.

First Officer: Flaps set to zero.

Kok: It's a very common practice to have a very senior captain

and a more junior first officer.

It enables the first officer

to learn and to progress in his career.

They should work as a, as a good team.

Fernandes: Autopilot on.

First Officer: Autopilot on.

Narrator: Investigators have exhausted

all available avenues of inquiry and come up empty.

The crash remains a mystery.

Investigator: Any news on the recorders?

Jones: Not yet, but I'll check in.

Investigator: Okay.

Narrator: Two weeks after the crash,

the flight data and cockpit voice recorders

are finally ready for analysis in Washington, D.C.

Jones: We were eager to see what the recorders had to tell us

because the recorders will help us with what the strategy

will be for the rest of the investigation.

Okay, we're ready for playback.

First Officer: Gaborone Area Control, LAM 470.

Controller: LAM 470, Gaborone.

Report your estimated time to Agram.

Fernandes: In about an hour.

First Officer: Gaborone, Lam 470. Copy that.

We should be at Agram at 10:20. We'll report back then.

Narrator: Investigators listen to the recording carefully

and hear something that piques their interest.

Jones: It was just a routine flight

until the first officer excused himself to go to the lavatory.

First Officer: I'm gonna step out to the toilet.

Do you have the controls?

Fernandes: No problem.

♪

Jones: The first officer leaves the cockpit.

Brenner: The captain confirmed that's fine,

and the first officer left.

♪

Jones: From that point on, it was just quiet.

♪

Narrator: 30 seconds go by.

A minute.

Six minutes of near silence on the CVR.

Jones: It just sounded like normal things going on.

[Door Handle Shaking]

The first officer is coming back.

[Knock On Door]

All of a sudden, you hear knocking on the door.

[Knocking]

There was no response.

[Knocking]

And then the knocking started becoming more repetitive.

[Knocking]

Narrator: The cockpit door remains locked.

Brenner: The co-pilot of the flight wants to get back in,

and the captain is not responding.

Narrator: During flight,

the cockpit door locks automatically.

It can be opened from the outside with a code,

but the code isn't unlocking the door,

and the captain still isn't responding.

Curtis: Maybe the captain fell asleep.

Maybe the captain is a little bit woozy.

Maybe if I just hit on the door, things will go back to normal,

he'll let me back in.

♪

Automation: High speed. High speed. High speed.

Jones: What the hell?

Investigator: What's going on?

Narrator: The recording becomes even more disturbing.

Automation: Sink rate. Sink rate. Sink rate.

Sink rate. Sink rate.

Jones: Then we heard the ground proximity warning system

saying, pull up.

Automation: Terrain. Pull up. Pull up. Pull up.

Jones: That was the first sense

that we knew that the airplane was even heading down.

Automation: Terrain. Pull up, pull up, pull up.

[Alarm]

[Static]

Narrator: The investigators are stunned.

Curtis: It's beyond abnormal.

This is strange. This is unusual.

One does not expect to have a situation where a pilot

is refused entry into the cockpit.

Jones: Was there something wrong with the captain?

The knocks that took place,

there was no response to those knocks.

And then all of a sudden, it comes to an abrupt end.

What's going on here?

Narrator: The investigation into the crash of LAM flight 470

has uncovered a shocking clue.

Jones: The first officer

was locked out of that cockpit for...

...six minutes,

right up until the plane crashes.

Investigator: And it sounds like the captain did nothing

to avert the crash.

Automation: Sink rate. Sink rate. Sink rate. Sink rate.

[Knocking]

Brenner: Here's an authorized crew member

who's trying to get back to his position

and isn't being allowed in.

That's completely abnormal.

Investigator: We need to figure out

what went on in that cockpit.

Brenner: The authorized co-pilot of the flight

wants to get back in.

Why isn't the captain responding?

Jones: Go back to the moment

the first officer leaves the cockpit.

Narrator: The team wants to review

The cockpit voice recording more carefully.

Did they miss something the first time?

Jones: Let's check for incapacitation.

Curtis: Subtle incapacitation is a situation

where a person appears to be normal

both physically and mentally,

but for some reason,

they're not performing up to standard.

First Officer: I'm gonna step out to the toilet.

Do you have the controls?

Fernandes: No problem.

Jones: Isolate the captain's mic and turn it up.

Curtis: They're not thinking straight.

They're not moving as quickly or with as much dexterity.

One of the kinds of subtle incapacitation

that can happen is hypoxia.

That is a lack of oxygen.

Jones: I can hear him breathing.

Investigator: He can still breathe and be incapacitated.

[Clicking]

Hold on. Play that again.

[Clicking]

Jones: Something's going on in that cockpit.

The captain's doing something.

We can hear clicking sounds.

It seemed as though the pilot that was on the flight deck

was operating some mechanisms.

[Clicking]

We couldn't tell exactly,

but it, it sounded like rotating the dials

and probably associated with the autopilot,

but we didn't know.

We just can hear a clicking sound going on.

[Clicking]

Investigator: He's definitely moving around.

Jones: We could hear movement,

so it seemed to be someone who was conscious.

[Clicking]

Investigator: What's he doing?

Jones: Inputting flight commands?

Curtis: What they didn't hear was even more unusual.

They didn't hear a single word

coming out of the mouth of the captain.

Not a word to the first officer, not a word on the radio,

not even a word to himself.

There was silence on his side.

Narrator: The recording leads to a grim hypothesis.

Curtis: Once the investigators heard what was happening,

it dawned on them that there was some sort of deliberate action

on the part of the captain.

Narrator: A captain making inputs

but not letting his first officer back into the cockpit

forces investigators to consider a disturbing possibility,

that the captain's actions were deliberate.

It seems extremely unlikely

that a well-trained, experienced pilot

would crash an aircraft deliberately.

The team needs to rule out all other possibilities

before making that determination.

Jones: We knew nothing about the profile of this aircraft,

What it was doing.

Once you get that information,

now you can correlate it with the cockpit voice recorder.

So, can we agree that the FDR confirms

that there was nothing wrong with the aircraft?

Brenner: Before you start to seriously

consider deliberate action,

you want to make sure that you understand

that all the alternatives really do not explain it.

Investigator: All conditions were normal.

There were no mechanical faults detected.

Jones: Okay. That leaves pilot action.

Let's take a look at what happened

after the first officer leaves the cockpit.

Narrator: The data will show which inputs, if any,

the captain made to the flight controls.

Investigator: Can we isolate these four parameters?

Narrator: The inputs paint a harrowing picture

of the captain's actions inside the cockpit.

Jones: The first officer leaves the cockpit.

A few minutes later,

it looks like he starts to make a series of inputs.

♪

First Officer: I'm gonna step out to the toilet.

Do you have the controls?

Fernandes: No problem.

♪

[Door Shuts]

Jones: Three minutes after the first officer leaves,

the altitude is adjusted three times,

instructing the plane to drop to an altitude

of 592 feet above sea level.

Investigator: That's the clicks we heard.

♪

[Clicking]

♪

Jones: 592 feet is well below ground level in that area.

Brenner: He was flying it on autopilot,

which is the way you would normally land an airplane.

Investigator: Three minutes later,

The first officer returns to the cockpit.

[Beeping]

Jones: But the captain doesn't unlock the door.

Instead, he must have overridden the door code.

Narrator: Planes like the Embraer 190

have a control that allows a pilot inside

to override the keypad outside and keep the door locked.

Investigator: Then he disengages the autothrottle,

starting the descent.

Jones: The power was reduced.

The throttles remained in the idle position.

These same kinds of inputs are what you would be using

during a descent to the destination.

[Pounding On Door]

Brenner: He was commanding the autopilot

to crash the airplane.

[Knocking]

First Officer: I can't get in.

[Beeping]

Let's not alarm the passengers.

Narrator: The first officer tries to be discreet.

First Officer: Captain, are you okay?

Narrator: The last thing he needs now is panic in the cabin.

Jones: With the first officer pounding on the door,

the captain makes one last move.

He employs the speed brake.

[Knocking]

Narrator: The speed brake raises the plane's spoilers.

Brenner: Deploying the spoilers

is completely outside normal procedures.

Curtis: The speed brakes increase the vertical speed

of the aircraft.

The airplane was descending at about 5,000 feet per minute.

Within a minute of deploying those speed brakes,

it went up to a maximum of just over 10,000 feet per minute.

♪

Narrator: During the aircraft's descent,

the captain leaves the autopilot engaged

and doesn't touch the control column.

Curtis: The inputs he was making shows that the captain

Had a very, very thorough knowledge

of the aerodynamics of the aircraft,

the behavior of the systems,

the effect of which was to have

a very smooth, very consistent descent

from cruise all the way into the ground.

[Pounding On Door]

[Alarm]

Automation: Terrain. Pull up.

Anthony: Everything that was being done by the pilot

was to the end of bringing the airplane down fast.

[Knocking]

First Officer: Captain.

[Knocks]

Captain, open this door.

Narrator: In less than 15 minutes,

Captain Fernandes deliberately takes his plane

out of cruising altitude and crashes it into the ground.

Brenner: This was a deliberate action.

♪

Narrator: There is now one burning question.

Jones: But why would a pilot do this?

♪

Narrator: Captain Herminio dos Santos Fernandes

was a seasoned pilot with one of Africa's best airlines.

What made him fly LAM 470 up to 38,000 feet

and then crash it into the ground?

Brenner: What we do know is that it took about two minutes

until the captain locked the door,

and then it took about an additional minute

until he initiated the descent, so during that time,

you have to assume that he was thinking about life,

about whether he'd want to do something like this.

Investigator: Okay, all right.

Did you know Captain Fernandes personally?

Narrator: The investigation digs into the captain's life,

current and past.

Investigator: And did he ever seem depressed?

Narrator: Despite finding no red flags

in his professional and medical records,

Investigators discover his private life was another matter.

Brenner: The investigators found a number of traumas

in the captain's background.

He had been separated from his wife for almost ten years,

uh, but that divorce proceedings had not gone through.

Investigator: Heart problems?

Brenner: His youngest daughter

was undergoing heart surgery about that time,

which would have been very stressful.

Narrator: And if that is not trauma enough for one man...

Brenner: One year before,

the captain's eldest son had died in a car crash,

which was believed to have been suicidal.

Investigator: It was almost one year to the day?

Brenner: The anniversary of the son's death

would have been about the time of this accident,

just a few days before,

and so certainly it would have been on his mind.

First Officer: Captain Fernandes,

a pleasure to see you again.

Fernandes: Hello, sir.

Anthony: The last thing that happened is not what causes,

but it may precipitate.

It may essentially spring the trap

that has already had all this energy behind it.

First Officer: The sun shines on us today.

A good day to fly.

Fernandes: Yes. Yes, it is.

Narrator: After the investigation of LAM 470,

air safety experts struggle to explain

what motivated the captain.

Curtis: It's really impossible for me to answer

what the effect his life circumstances

had on his decision at that moment during that flight.

It's impossible to know from the evidence we have

whether this was a deliberate act

that was concocted well before the flight

or whether it was something that happened during the flight.

Narrator: Determining how to keep such an irrational act

from happening again is also a challenge.

First Officer: I'm going to step out to the toilet.

Do you have the controls?

Fernandes: No problem.

Narrator: For many safety reasons,

having two people in the cockpit at all times is important.

It's called the two-person rule.

Brenner: Mozambique was ahead of most of the industry.

LAM had started a policy

that you don't leave one person alone in the cockpit.

It's just that at this time, it was not being followed.

Having someone else in the cockpit

would have given him a chance to talk about things.

It may have been a chance to work things out.

Narrator: But the horrific circumstances

surrounding the crash of flight 470

and the death of 33 people gets little attention worldwide.

[Crash]

Kok: If an accident happens in the first world,

it's being picked up by many more media houses sometimes

than when it happens in Africa.

It might have had a much bigger impact

and led perhaps quicker to measures

from the international aviation community

to address these aviation mental health issues.

Narrator: Then, on March 24, 2015,

a little more than a year after the crash of flight 470,

Germanwings flight 9525 disappears from radar

over the French Alps.

Just like LAM 470,

a pilot locks the other pilot out of the cockpit,

makes a calculated series of flight control inputs,

and lets the autopilot fly the plane into the ground.

Jones: It's as though he was familiar

with the LAM 470 report, you know,

based on the sequence of events that took place.

Narrator: The investigation reveals this crash was caused

by the deliberate actions of the first officer.

Brenner: Any attention to the LAM accident

would have benefited industry

and very possibly would have started procedures in place

That could have prevented Germanwings.

Germanwings did not have a policy

of having a second person in the cockpit,

and that's something that you learn from LAM

that may very well have prevented what happened.

Narrator: Publicity around the Germanwings crash

provokes a demand for action in the airline industry.

Brenner: Since these accidents,

the industry realizes the importance

of psychological well-being in screening pilots

and specifically the rule about having two people

in the cockpit at all times.

There's been a great deal of momentum

towards adopting that universally.

Kok: The world woke up to this issue after Germanwings

because it became a bigger focus of the press attention

than the accident in Mozambique, unfortunately.

But ever since, we are working as an industry to put into place

a much better aviation mental health package,

a system which will hopefully help us prevent

These kind of accidents in the future.