Description: December 29, 1972. Eastern Airlines Flight 401 is coming in for a landing in Miami. On the crews instrument panel, one of the three green lights confirming the planes landing gear is down and locked remains unlit. Captain Robert Loft decides

A party of Russian school children is on board a Tupolev 154 on its way to a holiday in Spain. A DHL courier plane is flying from Italy to Belgium. Their paths cross on the German/Swiss border. Back at the traffic control room, a lone controller is left t

A passenger jet is a traveling life-support system that contains the highly pressurized atmosphere we need to survive in the sky. But if that pressure escapes, it can be a nightmare come true… Featuring gripping reenactments, archival footage, and eyewitn

Marvels of engineering, todays modern jetliners are made up of hundreds of thousands of parts. Keeping these behemoths in the sky requires constant maintenance and repair. And if just one tiny flaw is overlooked, the result can be catastrophic. Featuring

When pilots climb into the cockpit of a modern jetliner, they put their trust in an automated computer system that can control virtually every aspect of flight. Its a complicated relationship between man and machine and when it doesnt work perfectly, disa

Twenty minutes after taking off from Taipei, Taiwan a China Airlines 747 suddenly disappears from radar. A massive rescue mission is launched, ut all 225 passengers and crew are dead. After ruling out both a bomb and a gas tank explosion, investigators ar

September 8, 1989 - On a charter trip from Oslo to Hamburg, Partnair Flight 94 is cruising at 22,000 feet -- when it suddenly begins diving toward the sea. The aging propeller plane crashes into the water. All 55 people on board are killed. It is the bigg

November 12th, 1996 - Shortly after take off from New Delhi, Saudi Airways Flight 763 levels off at 14,000 feet. As the crew waits for clearance to climb to their cruising altitude, the plane is hit by a Kazakhstan Airlines jet. The collision cripples bot

April 4, 1975. In the final, chaotic days of the Vietnam War, US President Gerald Ford orders an urgent mission of mercy called 'Operation Babylift'. Its goal: to rescue Vietnamese orphans from the chaos of the war and take them back to the safety of the

It's August 6th, 2005. Tuninter Flight 1153 is flying to the Tunisian resort island of Djerba. It's high above the Mediterranean when suddenly, its right engine fails. As the pilots begin an emergency descent, their situation gets much worse. Their second

January 1st, 2007 - After taking off from Indonesia's Suribaya airport, Adam Air Flight 574 settles in for the two-hour trip to Manado. The Boeing 737 is loaded with New Year's travelers taking advantage of the country's recent discount travel boom. But s

October 31, 1994 - It's a frigid Halloween night in the skies above Chicago. Bad weather is delaying dozens of flights, including American Eagle 41-84. Suddenly - the plane spins wildly out of control. The pilots fight desperately to right their plane - b

Bad weather can turn an ordinary flight into a fight for survival. And the right information and equipment - both on the ground and in the air - can mean the difference between life and death. In December 2008 the United Sates was battered by a series of